A Century of Social Democracy (First Edition)

A Century of Social Democracy

Joseph Paul Mc Carroll L.L.B.

First Edition

Copyright            Joseph Paul Mc Carroll 2001,2002,2003,2007,2009, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1              In      Democracy, Socialism and the First Stirrings of Socialist Politics

Chapter 2                    The Paris Commune, 1871

Chapter 3                    State Socialism

Chapter 4                    Opportunism in German Social Democracy

Chapter 5                    Misrepresentation and Censorship by the German Social Democrats

Chapter 6                    The Second International

Chapter 7                    Russian Social Democracy Before 1905

Chapter 8                    1905 – The Dress Rehearsal

Chapter 9                    Russian Marxism, 1905 – 1917

Chapter 10                  Soviet Government, Spring 1918

Chapter 11                  Soviet Power, 1917 –1922

Chapter 12                  Stalin

                        Author’s Epilogue

Introduction

From the 1830’s until the 1930’s the visions of a working class regime of political power took seed, grew and declined. The primary architects of socialism were Marx, Engels and Lenin. Stalin was their nemesis and split the movement internationally.

Communism in the 1830’s grew into socialism in the 1860’s and was referred to as Social Democracy after the 1891 name change in Germany.  The Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party was founded in 1898 and became the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in 1919. In 1952, this party became known as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  Before 1943 it led the Communist International (The Comintern) until its disbandment as Stalin’s concession to his wartime allies.  With Stalin died the dream of international revolution.   The chapter on Stalin serves as my closing chapter.

I have preserved the literary integrity of my work, although my own views on social democracy and the culture of protest have changed.

Joe Mc Carroll

May  2007

DEMOCRACY, SOCIALISM AND THE FIRST STIRRINGS OF SOCIALIST POLITICS

Prior to the unification of the Marxist Social-Democratic Workers Party and the Lassallean General Association of German Workers at Gotha in May 1875 to form the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, there was no mass party of socialists which advanced the political cause of the working class in any country.  There was a conspiracy of Babeuf in the French Revolution in 1798.  In the 1830’s migrant German workers formed a League of the Just in Paris (the Communist League) which had branches amongst German emigrants in Belgium, Switzerland, France and England.  The Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto in late 1847.  After the publication of this brief but brilliant pamphlet, Marx and Engels became the effective leaders of the League.

During the Berlin and Vienna insurrections of 1848 and the South German revolt of 1849, the democrats were challenged for political supremacy by the armed workers who had earlier fought alongside them.  The inspiration for the Germans’ revolutionary uprisings had been the revolt of the French middle classes and workers in February 1848.

As the leaders of the German revolutionary workers in the press, on the barricades and on the battlefields, Marx and Engels gave both practical and theoretical leadership despite their youthfulness.  After the defeat of the revolution both found themselves in London to where the League had disported itself.  Marx lodged with his wife and young children in a two-bedroom apartment in Soho and Engels lived in Manchester where his family were partners in a cotton factory.  In their private correspondence, both anticipated a revolutionary revival before it became clear in July 1850 that the economic crisis on the continent was over.

It is instructive for us to look back at the speeches given by way of guidance to the Central Committee of the Communist League meeting in London in March 1850 since the class struggle was “suppressed” and “embryonic” (Lenin, The Economic Content of Narodism, Volume 1, Collected Works).

The Address To The Central Committee of The Communist League, (Marx and Engels Selected Works, Moscow, 1968, Volume 1, page 175, [MESW] ) is therefore instructive.  It opens with a commentary on how league circles and communities had believed the revolution of 1848-1849 to be a time for the abandonment of secrecy and the loosening of ties with the centre.  As a result “the general movement…came completely under the domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats” (MESW, Volume1, page 174).  The workers lost their “independence”.  We must bear in mind that the Communist Manifesto had called for the workers to organise themselves as a separate party.  (In 1912, on the eve of elections to the Workers Curia (or section) of the Russian Duma (or Parliament) Lenin vigorously attacked the Liquidators who called for an end to illegal activity and the formation of a legal, open political party – when the constitutional monarchist, liberal, labour parties and their newspapers were all banned).

Engels and Marx described how the middle class had thrown in its lot with the feudal landowners and absolutist monarchist party after the workers had put forward their own demands.  They called for action “in the most organised, unanimous, most independent fashion possible (so as) not to be exploited and taken in tow again by the bourgeoisie as in 1848” (MESW, Volume 1, page 176).

The founders of scientific socialism characterised the next revolutionary upsurge as one led by the democratic lower middle class.  That party would consist of the radical big capitalist, the democratic-constitutionalist, and the democratic-constitutional lower middle class who collectively went under the name of Republicans or Reds.  Marx and Engels warned, “The relation of the revolutionary workers’ party of the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it marches together with them against the faction which it aims at overthrowing, it opposes them in everything whereby they seek to consolidate their position in their own interests” (MESW, Volume 1 page 178).

They characterised the German Republicans demands as cheap government (to use an Anglo-Saxon phrase), a “curtailment of the bureaucracy”, shifting the chief taxes onto the big landowners and capitalists, public credit institutions, laws against usury and the complete abolition of feudalism in the countryside.  Their aims were to be made possible through a democratic state structure (where they would hold the majority) and a democratic local structure, which would give them control over communal property and over a series of functions performed by bureaucrats.

In relation to the wage workers, the Republicans promised “better wages and a more secure existence” i.e. state employment and charity measures.  Remarking on this “bribe”, Marx and Engels commented,

“It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletariat” (MESW, Volume 1 page 179).

This was a summary of their intention of continuing the revolution beyond the democratic revolution.  Marx and Engels envisaged three scenarios where the working class must orientate itself towards the democratic lower middle class:

1.    where they were likewise oppressed,

2.    in a revolution where they gained the upper hand,

3.    after this struggle where they dominated the defeated classes and the workers.

1.            They characterised the first scenario thus,

“. . . . (T)he preach(ing) of general unity and reconciliation to the proletariat . . . . stirring for the establishment of a large opposition party which will embrace all shades of opinion in the democratic party . . . to entangle the workers in a party organisation in which general social-democratic phrases predominate behind which their special interests are concealed and in which the particular demands of the proletariat may not be brought forward for the sake of beloved peace . . . .”

Marx and Engels decisively rejected this union and called for “an independent, secret and public organisation of the workers’ party alongside of the official democrats . . . with equal power and equal rights” (MESW, Volume 1 pp 179 – 180).  Regarding a formal alliance or Popular Front, as it would be called now, they say;

“In the case of a struggle against a common adversary no special union is required”.

Such a union “calculated to last only for a moment, will arise of itself”.  The workers “win the victory by their courage, determination and self-sacrifice while the lower middle class “remain hesitant, undecided and inactive.  By holding on to their arms, the workers made the long-lived victory of the new class impossible and hence that victory will bear within it the seeds of its downfall”.  The founders of working class socialism advised the workers that their actions must be so aimed so as to prevent the direct revolutionary excitement from being suppressed again immediately after the victory.  They call for workers to take the leadership of “instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are associated only with hateful recollections”.  They also advised workers to obtain guarantees from the democrats by force, if necessary, as soon as the middle class take over government and to make “a calm and dispassionate estimate of the situation” (ibid, page 181).  They also called for the establishment alongside the new official governments of revolutionary workers’ governments.

2.            In the event of such a new government, the first thing is to arm the workers under their elected commanders and with a general staff of their own choosing at the command of “revolutionary community councils”.  They advise:

“Arms and ammunition must not be surrendered on any pretext; any attempt at disarming must be frustrated, if necessary by force”.

3.            The preponderance of lower middle class democrats over the defeated classes and the working class, once consolidated, is the beginning of their struggle against the workers.  Energetic opposition requires independent organisation and centralisation in the form of worker organisations.  In this eventuality, a national representative assembly will be elected.  This situation requires a full extension of the franchise to the workers.  (This was only achieved in 1867 in England for one third of male workers on the basis of household suffrage and was achieved in 1848 by the French workers and then overthrown a few years later by Napoleon III).  Secondly, it required that workers’ candidates be put up alongside the democrats, to preserve workers’ independence, count their numbers and to “bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint”.  The authors foresaw the democrats’ argument that this would split the democrats and allow the reactionaries to get in.  The remedy for this eventuality was the coming out “resolutely and terroristically” against the reaction.  The scene for conflict in France and Germany was set by the land issue where the middle class democrats accommodated the tenants of the feudal landowners. 

As in the French Revolution, the peasants/farmers still fell into “a cycle of impoverishment and indebtedness” albeit, in France, the land was seized by the lower middle class without compensation.  The rural wage labourers were both in France (1793) and Ireland (1924) left in the same position.  The political role of workers was to take the latter’s side against the tenants/farmers and lower middle class democrats by demanding that land be converted into workers’ colonies (collective or state farms).  Workers must also strive for both local and provincial self-government and national, political centralisation and against the appointment of (State) Commissioners (as happened in Newry and Armagh in 1922 when the Stormont Parliament was setting out on the road to a gerrymander).  The Paris Commune of 1871 as well as failing to seize the Bank of France and marching on the Versailles headquarters of the counter-revolution was not strong enough to call for anything more than a free association of the rural communes with Paris.  The workers, in this situation of lower middle class preponderance, can:

(a)”compel the latter to interfere in as many spheres as possible as well as to concentrate the utmost productive forces, means of transport, factories and so on in the hands of state”,

(b) drive the proposals of the democrats to the extreme and transform into “direct attacks on public property “ e.g. on the question of confiscation or compensation, there should be none of the latter, or e.g. on the question of taxes, these should be progressive rather than proportional or e.g. the repudiation of state debts, where the workers must demand state bankruptcy.”

In all areas the democrats’ concessions and measures call forth workers’ demands.

This process is “a lengthy revolutionary development” and the big countries with the longest history of revolutionary initiatives must lead.  Events in the lesser political and economic powers were accelerated by the experienced troops first going over the top.In the weaker countries, such as Germany in 1850 the workers must clarify their minds at to their class interests, taking up their position as an independent party and “not allowing themselves to be seduced . . . by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic lower middle class into refraining from independent organisation” of the party of the working class.

