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Title: State and Counter-Revolution
Author: Paul Mattick
Date: 1983
Language: en
Topics: anti-Bolshevism, anti-state, Bolshevism, Council Communism
Source: Chapter 6 of *Reform or Revolution* by Paul Mattick. https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1983/reform/ch06.htm

Paul Mattick

State and Counter-Revolution

Lenin’s state was to be a Bolshevik state supported by workers and

peasants. As the privileged classes could not be expected to support it,

it was necessary to disfranchise them and thus end bourgeois democracy.

Once in power, the Bolsheviks restricted political freedoms – freedom of

speech, press, assembly, and association, and the right to vote and to

be elected to the soviets – to the laboring population, that is, to all

people “who have acquired the means of living through labor that is

productive and useful to society, that is, the laborers and employees of

all classes who are employed in industry, trade, agriculture, etc., and

to peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who employ no help for

purposes of making profits.”[1] However, the peasants could not be

integrated into the envisioned “one great factory,” which transformed

“all citizens into the hired employees of the state,” for they had made

their revolution for “private property,” for land of their own,

disregarding the fact that nominally all land belonged to the nation as

a whole. The concessions made to the peasants were the price the

Bolsheviks had to pay for their support. “The Russian peasantry,” wrote

Trotsky, “will be interested in upholding proletarian rule at least in

the first, most difficult, period, no less than were the French peasants

interested in upholding the military role of Napoleon Bonaparte, who by

force guaranteed to the new owners the integrity of their land

shares.”[2]

But the peasants’ political support of the Bolsheviks was one thing and

their economic interests another. Disorganization through war and civil

war reduced industrial and agricultural production. The large landed

estates had been broken up to provide millions of agricultural laborers

with small holdings. Subsistence farming largely displaced commercial

farming. But even the market-oriented peasantry refused to turn its

surpluses over to the state, as the latter had little or nothing to

offer in return. The internal policies of the Bolshevik state were

mainly determined by its relation to the peasantry, which did not fit

into the evolving state-capitalist economy. To placate the peasants was

possible only at the expense of the proletariat, and to favor the

latter, only at the expense of the peasantry. To stay in power, the

Bolsheviks were constantly forced to alter their positions regarding

either one or the other class. Ultimately, in order to make themselves

independent of both, they resorted to terroristic measures which

subjected the whole of the population to their dictatorial rule.

The Bolshevik dilemma with regard to the peasants was quite generally

recognized. Despite her sympathies for the Bolshevik Revolution, Rosa

Luxemburg, for example, could not desist from criticizing their

agricultural policies as detrimental to the quest for socialism.

Property rights, in her view, must be turned over to the nation, or the

state, for only then is it possible to organize agricultural production

on a socialistic basis. The Bolshevik slogan “immediate seizure and

distribution of the land to the peasants” was not a socialist measure

but one that, by creating a new form of private property, cut off the

way to such measures. The Leninist agrarian reform, she wrote, “has

created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism in the

countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and

stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.”[3] This criticism,

however, did no more than restate the unavoidable dilemma. While she

favored the taking of power by the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg recoiled before

the conditions under which alone this was possible. Lenin, however,

expected the peasants’ continuing support not only because the

Bolsheviks had ratified their seizure of land, but also because the

Soviet state intended to be a “cheap government,” in order to ease the

peasants’ tax burden.

It is partly with this “cheap government” in mind that Lenin spoke so

repetitiously of the necessity of “workingmen’s wages” for all the

administrative and technical functionaries. “Cheap government” was to

cement together the “workers’ and peasants’ alliance.” During the first

period of Bolshevik rule, moreover, the egalitarian principles

enunciated in State and Revolution became largely a reality, due to the

difficulties in the way of providing the urban population with the bare

necessities of life. The government saw itself forced to take from the

peasantry all their surplus grain, and often more than that, in the form

of “loans,” or in exchange for valueless paper money. Their violent

reactions induced the Bolsheviks to replace the system of confiscation

with a tax in kind, which failed to still the peasants’ opposition.

Finally, in 1921 the government was forced into a New Economic Policy

(NEP), involving a partial return to capitalist market relations and an

attempt to attract capital from abroad.

The invitation to invest in Russian industry was largely ignored by

Western capitalism. The problem remained how to capitalize the country

without ending up with a private-enterprise system – the logical outcome

of a development of peasant farming under free market relations. The New

Economic Policy could be regarded either as a mere interval in the

“socialization process” or as a more permanent policy entailing the risk

that the newly generating private capitalist forces would overtake the

state-controlled sector of the economy and even destroy it. In such an

eventuality, the Bolshevik intervention would have been in vain – a mere

incident in a bourgeois revolution. Lenin felt sure, however, that a

partial return to market relations could be politically mastered, i.e.,

that the Bolshevik Party could hold state power and secure enough

economic weight by maintaining control of key positions, such as

large-scale industry, banking, and foreign trade, thus neutralizing the

emerging private property relations in agriculture, small-scale

industry, and the retail trade. In time, the real social power would

shift from the peasantry to state-controlled industry by virtue of the

latter’s growth.

In the end, however, the problems of the “mixed economy” of the NEP

period were resolved by the forced collectivization of agriculture, the

centrally planned economy, and the terroristic regime of Stalinism. The

fears of Rosa Luxemburg with respect to Bolshevik peasant policy proved

to be unwarranted. However, the destruction of peasant property by way

of collectivization did not lead to socialism but merely secured the

continuance of state capitalism. By itself, the collectivized form of

agriculture has no socialist character. It is merely the transformation

of small-scale into large-scale agricultural production by political

means in distinction to the concentration and centralization process

brought about, though imperfectly, in the capitalist market economy.

Collectivization was to make possible a more effective extraction of

surplus labor from the peasant population. It required a “revolution

from above,” a veritable war between the government and the

peasantry,[4] wherein the government falsely claimed to act on behalf of

and to be aided by the poor peasants, in wiping out the kulaks, or rich

peasants, who were blocking the road to socialism.

Unless for higher wages, implying better living standards, wage workers

see no point in exerting themselves beyond that unavoidable measure

demanded by their bosses. Supervision, too, demands incentives. The new

controllers of labor showed little interest in the improvement of

production at “workingmen’s wages.” The negative incentive, implied in

the need for employment in order to live at all, was not enough to spur

the supervisory and technical personnel to greater efforts. It was

therefore soon supplemented with the positive incentives of wage and

salary differentials between and within the various occupations and

professions, and with special privileges for particularly effective

performances. These differentials were progressively increased until

they came to resemble those prevalent in private-enterprise economies.

But to return to the Bolshevik government: Elected by the soviets, it

was in theory subordinated to, and subject to recall by, the All-Russian

Congress of Soviets, and merely empowered to carry on within the

framework of its directives. In practice, it played an independent role

in coping with the changing political and economic needs and the

everyday business of government. The Congress of Soviets was not a

permanent body, but met at intervals of shorter or longer duration,

delegating legislative and executive powers to the organs of the state.

With the “carrying of the class struggle into the rural districts,”

i.e., with the state-organized expropriatory expeditions in the

countryside and the installation of Bolshevik “committees of the poor”

in the villages, the “workers’ and peasants’ alliance” that had brought

the Bolsheviks to power promised to deteriorate and to endanger the

Bolshevik majority in the congress as well as its partnership with the

left Social Revolutionaries. To be sure, the Bolshevik government,

controlling the state apparatus, could have ignored the congress, or

driven it away, as it had driven away the Constituent Assembly. But the

Bolsheviks preferred to work within the framework of the soviet system,

and to work toward a Congress of Soviets obedient to the party. To this

end, it was necessary to control the elections of deputies to the

soviets and to outlaw other political parties, most of all the

traditional party of peasants, the Social Revolutionaries.

