Reform or Revolution
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People :
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Author : Paul Mattick

Sections (TOC) :
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    * Introduction
        4,410 Words; 28,505 Characters

    * Chapter 1 : Capitalism and Socialism
        6,915 Words; 46,335 Characters

    * Chapter 2 : Reform and Revolution
        7,692 Words; 50,893 Characters

    * Chapter 3 : The Limits of Reform
        4,087 Words; 26,384 Characters

    * Chapter 4 : Lenin's Revolution
        12,610 Words; 83,448 Characters

    * Chapter 5 : The Idea of the Commune
        4,021 Words; 26,282 Characters

    * Chapter 6 : State and Counter-Revolution
        13,033 Words; 85,746 Characters

    * Chapter 7 : The German Revolution
        2,868 Words; 18,938 Characters

    * Chapter 8 : Ideology and Class Consciousness
        3,122 Words; 20,414 Characters

Sections (Content) :
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* Introduction


First Published: in Marxism. Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? Paul Mattick, published posthumously by Merlin Press, 1983, edited by Paul Mattick Jr.;Source: Collective Action Notes;Transcribed: by Andy Blunden, for marxists.org 2003;Proofread: by Chris Clayton 2006.

On the basis of its assumptions, Marx’s model of capitalist production could only end in the collapse of the capitalist system. However, this collapse was not conceived of as the automatic outcome of economic processes, independent of human actions, but as the result of the proletarian class struggle:

Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with it, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they are incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (1)

The history of the labor movement, which from a bourgeois point of view has no connection with the foregoing economic analysis, is from a Marxian point of view of the utmost importance and the very reason for concern with the problems of political economy. This holds with respect to wide-ranging issues of historical materialism, as well as to the narrower question of capitalism’s destiny. For Marx, social history is the history of class struggles, determined by the class-related contradictions characterizing any particular social formation. The general development of the social “forces of production brings forth particular social relations of production, and the combination of these determines the ruling ideology as the consciousness of a given mode of production. Material social forces determine ideational development, a fact that is rather obvious and even trivial after it has been recognized and formulated. Class relations and exploitation are as old as known history. But they have different forms depending on the mode in which surplus labor is extracted by a ruling class. This in turn depends on the state of the productive powers available at any particular time. Because a given mode of production is most advantageous for an established ruling class, it will be defended by this class against any alteration that might diminish its power and its control over the social product. By the same token, however, it will hinder the further development of the social powers of production and set itself in opposition to emerging social needs that require changes in the mode of production, and to innovations arising within the process of production itself. The continuous reproduction process always changes any particular process of production, but to varying degrees. The changes may be so slow as to be almost imperceptible, which accounts for the static conditions that prevailed in some social formations for long periods of time. But even these societies had a history simply through the alterations, however limited, in the production processes.

Radical or revolutionary changes in modes of production presuppose the rise of new classes within the existing social relations, for history, however determined by objective necessities, has to be actualized through people’s subjective determination to alter the existing social relationships. This determination will express itself in a new ideology, but both are the results of the changes that have taken place within the existing social relations of production.

Marx summed up this materialist conception of history, which served as a “leading thread” in his economic studies, as follows:

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes a period of social revolution. (2)

If this situation may be described as one wherein the “economic structure of society” determines its “legal and political superstructure” and its “definite forms of social consciousness,” in order to bring out the point made by historical materialism, this does not imply an actual separation of “structure” and “superstructure” with the latter explained by the former, but merely states the fact that the material production process is consciously undertaken and thus conceptualizes the identity of a given state of the social powers of production with its corresponding social production relations. It is in terms of this two-sided totality, at once material and ideational, that historically evolving social formations are differentiated.

Although it is possible mentally to break up the totality of the social production and reproduction process into its various manifestations in the political, legal, and ideational spheres of social practice, these aspects cannot be concretely isolated and weighted with respect to their importance within the social system as a whole. In other words, it is not possible to say that the political, legal, and ideational activities may, on their own accord, affect the economic processes and codetermine their development, for the superstructure is the expression of the socioeconomic structure. This may be grasped by analogy with the value-price relations in capitalism, where the value relations must express themselves in the different form of price. It is not that the superstructure merely reflects the economic base, but that this base is what it is by virtue of its specific superstructure.

Just as capitalist price relations are both distinguishable and undistinguishable from value relations, so the superstructure in any social formation is also separable and inseparable from the
socioeconomic structure. If we speak of the one, we speak of the other, and in either case we speak of no more than the material production processes that allow society to exist. This implies, of course, that a fundamental change of society affects its “structure” and “superstructure” simultaneously, that is, that no socially significant political, legal, or ideational change can take place apart from changes in the relations of production and the state of the productive forces of society, and that basic changes only occur in the latter accompanied by corresponding alterations of the “superstructure.” It is therefore not possible to change a social system from the side of its “superstructure” alone – as for instance, by way of politically induced reforms – for such changes must always stop short at that point where they would jeopardize the existing social production relations. A change of the latter is only possible by way of revolution, which overthrows the “base” together with the “superstructure."

However, due to the development of the social forces of production, a social formation represents not only itself but also another society in embryonic form. The gestation period of the new society varies in accordance with the degree of change, spontaneous or consciously induced, in the social reproduction process. In societies without such changes, the productive forces and social relations will remain stagnant. Such societies have no history, although they may display class relations of one sort or another. Historical materialism concerns itself solely with developing societies. But changes in these societies are bound sooner or later to break down the stagnation of more static societies and alter their course.

Although incorporating technical innovations, the social forces of production are not reducible to technology. The transformation of the relatively static feudal-mercantilist economy into the dynamic capitalist system, for instance, was due not to technological changes but to the extension of a given technology over a wider field of application, by way of changes in the relations of production that opened the way for the vast development of the productive forces experienced in the Industrial Revolution.