THE PARIS COMMUNE 1871

The legacy of the Paris Commune is that of the first workers’ government in history.  In 1848, the Reds had made their first appearance on the historical stage only to be shot down by Cavaignac in the June days.  Three thousand died thus.  Since the Commune a series of imperialists, putschists and reformers have dominated the French socialist movement. 

The movement of the Commune was based on the anti-strike anarchist i.e. the followers of Proudhon and the conspiratorial utopians (or Blanquists).  After 1871 and exile, the French had a long succession of ministerialists and compromisers: Vaillant, Millerand, Guesde, Lafargue, Blum and Marchais who invariably began their careers as Marxists and were soon eclipsed as they accommodated themselves to imperialism and the radical middle class.  In the 1880’s the Marxists, the Maximalists, were based outside Paris while the Possibilists were based on the luxury trades of Paris.  The international movement of the Second International drew them together.  The French Socialist Party became the SFIO in the 1920’s after the Communists split away at the Tours Congress of 1922.   In the 1930’s the rise of fascism in France, Germany, Italy and Spain forced the Socialists and Communists into a Popular Front under the de facto direction of the Radical Republicans.  In the 1970’s, Mitterand united the reformists in the French Socialist Party.  Nowadays, the Stalinists form a party of three per cent of the electorate. 

Between 1848 and 1851, Napoleon the Little manipulated the most numerous class in France, the peasantry.  He introduced universal suffrage to give the peasantry electoral power.  The peasantry are by their conditions of existence dispersed and isolated from each other.  In France, the peasantry were under the spell of Napoleon Bonaparte’s greatness the mantle assumed by his nephew, Napoleon The Third.  Having gained election as President, Napoleon The Third restricted the franchise with a property qualification.  Orgies of financial speculation on the Stock exchange (the Bourse) and railways characterised Napoleon’s reign.

The Paris Commune grew out of the representative council of the Garde Civile, the armed people.  The Army and reactionary rabble were put to flight on March 28 1871 when the Commune was proclaimed by the Proudhonists and Blanquists.  The reactionary party proclaimed that they too were “revolutionary” but their leader at Versailles, Thiers, demanded that the Commune surrender its cannon to the regular army.  At the time, the Prussian Army was camped around Paris after the defeat of Napoleon The Third’s troops at Sedan.

The reign of the commune in Paris of nine weeks was the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state of a society in transition between capitalism and socialism.  The Commune subjected all political, judicial and educational office-holders to election and there existed the right of recall on the basis of binding mandates for the electorate.  None of these office-holders received more than a workman’s wages.  The police and army were abolished and the people were armed. 

Why did the Commune fail?  In the first place, the Communards failed to march on Versailles to disperse the reactionary party.  Secondly, they allowed the Bank of France to remain unoccupied rather than seizing the bank and its bullion.

The international socialist movement had not fully developed before 1871 but the German workers’ organisations unanimously came out against the annexations of Alsace and Lorraine by the Prussian authorities.  On this basis, the first mass socialist party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, was built.

The embryonic beginnings of revolutionary socialism in France, Germany and later Russia point to the central importance of the workers.  Whether led by a party after the fashion of the Bolsheviks or by elected representatives after the Commune’s example, the socialists gained the high ground of democracy and turned the workers into the ruling class.

STATE SOCIALISM

The nationalised economies of Russia and Eastern Europe represented an ideological threat to western capitalism in the 1940’s and during the two decades following the end of the war.  Politicians feared that it would become a pole of attraction for workers in the west.  They therefore took up the cry of nationalisation (particularly in Britain, France, Germany and Italy) and applied it to the steel, coal and iron industries, to railways, road-maintenance and airlines and to medicine, education, public libraries and so on.  This Western socialism is better known as “state socialism”.

The origins of state socialism were in the Germany of the 1880’s when Social Democracy gained a foothold amongst the rapidly growing working class.  It was, indeed, a movement by the expropriators against the threat of themselves being expropriated.  The German Socialist Workers Party (later the SPD) was comprised of two trends in Socialism: the Lassallean trend and the Marxist trend.  While Marx praised Lassalle for beginning the agitation against absolutism in 1862, Engels was later to point out that Lassalle had shamelessly plagiarised Marx and passed off Marx’s discoveries as his own.  It is also clear that Lassalle had engaged in shady dealings with Bismarck promising him the support of the workers in the struggle between the landlords and aristocracy and the rising capitalist class.  This process was cut short only by the death of Lassalle in a duel in 1864.  Bismarck was the political representative of aristocratic and feudal Germany.  Marx was later to remark that he had no objection to two socialist parties in Germany (Letter to Bracke, 1879).

Having banned the socialists from open organisation in 1878, Bismarck continued the process of uniting Germany on the basis of private property relations.  The Anti-Socialist Law 1878 and 1890 did not destroy the socialist movement but actually made it stronger by weakening the influence of those at the top and the professional agitators and strengthening those at the bottom of the party.  In 1881, Bismarck decided on a series of reforms: social insurance law in cases of industrial accident, illness, old age and invalidity.  As one would expect in an absolutist empire, these laws were decreed by the Emperor.

Engels characterised Bismarck’s measures of protective tariffs, nationalised railways, the tobacco monopoly and workmen’s insurance as neither a “semi-or . . . pre-socialist measure”.  He regarded the following for these measures among “those bourgeois and academic elements who have come over to us” (MECW, volume 46, page 260) as the results of “the one-sided campaign against the Free trade (or Manchester) economic trend”.  Engels defended prolective tariffs for America but not for Germany because German industry was sufficiently developed to require foreign semi-manufactured products on the home market and, secondly, because it was “a viable exporter under free trade”.  He believed that German railway shares had been bought up at above their market price and that the tobacco monopoly was a “minute” affair.  He did, however, point out how the development of a salaried management in the railways had rendered the bourgeoisie redundant.

The development of large-scale industry proceeded rapidly between 1870 and 1890 in Germany, based largely on the iron industry.

Several years after the promulgation of Bismarck’s decrees, Engels urged the German socialists in parliament and in their press to begin an agitation for a 8 – 10 hour working day, domestic and international factory legislation, radical revision of the legislation affecting employers’ liability and insurance for accident, sickness, disabled workmen etc., (MECW, Volume 47, page 217).  This was an issue taken up at that time in Germany and in Russia in the early twentieth century by the Bolsheviks in the workmens’ insurance societies.  While the English Liberals clearly saw reforms as the end, the Bolsheviks and German Socialists saw them as a means to stir up workers to fight the capitalist class.

In 1891, the German socialists discussed a new programme, the Erfurt Programme.  Engels called for “the rejection of all state socialism” and ridiculed their plans to nationalise: “(1) the bar, (2) medical services, (3) pharmaceutics, dentistry and (4) midwifery, nursing etc. and  . . . workers insurance” (MESW, Volume 3, page 461).  Engels pointed out the need “to abolish the massive survivals of feudalism and absolutism” (ibid, page 463).

OPPORTUNISM IN GERMAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY

Social-Democracy took root first in Germany before it was united as a single country and developed into a mass movement primarily on the basis of internationalist agitation during the 1870 – 1871 Franco-Prussian War.  The Prussian “cabbage-junkers” united Germany into a single national market dominated by its native middle-class in 1866.  In that year they annexed twenty-five million North West and South West Germans.  In 1862, Lassalle had founded the first workers’ movement after the 1848 bourgeois revolution, the General Association of German Workers.  In 1863, the Marxists had established the Union of German Workers Associations under the leadership of Bebel and Liebknecht.  In 1866, Bebel was elected to the North German Diet.  The UGWA decided at its first conference of 1863  in Frankeurt to set up trade unions and called for the abolition of the standing army.  In 1869, the UGWA became the German Socialist Workers Party and affiliated to the International working Men’s association.  Open membership was prohibited by the state.  Lassalle’s GAGW did not affiliate and took no part in economic agitation.  After the “revolutionary cookbook fashion” of its founder, the GAGW called for universal suffrage and state aid to producers’ associations i.e. co-operatives as “a universal panacea” (Engels).

In 1875, the Gotha conference united both the Socialist Workers Party and the General Association of German Workers in the Social Democratic Party of Germany.  The latter had succeeded in smuggling most of the ideological baggage of what Marx described as German or True Socialism in the Communist Manifesto into the Gotha Programme.  Marx’s critique of Lassalleanism in the Gotha Programme was not published until some months before the 1891 Erfurt Conference when Kautsky’s Programme was adopted by the SPD.  ‘True’ socialism had been plagiarised by the German professors of philosophy and middle class literati from the socialist and communist literature of the French bourgeoisie in the years from 1792 to 1798, according to Marx.  This literature had been so adapted as to portray the lower middle class – a class being relentlessly crushed by the concentration of capital and the militant wage-labourer) or (proletarian) as “the typical man”.  In the 1920’s, Hitler claimed his mission was to put the (bankrupt) ‘little man’ back on his feet.  In 1847, Marx said, “To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany”.

The lower middle class and the tradesman, the shopkeeper, the small businessman is, although often attracted to revolutionary socialism, a class that is “unstable and vacillating” and their loyalty is “temporary” and “conditional” (Lenin, Left-Wing communism, 1920).  (in Russia, after 1917, this class was being constantly regenerated – and with it the middle class mentality of “I’ll grab all I can for myself” – by the numerical predominance of the former tenant-farmer).  The purpose of this chapter is not to turn our attention to Germany before 1848 or to Russia after 1917 but rather to examine the origins of modern day “opportunism” in Western Europe in the eyes of the founders of revolutionary socialism, Marx and Engels.

The outcome of German, British and French opportunism was the vote in the German parliament in August 1914 for war credits (or loans) to the government to prepare the First World War.  Apart from Karl Liebknecht, an anti-militarist social democrat, the SPD under Kautsky’s leadership exercised the only legal and economic power residing in the Reichstag, namely, to approve loans to the militarists for the purposes of imperialist aggression.  Thereafter, Lenin referred to these opportunists as “social chauvinists” or “social-patriots”.