As the Mensheviks and the right Social Revolutionaries had withdrawn

from the congress and opposed the government elected by it, they could

easily be disfranchised, and were outlawed by order of the Central

Committee of the Congress of Soviets in June 1918. The occasion to put

an end to the left Social Revolutionaries arose soon, not only because

of the widespread peasant discontent but also because of political

differences, among which was the Social Revolutionaries’ rejection of

the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. After the signing of the treaty, the

left Social Revolutionaries withdrew from the Central Committee. The

Fifth Congress of Soviets, in July 1918, expelled the left Social

Revolutionaries. Both the Central Committee and the Council of People’s

Commissars were now exclusively in Bolshevik hands. The latter secured

their majority in the soviets not only because their popularity was

still in the ascendancy, but also because they had learned how to make

it increasingly more difficult for non-Bolsheviks to enter the soviets.

In time, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets became a manipulated body,

automatically ratifying the actions of the government. The abdication of

soviet power in favor of governmental rule, which Lenin had denounced

with the slogan “All power to the soviets,” was now for the first time

actually realized in the Bolshevik one-party government.

With the soviets no longer thought of as the organizational instrument

for a socialist production system, they became a kind of substitute

parliament. The soviet state, it was proclaimed programmatically,

“while affording the toiling masses incomparably greater opportunities

than those enjoyed under bourgeois democracy and parliamentary

government, to elect and recall deputies in the manner easiest and most

accessible to the workers and peasants,... at the same time abolishes

the negative aspects of parliamentary government, especially the

separation of the legislature and the executive, the isolation of the

representative institutions from the masses.... The Soviet government

draws the state apparatus closer to the masses by the fact that the

electoral constituency and the basic unit for the state is no longer a

territorial district, but an industrial unit (workshop, factory).”[5]

The soviet system was seen by the Bolsheviks as a “transmission belt”

connecting the state authorities at the top with the broad masses at the

bottom. Orders issuing from above would be carried out below, and

complaints and suggestions from the workers would reach the government

through their deputies to the Congress of Soviets. Meanwhile, Bolshevik

party cells and Bolshevik domination of the trade unions assured a more

direct control within the enterprises and provided a link between the

cadres in the factories and the governmental institutions. If so

inclined, of course, the workers could assume that there was a

connection between them and the government through the soviets, and that

the latter could, via the electoral system, actually determine

government policy and even change governments. This illusory assumption

pervades more or less all electoral systems and could also be held for

that of the soviets. By shifting the electoral constituency from the

territorial district to the place of production, the Bolsheviks did

deprive the nonworking layers of society of partaking in the

parliamentary game,[6] without, however, changing the game itself. In

the name of revolutionary necessity, the government made itself

increasingly more independent of the soviets in order to achieve that

centralization of power needed for the domination of society by a single

political party. Even with Bolshevik domination of the soviets, general

control was to be administered by the party and there, according to

Trotsky,

the last word belongs to the Central Committee.... This affords extreme

economy of time and energy, and in the most difficult and complicated

circumstances gives a guarantee for the necessary unity of action. Such

a regime is possible only in the presence of the unquestioned authority

of the party, and the faultlessness of its discipline.... The exclusive

role of the Communist Party under the conditions of a victorious

revolution is quite comprehensible.... The revolutionary supremacy of

the proletariat presupposes within the proletariat itself the political

supremacy of the party, with a clear programme of action.... We have

more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship

of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with

complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible

only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the

clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary

organization that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility

of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labor into the

apparatus of the supremacy of labor. In this “substitution” of the power

of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing

accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The

Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class. It is

quite natural that, in the period in which history brings up those

interests,.., the Communists have become the recognized representatives

of the working class as a whole.[7]

Whereas with regard to the soviets of 1905, Trotsky recognized that

their “substance was their efforts to become organs of public

authority,” now, after the Bolshevik victory, it was no longer the

soviets but the party and, more precisely, its central committee, that

had to exercise all public authority.[8] The Bolsheviks, or at any rate

their foremost spokesmen, Lenin and Trotsky, had no confidence whatever

in the soviets, those “shapeless parliaments of labor,” which, in their

view, owed their very existence to the Bolshevik Party. Because there

would be no soviet system at all without the party, to speak of a soviet

dictatorship was to speak of the party dictatorship – the one implying

the other. Actually, of course, it had been the other way around, for

without the revolution made by the soviets the Bolshevik Party could

never have seized power and Lenin would still have been in Switzerland.

Yet to hold this power, the party now had to separate itself from the

soviets and to control the latter instead of being controlled by them.

Notwithstanding the demagoguery displayed in State and Revolution,

Lenin’s and Trotsky’s attitude regarding the capacities and incapacities

of the working class were not at all surprising, for they were largely

shared by the leading “elites” of all socialist movements and served, in

fact, to justify their existence and privileges. The social and

technical division of labor within the capitalist system did indeed

deprive the proletariat of any control, and therewith understanding, of

the complex production and distribution process that assures the

reproduction of the social system. Although a socialist system of

production will have a division of labor different from that prevalent

in capitalism, the new arrangements involved will only be established in

time and in connection with a total reorientation of the production

process and its direction toward goals different from those

characteristic of capitalism. It is therefore only to be expected that

the production process will be disrupted in any revolutionary situation,

especially when the productive apparatus is already in a state of decay,

as was the case in the Russia of 1917. It is then also not surprising

that workers should have put their hopes in the new government to

accomplish for them what seemed extremely difficult for them to do.

The identification of soviets and party was clearly shared by the

workers and the Bolsheviks, for otherwise the early dominance of the

latter within the soviets would not be comprehensible. It was even

strong enough to allow the Bolsheviks to monopolize the soviets by

underhanded methods that kept non-Bolsheviks out of them. For the broad

urban masses the Bolsheviks were indeed their party, which proved its

revolutionary character precisely by its support of the soviets and by

its insistence upon the dictatorship of the proletariat. There can also

be no doubt that the Bolsheviks, who were, after all, convinced

socialists, were deadly serious in their devotion to the workers’ cause

– so much, indeed, that they were ready to defend it even against the

workers should they fail to recognize its necessary requirements.

According to the Bolsheviks, these necessary requirements, i.e., “work,

discipline, order,” could not be left to the self-enforcement of the

soviets. The state, the Bolshevik Party in this case, would regulate all

important economic matters by government ordinances having the force of

law. The construction of the state served no other purpose than that of

safeguarding the revolution and the construction of socialism. They

spread this illusion among the workers with such great conviction

because it was their own, for they were convinced that socialism could

be instituted through state control and the selfless idealism of a

revolutionary elite. They must have felt terribly disappointed when the

workers did not properly respond to the urgency of the call for “work,

discipline, and order” and to their revolutionary rhetoric. If the

workers could not recognize their own interests, this recognition would

have to be forced upon them, if necessary by terroristic means. The

chance for socialism should not be lost by default. Sure only of their

own revolutionary vocation, they insisted upon their exclusive right to

determine the ways and means to the socialist reconstruction of society.

However, this exclusive right demanded unshared absolute power. The

first thing to be organized, apart from party and soviets, was then the

Cheka, the political police, to fight the counterrevolution in all its

manifestations and all attempts to unseat the Bolshevik government.

Revolutionary tribunals assisted the work of the Cheka. Concentration

camps were installed for the enemies of the regime. A Red Army, under

Trotsky’s command, took the place of the “armed proletariat.” An

effective army, obedient only to the government, could not be run by

“soldiers’ councils,” which were thus at once eliminated. The army was

to fight both external and internal foes and was led and organized by

“specialists,” by tsarist officers, that is, who had made their peace

with the Bolshevik government. Because the army emerged victorious out

of war and civil war, which lasted from 1918 to 1920, the Bolshevik

government’s prestige was enormously enhanced and assured the

consolidation of its authoritarian rule.