The precapitalist era was based on agriculture, considered the only source of a surplus product making possible the nonproductive life of the land-owning ruling class. At least part of the total social product was a “gift of nature,” exceeding the results of the applied agricultural labor. This state of affairs found expression in the economic theories of the Physiocrats, who spoke of the “sterility” of all production outside of agriculture. In this theory, in contrast to mercantilist notions, a surplus arose in the sphere of production, not in that of circulation, or the exchange of commodities. Indeed, there was only a minimal exchange between agricultural products and those manufactured in the urban centers. The surplus was extracted from peasant labor, operating under conditions of self-sufficiency, which included the labor-producing agricultural implements; it was thus a clear case of expropriation, not of exchange relations. Whatever manufactures and handicrafts there were implied a technology exclusively and directly devoted to satisfying the needs and habits of the ruling class. There was also exploitation in the cities, in the sense that the city laborers produced not for themselves but for the ruling class, even though part of their products also served their own needs. But both their products and their surplus product were made possible by the agricultural surplus. Whatever technical development there was, was determined not by the accumulation of capital but by the needs and habits of the ruling class. If there was accumulation, it took not the abstract form of exchange value but that of use value.

With the means of production in the hands of the agricultural producers, the latter’s exploitation implied compulsory labor, which was also extended over the infrastructure as forced or corvèe labor. Under these conditions, any improvement of the productivity of agricultural labor would merely increase the surplus product falling to the landowning class and its state apparatus. There was, then, no incentive for technical innovation on the part of the peasantry, but rather the desire to work as little as possible in order to reduce the degree of their exploitation. The resulting stagnation of agricultural production set a limit to technological development in general, as it was almost totally dependent on the agricultural surplus. To increase this surplus was the sole concern of both the ruling classes and the urban population, as a precondition for the satisfaction of wants and the betterment of their living standards. This was eventually accomplished through the incorporation of agriculture into the exchange relations within and between the urban centers, brought about through a further division of labor within the existing class relations. In order to make the agricultural surplus grow, it was necessary to deprive the peasant population of control over their means of production and so force them out of their self-sufficiency and into the competitive market economy.

This was a twofold accomplishment, effected from the side of agriculture and from that of the merchant class as mediators of the exchange process. It involved the extension of market relations and commodity production over all of social production and the gradual transformation of labor into wage labor. While the commercialization of agriculture in England and France occasioned the “enclosure” movement, which drove a great deal of the peasantry from the land or transformed them into agricultural wage laborers, it also extended cottage industry, or the “putting out” system, from a supplementary to a main form of production. Provided by merchants with means of production and raw materials, peasants turned into wage laborers and merchants into capitalist entrepreneurs. Social relations became in increasing measure capital-labor relations and it was this fact that, by its generalization, expressed the growing social powers of production and the emergence of a new class accumulating surplus labor as surplus value and capital.

To cut a long and rather well-known story short, it may be said that with the increasing capitalization of agriculture, the way was open to bringing the whole of social production under the dominance of capital. Occupying a position between the landed aristocracy and the rural and urban proletariat, the middle class widened its field of operation with the extension of wage labor and the competitive pursuit of exchange value as an abstract and apparently limitless form of wealth, bound not to any specific form of property but to all forms in which surplus value materialized itself. New methods of production evolved to increase the profits on invested capital and technical innovations were searched for and introduced, not for the limited purpose of increasing the well-being and the luxuries of the ruling class, but in order to extract more surplus value out of all types of labor. While not in theory, at any rate in practice the capitalists were fully aware of the fact that a man’s labor “may mean either the personal act of working, or the effect which is produced by that act. In the first sense, it must be allowed that a man’s labor is properly his own ... but it does not follow ... that the effect of his laboring... must likewise be properly his own.” (3)

With surplus value the goal of production and wage labor the only means of existence for a growing number of people, production accelerated in accordance with increasing exploitation. Of course, this social transformation was accompanied by all sorts of serious dislocations of the economy and its political system, affecting not only the working population but all of society. Industrial capital and its demand for profits grew at a relatively faster pace than capital based on agriculture, and set itself in opposition to the latter. Surplus value in the form of rent, thanks to the monopoly position of landed property, escaped the averaging process of profit rates and lowered the profits of industrial capital. The antagonism between the landed interests and those of the advancing bourgeoisie characterized the early stages of capitalist development and found expression in the aspirations of the bourgeoisie for political power and control of the state. This antagonism resolved itself in the bourgeois revolutions, which in one way or another turned feudal relations into the capitalist relations of production and production itself into the production of capital.

To be sure, this historical process did not manifest its nature as clearly as did its final outcome. Ideologies encompass the past as well as the future and refer not to special but to putative general interests. They can thus be isolated from the specific purposes and concerns they serve under particular conditions and class relations. It is by virtue of this that they are indispensable for the maintenance as well as for the overthrow of given social relations, precisely because they cut across otherwise unbridgeable class differences. While history is being made, the apparently indivisible unity of the mode of production and its political and ideational superstructure is rent apart and seems to reveal competing ideologies with independent powers. But in retrospect, once society has changed, everything comes together again to constitute a particular historical period, characterized by the productive forces released by it, the social production relations associated with them, and the apparently extraeconomic “superstructural” expressions of the material production process.

History is clearly the history of social changes of modes of production and class relations, which have led to capitalist society, the subject matter of Marx’s concerns and those of the class at whose expense it exists. There is therefore no longer any history for the bourgeoisie: the development of any new mode of production would imply its own demise as a ruling class. From the point of view of historical materialism, however, capitalism must be analyzed with respect to its specific class relations and their effect upon the development of capital production. Obviously, the emergence of these class relations allowed for an enormous increase of the social powers of production in the form of the accumulation of capital. If the latter is the life’s blood of capitalist society, it is here also that this system’s historical limitations will be found. If there are none, then of course the bourgeoisie is right and history has come to an end.

Marx’s theory of proletarian revolution is thus an integral part of his theory of capitalist accumulation. As capital expands, so does the working class. But while accumulation assures the rule and comfort of the capitalist class, this is due only to the constant increase in the exploitation of labor power, which may or may not e compensated for by improvements of the workers’ living standards. This depends on changing value relations, on whether or not the lower exchange value of labor power will be the value equivalent of a greater quantity of use values. According to Marx, to recall, the changing value structure of capital in the course of its accumulation diminishes the rate of profit, even with a rising rate of surplus value, because the mass of surplus value is reduced due to the decline of the variable relative to the constant capital, or, what is the same, to the decrease in the number of workers with respect to the total capital amassed. Of course, just as the lower exchange value of labor power may not contradict a rise of wages in use-value terms, so a rise in the organic composition of capital may be compensated for by an increase of productivity, overcoming the decline of surplus value in each commodity by a disproportionally greater quantity of commodities, so as to restore, or even surpass, the customary rate of profit on capital. This depends in turn on the possibility of a sufficiently high rate of accumulation of capital. This makes the rate of profit in Marx’s system indefinite and, aside from the specific assumptions made by Marx in expounding his theory, unpredictable, in a strictly empirical sense.