The problem of opportunism was reflected in letters written by Marx and Engels to Bebel and Bracke in 1875 – the year of the Gotha Unity Conference – and in the famous Circular Letter to Bebel, Bracke, Liebknecht and Others which was signed by Engels and Marx in 1875.  The letter of 18 – 28 March 1875 was referred to by Lenin in his pamphlet The State and Revolution (1917) and, again, in his political guidance to Western revolutionary socialists, Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile disorder (1920).  Bebel withheld the letter of 18 – 28 March 1875 from publication until he published his memoirs, Aus Meinem Leben, 1911.

The draft programme of the Unity conference was first seen by Marx and Engels when it appeared in the press in March 1875.  Engels wrote to Bebel between 18 and 28 March – while Bebel was in prison for insulting the German Emperor – that the Lassalleans had “a shattered reputation” and had previously rejected co-operation (MECW Volume 45, page 60ff).  Engels pointed out that the Lassallean nostrums of state aid to producers’ associations and the attitude to the non-proletarian classes as “one reactionary mass” were built into the programme.  Regarding the latter point, Engels said this proposition was only true in certain exceptional circumstances and the Socialist Workers Party had gone hand in hand with the People’s Party, the party of the democratic bourgeoisie, for years and derived most of its political content from its’ newspaper.  Secondly, the Lassalle sect denied the international movement.  The leading role of the Germans in the international movement had been won through its opposition to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871.  Internationalism took the form of aid to strikers, abstention from blacklegging, information on the movement abroad and agitation against dynastic wars.  Thirdly, the Unity Programme contained the ”iron law of wages” which claimed that workers received only the minimum wage whereas Marx proves in Capital that the laws of wages are complex and “elastic”.  Fourthly, on state aid, Engels says that this demand is “sheer futility”.  Fifthly, the programme did not call for  “the organisation of the working class as a class through the medium of trade unions”.

The democratic demands of the Unity Programme omitted even the need for administration by the people and “the first pre-requisite of all liberty – that all officials be responsible for all their official actions to every citizen before the ordinary courts and in accordance with common law”.   The Gotha Programme called for a “free state” which is “a despotic government”.  The formulation of “the elimination of all social and political inequality” was an attempt to modernise the “one-sided French concept” of liberty, equality and fraternity.  Engels says that this demand ignores the fact that there will always be a measure of inequality in living conditions, for example, between one country, or province or one place and another.

Engels predicted a split in such a party but clearly stated that the revolutionary social democrats would be compromised by such a programme afterwards. 

On 5 May 1875, Marx informed Bracke that he and Engels would dissociate themselves from such a programme.  He called the programme “deplorable as well as demoralising for the party”.  He advised “ a longish spell of common activity” in place of the programme.  The programme, Marx maintained, was “surrendering unconditionally to men who are themselves in need of help”.  In terms of tactics, Marx pointed out that the Lassalleans had held their conference before the Unity conference and the Eisenachers held theirs afterwards.  This device, he said, did not allow the Lassallean party as a whole, time for reflection, Marx believed.

On 12 October 1875, Engels wrote to Bebel that the united programme of the Social Democratic Party of Germany bore within it “the seeds of future dissension”.  He called the adoption of state aid in the programme a “tremendous moral defeat”.  Engels regarded the programme as “excessively disjointed, muddled, inconsequential, illogical and discreditable”.  Engels and Marx decided to make no public dissociation from the German Party because the workers were reading Marxist views into the programme. In terms of personnel, the executive committee was comprised of three Lassalleans and two Eisenachers.

In 1878, Bismarck’s government passed an Anti-Socialist Law to derail the growing socialist movement.  Socialist publications were published and printed abroad and a new variety of socialists were attracted to the party.  (In 1875, Engels had characterised the economic ignorance of Kautsky in his letter to Bebel as a liability to the superiority of German theory).  By 1879, Bernstein, Hochberg and Schramm had established an editorial commission in Zurich to publish socialist literature.

In the famous circular Letter of Marx and Engels to Bebel, Liebknecht and Bracke of 17 – 18 September 1879, they criticised the Kathedersozialisten (university-chair socialists) who had slipped into the party.  The “Zurich trio” placed their emphasis on winning over the educated classes.  They were “the voices of the representatives of the petty bougeoisie, terrified lest the proletariat, impelled by its revolutionary situation, should “go too far”.  For them, the class struggle was acknowledged on paper yet they talked of “general conciliation” instead of “resolute political opposition”.  Instead of “defiant resistance to maltreatment from above” they preached “humble subjection -  and  the admission that the punishment was deserved”.

With the brilliance of a genius for political insight that could be directed at the dead embers of Stalinism, Engels and Marx said,

“Every historically necessary conflict is reinterpreted as a misunderstanding and every discussion wound up with the assurance; we are, of course, all agreed on the main issue”.

Marx and Engels acknowledge that political dissolution in the ruling class leads to some “eddicated elements” joining the working class.  They remark that the Zurich Trio “teach what they have not learnt”.  Regarding their bourgeois and petty bourgeois prejudices, they say that the place for them is outside the Social Democratic Party.  When outside the party, they could set up their own Social-Democratic petty-bourgeois party.  Then revolutionary socialists could negotiate with them and “according to circumstances” form an “alliance” with them.  Inside a workers’ party, such people are “an adulterating element” which would put paid to its “proletarian grit”.

In his Theses on Feuerbach in the 1840’s Marx had written that the educators must themselves be educated so as to be able to teach both that nature and society form human consciousness and that, in turn, humanity shapes nature and society. 

Our excursion into the history of German Social-Democracy reveals the dubious addition, which is provided to the movement by the elements thrown off by the political dissolution of the ruling class.

MISREPRESENTATION AND CENSORSHIP BY THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATS

In 1866, Bebel, a wood-turner by trade, was elected to the Reichstag as the first Social Democrat in parliament.  In 1870 – 1871, the Social Democrats had six representatives in the Reichstag who pursued a policy of internationalism after Germany’s war with France became a war of aggression and annexation.  By 1890, the Social Democrats had, on the basis of trade unions and theoretical leadership, established themselves firmly in parliament.  However, because parliamentary representatives were unsalaried they had to put forward self-financing “philistines” (Marx) for the elections.  In 1890, Engels called most of them mouchards (or police informers).  The only real power invested with deputies was to vote for war credits for German militarism.  In the slaughter of the First World War, hundreds of thousands of German workers lost their lives and millions lost limbs.  In 1919, the SPD formed a government with the approval of the German warlords.  The militarists killed the leaders of the anti-militarist socialists.

The decay of German Social-Democracy between the Basle resolution of the second International of 1912 which resolved “Not a penny, Not a man!” in response to military preparations in Europe and the August 1914 capitulation began much earlier.  In Germany, it can be traced to academic socialists who gained influence and positions of authority in the Social Democratic Party after the unification of the revolutionary socialists with those who believed in state aid and peaceful change through universal suffrage (“acquired rights”) in 1875.  In 1877, Duhring became the first figure in the SPD to advocate ‘state socialism’.  From the 1870’s to 1914 these Kathedersozialists (‘semi-educated louts’, as Marx called them) exercised ever increasing ideological influence.  Bernstein and Kautsky distinguished themselves as hard-working literary (if ignorant) figures in the socialist press and through literary activity before turning reformist.  They were facilitated by the ideological malaise, which was the consequence of political diffusion in the shape of locally based socialist newspapers in Germany.

The abandonment of the practice of purging the party of anarchists and the lower middle class established by the International Workingmen’s Association in the years from 1864 to 1872 and by the Russian Social Democrats between 1903 and 1912 propelled the German workers into the abyss of a war for the re-division of the world.  The censorship and misrepresentation of Marx and Engels’ guidance and writings registered this shift from revolution to state capitalism.  The “strong state” as the aim of Social Democratic opportunism in the twentieth century began with Brentano, Duhring and the German academic socialists in the 1870’s and was continued by Vollmar in the 1890’s and Bernstein after 1895.  During their lifetime, Marx and Engels carried on a war of words with these “louts” but eventually it was the former who were censored by the parliamentary leadership of the SPD and Bernstein and the labour officials who led the SPD into the baggage train of German imperialism.

There are three examples of this censorship.  The Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx was written in 1875 as a letter to Bebel.  (The Gotha congress united the anti-militarists and the “state-aid” parties).  Marx said that this programme contained the economic demands of the Lassalleans (the Leipzigers) for state aid to producers’ associations and the political demands of the socialists (the Eisenachers) which had previously been in an alliance with Catholic Federalists.  The Lassalleans “shibboleths” (Marx) about all non-proletarians ‘forming one reactionary mass’ were taken as the basis of the ‘free people’s state’.  The latter was, as Marx pointed out a despotic state.  (A state, which is free, is one, which is in a position to abolish legal rights etc).  Marx’s critique was not published until 1891.  Marx and Engels believed the workers read revolutionary demands into the Gotha Programme.  In 1891, a new draft programme was sent to Engels.  The Erfuhrt Programme demanded the replacement of capitalism by socialism and the conquest of power by the wage-labourers, an advance from Gotha.  The SPD had a minimum and maximum programme after 1891 but ignored Engels’ advice to include the demand for a “dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional state between capitalism and socialism.

A key factor in the adoption of this model programme was the publication by Karl Kautsky in the German SPD theoretical magazine, Die Neue Zeit, of Marx’s remarks on the Gotha Programme.  The parliamentary ‘mouchards’ kicked up a fuss and the editor of Vorwarts, the daily Berlin Central Organ of the SPD,Wilhelm Liebknecht, tried to prevent a debate on the programme.  Eventually, Liebknecht and the parliamentary group agreed to publish Marx’s Critique in Vorwarts.

Engels had no such luck with his remarks on The Erfuhrt Programme.  Both Liebknecht and Kautsky did not publish his remarks.  After Liebknecht’s death in 1900, Kautsky published Engels’ remarks in Die Neue Zeit.  (Engels had died in 1895).