Far from endangering the Bolshevik regime, war and civil war against

foreign intervention and the White counter-revolution strengthened it.

It united all who were bound to suffer by a return of the old

authorities. Regardless of their attitude toward the Bolsheviks and

their policies, the peasants were now defending their newly won land,

the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries their very lives. The

Bolsheviks, at first rent by internal dissension, united in the face of

the common enemy and, if only for the duration of the civil war, gladly

accepted the aid of the harassed but still existing Mensheviks, Social

Revolutionaries, and even Anarchists as that of a “loyal opposition.”

Finally, the interventionist character of the civil war gave the

Bolshevik resistance the euphoria of nationalism as the government

rallied the population to its side with the slogan “the fatherland is in

danger.” In this connection it must be pointed out that Lenin’s and so

the Bolsheviks’ nationalism and internationalism were of a peculiar

kind, in that they could be used alternatively to advance the fortunes

of the Russian revolution and those of the Bolshevik Party. In Trotsky’s

words, “Lenin’s internationalism needs no recommendation. But at the

same time Lenin himself is profoundly national. Lenin personifies the

Russian proletariat, a young class, which politically is scarcely older

than Lenin himself, but a class which is profoundly national, for

recapitulated in it is the entire past development of Russia, in it lies

Russia’s entire future, with it the Russian nation rises and falls.”[9]

Perhaps, being so profoundly national, mere introspection may have led

Lenin to appreciate the national needs and cultural peculiarities of

oppressed peoples sufficiently to induce him to advocate their national

liberation and self-determination, up to the point of secession, as one

aspect of his anti-imperialism and as an application of the democratic

principle to the question of nationalities. Since Marx and Engels had

favored the liberation of Poland and home rule for Ireland, he found

himself here in the best of company. But Lenin was a practical

politician first of all, even though he could fulfill this role only at

this late hour. As a practical politician he had realized that the many

suppressed nationalities within the Russian Empire presented a constant

threat to the tsarist regime, which could be utilized for its overthrow.

To be sure, Lenin was also an internationalist and saw the socialist

revolution as a world revolution. Still, this revolution had to begin

somewhere and in the context of the Russian multinational state, the

demand for national self-determination promised the winning of “allies”

in the struggle against tsardom. This strategy was supported by the hope

that, once free, the different nationalities would elect to remain

within the Russian Commonwealth, either out of self-interest or through

the urgings of their own socialist organizations, should they succeed in

gaining governmental power. Analogous to the “voluntary union of

communes into a nation,” which Marx had seen as a possible outcome of

the Paris Commune, national self-determination could lead to a unified

socialist Russian Federation of Nations more cohesive than the old

imperial regime.

Until the Russian Revolution, however, the problem of national

self-determination remained purely academic. Even after the revolution,

the granting of self-determination to the various nationalities within

the Russian Empire was rather meaningless, for most of the territories

involved were occupied by foreign powers. Self-determination had

meanwhile become a policy instrument of the Entente powers, in order to

hasten the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and an imperialistic

redrawing of the map of Europe in accordance with the desires of the

victor nations. But “even at the risk of playing into bourgeois hands,

Lenin nevertheless continued to promote unqualified self-determination,

precisely because he was convinced that the war would compel both the

Dual Monarchy and the Russian Empire to surrender to the force of

nationalism.”[10] By sponsoring self-determination and thereby making

the proletariat a supporter of nationalism, Lenin, as Rosa Luxemburg

pointed out, was merely aiding the bourgeoisie to turn the principle of

self-determination into an instrument of counter-revolution. Although

this was actually the case, the Bolshevik regime continued to press for

national self-determination by now projecting it to the international

scene, in order to weaken other imperialist powers, in particular

England, in an attempt to foster colonial revolutions against Western

capitalism, which threatened to destroy the Bolshevik state.

Though Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction, that the granting of

self-determination to the various nationalities in Russia would merely

surround the Bolshevik state with a cordon of reactionary

counterrevolutionary countries, turned out to be correct, this was so

only for the short run. Rosa Luxemburg failed to see that it was less

the principle of self-determination that dictated Bolshevik policy than

the force of circumstances over which they had no control. At the first

opportunity they began whittling away at the self-determination of

nations, finally to end up by incorporating all the lost independent

nations in a restored Russian Empire and, in addition, forging for

themselves spheres of interest in extra-Russian territories. On the

strength of her own theory of imperialism, Rosa Luxemburg should have

realized that Lenin’s theory could not be applied in a world of

competing imperialist powers, and would not need to be applied, should

capitalism be brought down by an international revolution.

The civil war in Russia was waged mainly to arrest the centrifugal

forces of nationalism, released by war and revolution, which threatened

the integrity of Russia. Not only at her western borders, in Finland,

Poland, and the Baltic nations, but also to the south, in Georgia, as

well as in the eastern provinces of Asiatic Russia, new independent

states established themselves outside of Bolshevik control. The February

Revolution had broken the barriers that had held back the nationalist or

regionalist movements in the non-Russian parts of the Empire. “When the

Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd and Moscow,

nationalist or regionalist governments took over in the non-Great

Russian areas of European Russia and in Siberia and Central Asia. The

governing institutions of the Moslem peoples of the Transvolga (Tatars,

Bashkirs), of Central Asia and Transcaspia (Kirghiz, Kazakhs, Uzbeks,

Turkomans), and of Transcaucasia (Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaidzhanis,

Tartars) favored autonomy in a Russian federation and opposed the

Bolsheviks.”[11] These peoples had to be reconquered in the ensuing

civil war.

The nationalist aspect of the civil war was used for revolutionary and

counter-revolutionary purposes. The White counter-revolution began its

anti-Bolshevik struggle soon after the overthrow of the Provisional

Government. Volunteer armies were formed to fight the Bolsheviks and

were financed and equipped by the Entente powers in an effort to bring

Russia back into the war against Germany. British, French, Japanese, and

American troops landed in Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok. The

Czech Legion entered the conflict against the Bolsheviks. In these

struggles, territories changed hands frequently but the

counter-revolutionary forces, though aided by the Allied powers, proved

no match for the newly organized Red Army. The foreign intervention

continued even after the armistice between the Allied powers and

Germany, and, with the consent of the Allies, the Germans fought in

support of the counter-revolution in the Baltic nations, which led to

the destruction of the revolutionary forces in these countries and the

Soviet government’s recognition of their independence. Poland regained

its independence as an anti-Bolshevik state. However, the

counter-revolutionary forces were highly scattered and disorganized. The

Allied powers could not agree among themselves on the extent of their

intervention and on the specific goals to be reached. Neither did they

trust the willingness of their own troops to continue the war in Russia,

nor in the acquiescence of their own population in a prolonged and

large-scale war for the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. The decisive

military defeat of the various White armies induced the Allied powers to

withdraw their troops in the autumn of 1918, thus opening the occupied

parts of Russia to the Red Army. The French and British troops withdrew

from the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the spring of 1919. American

pressure led to the evacuation of the Japanese in 1922. But the

Bolsheviks had definitely won the civil war by 1920. While the

revolution had been a national affair, the counter-revolution had been

truly international. But even so, it failed to dislodge the Bolshevik

regime.