What will interest us here is not so much the economic development of capital as the expectations based on it with regard to the evolution of a revolutionary consciousness on the part of the working class. Like all true revolutionaries, and notwithstanding his scientific bent and materialistic outlook, Marx was a romantic in his thoughts, feeling, and attitudes. Although convinced that “no social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have been matured in the womb of the old society,” (4) he saw in the maturing proletariat the most important productive force straining against the capitalist relations of production. History, in Marx’s view, does nothing, but must be made by people, by way of class struggle. As an ardent student of the French Revolution, and an observer of, as well as participant in, the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 – during which the working class, even within the context of bourgeois aspirations, displayed itself as an independent anti-capitalist force-Marx saw capitalism’s future preordained with the proletarian revolution. It was of course not possible, and from Marx’s point of view also superfluous, to determine in advance when the capitalist relations of production would cease to further the development of the social forces of production and thus release the objective need for social change. All that was necessary for revolution was the presence of a force within the shell of capitalism representing new social relations in conflict with the capitalistically limited forces of production. In a developed capitalism, any prolonged and deep going crisis could lead to a revolutionary situation and to the overthrow of capitalism. By breaking the crisis cycle of capital production, the way would then be open for a further unhampered social development. In the early Marxist movement this was seen as a realistic possibility, due to the fact of a growing socialist movement and the spreading recognition that there was an alternative to capitalism.

Objective conditions, changing in the course of capitalist development, would bring forth a subjective readiness on the part of the working class to change the social relations of production. The theory and practice of a growing labor movement was seen as a unitary phenomenon, due to the self-expansion and at the same time the self-limitation of capitalist development. Marx’s Capital employing the methods of scientific analysis, was able to proffer a theory that synthesized the class struggle and the general contradictions of capitalism. The actual class struggle would – in time – turn class consciousness into revolutionary consciousness, and the fight over wages and working conditions would become a struggle for the abolition of the wage system, that is, for the ending of capitalism. Class consciousness was seen by the Marxists as one of the results of capital accumulation, emerging out of the master-slave relation in the direct production process, the disproportional increase of exploitation within the capital-labor exchange relations, the observably increasing misery of growing layers of the unemployed and the unemployable, the general wretchedness experienced during periods of depression, and the insecurity prevailing under all capitalist circumstances. On the positive side, there was the capitalistically enforced concentration of great numbers of workers in all industries, inducing the recognition that the laborer was a member of a social class and thus was able to proceed from individual to collective attempts to improve his working conditions. The results of the workers’ struggles were seen not only in the improvement of their living standards but also in the recognition of their growing strength in the contest between capital and labor, and in the attendant development of their self-confidence both as individuals and as members of a class. It was thought that out of this class itself and its constant confrontation with the bourgeoisie would arise not only a willingness to assert the workers’ temporary interests but also a growing conviction that social production could be carried on outside the capital-labor relation.

These expectations were to be disappointed. Although a growing number of workers became adherents of revolutionary ideas and organized themselves in socialist organizations, a greater number remained immune to socialist ideologies, even though they were prepared to fight for higher wages and better working conditions. The economic struggles found organization in the trade unions; but these organizations did not, as Marx had expected they would, become “schools for socialism,” but remained what they were at their outset, a mere phenomenon of the commodity character of labor power. Their concern was with the price of labor power within the capitalist market relations. What socialist ideas had been associated with trade unionism were gradually jettisoned as an unnecessary ballast, and even an embarrassment, hindering the ascent and endangering the legal status of those organizations.

Marx’s maxim that the consciousness of a time is that of its social and material production relations holds also for the working class. While the class struggle, as seen with socialist eyes, was supposed to change the consciousness of the laborers, and to some extent actually did so, this change was not in the direction of socialism as a practical goal. Although the class struggle implied awareness of the opposed interests of labor and capital, it did not challenge the capital-labor relation itself, but merely the degree of exploitation as measured by the wage-profit ratio. In order to be effective, the class struggle has to be organized, and the gains made in this struggle must be sustained by making the organizations permanent. The greater the number of organized workers and the need for coordinated actions, the less was their own initiative in determining these activities. The decision-making powers became those of a centralized leadership in a hierarchical bureaucratic organizational structure that came to look upon itself as an instrument to secure its own special interests as a precondition for its activities in behalf of the working class. Of course, it was the workers themselves who built these organizations and delegated to them control over their own activities. The fact that they did not leave these organizations could only mean that their own demands coincided with those brought forward in their name by the leaders occupying the commanding posts in their organizations. Now, it is true that these leaders, in any case those in the socialist parties, professed to consider the fight for capitalistic reforms as a mere means to reach the revolutionary goals and not as an end in itself; but actually, the struggle for reforms was the only one possible, bringing with it types of organization that were only able to function within the given relations of production and were thus bound, by their very growth and successes, to turn into defenders of the capitalist system, as a precondition of their own existence.

They could have no conceivable function in a socialist society, and for that reason did not think in terms of revolutionary change, except rhetorically where this seemed opportune.

The supposed “dialectic” between reform and revolution-the everyday struggle for immediate demands changing into a struggle against the system itself – did not actually lead to a noticeable increase in revolutionary class consciousness, but merely issued into organizational forms of class struggle incapable of making the leap from reform to revolution. To the controlling ideology of bourgeois society was now added the controlling influence of nonrevolutionary organizations over the organized as well as unorganized parts of the working class in a two-sided effort to hold the class struggle within the confines of capitalist society.

Marx’s expectations as to the revolutionary effect of capital accumulation upon the consciousness of the working class turned out to be erroneous, at least in the ascending stage of capitalist development.