During the last months of his life, Engels wrote an Introduction to the Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850.  Marx had written this pamphlet in 1850 to outline the political chicanery and abuse of the universal suffrage by Napoleon The Little in France.  Engels wrote of the use of parliamentary agitation and German universal suffrage as bringing forward “the decisive day”.  He warned the SPD not to fritter away this daily increasing shock force in vanguard skirmishes, but to keep it intact until the decisive day.  In his characterisation of the eclipse of barricade fighting (Marx and Engels, Selected Works in one volume, page 625) Engels remarks that the Imperial constitution was based on “usurpation and contract”.  He added that if this contract was broken then Social Democracy “can do as it pleases” as Bismarck did in 1866 when he overthrew the North German Confederation.A war with Austria in this year incorporated millions of North Germans into the German Empire.  This latter remark therefore, concerns the use of force.  The leaders of the German SPD edited this remark from the edition of Marx’s work published in Germany in 1895.  Engels wrote back that he had been portrayed as a peaceful parliamentarian type by this selective editing.  Kautsky and the German SPD ignored this reply and never printed Engels’ remarks in full.  The full text was printed first in the Soviet Union, and, in English, in New York in 1922.

A few months after Engels death, Bernstein, his literary executor, came out with the slogan of revisionism “The movement of everything, the end is nothing” (Principles of Evolutionary Socialism,Zurich,1895).Bernstein foreswore violence against the the ruling class by the working class and, therefore, revolution.

THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

In the late 1880’s and early 1890’s, Engels carried the standard of Marxism alone.  He used his authority as a revolutionary socialist, writer, long-time organiser and Marx’s literary executor to uphold Marx’s doctrines on political economy, history, philosophy and the class struggle.  Opportunism developed at the top of the socialist parties almost as rapidly as the widespread diffusion of the support for revolutionary socialism amongst the workers.  Marxism took root in all the big countries in these years.  Socialist parties expanded quickly in all countries with the exception of the Socialist Labour Party in the United States and the Social Democratic Federation in England.

The leading party of the international movement was the Social Democratic Party of Germany.  By 1891, one tenth of German voters cast their ballot for this party.  In France, the revolutionary socialists were grouped in the urban centres outside Paris (the Maximalists).  In Paris itself, the workers were largely dependent on the luxury trades and were, therefore, orientated towards Brousse and the Possibilists who, as their name suggests, wanted peaceful reforms rather than violent revolution.  In 1889, both camps of revolution and reform held separate international congresses.  The SDF in Britain and the tiny Belgian socialist groups united under the leadership of the Possibilists to hold their International Socialist Conference.  The biggest socialist party, the SPD, joined the revolutionary camp.

In 1891, the Possibilists collapsed and with them their international support.  In 1890, a group of socialists from many countries met at the SPD annual conference in Halle and canvassed support for a united international socialist conference in the following year.  In 1891, the Second International gathered. 

The German SPD represented 596,000 in 1890 (MECW, Volume 49, page 99).  Since the 1880’s, the party had displayed signs of what Marx and Engels called Kathedersozialismus (University Chair Socialism).  In 1847, Marx and Engels characterised this lower middle class socialism of the professors and middle class socialism as German or True Socialism in The Communist Manifesto.  After the unification of the ’acquired rights’ and anti-militarist socialists at Gotha in 1875, a compromise programme was agreed on.  (In 1878, Bismarck criminalised all socialist trade unions, assemblies,  publications and parties).  The Anti-Socialist Law left open only the avenues of parliamentary agitation, elections and an illegal press.  In 1879, Marx and Engels circulated all leading socialist executive members with an attack on the “eddicated” lower middle class Social Democrats, saying that they would cost the party its “proletarian grit” with appeals to the educated middle classes (Letter to Bracke, Bebel, Liebknecht and others).  The influx of academics would lead to the abandonment of the principle that the working class should organise itself as an independent party and seek the overthrow by force of the wages system and private property.  This principle was the cornerstone of the Communist Manifesto and of the International Working Mens’ Association of 1864 to 1872.  The international movement preceded national parties.

The influx of academics did not stop, however, and confusion at the top spread almost as fast as popular support from below.  In 1890 – 1991, Engels wrote that the SPD parliamentary group was largely composed of philistines  (mouchards).  In 1891, this group and the official organ of the SPD, Vorwarts, tried to halt publication of Marx’s remarks on the Erfuhrt Programme.  In early 1891, Kautsky published Marx’s programmatic remarks in Die Neue Zeit.  The parliamentarians were furious and boycotted Engels.  (Engels was living in London and the parliamentarians were referred to by him at ‘the Berliners’).  After the publication of die Neue Zeit, ‘the Berliners’ caved in and published Marx’s Gotha Programme in Vorwarts.  Later, in 1891, Kautsky wrote the SPD’s Erfurt Programme and this was adopted – under threat of a new Exceptional Law – at the annual Party Conference.  This programme became the basis of the programmes of all the parties of the Second International, including the programme of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (1898). 

The opportunists expelled the trend which vacillated between revolution and reform, centrism.  In 1914, the opportunists approved war loans in Germany, Britain and France to fund militarism and the imperialist slaughter which killed and maimed tens of millions of European workers and soldiers.  Kautsky and the SPD turned about-face on the Basel International Socialist Conference resolution towards the impending catastrophe, which proclaimed “Not a penny, Not a man”.  A handful of Swedish, German and Scottish socialists and the majority of the Russan socialists – the Bolsheviks – fought the war policy.  After the war, Kautsky attacked the Russian revolution on the basis that democracy can be ‘pure’ and isolated from its class basis.  He also accused the Russians of adopting the Prussian practice of taking hostages from amongst the monarchist classes to deter the latter from slaughtering workers, prisoners, Jews and Bolshevik members of the Soviets.  In 1919, Kautsky split from the SPD when it became the ruling parliamentary party.  His direction was in opposition to both revolution and reform i.e. centrism.  Nevertheless, Lenin argued in 1920 that revolutionaries of the Communist International keep open the offer of a bloc with centrists, to oppose the parties who openly betrayed the revolutionary socialist movement of the twenties (Left-Wing Communism,An Infantile Disorder,1919). 

What had the centrists and the Kathedersozialists of the 1880’s in common?

Marx and Lenin attacked both trends vigorously in a war of words i.e. polemics and also offered co-operation with these centrists against the openly reformist parties on condition that the centrists formed their own party.  Such alliances were to be “temporary” and “conditional”, Lenin claimed. 

RUSSIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY BEFORE 1905

Leafing through Lenins What Is To Be Done? (1902-1902) and Two Tectics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (July 1905) we learn much of revolutionary organisation and agitation.  The first of these pamphlets is characterised as building a revolutionary movement from all sides around an illegal newspaper of social democracy.  The second pamphlet was written weeks after the meeting of the sailors on the battleship Potemkin in June 1905, some months before the armed uprising.  This revolution was referred to by Lenin in 1917 as the “dress rehearsal for October 1917”.

From the history of the first mass revolutionary socialist party, the German SPD, we learn that agitation, propaganda, education and organisation proceeded peaceably from 1863 to 1878. In that year four hundred and twenty three socialists were arrested and imprisoned under the anti-Socialist Law.  The Act was approved by the National-Liberals and Catholic Federalists in the Reichstag.  The socialists’ opposition to war-fever in 1870 – 1871 and rejection of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the German militarists earned them the accolade of Engels as “the most theoretical nation in Europe” and the persecution of the military-bureaucratic-landlord class(Introduction to The Civil War in France).  The climate of fear was reflected in the Party censorship of Marx and Engels articles and programmatic observations. 

In Russia, legal  Marxist literature enjoyed a boom until the autocracy realised that the enemies of terrorism were also enemies of “police government” and “social oppression”.  The end of the honeymoon came in the last decade of the nineteenth century.  Thereafter socialists were exiled internally, imprisoned or forced to leave Russia.  The social democrats grew out of the Leagues of  Struggle in the main cities.  In 1898, eight representatives of these Leagues formed the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (Zinoviev, The History of the Bolshevik Party, 1924).  Regarding What Is To Be Done? the plan for an All-Russia newspaper had to be defended against those who wanted trades unionism on the English model.  They were called the Economists by Lenin and did see a limited role for political activity.  Lenin’s polemics against this trend were directed at its journal, Rabocheye Dyelo.

He characterised the Economists and those who wanted to build an All-Russia terrorist network as bowing to “spontaneity”.  He counter-posed the need for a professional revolutionary organisation, which would bring consciousness from without since it would not arise from the working class in the course of its everyday struggle against the employers.  He cited the example of the German workers led by Liebknecht and Kautsky who always led from a political stance.  He contrasted the political party and Social Democratic trades union with unionism (What Is To Be Done? [1901 - 2]).

The Russian Economists pleaded for “freedom of criticism” and rejected “dogmatism”.  Those were the pleas of the Bernstein and Brentano trend of the SPD, which was threatened with expulsion for opportunism at the Lubeck and Hannover congresses.  The French socialists had already put into practice Bernstein’s creed that the socialists must be a party of peaceful reforms, not violent revolution.  Millerand joined the French government and was, therefore, a Minister in a French cabinet, which shot down striking workers.  Tsar Nicholas deported Russian revolutionaries. 

Lenin rejected the Anglo-Saxon prescription of ‘simple’ trades unionism and a liberal-labour party which was independent of the working class.  In the early twentieth century, revolutionary socialists were labelled as “conspirators”, “terrorists”, “dogmatists”, “slanderers”, “mystifiers” and so on by the opportunists, he wrote (What Is To Be Done).  This was the response of those who rejected training, in revolutionary activity, collective agitation, secrecy and professionalism.  The Russian autocracy created this party of professional revolutionaries and the all-Russian political newspaper was its weapon of resistance.  In 1905, the Bolsheviks threw their weight behind the liberals and capitalists who were engaged in a struggle with the autocracy for parliamentary government.  The Bolsheviks agitated for a democratic republic while many Liberals agitated for the demand of a constitutional monarchy.