Lenin and Trotsky, not to speak of Marx and Engels, had been convinced

that without a proletarian revolution in the West, a Russian revolution

could not lead to socialism. Without direct political aid from the

European proletariat, Trotsky said more than once, the working class of

Russia would not be able to turn its temporary supremacy into a

permanent socialist dictatorship. The reasons for this he saw not only

in the opposition on the part of the world reaction, but also in

Russia’s internal conditions, as the Russian working class, left to its

own resources, would necessarily be crushed the moment it lost the

support of the peasantry, a most likely occurrence should the revolution

remain isolated. Lenin, too, set his hopes on a westward spreading of

the revolution, which might otherwise be crushed by the capitalist

powers. But he did not share Trotsky’s view that an isolated Russia

would succumb to its own internal contradictions. In an article written

in 1915, concerned with the advisability of including in the socialist

program the demand for a United States of Europe, he pointed out, first,

that socialism is a question of world revolution and not one restricted

to Europe and second, that such a slogan

may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a

single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as

to the relations of such a country to the others. Uneven economic and

political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the

victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one

capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and

organizing their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of

that country will arise against the rest of the world – the capitalist

world – attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other

countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the

capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the

exploiting classes and their states.[12]

Obviously, Lenin was convinced – and all his decisions after the seizure

of power attest to this – that even an isolated revolutionary Russia

would be able to maintain itself unless directly overthrown by the

capitalist powers. Eventually, of course, the struggle between socialism

and capitalism would resume, but perhaps under conditions more favorable

for the international working class. For the time being, however, it was

essential to stay in power no matter what the future might hold in

store.

The world revolution did not materialize, and the nation-state remained

the field of operation for economic development as well as for the class

struggle. After 1920 the Bolsheviks no longer expected an early

resumption of the world revolutionary process and settled down for the

consolidation of their own regime. The exigencies and privations of the

civil war years are usually held responsible for the Bolshevik

dictatorship and its particular harshness. While this is true, it is no

less true that the civil war and its victorious outcome facilitated and

assured the success of the dictatorship. The party dictatorship was not

only the inevitable result of an emergency situation, but was already

implied in the conception of “proletarian rule” as the rule of the

Bolshevik Party. The end of the civil war led not to a relaxation of the

dictatorship but to its intensification; it was now, after the crushing

of the counter-revolution, directed exclusively against the “loyal

opposition” and the working class itself. Already at the Eighth Congress

of the Bolshevik Party, in March 1919, the demand was made to end the

toleration of opposition parties. But it was not until the summer of

1921 that the Bolshevik government finally decided to destroy all

independent political organizations and the oppositional groups within

its own ranks as well.

In the spring of 1920 it seemed clear that the military balance in the

civil war favored the Bolsheviks. This situation led to a resurgence of

the opposition to the regime and to the draconian measures it had used

during the war. Peasant unrest became so strong as to force the

government to discontinue its expropriatory excursions into the

countryside and to disband the “committees of the poor peasants.” The

workers objected to the famine conditions prevailing in the cities and

to the relentless drive for more production through a wave of strikes

and demonstrations that culminated in the Kronstadt uprising. As the

expectations of the workers had once been based on the existence of the

Bolshevik government, it was now this government that had to take the

blame for all their miseries and disappointments. This government had

become a repressive dictatorship and could no longer be influenced by

democratic means via the soviet system. To free the soviets from their

party yoke and turn them once again into instruments of proletarian

self-rule required now a “third revolution.” The Kronstadt rebellion was

not directed against the soviet system but intended to restore it to its

original form. The call for “free soviets” implied soviets freed from

the one-party rule of Bolshevism; consequently, it implied political

liberty for all proletarian and peasant organizations and tendencies

that took part in the Russian Revolution.[13]

It was no accident that the widespread opposition to Bolshevik rule

found its most outspoken expression at Kronstadt. It was here that the

soviets had become the sole public authority long before this became a

temporary reality in Petrograd, Moscow, and the nation as a whole.

Already in May 1917 the Bolsheviks and left Social Revolutionaries held

the majority in the Kronstadt Soviet and declared their independence

vis-à-vis the Provisional Government. Although the latter succeeded in

extracting some kind of formal recognition from the Kronstadt Soviet,

the latter nonetheless remained the only public authority within its

territory and thus helped to prepare the way for the Bolshevik seizure

of power. It was the radical commitment to the soviet system, as the

best form of proletarian democracy, that now set the Kronstadt workers

and soldiers against the Bolshevik dictatorship in an attempt to regain

their self-determination.

It could not be helped, of course, that the Kronstadt mutiny was lauded

by all opponents of Bolshevism and thus also by reactionaries and

bourgeois liberals, who in this way provided the Bolsheviks with a lame

excuse for their vicious reaction to the rebellion. But this unsolicited

opportunistic verbal “support” cannot alter the fact that the goal of

the rebellion was the restoration of that soviet system which the

Bolsheviks themselves had seen fit to propagandize in 1917. The

Bolsheviks knew quite well that Kronstadt was not the work of “White

generals,” but they could not admit that, from the point of view of

soviet power, they had themselves become a counter-revolutionary force

in the very process of strengthening and defending their government.

Therefore, they had not only to drown in blood this last attempt at a

revival of the soviet system, but had to slander it as the work of the

“White counter-revolution.” Actually, even though the Mensheviks and

Social Revolutionaries lent their “moral” support to the rebellion, the

workers and sailors engaged in it had no intentions of resurrecting the

Constituent Assembly, which they regarded as a stillborn affair of the

irrevocable past. The time, they said, “has come to overthrow the

commissarocracy.... Kronstadt has raised the banner of the uprising for

a Third Revolution of the toilers.... The autocracy has fallen. The

Constituent Assembly has departed to the region of the damned. The

commissarocracy is crumbling.”[14] The “third revolution” was to fulfill

the broken promises of the preceding one.

With the Kronstadt rebellion the disaffection of workers and peasants

had spread to the armed forces, and this combination made it

particularly dangerous to the Bolshevik regime. But the rebellion held

no realizable promise, not because it was crushed by the Bolsheviks but

because, had it succeeded, it would not have been able to sustain and

extend a libertarian socialism based on soviet rule. It was indeed

condemned to be what it has been called: the Kronstadt Commune. Like its

Paris counterpart, it remained isolated despite the general discontent,

and its political objectives could not be reached under the prevailing

Russian conditions. Yet it was able to hasten Lenin’s “strategic

retreat” to the New Economic Policy, which relaxed the Bolshevik

economic dictatorship while simultaneously tightening its political

authoritarian rule.

The workers’ dissatisfaction with Lenin’s dictatorship found some

repercussion in his own party. Oppositional groups criticized not only

specific party decisions, such as state control of trade unions, but

also the general trend of Bolshevik policy. On the question of “one-man

management,” for instance, it was said that this was a matter not of a

tactical problem but of two “historically irreconcilable points of

view,” for

“one-man management is a product of the individualistic conception of

the bourgeois class ... This idea finds its reflection in all spheres of

human endeavor – beginning with the appointment of a sovereign for the

state and ending with a sovereign director in the factory. This is the

supreme wisdom of bourgeois thought. The bourgeoisie do not believe in

the power of a collective body. They like only to whip the masses into

an obedient flock, and drive them wherever their unrestricted will

desires. The basis of the controversy (in the Bolshevik Party) is mainly

this: whether we shall realize communism through the workers or over

their heads by the hand of the Soviet officials. And let us ponder

whether it is possible to attain and build a communist economy by the

hands and creative abilities of the scions from the other class, who are

imbued with their routine of the past? If we begin to think as Marxians,

as men of science, we shall answer categorically and explicitly – no.

The administrative economic body in the labor republic during the

present transitory period must be a body directly elected by the

producers themselves. All the rest of the administrative economic Soviet

institutions shall serve only as executive center of the economic policy

of that all-important economic body of the labor republic. All else is

goose stepping that manifests distrust toward all creative abilities of

workers, distrust which is not compatible with the professed ideals of

our party... There can be no self-activity without freedom of thought

and opinion, for self-activity manifests itself not only in initiative,

action, and work, but in independent thought as well. We are afraid of

action, we have ceased to rely on the masses, hence we have bureaucracy

with us. In order to do away with the bureaucracy that is finding its

shelter in the Soviet institutions, we must first of all get rid of all

bureaucracy in the party itself.[15]

Apparently, these oppositionists did not understand their own party or,

in view of its actual practice, diverged from its principles as outlined

by Lenin since 1903. Perhaps they had taken State and Revolution at face

value, not noticing its ambivalence, and felt now betrayed, as Lenin’s

policy revealed the sheer demagoguery of its revolutionary declarations.