* Chapter 1 : Capitalism and Socialism


Whereas Marx’s analysis of the social contradictions inherent in
capitalism refers to the general trend of capitalistic development, the actual
class struggle is a day-to-day affair and necessarily adjusts itself to
changing social conditions. These adjustments are bound to find a reflection in
Marxian theory. The history of capitalism is thus also the history of Marxism.
Although interrupted by periods of crisis and depression, capitalism was able
to maintain itself until now by the continuous expansion of capital and its
extension into space through an accelerating increase of the productivity of
labor. It proved possible not only to regain a temporarily lost profitability
but to increase it sufficiently to continue the accumulation process as well as
to improve the living standards of the great bulk of the laboring population.
The economic class struggle within rising capitalism, far from endangering the
latter, provided an additional capitalist incentive for hastening the expansion
of capital through the application of technological innovations and the
increase of labor efficiency by organizational means. While the organized
labor movement grew and the conditions of the working class improved, this fact
itself strengthened the capitalist adversary and weakened the oppositional
inclinations of the proletariat. But without revolutionary working class
actions, Marxism remains just the theoretical comprehension of capitalism. It
is thus not the theory of an actual social practice, able to change the world,
but functions as an ideology in anticipation of such a practice. Its
interpretation of reality, however correct, does not affect this reality to any
important extent. It merely describes the conditions in which the proletariat
finds itself, leaving their change to the indeterminate future. The very
conditions in which the proletariat finds itself in an ascending capitalism
subject it to the rule of capital and to an impotent, merely ideological
opposition at best.

The successful expansion of capital and the amelioration of the conditions
of the workers led to a spreading doubt regarding the validity of Marx’s
abstract theory of capital development. Apart from recurring crisis
situations, empirical reality seemed in fact to contradict Marx’s
expectations. Even where his theory was upheld, it was no longer associated
with a practice ideologically aimed at the overthrow of capitalism. Marxism
turned into an evolutionary theory, expressing the wish to transcend the
capitalist system by way of constant reforms favoring the working class.
Marxian revisionism, in both covert and overt form, led to a kind of synthesis
of Marxism and bourgeois ideology, as the theoretical corollary to the
increasing practical integration of the labor movement into capitalist
society.

As an organized mass movement within ascending capitalism, socialism could
be “successful” only as a reformist movement. By adapting itself
politically to the framework of bourgeois democracy and economically to that of
the labor market, the socialist movement challenged neither the basic social
production relations nor the political structures evolved by these relations.
As regards its significance, furthermore, Marxism has been more of a regional
than an international movement, as may be surmised from its precarious hold in
the Anglo-Saxon countries. It was above all a movement of a continental Europe,
even though it developed its theory by reflection on capitalistically more
advanced England. While in the latter country capitalism was already the
dominant mode of production, the bourgeoisie of continental Europe was still
struggling to free itself from the remaining shackles of the feudal regime and
to create national entities within which capitalist production could progress.
The economic and political turmoil accompanying the formation of the various
European national states involved the proletariat along with the bourgeoisie
and created a political consciousness oriented toward social change. While
opposing the entrenched reactionary forces of the past, the rising bourgeoisie
also confronted the working class insofar as this class tried to reduce the
degree of its exploitation. Despite this early confrontation, the working class
was forced to support the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, if only to create the
conditions for its own emancipation. From the very beginning of the
working-class movement in continental Europe, therefore, there existed
simultaneously the need to fight against capitalist exploitation and need to
support the development of capitalism as well as the political institutions it
created for itself. The common interest of the emerging classes – the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat – in overcoming the vested interests of
the past was already a form of integration that found its reflection in the
strategy and tactics of the labor movement, that is, in its striving for
political power within bourgeois democracy and the alleviation of economic
conditions of the working class within the confines of political economy. As a
political movement, however, Marxism could not dispense with its socialist
goal, even though practically it could gain no more for the working class than
any of the apolitical movements that arose in the established capitalist
nations, such as England and the United States, which restricted themselves to
the fight for higher wages and better working conditions without challenging
the existing social relations of production.

It was thus historical peculiarities that determined the character of the
socialist movements in continental Europe – that is, the partial identity
of proletarian and bourgeois political aspirations within the rising
capitalism. Marxian theory implied preparation for a socialist revolution
within a general revolutionary process that could as yet only issue into the
triumph of the bourgeoisie, the destruction of the semifeudal state, and the
dominance of capital production. After these accomplishments, the road would be
open for a struggle restricted to the labor-capital antagonism, which would
first pose the question of a proletarian revolution.

The way to foster this general development was by partaking in the as yet
incomplete bourgeois transformation and by pushing forward the capitalist
forces of production, through economic demands that could be met only by an
accelerated increase of the productivity of labor and the rapid accumulation of
capital. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, however, the special issues that
agitated the European labor movement no longer existed, or did not arise at
all, as the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois rule constituted the
uncontested social reality. Here the conditions that were goals for the
European labor movement were already an established fact and reduced the
struggle between labor and capital to the economic sphere. Class consciousness
found its expression in pure trade unionism; the ongoing monopolization of
capital was echoed by the attempted “monopolization” of labor, as
one of the developed forms of general competition in expanding capitalism. This
situation foreshadowed the continental labor movement’s further
development and with it that of its Marxist, or socialist, wing. The more
capitalism came into its own, the more the idea of revolutionary change fell by
the wayside. The growing trade unions severed their early close relationship
with the socialist parties, and the latter themselves concentrated their
efforts on purely parliamentary activities to press for social legislation
favorable to the working class, through the extension, not the abolition, of
bourgeois democracy. For the time being, and the foreseeable future, as Eduard
Bernstein, one of the leading “revisionists” of the German Social
Democracy and the Second International, put it, “the movement was
everything and the goal nothing."

However, organized ideologies do not abdicate easily, and this the less so
as their proponents defend not only their convictions but also their positions
within the organizations that are supposed to realize the ideological goals.
The rather quick rise of the socialist movement allowed for an organizational
structure increasingly attractive to intellectuals and capable of supporting a
bureaucracy whose existence was bound up with the steady growth and permanence
of the organization. The hierarchical structure of capitalist society repeated
itself in that of the socialist organizations and trade unions as the
differentiation between the commanding leadership and the obeying rank and
file. And just as the workers accommodated themselves to the general conditions
of capitalism, so they accepted the similar structure of the socialist movement
as an unavoidable requirement for effective organizational activity.