In Two Tactics of Social Democracy, Lenin remarked that the words “socialist” and “revolution” are often adapted wrongly by “liberals” and “reactionaries” who sense a fundamental shift in society and want to mislead the movement.  Socialists also argued for the abolition of all classes and “the expropriation of the expropriators “i.e. those who exploit the labour power of others.  He wanted the continuation of the struggle for democracy until a workers’ democracy was set up.  This workers’ democracy can only exist by the suppression of the exploiting class, he wrote.

As between the revolutionaries and the opportunists there could be no true conciliation.  There could only be a temporary and conditional alliance where they remembered that they represent the real interests of the overwhelming majority against the tiny minority of exploiters, Lenin wrote.  This minority was dependent for its reign on the armed bodies of men, gaolers and so on who constituted the state.  For every revolutionary newspaper, there were dozens of capitalist newspapers, monopolies and so on with their staff of journalists, editors, professors and experts, Lenin said (What Is To Be Done). 

1905 – THE DRESS REHERSAL

The going over from a general political strike to an armed uprising was the key feature of the 1905 Moscow Insurrection.  This shattered the syndicalist dream of a general stoppage of work, which would lead, to an overthrow of capital (or private property relations).  The 1905 Revolution ushered the working class on to the stage of history not just as “a class in itself” but as “a class for itself”.  The Moscow uprising was the outcome of a democratic revolution against the Russian autocracy, where the Bolsheviks posed the tasks of defining which classes were to build the new political superstructure and how they were to build it (Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Chapter 11, (1905)).

The struggle to sweep away the autocracy and military-bureaucratic-landlord class which was its social support  base arose in an economically backward country, Russia.  (In 1861, Tsar  Alexander II had abolished feudal obligations and relations in agriculture.  The Peasant Reform obliged the former peasants to pay redemption payments to the landlords and the best land was now owned by the landlords.  They also paid quit rent or rendered corvee service as they were “temporarily bound” to the landlord until the land was redeemed.  Twenty two million five hundred thousand serfs were thus emancipated.

Two revolutionary situations, Lenin said, characterised this period.

There also arose a revolutionary-democratic movement, which set out to abolish the remnants of feudalism in agriculture and the autocracy in politics.  (The land redemption payments were set at 2,000,000 rubles annually which was a gross over-valuation.  In Autumn 1876, Zemlya y Volya (Land and Freedom) was formed in Saint Petersburg to raise a peasant rebellion in Russia.  In August 1879, this “splendid” organisation which “produced a galaxy of heroes” (Lenin, What Is To Be Done?) split into Chorny Peredel (General redistribution) and Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) under pressure from repression and the failure of “work amongst the peasants”.  Narodnaya Volya launched terrorist attacks against  the autocracy while one of the leaders of Chorny Peredel, Plekhanov, went to Geneva to found the Emancipation of Labour Group.

This group disseminated Marxism in Russia.  It represented a break with the terrorist theory of the “intellectual leader and the inert mass”(Lenin).  In 1895, Lenin brought together twenty workers study circles in the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class of St. Petersburg.  In spring 1898, eight representatives of the Leagues in Russia cities founded the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party,the first Marxist party in Russia.  The 1896 strike movement was the prelude to the foundation of the R.S.D.L.P.

The Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. was held in London and Brussels in 1903.  There was a split between those who, in essence, wanted to pursue a policy of peaceful reforms, the Mensheviks, and those who wanted the complete overthrow of the autocracy under strict control form the centre, the Bolsheviks.  In 1903, Lenin characterised the political differences in his pamphlet  One Step Forward, Two Steps Backwards.  These focussed on the need for strict adherence to central decision-making.  In 1905, the Bolsheviks held the Third Congress while the Mensheviks held what Lenin refers to as their Conference  (Two Tactics on Social Democracy).  In his pamphlet Lenin compares the resolutions of the Congress and the Conference.  He described the revolution in progress in 1905 as “a bourgeois or democratic revolution” where the workers formed the only consistent party in the fight against the autocracy.  Only the working class could overthrow the rule of the landlords and autocracy while the middle class would partly openly, partly by subterfuge accommodate themselves to Tsarism.  To ‘show up’ the liberals, Lenin called for workers’ participation in a Provisional  Revolutionary Government as a step towards a Constituent Assembly based on universal suffrage and complete freedom to conduct agitation.  The democratic republic was the form required for this revolution.  Freedom of agitation was aimed at carrying the working class and peasantry into the Provisional Government as an independent force.  Lenin said,

“We must outline for such a government a programme of action that will conform with the objective conditions of the present period and with the aims of such a government” (Chapter 2, Two Tactics of Social Democracy,1905).

He characterised the revolution as “a bourgeois revolution”.  The path to proletarian democracy lay through political democracy i.e. socialist agitation, organisation and education for the forceful overthrow of the new order.  Such a revolution could only be prepared by action “from above” and “from below”.  The working class had to, therefore, render all support to the middle class while agitating on behalf of the working class. 

In his pamphlet, Lenin writes,

“In countries like Russia the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism.  The working class is, therefore, most certainly interested in the broadest, freest, and most rapid development of capitalism” (Chapter 6, ibid).

The sweeping away of the remnants of the old order is an “advantage” for the working class.

Much of Lenin’s polemics were directed at followers of the Osvobozhdeniye League, a group that later became the Constitutional Democratic Party.  He also opposed the ”pyrotechnic methods” of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

The fundamental difference of the Bolsheviks with ”opportunists” was that Lenin believed in participation in a liberal provisional government rather than bring a party of “extreme opposition” to both the autocracy and the middle class. “ The democratic revolution is a revolution of the whole people”, Lenin said.  The complete victory over Tsarism would be “despite the inconsistent, self-seeking and cowardly bourgeoised” (chapter 12,Two Tactics).  He posed the question, “Dare We Win?”

In June 1905, the sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutinied in the port of Odessa.  In December 1905, the Moscow Volunteer Fighting Squadrons mobilised 1500 insurgents, according to James Connolly (Collected Works Volumes One to Two ,New Books, Dublin, 1988).  Against them were arrayed 15,000 troops few of whom were regarded as reliable by the officers of the Moscow garrison.  Demonstrators fraternised with troops.  Even the Cossacks were “neutralised”.  However the officers quickly took stock of the situation and exploited the insurgents’ tardiness in winning over wavering troops.  Makakhov rushed towards one body of troops and delegates made their way towards them from the opposite direction.  Having surrounded the wavering troops, Makakhov swung them around and marched them back to their barracks.  In his article, Lessons of The Moscow Uprising (1906), Lenin concluded,

“We must proclaim from the housetops the need for a bold offensive and armed attack, the necessity at such a time of exterminating the persons in command of the enemy, and of a most energetic fight for the wavering troops”.

Engels had dismissed the old tactic of Paris in 1848 and Berlin in 1849 of barricade fighting in his Introduction to the Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850 (1895).  He showed how the “people” were unarmed, politically divided and arrayed against relatively greater numbers of troops in districts with long broad, straight boulevards suitable for artillery. 

Lenin remarks that a new form of barricade fighting was introduced in Moscow – guerrilla fighting.  Having brought down a fusillade of small arms fire on the advancing troops, the insurgents made good their escape, James Connolly wrote.  They did not “stand and fight” as their opponents would have wished.  The Muscovites had worked out a new tactic. 

Lenin, however, declared in August 1906, “The December events confirmed another of Marx’s profound propositions which the “opportunists” have forgotten, namely that insurrection is an art and that the principal rule of this art is the waging of a desperately bold and irrevocably determined offensive . . . attack at all costs”.

It was the role of the party to teach the workers the need for an armed uprising and “attack, not defence”.  The uprising and “mass terror” taught the Russian workers this lesson.  Lenin pointed to the need for “middle and exceedingly small units, units of ten, three or even two persons” in the face of criticism by other Social Democrats (Letter to a Saint Petersburg Worker (1902)).

In Russia, after 1905, there was “a permanent revolutionary crisis” until 1907.  Thereafter, the Social Democratic movement lost most of its activists.  The Bolsheviks had to contend with those who wanted to disband the illegal Party, its illegal press and underground organisation etc, (the Liquidators) and those who wanted to disband the legal organisation of censored newspapers and recall the Bolshevik deputies form the Workers Curia of the Tsarist Duma foundations.  In February 1917, a democratic revolution overthrew the tsar and imprisoned him.  After nine months, this democratic revolution was followed by a proletarian revolution.

RUSSIAN MARXISM 1905 – 1917

Mention the words “revolutionary socialism” to the average industrial worker in Western Europe and one is soon sympathetically reminded of the “gangster socialism” of the Stalin era, the political autocracy and economic autarchy.  If one uses the word Communism as the American Socialists often do, one is immediately bracketed as a bloodthirsty maniac who would shoot or starve any farmer who wouldn’t join a collective farm, a persecutor of the faithful or, at best, a ‘yesterday’s man’ who cannot see that the cause is lost.  These first impressions of the backward workers are particularly strong in Ireland as a whole.  In total, they represent the historical legacy of the bloody tyrant whom Mandelstam, one of the millions of “enemies of the people”, described as The Kremlin Mountaineer- someone climbing to the pinnacle of his bitter destiny over a mountain of corpses.

The retreat of the world revolution and the revolutionary tide coincided with Lenin’s effective imprisonment by the Politburo (or Council of Peoples Commissars) and the Secretariat of the Russian Communist Party of which Stalin was General Secretary after 1922.

A medical commission decided on whether Lenin was to be allowed to study or receive visitors in the very months when he was trying to have Stalin dismissed by the upcoming party conference.  The retreat of world socialism in the 1920’s turned into a headlong collapse in the 1930’s at the time when socialist criticism was possible in one great country and, at the same time, of absolute necessity for the victory of the international revolution and the consolidation of the Russian Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic on the basis of socialised property.