It should have been evident from Lenin’s concept of the party and its

role in the revolutionary process that, once in power, this party could

only function in a dictatorial way. Quite apart from the specific

Russian conditions, the idea of the party as the consciousness of the

socialist revolution clearly relegated all decision making power to the

Bolshevik state apparatus.

True to his own principles, Lenin put a quick end to the oppositionists

by ordaining all factions to disband under threat of expulsion. With two

resolutions, passed by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist

Party, March 1921, “On Party Unity” and “On the Syndicalist and

Anarchist Deviation in our Party,” Lenin succeeded in completing what

had hitherto only approximately been accomplished, namely, an end to all

factionalism within the party and the securing of complete control over

it through the Central Committee, which, in addition, was itself

reorganized in such a fashion as to get rid of any opposition that might

arise within the party leadership. With this was laid a groundwork on

which nothing else could be built but the emerging omnipotence of the

rising bureaucracy of party and state and the infinite power of the

supreme leader presiding over both. The one-man rule of the party, which

had been an informal fact due to the overriding “moral” authority of

Lenin, turned into the unassailable fact of personal rule by whoever

should manage to put himself at the top of the party hierarchy.

The bourgeois character of Bolshevik rule, as noted by its internal

opposition, reflected the objectively nonsocialist nature of the Russian

Revolution. It was a sort of “bourgeois revolution” without the

bourgeoisie, as it was a proletarian revolution without a sufficiently

large proletariat, a revolution in which the historical functions of the

Western bourgeoisie were taken up by an apparently anti-bourgeois party

by means of its assumption of political power. Under these conditions,

the revolutionary content of Western Marxism was not applicable, not

even in a modified form. Whatever one may think of Marx’s declaration

concerning the Paris Commune – that the “political rule of the

proletariat is incompatible with the externalization of their social

servitude” (a situation quite difficult to conceive, except as a

momentary possibility, that is, as the revolution itself) – Marx at

least spoke of the “producers,” not of a political party substituting

for the producers, whereas the Bolshevik concept speaks of state rule

alone as the necessary and sufficient prerequisite for the

transformation of the capitalist into a socialist mode of production.

The producers are controlled by the state, the state by the party, the

party by the central committee, and the last by the supreme leader and

his court. The destroyed autocracy is resurrected in the name of

Marxism. In this way, moreover, ideologically as well as practically,

the revolution and socialism depend finally on the history-making

individual.

Indeed, it did not take long for the Russian Revolution and its

consequences to be seen as the work of the geniuses Lenin, Trotsky, and

Stalin; not only in the bourgeois view, to which this comes naturally,

but also quite generally by socialists claiming adherence to the

materialist conception of history, which finds its dynamic not in the

exceptional abilities of individuals, but in the struggle of classes in

the course of the developing social forces of production. Neither Marx

nor any reasonable person would deny the role of the “hero” in history,

whether for better or for worse; for, as previously pointed out, the

“hero” is already implicit in class society and is himself, in his

thoughts and actions, determined by the class contradictions that rend

society. In his historical writings, for instance, Marx dealt

extensively with such “heroes,” like the little Napoleon, who brought

ruin to his country, or, like Bismarck, who finished the goal of German

unification, left undone by the stillborn bourgeois revolution. It is

quite conceivable that without Napoleon III and without Bismarck the

history of France and Germany would have been different from what it

actually was, but this difference would have altered nothing in the

socioeconomic development of both countries, determined as it was by the

capitalist relations of production and the expansion of capital as an

international phenomenon.

What is history anyway? The bourgeoisie has no theory of history, as it

has no theory of social development. Since it merely describes what is

observable or may be found in old records, history is everything and

nothing at the same time and any of its surface manifestations may be

emphasized in lieu of an explanation, which must always serve the social

power relations existing at any particular time. Like economics,

bourgeois history is pure ideology and gives no inkling of the reasons

for social change. And, just as the market economy can only be

understood through the understanding of its underlying class relations,

so does this kind of history require another kind if its meaning is to

be revealed. From a Marxian point of view, history implies changing

social relations of production. That history which concerns itself

exclusively with alterations in an otherwise static society, as

interesting as it may be, concerns Marxism only insofar as these changes

indicate the hidden process by which one mode of production releases

social forces that point to the rise of another mode of production. From

this point of view, the historical changes brought about by the Russian

Revolution and the Bolshevik regime have their place within an otherwise

unaltered mode of production, as its social relations remained

capital-labor relations, even though capital – that is, control over the

means of production – and with it wage labor were taken out of the hands

of private entrepreneurs and placed in those of a state bureaucracy

performing the exploitative functions of the former. The capitalist

system was modified but not abolished. The history made by the

Bolsheviks was still capitalist history in the ideological disguise of

Marxism.

The existence of “great men” in history is a sure indication that

history is being made within the hierarchical structure of class-ridden

competitive societies. The Lenin cult, the Hitler cult, the Stalin cult,

etc., represent attempts to deprive the mass of the population of any

kind of self-determination and also to ensure their complete

atomization, which makes this technically possible. Such cults have

little to do with the “great men” themselves, as personalities, but

reflect the need or desire for complete conformity to allow a particular

class or a particular political movement sufficient control over broad

masses for the realization of their specific objectives, such as war, or

making a revolution. “Great men” require “great times,” and both emerge

in crisis situations that have their roots in the exaggeration of

society’s fundamental contradictions.

The helplessness of the atomized individual finds a sort of imaginary

solace in the mere symbolization of his self-assertion in the

leadership, or the leader, of a social movement claiming to do for him

what he cannot do for himself. The impotence of the social individual is

the potency of the individual who manages to represent one or another

kind of historically given social aspiration. The anti-social character

of the capitalist system accounts for its apparent social coherence in

the symbolized form of the state, the government, the great leader.

However, the symbolization must be constantly reinforced by the concrete

forms of control executed by the ruling minority.

It is almost certain that without Lenin’s arrival in Russia the

Bolsheviks would not have seized governmental power, and in this sense

the credit for the Bolshevik Revolution must be given to Lenin – or

perhaps, to the German General Staff, or to Parvus, who made Lenin’s

entry into the Russian Revolution possible. But what would have happened

in Russia without the “subjective factor” of Lenin’s existence? The

totally discredited tsarist regime had already been overthrown and would

not have been resurrected by a counter-revolutionary coup in the face of

the combined and general opposition of workers, peasants, the

bourgeoisie, and even segments of the old autocratic regime. In

addition, the Entente powers, relieved of the alliance with the

anachronistic Russian autocratic regime, favored the new and ostensibly

democratic government, if only in the hope of a more efficiently waged

war against the Central European “anti-democratic” powers. Although

attempts were made to resume the offensive in the west, they were not

successful, and merely intensified the desire for an early peace, even a

separate peace, in order to consolidate the new regime and to restore

some modicum of order within the increasing social anarchy. A

counter-revolution would have had as its object the forced continuation

of the war and the elimination of the soviets and the Bolsheviks, to

safeguard the private-property nature of the social production

relations. In short, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would most

probably have been overthrown by a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,

enforced by a White terror and other fascist methods of rule. A

different political system and different property relations would have

evolved, but on the basis of the same production relations that

sustained the Bolshevik state.