Although in an entirely different sense from the way the phrase is usually
understood, this found a rather apt expression in the interpretation of Social
Democracy as “a state within the state.” As in the capitalist world
at large, in the Social Democratic movement too there was a right wing, a
center, and a left wing, although the struggle between these tendencies
remained purely ideological. The actual practice of the movement was reformist,
untouched by left-wing rhetoric and indirectly aided by it, as it provided a
socialist label for opportunistic activities aimed no longer at the overthrow
of capitalism but at organizational growth within the system. Supposedly,
bourgeois democracy and capitalism itself would through their own dynamics
prepare the social conditions for a qualitative change corresponding to a state
of socialism. This comfortable idea was held by all the tendencies within the
socialist movement, whether they still believed in revolutionary action to
accomplish the transformation of capitalism into socialism, or assumed the
possibility of a peaceful nationalization of the means of production through
the winning, with a socialist majority, of control of the state.

In any case, the social transformation was cast into the far-away future and
played no part in the everyday activity of the labor movement. Capitalism would
have to run its course, not only in the already highly developed capitalist
nations but even in those just in the process of evolving the capitalist
relations of production. It remained true, of course, that devastating crises
interrupted the steady capitalization of the world economy, but like the social
miseries accompanying the early stages of capitalist production, its
susceptibility to crises and depressions was now also adjudged a mark of its
infancy, which would be lost as it matured. With the concentration and
centralization of capital by way of competition, competition itself would be
progressively eliminated and with it the anarchy of the capitalist
market. Centralized control of the economy on a national and eventually an
international scale would allow for conscious social regulation of both
production and distribution and create the objective conditions for a planned
economy no longer subject to regulation by the law of value.

This idea was forcefully expressed by Rudolf Hilferding, whose economic
writings were widely regarded as a continuation of Marx’s Capital.(1) Leaning heavily on the work of Michael Tugan-Baranowsky, who
deduced from the “equilibrium conditions” of Marx’s
reproduction schemata (in the second volume of Capital) the theoretical
feasibility of a limitless expansion of capital, (2)
Hilferding saw this possibility still very much impaired by difficulties in
the capitalist circulation process which hindered the full realization of
surplus value. He perceived the capital concentration process in the course of
accumulation as a merging of banking capital with industrial capital to create
a form of capital best described as “financial capital.” It
implied the progressive cartelization of capital, tending toward a single
General Cartel that would gain complete control over the state and the
economy. As the progressive elimination of competition meant an increasing
disturbance of the objective price relations, this would mean, of course, that
the price mechanism of classical theory would cease to be operative and that
the law of value would therefore be unable to serve as the regulator of the
capitalist economy.

We are here not interested in Hilferding’s rather confused theory of
crisis as a problem of the realization of surplus value, due to
disproportionalities between the different spheres of production and between
production and consumption, because in his view these difficulties do not
arrest the trend towards the complete cartelization of the capitalist economy
(3) With the coming to pass of the General Cartel, prices
would be consciously determined so as to assure the system’s viability.
They would no longer express value relations but the consciously organized
distribution of the social product in terms of products. Under such conditions,
money as the universal and most general form of value could be eliminated. The
continuing social antagonisms would no longer arise from the system of
production, which would be completely socialized, but exclusively from that of
distribution, which would retain its class character. In this fashion
capitalism would be overcome through its own development; the anarchy of
production and that type of capitalism analyzed by Marx in Capital would be
ended. The expropriation of capital or, what is the same, the socialization of
production, will thus be capitalism’s own accomplishment.

Of course, like Marx’s “logical” end result of the
capitalist accumulation process, the concept of the General Cartel merely
serves to illustrate the trend of concrete capitalistic development. But while
in Marx’s model capitalism finds an inevitable end in decreasing
profitability, Hilferding’s General Cartel points to an
“economically conceivable” capitalist system able to maintain
itself indefinitely through the control of the whole of social production. If
capitalism tends toward collapse, this is not for economic reasons but must be
seen as a political process, as dependent on the conscious resolve to extend
the capitalistically achieved socialization of production into the sphere of
distribution. Such a transformation is possible only through a sudden political
change that transfers control of production from the hands of the cartelized
private capital into those of the state. This transformation thus requires the
socialist capture of political power within otherwise unchanged production
relations

Such a development seems conceivable given the constant growth of socialist
organization, striving for political power within bourgeois democracy and able
to win the allegiance of always larger masses of the electorate, and finally
leading to a socialist parlimentary majority and to the control of government.
The socialist state would then institute socialism by decree, through the
nationalization, or – what is thought to be the same – the
socialization of the decisive branches of industry. This would suffice to
extend the socialist type of production and distribution gradually to the whole
society. Due to capitalism’s specific form as financial capital,
Hilferding suggested that it would be enough to nationalize the larger banks to
initiate the socialist transformation. With this, the economic dictatorship of
capital would be turned into what Hilferding – in deference to Marx and
Engels – called the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

All this would of course depend on the persistence of the political
institutions of bourgeois democracy and the labor movement’s fidelity to
its socialist ideology. Would the bourgeoisie honor the parliamentary game if
it found itself on the losing side? Would the character of the socialist
movement remain the same despite its increasing influence and organizational
power within the capitalist regime? Even apart from such unasked questions, it
is unclear why, if there is no “economically conceivable” end to
capitalism, there should arise a political opportunity for its abolition. An
economically secure capitalism would guarantee its political security.
Moreover, if capitalism socializes the production process on its own, this
“socialization” includes the maintenance of the social production
relations as class relations, to be carried over into the nationalized form of
social production. Indeed, in Hilferding’s exposition, the change from
private to governmental control does not affect the relation between wage labor
and capital, except insofar as economic control is transferred from the
bourgeoisie to the state apparatus. Thus socialism, in his view, means the
completion of the centralization process inherent in competitive capital
expansion, the transformation of private into “social” capital and
its control by the state, and therewith the possibility for centrally planned
production, which would be distinguished from organized capitalism mainly by
allowing for a more equitable distribution.