Western workers have been led to believe that communism was a purely Russian phenomenon.  From the 1860’s when the German Social-Democratic Workers Party and the General Association of German Workers were formed as revolutionary workers’ organisations until 1916, the German socialists formed the model party.  The former party was, unlike Lassalle’s GAGW, based on the organisation of the workers into trades unions.  Theory became its strongpoint under the influence of Marx, Engels, Bebel, Liebknecht and Kautsky before 1914.  After amalgamation with the GAGW at Gotha in 1875, it survived legal prohibitions on its press and meetings to send socialists into parliament for the purposes of agitation and published newspapers abroad for distribution in Germany.  In one vital area, there was not the strict centralised decision-making of political policy in the German Socialist Workers Party that characterised the Russian Bolsheviks –almost from the establishment of the latter in 1898.  Instead there were local i.e. city newspapers with a local and regional circulation.  Only Die Neue Zeit, the party periodical, was aimed at all German workers.  Die Neue Zeit was, after 1895, edited by Bernstein, the “revisionist” who declared in his book The Premises of Socialism, “The movement is everything, the ends are nothing” and, later, by Kautsky who voted for war loans for the German imperialists in 1914.  The weakness of the third front of socialism, theory, was its fatal flaw.  That was the main reason for the emergence of the Bolsheviks as the leaders of world socialism and the collapse of the Arbeiter-und Soldaten-rate (Workers and Soldiers Councils) after the November 1918 Revolution.  The Russian Socialists were on the other hand, characterised by the strictest democratic centralism and a revolutionary, iron discipline which prepared Russia for its role as leader of the international working class before 1968, that is, years after the dictatorship of the proletariat had been usurped by a counter-revolution which resembled the vanquished “autocracy”. 

Lenin characterised the early and later phases of Bolshevism in What Is To Be Done? (1902) and Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder (1919).  In Lenin’s guide to the different periods of socialist struggle, we remember that the class struggle is the major and minor key and, indeed, that it is the course of the rise of the working class from absolute and relative poverty to its position as the ruling class which, he wrote, was Marx’s unique discovery.  Lenin characterises the early history of Russian Marxism before 1902 in the conclusion to his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?  The first period was that from 1884 when Marxism grew as a theory and programme without a party.  In the period 1894 – 1898, he wrote, “. . .  Social-Democracy appeared on the scene as a social movement, as the upsurge of the masses, as a political party”.  How can Lenin characterise as a party a group of people who had not even come together for a conference?  Tsarism was an “autocracy”, which was based on a tyranny and repression.  Like German Social-Democracy, theory was the only avenue open to the revolutionary intelligentsia in Russia and Germany as industry developed – and absolutism swelled their ranks – and practical activity was dangerous and for the Russian poor, even premature.  Many clung to the “captivating impressions” of the terrorist movement, the Narodniks.  Not only did history weigh on the minds of the living but many Social-Democrats had come from the terrorist movement and had worshipped its “heroes” in their youth.  In spring 1898, the Social Democratic Labour Party was founded and held its First Congress.

The third period began before this second period had ended just as in warfare parts of an army may still be advancing when the rest of the army is in retreat.  Lenin characterised the third period of Social-Democracy as “a period of disunity, dissolution and vacillation”.  The past and future leaders of liberalism and opportunism, Struve and Martinov, appeared during this period.  Lenin had polemicised against liberalism before the foundation of the R.S.D.L.P. proper.  Lenin clearly saw that it was the movement that mattered.  The movement advanced “with enormous strides”.  The proletarian struggle spread to new strata of the workers and extended to the whole of Russia at the same time indirectly stimulating the revival of the democratic spirit among the students and among other sections of the population.  After the practice of Marx and Engels in the German democratic revolution of 1848 – 1849, Lenin in the earlier chapters of his pamphlet directed the Socialists to carry on agitation among all sections of the population, the radical middle class, the democratic lower middle class and the emerging working class.  The level of economic development of Russia in the first years of the twentieth century was at a higher level than Germany in 1848 or, in turn, of France in 1789 or, again, of England in 1648.  This rapid development and concentration of capital brought workers together in large factories, which were in 1905 and 1917 to form centres of revolutionary activity.  In Russia legal literature and illegal revolutionary literature existed side by side and the backward functionaries who read the legal literature “sought to justify their backwardness by all manner of high-flown arguments.  Social-Democracy was degraded to the level of trade-unionism . . .”, Lenin wrote.

To turn to the content of Marxist polemics in the chapters of his pamphlet, Lenin declared war on Economism or Trade Unionism i.e. an economic struggle without revolutionary political activity and the revolutionary heritage of terrorism.  Not only did terrorism not die out after the R.S.D.L.P. came on the scene, it found a new expression in émigré literature and a Socialist Revolutionary Party which in elections called on the basis of a universal suffrage for the Constituent Assembly on October 26 (November 8) 1917 i.e. many years later, gathered in more than three times as many votes as the Bolsheviks.

In 1902, Lenin criticised the cribbers of the latest German textbooks who played at “democratic” forms and establishing “a revolutionary bureaucracy” rather than a militant organisation of revolutionaries.  Lenin anticipated “the genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class”.

Opportunism did not die with the now forgotten names of Martinov, Martov etc.  In 1903, the R.S.D.L.P. split into a revolutionary majority (the Bolsheviks) and an “opportunist” minority (the Mensheviks).  During 1903, Lenin characterised this split in his pamphlet One step Forward, Two Steps Backward. 

Casting his mind back from 1920, the first full year of the Communist International, Lenin states that 1903 was the beginning of Bolshevism.  The years from 1903 to 1905 were, as he wrote in Left-Wing Communism, “the years of preparation for revolution” and a purge, as Marx wrote, “proved the strength of the party”.  The split and the fate of the revolution of 1905 are inextricably tied together.  “The state of ferment, preparation and anticipation, were felt by all classes.  The requisite political and ideological weapons for the impending battles were forged in this period”Lenin wrote (Left Wing Communism,An Infantile Disorder,1919).

Between 1905 and 1907, these programmatical and tactical views were “tested by the action of the masses”.  Lenin states in simple language that “the economic strike developed into a political strike and the latter into an insurrection”.  Lenin ,he wrote, 1905 was a dress rehearsal for 1917.  Later he says, in connection with the struggle within the working class movement, that the boycott of the Tsar’s consultative parliament (The Bulygin Duma) in 1905 after the armed uprising and the establishment of Workers’ Soviets was the correct tactic whereas the 1906 boycott was “a mistake, although a minor and easily remediable one”.  The revolutionary tide had begun to ebb in that year.  Nevertheless in 1907 and 1908 and subsequent years, the boycott was “ a most serious error and difficult to remedy”.  Between 1908 and 1914 the Bolsheviks did participate not just in “a most reactionary parliament” and thereby combined illegal and legal forms of struggle but also stood candidates in the sickness insurance societies.  These had been established under the superintendence of Zubatov, a police chief.

The years from 1907 to 1910 were the years of reaction.  “All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed.  Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection and pornography took the place of politics”, Lenin wrote later.  Lenin calls this “a lesson in dialectics” and concluded from this experience of the revolutionary parties and the working class, “Defeated armies learn their lesson”.  Not only did Tsarism proceed with destroying patriarchal relations but also “illusions that stood outside and above class distinctions” were “scattered to the winds”.  The revolutionary parties learned how to retreat “in good order”.  The Bolsheviks survived the retreat in best shape.  This period was also characterised by the exposure and expulsion of “revolutionary phrasemongers”.  In Lenin’s other works from this period we read that two trends of opportunism emerged within Bolshevism, god building (Otzovism) and Liquidationism.  The otzovists demanded the recall of the Bolshevik deputies to the Duma.  The liquidators wanted to liquidate the illegal party and establish a solely legal labour party on the Western Europe model in a country where even the liberal middle class had to publish its newspaper abroad.

The working class movement revived after 1910.  This revival was based on both the combination of legal and illegal work.

After 1914, a period of acute and decisive class struggle began when Russia joined the First World War on the side of Britain and France against the Central Powers.  The Bolshevik deputies who had won “the full support” of the Workers Curia were exiled to Siberia.  The political leadership and its press emigrated to the West.  The outbreak of the First World War brought to an end the international movement, which had constituted the Second International.  Kautsky had been instrumental in drafting the Erfurt Programme in 1891 and had provided the basis of the socialist politics of the international movement and, in particular, of the Russians’ programme of 1898. 

In 1912, the Second International decided in the Basle manifesto that the developing international crisis manifested by the economic competition for markets and the political and military crises that went with it, could only be defeated by opposition to both conscription and military spending which was summed up by the slogan, “Not a pound, not a man”. 

In 1914, Kautsky repudiated and thereby destroyed the unity of the international socialist movement by voting for war credits for German imperialism.  The leading light of the movement abandoned the German and European workers for “social chauvinism” (Lenin).  In Russia, the Mensheviks were the representatives of this trend which set the workers at each other’s throats.  The war ended with millions dead and maimed and no resolution to the crisis of international capitalist competition. 

Lenin characterised this period of “social imperialism, social-chauvinism, social-patriotism, inconsistent and inconsistent internationalism, pacifism, and the revolutionary repudiation of pacifist illusions” in the Russian emigre press as a “free (legal) interchange of views and  . . .  A free (illegal) evolution of correct views”.  As the leaders of the majority of the parties of the Second International were exposed by their own actions, the experience of the workers laid the basis of Bolshevik views.

In February 1917, a bourgeois democratic republic was established after the overthrow of an autocracy that had become “senile” and “obsolete”.  The parliamentary leaders of the opposition and revolutionary parties were catapulted, as it were, into power and, in the case of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, took on the methods, arguments and manners of Western European opportunism.  In their turn, the Western European opportunists looked for their ministerial forerunners in the Mensheviks.  After the war, the French, German and English opportunists merely swapped their seats on the opposition benches for ministerial places whereas the Mensheviks lost control of the workers councils to the Bolsheviks and vanished into obscurity after a rule of only nine months.

In the space of less than a year, Russia passed from autocracy through a democratic bourgeois republic to a Soviet Republic.  These revolutions were as Lenin says, the result of “thorough, circumspect and long preparations” after the April (1917) Conference of the Bolshevik party.  During these decisive months, the Bolsheviks “did not call for the overthrow of the government but explained that it was impossible to overthrow it without first changing the composition and temper of the Soviets”.