Similarly, there is little doubt that World War II was initiated by

Adolf Hitler in an attempt to win World War I by a second try for German

control of capitalist Europe. Without Hitler, the second war might not

have broken loose at the time it actually did, but perhaps also not

without the Stalin-Hitler Pact, or without the deepening of the

worldwide depression, which set definite limits to the Nazis’ internal

economic policies, on which their political dominance depended. It is

clear, however, that Hitler cannot be blamed for World War I or for the

Great Depression preceding World War II. Governments are composed of

individuals, representing definite ideologies and specific economic

interests, for which reason it is always possible to give credit, or to

put the blame, for any particular policy on individual politicians, and

to assume that had they not been there, history would have run a

different course. This might even be true, but the different course

would in no way affect the general development insofar as it is

determined by capitalist production relations.

In brief, it is not possible to make any reliable predictions with

regard to historical development on the strength of political movements

and the role of individuals within these movements as they are thrown up

by the development of capitalism and its difficulties, so long as these

occurrences do not concern the basic social production relations but

only reflect changes within these relations. It is true that political

and economic phenomena constitute an entity, but to speak of such an

entity may be to refer to no more than erratic movements within the

given social structure, and not to social contradictions destined to

destroy the given political and economic entity by way of revolutionary

changes that bring another society into existence. Just as there is no

way to foresee economic development in its details, that is, at what

point a crisis will be released or be overcome, there is also no way to

account for political development in its details, that is, which social

movement will succeed or fail, or what individual will come to dominate

the political scene and whether or not this individual will appear as a

“history-making” individual, quite apart from his personal

qualifications. What cannot be comprehended cannot be taken into

consideration, and political as well as economic events appear as a

series of “accidents” or “shocks,” seemingly from outside the system but

actually produced by this system, which precludes the recognition of its

inherent necessities. The very existence of political life attests to

its fetishistic determination. Outside this fetishistic determination,

this helpless and blind subjection to the capital-expansion process, the

entity of politics and economics would not appear as such, but rather as

the elimination of both in a consciously arranged organization of the

social requirements of the reproduction process, freed of its economic

and political aspects. Politics, and with it, that type of economy which

is necessarily political economy, will cease with the establishment of a

classless society.

That even Lenin was somehow aware of this may be surmised by his

reluctance to use the term “wage labor” after the seizure of power. Only

once, in deference to an international audience, at the founding

Congress of the Third International in March 1919, did he speak of

“mankind throwing off the last form of slavery: capitalist or wage

slavery.” Generally, however, he made it appear that the end of private

capital implies the end of the wage system; although not automatically

abolishing the wage system in a technical sense, it would free it from

its exploitative connotations. In this respect, as in many others, Lenin

merely harked back to Kautsky’s position of 1902, which maintained that

in the early stages of the construction of socialism wage labor, and

therefore money, (or vice versa) must be retained in order to provide

the workers with the necessary incentives to work. Trotsky, too,

reiterated this idea, but with an exemplary shamelessness, stating that

we still retain, and for a long time will retain, the system of wages.

The farther we go, the more will its importance become simply to

guarantee to all members of society all the necessaries of life; and

thereby it will cease to be a system of wages. [But] in the present

difficult period the system of wages is for us, first and foremost, not

a method for guaranteeing the personal existence of any separate worker,

but a method of estimating what the individual worker brings with his

labor to the Labor Republic.... Finally, when it rewards some (through

the wage system), the Labor State cannot but punish others – those who

are clearly infringing labor solidarity, undermining the common work,

and seriously impairing the Socialist renaissance of the country.

Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of

the Socialist dictatorship.[16]

As the wage system is the basis of capitalist production, so it remains

the basis of “socialist construction,” which first allows people like

Lenin and Trotsky, and their state apparatus, not only to assume the

position but also to speak in the voice of the capitalists when dealing

with the working class. As if the wage system had not always been the

only guarantee for the workers to earn a livelihood, and as if it had

not always been used to estimate the amount of surplus value to be

extracted from their work!

As a theory of the proletarian revolution, Marxism does not recognize

alterations within unchanged social production relations as historical

changes in the sense of the materialist conception of history. It speaks

of changes of social development from slavery to serfdom to wage labor,

and of the abolition of the latter, and therewith all forms of labor

exploitation, in a classless socialist society. Each type of class

society will have its own political history, of course, but Marxism

recognizes this as the politics of definite social formations, which

will, however, come to an end with the abolition of classes, the last

political revolution in the general social developmental process. Quite

apart from its objective possibility or impossibility, the Bolshevik

regime had no intention to abolish the wage system and was therefore not

engaged in furthering a social revolution in the Marxian sense. It was

satisfied with the abolition of private control over the accumulation of

capital, on the assumption that this would suffice to proceed to a

consciously planned economy and, eventually, to a more egalitarian

system of distribution. It is true, of course, that the possibility of

such an endeavor had not occurred to Marx, for whom the capitalist

system, in its private-property form, would have to be replaced by a

system in which the producers themselves would take collective and

direct control of the means of production. From this point of view, the

Bolshevik endeavor, through a historical novelty not contemplated by

Marx, still falls within the history of the capitalist mode of

production.

By adhering to the Marxist ideology evolved within the Second

International, Lenin and the Bolsheviks succeeded in identifying their

inversion of Marxian theory as the only possible form of its

realization. While the Bolshevik concept implied no more than the

formation of a state-capitalist system, this had been the way in which,

at the turn of the century, socialism had been quite generally

understood. It is therefore not possible to accuse the Bolsheviks of a

“betrayal” of the then prevailing “Marxist” principles; on the contrary,

they actualized the declared goals of the Social Democratic movement,

which itself had lost all interest in acting upon its beliefs. What the

Bolsheviks did was to realize the program of the Second International by

revolutionary means. However, in doing so, that is, by turning the

ideology into practice and giving it concrete substance, they identified

revolutionary Marxism with the state-directed socialist society

envisioned by the orthodox wing of international Social Democracy.

Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the bourgeoisie had looked upon

Marxism as a meaningless utopia, contrary to the naturally given market

relations and to human nature itself. There was of course the class

struggle, but this, too, like competition in general, implied no more

than the Darwinian struggle for existence, which justified its

suppression or amelioration, as the case might be, in accordance with

changing circumstances or opportunities. But the very fact of the

existence of the bourgeoisie was proof enough that society could not

prevail without class divisions, as its very complexity demanded its

hierarchical structure. Socialism, in the Marxian sense of the

self-determination of the working class, was not a practical possibility

and its advocacy was not only stupid but also criminal, for its

realization would destroy not only capitalist society but society

itself. The adaptation of the reformist labor movement to the realities

of social life and its successful integration into the capitalist system

was additional proof that the capital-labor relations were the normal

social relations, which could not be tampered with except at the price

of social decay.

This argument was put aside by the Bolshevik demonstration that it is

possible to have “socialism” on the basis of capital-labor relations and

that a social hierarchy could be maintained without the bourgeoisie,

simply by turning the latter into servants of the state, the sole

proprietor of the social capital. Although Marx had said that capitalism

presupposes the capitalist, this need not imply the capitalist as

bourgeois, as owner of private capital, for the capital concentration

and centralization process indicated the diminishing of their numbers

and the increasing monopolization of capital. If there was an “end” to

this process, it would be the end of private capital, as the property of

many capitalists, and the end of market economy, which would issue into

the complete monopoly of ownership of the means of production. This

might as well be in the hands of the state, which would then become the

organizer of social production in a system in which “market relations”

were reduced to the exchange between labor and capital through the

maintenance of wage labor in the state-controlled economy. This concept

might have made “socialism” comprehensible to the bourgeoisie, were it

not for the fact that it involved their abolition as a ruling class.