The theoretical progress made in the socialist movement since its beginnings
within the incomplete bourgeois revolution thus consisted in the assertion
that, just as the socialist movement fostered capitalist development, fully
developed capitalism and bourgeois democracy were now opening the way to
socialism. If the workers, for historical reasons, and however reluctantly,
aided the rise of democratic capitalism, this very same capitalism was now
preparing with equal reluctance, but unavoidably, the conditions for a
socialist transformation. The development of wage labor and capital was thus a
reciprocative evolution, in which both workers and capitalists functioned as
precursors of socialism through the accumulation of capital. All that was
necessary in order to play an active part in this historical process was to
increase general awareness of its happening so as to hasten its completion.

For Hilferding capitalism had already reached its highest stage of
development. Notwithstanding the imperialist war and the revolutions in its
wake, the prevailing “late capitalism” was for him an organized
capitalism, no longer determined by “economic laws” but by
political considerations. The capitalist principle of competition was making
room for the socialist planning principle through state interventions in the
economy. The class struggles over wages and working conditions changed into
political struggles and the wage itself into a “political wage,”
by way of the parliamentary accomplishments of the socialist parties in the
field of social legislation, such as arbitration laws, collective bargaining,
unemployment insurance, and so forth, which augmented the “economic
wage” and freed it from its value determination. According to Hilferding,
the state was not simply, as Marx had called it, the “executive committee
of the ruling class,” but reflected, through the medium of political
parties, the changing power relations between different classes – all of
them sharing in state power. The workers’ class struggle turns into a
fight for the determination of social policy and finally for the control of
“bourgeois democracy,” or “formal democracy,” because
democracy belongs to none but the working class, which first had made it a
reality through its struggle against the bourgeoisie. Through democracy the
workers will gain the government, the army, the police, and the judiciary, and
thus realize their longing for a socialist society. (4)

In view of the actual course of events, Hilferding’s rationalization
of the precapitalistic policies of the socialist parties seems to be of no
interest at all. The “democratic road to socialism” led direct to
the fascist dictatorships and to Hilferding’s own miserable end. However,
his concept of socialism as a planned economy under governmental control, one
that assumes the functions previously exercised by the centralized but private
capital, characterizes almost all of the existing images of a socialist
society.

As Marx stopped his analysis short of the expected overthrow the capitalist
system and, aside from occasional very general remarks about the basic
character of the new society, left the construction of socialism to the future,
so Hilferding stopped short at capitalism’s “last stage,”
without entering into a more detailed investigation of the problems of the
transformation of “organized capitalism” into the socialist
organization of society. His party colleague Karl Kautsky, however, as the most
eminent of Marxists after Marx and Engels, felt obliged to offer some
speculations about the possible postrevolutionary situation. (5) He too saw the “expropriation of the
expropriators” in the completion of society’s democratization, to
be accomplished by the working class. The immediate measures to be taken were
for him those democratic goals the bourgeoisie itself had failed to bring about
– that is, the unrestricted vote, a free press, separation of church and
state, disarmament, the replacement of the army by a militia, and progressive
taxation. Because class relations had existed for thousands of years and were
still deeply ingrained in human consciousness, Kautsky felt that they would not
be overcome all at once. Only equality in education would gradually do away
with class prejudices. Most of all, however, unemployment would have to be
abolished through a system of unemployment insurance that would raise the
market value of labor power. Wages would rise and profits diminish or disappear
altogether. There would be no need to chase the capitalists away from their
leading position in industry, because under the changed conditions the
bourgeoisie would most likely prefer to sell their property rights, recognizing
that political power in the hands of the working class is incompatible with a
capitalist mode of production.

A jest on the part of Marx – to the effect that perhaps the cheapest
way to socialism would be the buying-out of the capitalists-Kautsky elevated
into a political program. But who would buy the capitalist property? Part of
it, Kautsky related, could be bought by the workers themselves, other parts by
cooperatives, and the rest by governmental agencies on the local and national
level. The big monopolies, however, could be expropriated outright as
detrimental to all social classes, including the smaller capitalists. And
because the monopolies constitute such a large part of the economy, their
expropriation would enhance the otherwise more gradual transformation of
private into public property. It would also allow for a conscious regulation of
production and thus end its determination by value relations. Although
labor-time calculation would continue to aid the formation of prices, it would
no longer rule production and distribution. Money too would lose its commodity
and capital character by being reduced to a mere means of circulation. The
continued utilization of prices and money would imply, of course, the
continuation of the wage system, even though wages would no longer reflect
supply and demand in the labor market. There would also be wage differentials,
in order to facilitate the allocation of the social labor, which would not,
however, prevent a general rise of all wages. Of course, capital would have to
be accumulated and compensation would have to be paid for the loss of the
property rights of the capitalists. Taxes would have to be raised, for the
various and enlarged state functions. For all these reasons, productivity would
have to be increased beyond the level achieved in the old capitalism, so as to
make a higher living standard possible.

Although preferring compensation for the loss of the capitalists’
property, Kautsky is not sure that this will actually be done, but leaves this
issue for the future to decide. He realizes that with compensation, surplus
value, once directly extracted by the capitalists, would still fall to them in
terms of claims on the government. However, this extra expense would disappear
with the accumulation of additional capital, thus ending the continued
exploitation. Besides, Kautsky remarks slyly, if capitalist property were to
exist only in the form of claims on the new public owners, this unearned income
could easily be taxed away. Compensation would after all amount to
confiscation, albeit in a less brutal form.

The watchword of socialism is, then: more work and higher productivity. In
this respect, according to Kautsky, socialists could learn a lot from the
production methods of the large U.S. corporations. What is more, these
methods, as yet limited to the gigantic trusts, could be even more effective
when extended to the whole of society. The socialist organization of production
is thus well prepared by capitalism and need not be newly invented. The only
requirement is to change the accidental and anarchic character of production
into a consciously regulated production concerned with social needs.