Lenin’s political legacy to and dreams for the Western European and American socialists are summed up in Left-Wing communism.  He called participation in elections ”obligatory” in this context and urged the Bolsheviks of the West to penetrate into even ‘reactionary’ trades unions.

SOVIET GOVERNMENT, SPRING 1918

Soviet government (or the armed workers) is often characterised as the brutal usurpation of power by a handful of political functionaries and the baiting of the international socialists.  In March – April 1918, Lenin and Trotsky developed the basis of Soviet Democracy in the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism (or the lower form of communism, as Marx called it).  Soviet democracy was the dictatorship of the exploited masses over the handful of exploiters, Lenin wrote.  In practical terms, the Soviets (or Councils) of Workers, Soldiers and Poor Peasants disarmed and disenfranchised “the tiny minority of exploiters”.

In early March, Lenin addressed the Bolshevik Party Conference on what was to be the determining factor of the course of the October Revolution (Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 2, pages 526 – 565).  Socialism was an international movement and could not be built on the basis of “socialism in one country”, Lenin believed.  Lenin reviewed the international situation of the Russian Republic after the Pskov peace with German militarism, which gave the Germans control of Ukrainian grain.  He put forward the “respite theory” (or “defencist” position) which allowed the army time to heal as its political leaders played for time.  Lenin and Trotsky saw war as a means to consolidate and develop socialism.  In diplomatic terms, they manoeuvred between the imperialist powers that were fighting for the redivision of the world.  A successful consolidation of Soviet power required the spread of revolution to Germany.  How did Lenin describe this necessity? He says simply;

“…. It is an absolute truth that without German revolution we are doomed – perhaps not in Petrograd, not in Moscow, but in Vladivostok, in more remote places to which perhaps we shall have to retreat and the distance to, which is perhaps greater than the distance from Petrogard to Moscow.  At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed” (op  cit, page 536).

Lenin wrote that the Russian revolution was as “easy as lifting a feather”.  In November 1918, Soldiers and Workers Councils were established in Germany after food shortages became apparent.  German imperialism collapsed and an Armistice was signed.  In the economic crisis of the early 1920’s, Germany – which had come under the leadership of the parliamentary socialists –could have provided Russia with machinery and technical assistance in exchange for Russian food and raw materials.  This was the inspiration for directives from Zinoviev on behalf of the Communist International in 1923 to the German Communists to organise armed uprisings – an attempt to jumpstart the German Revolution.

In spring 1918, Russia was threatened not just by Germany but also by the monarchist officers of the Tsarist army.  The Civil War and imperialist interventions were beginning.  Industry had been destroyed by the years of war between 1914 and 1917.  The syndicates and banks were making 50 million roubles a day in profits until the Bolsheviks took power and proposed a democratic peace on 8 November 1917.  The primary problem for Russia was that of restoring industry and increasing the stores of social wealth for distribution by raising productivity.  Lenin turned his attention to these problems in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government in April 1918 (Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 2).  Lenin characterises the dictatorship of the proletariat as proletarian democracy in his famous pamphlet “The State and Revolution” which was written shortly before The October Revolution and returned to these themes in 1918.  Lenin said that the dictatorship of a class in revolutionary periods could take the form of a dictatorship of a leader or person.  The conditions for such a dictatorship are the approval of the revolutionary class in its organisations, public meetings and the strictly limited nature of its scope.  He refers to “the dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely executive functions”.  Executive functions are those carrying out the decisions of democratic bodies i.e. the Soviets.  Lenin recognised the strength of the Russian bureaucracy, in adding the immediate condition of “varied . . . . forms and methods of control from below in order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of distorting the principles of Soviet government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy” (op, cit, page 616).  The Soviet Thermidor or victory of the “military-bureaucratic caste” of Party functionaries who usurped Soviet democracy and their position as servants of the workers and peasants to become brutal, red-baiting masters of the Soviet Union and beyond was the outcome of the revolutionary ebb of the 1920’s.  Doubtless, a high-tide of revolutionary socialism would have occurred after the Second World War had it not been for “the dizzy heights” of brutality and the unnecessary slaughter of the socialists launched by Stalin.  One of the instruments of this repression was the Red Army with which Trotsky’s name is forever associated as its founder and leader in the war against the fourteen armies of imperialist intervention and the White Armies of monarchists and reactionaries.

In April 1918, Trotsky addressed the Central Executive Committee of Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants to gain its approval for the establishment of the Red Army (The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky, Volume 1, How The Revolution Armed, page 126).  One is accustomed to see in a revolutionary army a co-relative of a capitalist society.  The Red Army was altogether different – if was the revolutionary army of a revolutionary country.

The Red Guards had been formed in the main cities in the period leading up to October 25, 1917(Gregorian calendar).  They were formed of the armed workers, soldiers and sailors who were dispatched by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviets to seize key installations and arsenals.  In 1916, Lenin had called while in exile in Switzerland for the acquisition of arms and training in their use by the oppressed classes (The Military Programme of The Proletarian Revolution, Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 1).  After the February 1917 revolution, Russia had come under the rule of “social-patriots” who wanted to continue an impossible war.  They hoped to bring the rule of the Soviets to an end and establish a Constituent Assembly.  In the end, Russia moved quickly on from a bourgeois democracy to a workers’ and peasants’ democracy in a period of months.

The beginning of a monarchist reaction to the Russian Republic began in 1918 and a move away from voluntarist organisation and the end of the election of officers was dictated by events.  However, as with the indirect election of judges by the working class through the medium of Soviets, Trotsky proposed to the Central Executive Committee that the Soviets appoint the members of the three-man military boards (or collegiums) at district, regional, province, uyezd, country and volost (groups of 2 – 3 villages) levels.  The board consisted of a military specialist who had military training and was responsible for all operational matters and two commissars who were responsible for ideological and political formation.  Trotsky called this the bisection or “duality” of military authority.

In his attitude to the “mental capital – an accumulated sum of knowledge, military experience, habits of administration and so on” which was left over or inherited from capitalism, Trotsky was confident that such military specialists understood that an army ’reflected a class formation of power’.  The army was a reflection of Soviet power.  Trotsky understood the need to ‘bring on’ the workers who had distinguished themselves during the revolution by giving them military training in the art of war.  The Red Army was to be based on the militia system i.e. compulsory military service of all those aged between 18 years and 40 years with preparatory education for those aged 16 to 18 years to be organised by the education authorities.  The old All-Russia Board for a Workers and Peasants Red Army became the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs.  The latter was charged with laying down a common plan for the training of the main body of the militia.  Militia service was compulsory for 12 hours per week and each worker had to give eight weeks service a year i.e. 96 hours per year.   There was no pay for compulsory training.  After training, the militiamen were liable for call up to military service.

The key element of this Army was the exclusion of the bourgeois or exploiting class from the Army.  They were “disintegrating elements” in Trotsky’s words.  Not only were the exploiters of the labour of others before the Revolution disarmed, they were also disentranchised.  Universal suffrage was only restored by Stalin in the 1936 Constitution which made the Russian workers “the freest in the world” – the year before the Purge of the “social fascists” and “Fifth Columnists”.

The spread of the international revolution was a precondition for its success and consolidation in the Soviet Union.  The outright ‘betrayal’ of the workers’ movement by parliamentary socialists on the European Continent and the primitive development of revolutionary socialism in the Anglo-Saxon and dependent, semi-colonial countries – as well as subjective factors, such as Lenin’s early death – led workers into the blind alley of Stalinism and solidarity for “socialism in one country”.

SOVIET POWER 1917 – 1922

Between 1917 and 1922, Russia traversed the path of civil war, war communism, nationalisation and the policy of concessions to capital  (The New Economic Policy).  These developments grew out of the 70% collapse of Russian industry between 1914 and 1917 and the turn inwards by capitalism in all leading countries after the First World War.  The collapse of world trade after 1919 prepared the rise of Hitler and Stalin in the 1920’s.

The October Revolution was “the dictatorship of the proletariat” i.e. workers’ democracy.  The rich were disentranchised, disarmed, taxed at ruinous rates and shot when they stepped out of line.  The police force was disbanded.  The banks were nationalised.  The industrial syndicates were amalgamated and private owners driven out or put under strict control and supervision and made to fill out workbooks.  Commercial secrecy was abolished and the secret treaties were published.  A non-annexationist peace was promulgamated on the day after the revolution and the troops were told to fraternise with the German troops.  The capital was relocated from St Petersburg to Moscow.  In the summer of 1918, the liberal-monarchist, liberal-labour and terrorist parties and their publications were banned after they supported the Whiteguards.

Regarding the capitalists, they were subject to equal liability to labour – they were compelled to work.  Wage differentials were decreased so that not even a specialist earned more than five times the rate of a skilled worker.  He who did not work did not eat.  In short, Soviet Democracy was trades union government, Lenin wrote.

The arming of the workers and peasants under the leadership of the workers’ party was the principal form of the consolidated workers’ power.  The Red Army was demobilised after it reached a strength of twelve million men at the end of the Civil War.  In 1921 – 1922, labour armies were formed from its ranks under the control of the Council for Labour and Defence.  In the Red Army, the workers learned to read and write and they were given socialist literature to read.  They brought culture back to the villages.  The workers were taught double-entry bookkeeping. Before his premature death, Lenin said that Soviet Power equalled “the New Economic Policy and the electrification of the USSR”, the purpose of the latter being to tie the villages and towns to the cities and abolish the distinction between town and country.  Along with the abolition of classes in law and the abolition of the distinction between town and country in politics, there remained the old distinction between mental and manual labour and the real distinctions between manager and worker and peasants due to Russia’s backwardness.

State capitalism was a term coined by Lenin in 1918 to describe the amalgamation of competing factories in each branch of industry under the control of the Government department for the various industries.  It was modelled on the war industry committees of Britain and Germany, which directed their war production.  The acme of state capitalism was Germany.  For the first months of Soviet power the problems for all classes were food, fuel, transport and provision for the armies on the front.  War Communism was based on nationalisation and the requisitions by force of surplus food stocks in the countryside by armed workers, sailors and soldiers.