From the bourgeois point of view, it was quite immaterial whether they

found themselves expropriated by a state, which was no longer their own,

or by a proletarian revolution in the Marxian sense, that is, the

appropriation of the means of production by the working class. The

Bolshevik state-capitalist, or, what amounts to the same,

state-socialist concept was consequently equated with the Marxian

concept of socialism. When the bourgeoisie speaks of Marxism, it

invariably refers to its Bolshevik interpretation, as this is the only

one that has found concrete application. This identification of Marxism

with the Leninist concept of socialism turned the latter into a synonym

for Marxism, and as such it has dominated the character of all

revolutionary and national-revolutionary movements down to the present

day.

Whereas for the bourgeoisie Bolshevism and Marxism meant the same thing,

Social Democracy could not possibly identify the Leninist regime as a

socialist state, even though it had realized its own long-forgotten goal

of reaching socialism via the capture of state power. Yet because

Bolshevism had expropriated the bourgeoisie, it was equally impossible

to refer to it as a capitalist system, without acknowledging that even

legal conquest of the state by parliamentary means need not lead to a

socialist system of production. Hilferding, for one, resolved the

problem simply by announcing that Bolshevism was neither capitalism nor

socialism, but a societal form best described as a “totalitarian state

economy,” a system based on an “unlimited personal dictatorship.”[17] It

was no longer determined by the character of its economy but by the

personal notions of the omnipotent dictator. Denying his own long-held

concept of “organized capitalism” as the inevitable result of the

capital concentration process, and the consequent disappearance of the

law of value as the regulator of the capitalist economy, Hilferding now

insisted that from an economic point of view state-capitalism cannot

exist. Once the state has become the sole owner of the means of

production, he said, it renders impossible the functions of the

capitalist economy because it abolishes the very mechanism which

accounts for the economic circulation process by way of competition on

which the law of value operates. But while this state of affairs had

once been equated with the rise of socialism, it was now perceived as a

totalitarian society equally removed from both capitalism and socialism.

The one ingredient that excluded its transformation into socialism was

the absence of political democracy. But if this were so, Hilferding was

fundamentally in agreement with Lenin on the assumption that it is

possible to institute socialism by political means, although there was

no agreement as to the particular political means to be employed. In

fact, Lenin was very much indebted to Hilferding, save in his rejection

of the means of formal democracy as the criterion for the socialist

nature of the state-controlled economy.

In this respect it is noteworthy that neither Lenin nor Hilferding had

any concern for the social production relations as capital-labor

relations, but merely for the character of the government presiding over

the “new society.” In the opinion of both, it was the state that must

control society, whether by democratic or dictatorial means; the working

class was to be the obedient instrument of governmental policies. Just

the same, it was Lenin’s concept of “dictatorship” that carried the day,

for the Bolsheviks had seized power, whereas Hilferding’s “democracy”

was slowly eroded by the authoritarian tendencies arising within the

capitalist system. Besides, the “Marxism” of the Second International

had lost its plausibility at the eve of World War I, whereas the success

of the Bolshevik Revolution could be seen as a return to the

revolutionary theory and practice of Marxism. This situation assured the

rising prominence of the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, as

dependent on the existence of a vanguard party not only for seizing

power but also for securing the transition from capitalism to socialism.

At any rate, in the course of time the Leninist conception of Marxism

came to dominate that part of the international labor movement which saw

itself as an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist force.

We have dealt with Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution in some detail

in order to bring out two specific points: first, that the policies of

the Bolshevik regime subsequent to Lenin’s death had their cause in the

prevailing situation in Russia and the world at large as well as in the

political concepts of the Leninist party; and second, that the result of

this combination of factors implied a second and apparently “final”

destruction of the labor movement as a Marxist movement. World War I and

its support by the socialist parties of the Second International

signified a defeat of Marxism as a potentially revolutionary workers’

movement. The war and its aftermath led to a temporary revival of

revolutionary activities for limited reformist goals, which indicated

the workers’ unreadiness to dislodge the capitalist system. Only in

Russia did the revolutionary upheavals go beyond mere governmental

changes, by playing the means of production – not at once, but gradually

– into the hands of the Bolshevik party-state. But this apparent success

implied a total inversion of Marxian theory and its willful

transformation into the ideology of state-capitalism, which, by its very

nature, restricts itself to the nation-state and its struggle for

existence and expansion in a world of competing imperialist nations and

power blocs.

The concept of world revolution as the expected result of the

imperialist war, which seemingly prompted the Bolsheviks’ seizure of

power, was dependent upon Lenin’s notion of the indispensable existence

of a vanguard party, able to grasp the opportunity for the overthrow of

the bourgeois state, and capable of avoiding, or correcting, the

otherwise aimless squandering of spontaneously released revolutionary

energies on the part of the rebellious masses. Aside from the Russian

Bolsheviks, however, no vanguard party of the Leninist type existed

anywhere, so that this first presupposition for a successful socialist

revolution could not be met. In the light of Lenin’s own theory, it was

therefore logically inconsistent to await the extension of the Russian

into an international revolution. But even if such vanguard parties

could have been created overnight, so to speak, their goals would have

been determined by the Leninist concept of the state and its functions

in the social transformation process. If successful, there would have

been more than one state-capitalist system but no international

socialist revolution. In short, there would have been accomplished at an

earlier time what actually came to pass after World War II without a

revolution, namely the imperialistic division of the world into

monopolistic and state-capitalistic national systems under the aegis of

unstable power blocs.

Assuming for the sake of argument that revolutions in Western Europe had

gone beyond purely political changes and had led to a dictatorship of

the proletariat, exercised through a system of soviets controlling

economic social relations, such a system would have found itself in

opposition to the party-state in its Leninist incarnation. Most

probably, it would have led to a revival of Russia’s internal opposition

to the Bolshevik power monopoly and to the dethroning of its leadership.

A proletarian revolution in the Marxian sense would have endangered the

Bolshevik regime even more than would a bourgeois and social democratic

counter-revolution, because for the Bolsheviks the spreading of the

revolution was conceivable only as the expansion of the Bolshevik

Revolution and the maintenance of its specific characteristics on a

global scale. This was one of the reasons why the Third International,

as a “tool of world revolution,” was turned into an international

replica of the Leninist party.

This particular practice was based on Lenin’s theory of imperialism.

More polemical than theoretical in character, Lenin’s Imperialism: The

Highest Stage of Capitalism paid more attention to the fleeting

political aspects of imperialism than to its underlying socioeconomic

dynamics. It was intended to unmask the imperialist character of the

first world war, seen as the general condition for social revolution.

Lenin’s arguments were substantiated by relevant data from various

bourgeois sources, by a critical utilization of the theoretical findings

of J. H. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding, and by a rejection of Karl

Kautsky’s speculative theory of superimperialism as a way toward a

peaceful capitalism. The data and the theories were bound up with a

particular historical stage of capitalist development and contained no

clues regarding its further course.

The compulsion to imperialism is inherent in capitalist production, but

it is the development of the latter which accounts for its specific

manifestations at any particular time. For Lenin, however, capitalism

became imperialistic “only at a definite and very high stage of

capitalistic development,” a stage that implied the rule of national and

international monopolies which, by agreement or force, divided the

world’s exploitable resources among themselves. In his view, this period

is characterized not so much by the export of commodities as by that of

capital, which allows the big imperialist powers, and a part of their

laboring populations, an increasingly parasitical existence at the

expense of the subjugated regions of the world. He perceived this

situation as the “highest stage” of capitalism because he expected that

its manifold contradictions would lead directly to social revolutions on

an international scale.

However, although World War I led to the Russian Revolution, imperialism

was not the “eve of the proletarian world revolution.” What is

noteworthy here nonetheless is the continuity between Lenin’s early work

on the development of Russian capitalism and his theory of imperialism

and the impending world revolution. Against the Narodniks, as we saw,

Lenin held that capitalism would be the next step in Russia’s

development and that, for that reason, the industrial proletariat would

come to play the dominant role in the Russian revolution. But by

involving not only the workers, but also the peasants and even layers of

the bourgeoisie, the revolution would have the character of a “people’s

revolution.” To realize all its potentialities, it would have to be led

by an organization representing the socialism of the working class.