Kautsky’s exceedingly tame vision of the state of the future, its
relation to the socialist economy was still considered by right-wing socialists
as unwarranted and even dangerous, a threat to the steady progress of the
Social Democratic movement envisioned this progress in terms of a pure trade
unionism of British and American type, and a pure parliamentarism, which would
enable the party to enter into coalitions with bourgeois parties and, sooner or
later, perhaps, into government positions. To that end, the Marxist ideology would
have to be sacrificed in favor such evolutionary principles as those propounded
by Eduard Bernstein. But Kautsky was the leading Marxist authority and quite
unwilling to denounce the Marxist heritage. He was also impressed by the 1905
revolutionary upheavals in Russia and by the mass strikes that occurred around
the same time in a number of European countries. A socialist revolution
appeared to him, while not an immediate, nevertheless a future possibility. In
this spirit, he wrote his most radical work, The Road to Power, against the
pure reformism that actuated the socialist parties.(6)

Socialism and its presupposition, political power in the hands of the
proletarian state, Kautsky wrote in this work, could not be reached by an
imperceptible, gradual, and peaceful transformation of capitalism through
social reforms, but only in the manner foreseen by Marx. State power must be
conquered. On this point there existed an affinity between the ideas of Marx
and Engels and those of Blanqui, with the sole difference that while the latter
relied on the coup d’etat, executed by a minority, Marx and Engels looked
to revolutionary actions by the broad masses of the working class – the
only revolutionary force in modern capitalism – to lead to a proletarian
state, that is, to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Kautsky’s insistence upon the revolutionary content of the labor
movement led to a division of the socialist party, in a general way, into an
“orthodox” and a “revisionist” wing, whereby the first
seemingly dominated ideologically while the other determined the actual
practice. Of course, this division was not peculiar to German Social Democracy
but, via the Second International, played a part in all socialist
organizations. In addition, there were other movements opposing Marxist theory
and practice, such as the anarcho-communists, the syndicalists, and the
apolitical labor movements in the Anglo-Saxon countries. But it was the Marxist
movement which the bourgeoisie recognized as the most important threat to its
rule, for it had developed an effective counter-ideology able to subvert the
capitalist system. In any case, the success of the apparently
“Marxist” revolution in Russia in 1917, its repercussions in the
Central European nations, and finally, the subsequent division of the world
into capitalist and “socialist” countries, led to a situation
wherein any kind of social upheaval in any part of the world received and still
receives the label “Marxism."

At this point, however, we are still dealing with the prerevolutionary
socialist movement, which found in Hilferding and Kautsky its most exemplary
spokesmen. It was their interpretation of Marxism, in the light of changed
social conditions, that dominated the socialist ideology. For both, socialism
implied the capture of political power through the conquest of the state,
either by an evolutionary or a revolutionary process. For both of them, too,
capitalism had already prepared the ground for a socialist system of
production. All that remained was to remove the value determination of
capitalist production, its subjugation to the commodity fetishism of the
competitive market, and to organize production and distribution in accordance
with the ascertainable needs of society.

It is of course true that Marx and Engels acknowledged the obvious, namely,
that the overthrow of capitalism demands the overthrow of its state. For them,
the political aspect of the proletarian revolution exhausts itself in
overwhelming the capitalist state apparatus with all the means required to this
end. The victorious working class would neither institute a new state nor seize
control of the existing state, but exercise its dictatorship so as to be able
to realize its real goal, the appropriation of the means of production and
their irrevocable transformation into social means of production in the most
literal sense, that is, as under the control of the association of free and
equal producers. Although assuming functions previously associated with those
of the state, this dictatorship is not to become a new state, but a means to
the elimination of all suppressive measures through the ending of class
relations. There is no room for a “socialist state” in socialism,
even though there is the need for a central direction of the socialized
economy, which, however, is itself a part of the organization of associated
producers and not an independent entity set against them.

Of course, for reasons not as yet discernible, this might be utopian, as
thus would be a socialist society in the Marxian sense. It has to be tried in a
revolutionary situation if a serious effort is to be made to reach the
classless society. It may be forced the workers by objective conditions, quite
aside from whether not they understand all its implications. But it may also
fail, if proletariat abdicates its own dictatorship to a separately or new
state machine that usurps control over society. It is not possible to foresee
under what particular concrete social conditions the revolutionary process
might unfold, and whether or the mere extension and intensification of
dictatorial rule will degenerate into a new state assuming independent powers.
Whatever the case may be, it is not through the state that socialism can
realized, as this would exclude the self-determination of the class, which is
the essence of socialism. State rule perpetuates the divorce of the workers from
the means of production, on which their dependence and exploitation rests, and
thus also perpetuates social class relations.

However, it was precisely the attempt to overcome the apparently utopian
elements of Marxian doctrine which induced the theoreticians of the Second
International to insist upon the state as the instrument for the realization of
socialism. Although they were divided on the question of how to achieve control
of the state, they were united in their conviction that the organization of the
new society is the state’s responsibility. It was their sense of reality
that made them question Marx’s abstract concepts of the revolution and
the construction of socialism, bringing these ideas down to earth and in closer
relation to the concretely given possibilities.

Indeed, the construction of a socialist system is no doubt a most formidable
undertaking. Even to think about it is already of a bewildering complexity
defying easy or convincing solutions. It certainly seems to be out of reach
for the relatively uneducated working class. It would require the greatest
expertize in the under standing and management of social phenomena and the most
careful approach to all reorganizational problems, if it is not to end in
dismal failure. It demands an overall view of social needs, as well as special
qualifications for those attending to them, and thus institutions designed to
assure the social reproduction process. Such institutions must have enough
authority to withstand all irrational objections and thus must have the support
of government which, by sanctioning these decisions, makes them its own. Most
of all, the even flow of production must not be interfered with and all
unnecessary experimentation must be avoided, so that it would be best to
continue with proven methods of production and the production relations on
which they were based.

In Marxian theory, a period of social revolution ensues when the existing
social relations of production become a hindrance to the utilization and
further development of the social forces of production. It is by a change of
the social relations of production that the hampered social powers of
production find their release. Their further expansion might, but need not,
require a quantitative increase in the social powers of production. By ending
the drive to “accumulate for the sake of accumulation” and with it
the various restrictions due to this type of abstract wealth production, the
available productive power of social labor is set free in a qualitatively
different system of production geared to the rationally considered needs of
society.