The quest for power was only possible because the Bolsheviks held a majority in the workers’ and regimental councils and had “dispersed” the Constituent Assembly.  At the head of Soviet democracy stood the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).  For a while the liberal-labour and terrorist party shared power in the Soviets but their support for the Whiteguards’ massacres of workers and communists in Baku and elsewhere brought proscription.  The balance of forces in the world movement dictated the monopoly of power for the Bolsheviks within Russia.

State capitalism was, Lenin said, a transitional state between capitalism and socialism, the lower phase of communism.  The success of the revolution in Russian depended on the outcome of the German Revolution, he said in March 1918.

With state capitalism came the People’s Commissariat for Workers’ Inspection and Control.  Between 1918 and 1922, the Commissariat for Workers Inspection became the Workers and Peasants Inspection.  In late 1922 and early 1923, Lenin wrote his last letters on the need to amalgamate the W.P.I. and the State Control Commission and put out Stalin.  Lenin envisaged a Workers and Peasants Inspection of fifty to seventy-five of the most conscientious, devoted and learned workers.  The W.P.I. was to have both political and administrative roles.  There was no separation of power after the Western model of political, executive and juridical powers.

The cancer of bureaucracy within Russia and the failure of the world revolution scuppered Lenin’s plan and dreams of a world union of socialist governments. 

The one-man management of enterprises to bring the productive forces of Russia back up to a reasonable level was agreed on in the Soviets in Spring 1918.  One-man management represented the dictatorship of individuals in executive or administrative matters only.  They were under the political control of the Soviets and public meetings of the workers and the formal supervision of the W.P.I.  In The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, Lenin wrote, “The more resolutely we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for the dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below in order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of distorting the principles of Soviet Government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy”.

In this Draft  Programme of the RCP (B) of February 1919, Lenin also wrote of the need to “ensure democracy for the great majority of the population (the working people) i.e. actual participation in state administration”.  This section of the population were “the most concentrated, united, educated and steeled in the struggle”.  Their supremacy or dictatorship implied “excluding the exploiters from the category of members of society possessing full rights”.

The policy of concessions to foreign capitalists in return for a share of the production and the means of subsistence for workers thus engaged never took off as Lenin admitted in his last letters and articles.  Factories leased to managers and former directors remained state property. 

The cardinal point was that above all of these bodies stood the Soviet and in these the RCP held a near monopoly of power.  Lenin intended that one half or three quarters of the Bolshevik Central Committee would be composed of W.P.I. Inspectors with 400 – 500 assistants, paid well.

When we look back at the course traversed by the Russian Communist Party to Stalin’s reign of terror against the internationalists and the break-up of the Communist International, we witness a phenomenon that is a reflection of the course of the world movement.  The war of the rival imperialist powers exiled the hopes and dreams of revolutionary workers to the periphery of the world economy.  In the fifties and sixties, only the weak and dependent lands nourished revolutionary movements.

The world today stands at a much higher level of economic, industrial and cultural development.

STALIN

Materialism (or political economy) does not provide all the answers to the questions thrown up by capitalism and by the analysis of the autocracy of 1930’s Russia but it lies at the heart of a characterisation of Stalinism.  Put simply, the backward masses of Russia demolished the Christian god and looked to the Great Generalissimo for a new god with angel eyes.

Revolutionaries characterise Russia as “a degenerated workers’ state” or a “state capitalist” regime, the latter definition after Lenin’s writings in The Immediate Tasks of The Soviet Government (1918).  They declaim the bureaucracy as a class above society or as a military-bureaucratic caste above society intent on its “power, prestige and revenues”(Leon Trotsky,The Revolution Betrayed,1936).  Today, U.S. communists claim that nationalised property in Eastern Europe constitutes a workers’ state.  In 1991, a political revolution swept away the rulers of Russia.  There was no social revolution – the means of production and exchange are, for the most part, in the hands of the state.  The period between 1983 and 1991 represented a democratic revolution, a political revolution against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its stooges and fan groups, against the nomenklatura in the Army and industry and against poverty, ignorance and despair.

In 1935, Stalin announced that socialism had been achieved and communism would be set in motion.  In that year he passed a constitution that guaranteed personal freedom of speech, agitation and organisation, gave the vote back to the defeated classes and made ownership of arms a monopoly of the State. 

He prepared the slaughter of between six hundred and seven hundred thousand “counter-revolutionaries” in that year.  Since 1991, Soviet historians have dragged out the real truth from the KGB archives.  Five hundred and eighty thousand were imprisoned as counter-revolutionaries in the last year of Stalin’s reign.  In 1953 the total population of the slave labour camps, colonies and settlements was 5 223 000 (R.W. Davies, New Left Review 214, 1995).  Stalin pursued a policy of peaceful co-existence and collaboration with imperialism and saved his evil works for those within the Soviet Union.  The seizure of Eastern Europe from the Nazis, the Hungarian Iron Front and the Rumanians spread the contagion of show trials and the Great Terror.

A socialist revolution raises the proletariat to the level of “the ruling class”.  The transition to communism, the higher level of common property, is simply the rule of “From each according to this ability, to each according his needs”.  Socialism expropriates the expropriators and abolishes wage labour and the class system.  It allows the productive forces to develop freely without crises or “the slaughter of many capitalists by one capitalist”(Marx,Capital).  Since capitalism had always been a world system, no Russian road to socialism (or ‘socialism in one country’) is possible outside the international division of labour. 

The “absolute truth” of Russian’s situation in March 1918 was that there had to be a German revolution to swing the world movement onto the side of the revolution, Lenin said.  Tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors came out against the Junkers in November 1918 but the movement was betrayed by the German opportunists.  Orders from the Communist International led only to putschs, which were damp squibs.  In April 1924, Stalin exploited Trotsky’s silence about Lenin’s testament calling for the removal of Stalin from the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party.  Trotsky’s Herculean efforts in building up the Red Army during the Civil War faded quickly from the minds of the theoretical leaders, agitators and combatants and he become a ‘grey blur’ during Russia’s counter-revolution and industrialisation. 

Stalin utilised the Army for a terrorist campaign against officers, bureaucrats and party functionaries.  He quoted out of context Lenin’s statements about “saboteurs”, “wreckers” and “opportunists”.  In effect, he restored the rule of the Tsarist bureaucracy, which survived the revolution.  He took it upon himself to pursue those who had not followed the ‘Party line’ since before the time of Adam and Eve.  After the show trials of 1937, he prepared for war with Germany.

In 1933, the share of national wealth going to capital expenditure was 58%, that to consumption 42% (Stalin, Leninism, Lawrence and Wishart,London, 1942, page 490).  By 1938, Cliff records that 98% of machine tools i.e. tool-making machinery was going to military production (Tony  Cliff,State Capitalism in Russia, London, 1948).  In 1940, Russia produced 1500 tanks to Germany’s 500.  By 1943, Germany had 10,000 factories for the production of armaments and Russia 2000.  Still Russian workers built 4500 tanks and Germany less than 2500 in that year (Operation Barbarossa, United States,1987). 

Was the bureaucracy a class? Clearly as a state capitalist country developing in isolation from the international market, Russia’s bureaucracy organised the means of production and exchange and enforced the will of the autocrat.  In the years immediately after the Revolution, the managers had to answer before workers’ councils and public meetings for administrative decisions under the regime of one-man management.  In the twenties and thirties, they usurped the power of workers’ councils and their party to take power, prestige and revenues for themselves.  Whether they were a class or a caste is a question for sophists – they stood above society.  At their head stood Stalin.  Since a bureaucracy must lay claim openly to property and enshrine its possession and ownership in law to make it transferable, the Eastern workers unanimously reject the claim that they were a class.  Trotsky did so too.

As for the policy of concessions to foreign capitalists and former directors, which formed the basis of the New Economic Policy in 1922, they never enjoyed success.  By 1922, NEPMEN employed only 80,000 workers while 1,000,000 worked in nationalised factories (Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2, page 240).  The collapse of world trade accelerated after the post-war crisis of 1920 – 1921.  Russia exported and imported less than one per cent of its 1913 trade by 1920(Lenin).  The international collapse and Russia’s self-sufficiency in gold,coal, iron ore, timber, oil and gas was to be the foundation of nationalist socialism.  When world trade regained its 1913 level in the early 1980’s Russia’s isolation slowed its economic growth.  This isolation found its reflection in military and political crises.  In the end, Russia lost its status as a great power and the nomenklatura was stripped of its power, prestige and influence.

Author’s Epilogue

I wrote this history of Social Democracy between September 2002 and March 2003 on the basis of fifteen years of study which began in September 1988 when I had just broken my links with militant republicanism.  It is the fruit of my research. I was first and foremost interested in the economics of Marx in 1988.

The mixed economy has triumphed in the last bastion of state-directed socialism,  China, which continues its prodigious economic expansion on the basis of foreign investment and the native genius for enterprise.

My discourses in revolutionary socialism came to an end in March 2003 when further study in Marx’s and Engels Collected Works revealed that Marx was receiving opium from a Dr Kugelmann in Hanover in 1869.  This preceded the founding work of social democracy in Germany, The Civil War in France (1871).  I am not a drug-user and view Marx’s linguistic flourishes and bitter invectives in his works as symptomatic of his drug addiction.  All the substance of The Civil War in France, the remarks on the inferior weapons of the Prussians, the failure to seize the Bank of France, the failure of the Communards to forge an alliance with the rural communities comes from the sober pen of Engels in his Introduction.

 

Marxism led to unparalleled bloodshed and the rise of its nemesis, fascism, in Germany in the 1930’s.

I have stayed true to the original text in my corrections, emendations and editting but I would prefer to think that the mixed economy is the more sober and sane answer to the problems of a weak national economy.  The spell of Marxism has broken for me as for others.

Joseph Paul Mc Carroll

May 2007