Lenin’s theory of imperialism as “the eve of world revolution” was thus

a projection of his theory of the Russian revolution onto the world at

large. Just as in Russia different classes and nationalities were to

combine under proletarian leadership to overthrow the autocracy, so on

an international scale whole nations, at various stages of development,

are to combine under the leadership of the Third International to

liberate themselves from both their imperialistic masters and their

native ruling classes. The world revolution is thus one of subjugated

classes and nations against a common enemy – monopolist imperialism. It

was this theory that, in Stalin’s view, made “Leninism the Marxism of

the age of imperialism.” However, based on the presupposition of

successful socialist revolutions in the advanced capitalist nations, the

theory could not be proven right or wrong as the expected revolutions

did not materialize.

This truly grandiose scheme, which puts Bolshevism in the center of the

world revolutionary process and, to speak in Hegelian terms, made the

Weltgeist manifest itself in Lenin and his party, remained a mere

expression of Lenin’s imaginary powers, for with every step he took the

“greatest of Realpolitiker” found himself at odds with reality. Just as

he had to jettison his own agrarian program in exchange for that of his

Social Revolutionary opponents, to rid himself of the “natural economy”

practiced with devastating results during the period of “war communism”

and fall back to market relations in the New Economic Policy, and to

wage war against the self-determination of oppressed nationalities at

first so generously granted by the Bolshevik regime, so he saw himself

forced to construct and utilize the Third International not for the

extension of the international revolution but for no more than the

defense of the Bolshevik state. His internationalism, like that of the

bourgeoisie, could only serve national ends, camouflaged as general

interests of the world revolution. But perhaps it was this total failure

to further the declared goods of Bolshevism that really attests to

Lenin’s mastery of Realpolitik, if only in the sense that an

unprincipled opportunism did indeed serve the purpose of maintaining the

Bolsheviks in power.

Lenin’s single-mindedness in gaining and keeping state power by way of

compromises and opportunistic reversals, as dictated by circumstances

outside his control, was not a practice demanded by Marxist theory but

an empirical pragmatism such as characterizes bourgeois politics in

general. The professional revolutionary turned into a statesman vying

with other statesmen to defend the specific interests of the Bolshevik

state as those of the Russian nation. Any further revolutionary

development was now seen as depending on the protection of the first

“workers’ state,” which thus became the foremost duty of the

international proletariat. The Marxist ideology served not only internal

but also external purposes by assuring working-class support for

Bolshevik Russia. To be sure, this involved only part of the labor

movement, but it was that part which could disrupt the anti-Bolshevik

forces, which now included the old socialist parties and the trade

unions. The Leninist interpretation of Marxism became the whole of

Marxian theory, as a counter-ideology to all forms of anti-Bolshevism

and all attempts to weaken or to destroy the Russian government.

Simultaneously, however, attempts were also made to bring about a state

of coexistence with the capitalist adversaries. Various concessions were

proposed to demonstrate the mutual advantages to be gained through

international trade and other means of collaboration. This two-faced

policy served the single end of preserving the Bolshevik state by

serving the national interests of Russia.

[1] Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic

(1918), Article 4, Chapter XIII.

[2] Trotsky, Our Revolution, p. 98.

[3] Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, p. 46.

[4] Lord Moran reports the following dialogue between Churchill and

Stalin in Moscow in 1942: Churchill: “When I raised the question of the

collective farms and the struggle with the kulaks, Stalin became very

serious. I asked him if it was as bad as the war. ’Oh, yes,’ he

answered, ’Worse. Much worse. It went on for years. Most of them were

liquidated by the peasants, who hated them. Ten millions of them. But we

had to do it to mechanize agriculture. In the end, production from the

land was doubled. What is a generation?’ Stalin demanded as he paced up

and down the length of the table.” C. Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for

Survival, 1940–1965 (Boston: Houghton, 1966), p. 70.

[5] Lenin, Program of the CPSU (B), adopted 22 March 1919 at the Eighth

Congress of the Party.

[6] Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 reestablished the universal right to

vote, but combined it with a number of controls that preclude the

election to state institutions of anyone not favored by the Communist

Party, thus demonstrating that universal franchise and dictatorship can

exist simultaneously.

[7] Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy (New York, 1922), pp. 107–9.

[8] Trotsky, undoubtedly as outstanding a revolutionary politician as

Lenin, is nonetheless of no interest with respect to the Bolshevik

Revolution, either as a theoretician or as a practical actor, because of

his total submission to Lenin, which allowed him to play a great role in

the seizure of power and the construction of the Bolshevik state. Prior

to his unconditional deference to Lenin, Trotsky opposed both the

Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, the first because of their passive

acceptance of the expected Russian Revolution as a bourgeois revolution

in the traditional sense, and the second because of Lenin’s insistence

on a “peasant-worker alliance,” which in Trotsky’s view could not lead

to a socialist revolution According to Trotsky, moreover, the socialist

revolution, dominated by the industrial proletariat, cannot be

contemplated at all within the framework of a national revolution, but

must from the start be approached as an international revolution, united

the Russian revolution with revolutions in Western Europe, that is, as a

“permanent revolution” under the hegemony of the working class. Changing

over to Lenin’s ideas and their apparent validity in the context of the

Russian situation, Trotsky became the prisoner of a dogmatized Leninism

and thus unable to evolve a Marxist critique of the Bolshevik

Revolution.

[9] Trotsky, “Lenin on his 50^(th) Birthday,” in Fourth International

(January-February 1951), pp. 28–9.

[10]

A. J. Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin (1964), p. 301.

[11] H.H. Fisher, “Soviet Policies in Asia,” in The Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science (May 1949), p. 190.

[12] “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe” (1915), in Collected

Works, Vol 21 (Moscow: Progress, 1964), p. 342.

[13] This found its expression in the program adopted by the sailors,

soldiers, and workers of Kronstadt: 1) Immediate new elections to the

soviets. The present soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers

and peasants. The new elections should be by secret ballot, and should

be preceded by free electorial propaganda. 2) Freedom of speech and of

the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the left

socialist parties. 3) The right of assembly, and freedom of trade union

and peasant organizations. 4) The organization, at the latest on 10^(th)

March 1921, of a conference of non-party workers, soldiers and sailors

of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd district. 5) The liberation of

all political prisoners of the socialist parties, and of all imprisoned

workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and

peasant organizations. 6) The election of a commission to look into the

dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps. 7)

The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No

political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas,

or receive State subsidies to this end. In the place of the political

sections, various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources

from the State. 8) The immediate abolition of the militia detachments

set up between towns and countryside. 9) The equalization of rations for

all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs. 10)

The abolition of party combat detachments in all military groups. The

abolition of party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are

required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the

workers. 11) The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their

own soil and the right to own cattle, provided they look after them

themselves and do not employ hired labor. 12) We request that all

military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this

resolution 13) We demand the press give proper publicity to this

resolution 14) We demand that handicraft production be authorized

provided it does not utilize wage labor. Quoted by Ida Mett, The

Kronstadt Commune (London: Solidarity, 1967), pp. 6–7. For a detailed

history of the Kronstadt rebellion, see Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

[14] In Izvestiya. Journal of Kronstadt’s Temporary Revolutionary

Committee, 12 March 1921; quoted in The Truth about Kronstadt (Prague,

1921).

[15]

A. Kollontai, The Workers’ Opposition (1921).

[16] Dictatorship vs. Democracy, p. 149.

[17] Article written for Sotsialistichesky Viestnik; English version in

Proletarian Outlook 6:3 (1940).