In capitalism the productive forces of social labor, which appear as the
productive power of capital, limit their own expansion through the decrease of
surplus value in the course of capital accumulation. The applications of
science and technology merely hasten this process and become themselves
barriers to the formation of capital. But without this formation, production
must decline even with respect to the capitalistically determined social needs,
first with respect to the enlarged reproduction of capital, and then also with
regard to simple reproduction, which would mean the end of the capitalist
system. Concretely, this process takes the form not only of recurrent periods
of depressions and along-term trend of economic decline, but also of
capitalism’s inability to avail itself even of the productive forces
developed during its relentless drive for surplus value. Part of the existing
productive forces are such only potentially, as they fail to increase the
profitability of capital in sufficient measure, or at all, and for that reason
are not employed. In economic terms, constant and variable capital remain idle
because, if not used capitalistically, they cannot be used at all. Their full
utilization would require a change in the relations of production which would
disencumber social production of its dependence on the creation of surplus
value.

Because the capitalistic increase of the social powers of production has the
form of the accumulation of capital, science and serve this particular brand of
social development and the latter as such. And because science and technology
are limitless in every direction, they can change their direction through a
change of the social structure, away from its need to accumulate capital, to
the real production and consumption requirements of a society not only
“socialized” in the limited sense that its development is
determined by the interdependence of the separated commodity producers, but in
a truly social sense, implying the prevention of special private or class
interests from interfering in the consciously recognized needs of society as a
whole. Science and technology would move in different directions than those
required by society.

Moreover, although an expression of the rapid accumulation capital, its
increasing monopolization implies the monopolization of science and technology
and their subordination to the specific interests of the centralized capitals.
This hinders the increase of productivity in the remaining competitive sectors
of the economy and prevents the growth of the social forces of production in
capitalistically underdeveloped nations, except insofar as this may suit the
special interests of the centralized capitals in the dominating capitalist
countries. Finally, the monopolization of the world market plays the bulk of
the produced surplus value world-wide into the hands of a diminishing number of
internationally operating capitals, at the price of the increasing
pauperization of the world’s population. At the same time, the national
form of capital production prevents its internationalization for an all-round
expansion of the social forces of production, which would require consideration
of the real needs of the world population within the framework of a socialized
world economy. Unable to proceed in this direction, the increasing productive
power of capital turns into a destructive power, which today threatens not only
the setbacks of new and worldwide wars, but the destruction of the world
itself. Under these conditions the capitalist system has ceased to be a vehicle
for the growth of the social forces of production. It merely provides the stage
for the change of social relations that is the precondition for the resumption
of the civilizing process of social labor.

For the theoreticians of the Second International as well, socialism meant a
change of the social relations of production, but they saw this change not in
the abolition of wage labor but in the sudden or gradual transformation of
private into social capital under the auspices of the state. It is true that
they also spoke of the end of wage labor, but this implied no more than the
negative act of the state’s expropriation of capital, which would,
presumably, automatically change the social status of the laboring class. It
did not enter their minds that the workers themselves would have to take
possession of the means of production and that they themselves would have to
determine the conditions of production, the allocation of social labor, the
priorities of production, and the distribution of the social product, through
the creation of organizational forms that could assure that decision-making
powers would remain in the hands of the actual producers. In the statist
conceptions of socialism it is not the working class itself that rearranges
society. This is done for it, through substitution for it of a special social
group, organized as the state, which imagines that by this token it removes the
stigma of exploitation from wage labor.

On the whole, it is of course true that the socialist workers themselves
shared this concept with their leaders and assumed that the act of
socialization would be a function of government. This turned out to be an
illusion, but an illusion that had been systematically indoctrinated into the
working class. The indoctrination was successful because the procedure it
predicted appeared logical in view of the centralizing tendencies of capitalist
production and the democratic form of bourgeois politics. The great difference
between capitalism and socialism was thus perceived as the mere elimination of
the private property character of capital, or as the complete monopolization of
capital under centralized government control, which would serve no longer the
specific interests of the capitalist class but the whole of society. But to
that end, the state would have to regulate production and thus the labor
process, which, under these conditions, seemed feasible only through the
maintenance of wage labor.

However, wage labor is only the other side of the capital-labor relation
that characterizes capitalist society and determines its productive powers. The
complete monopolization of capital does do away, at least ideally, with
competitive market relations and does allow for a measure of conscious control
of the economy, and thus impairs or ends the value-determination of social
production. This may or may not increase the powers of social labor, but it
leaves the capitalist relations of production intact. The socialization of
production remains incomplete, as it does not affect the social relations of
production. The removal of the fetishism of commodity production through its
conscious control also removes the fetishistic character of wage labor but not
wage labor itself. It continues to express the lack of social power on the part
of the working class and its centralization into the hand of the controlling
state. The capital-labor relation has been modified but not abolished; there
has been a social revolution but not a working-class revolution.

Notes

 
1. Das Finanzkapital (1909); English translation, Finance Capital (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

 
2. Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Handelskrisen (1901); Theoretische Grundlagen des
Marxismus (1905).

 
3. Actually, Hilferding has no crisis theory; he merely describes the differences in market
conditions that distinguish periods of prosperity from those of depression. Insofar as he attempts
an explanation, it is clearly self-contradictory. On the one hand, he maintains with Marx that the
cause of crisis must be looked for in the sphere of production, in the recurring difficulty of
producing the surplus value necessary for a further profitable expansion of capital; on the other
hand, he speaks of a lack of coordination between the expanding capital and the growing
consumption, which disturbs the supply and demand relations in terms of prices, thereby
impairing the realization of the produced surplus value. Besides this particular
disproportionality, Hilferding mentions a number of others, such as may arise between fixed and
circulating capital; between technical and value relations of production; between
the functions of money as a hoard and as medium of exchange; between unequal changes in the
turnover of the different capital entities, and so forth

 Although Hilferding refers to the law of the falling
rate of profit in the course of the rising organic composition of capital and
for that reason rejects the popular underconsumption theories, he asserts
nevertheless that the differences in the organic composition of the diverse
capitals display themselves in discrepancies arising between production and
consumption in terms of price relations. He forgets that it is the general, or
average, rate of profit that regulates the prices of production, regardless of
differences in the organic compositions of the individual capitals, and that it
is the accumulation process itself that allocates social labor in favor of a
more rapid growth of the constant capital. However, searching for the cause of
crisis in the circulation process, Hilferding speaks of a difference between
market prices and the prices of production. He says, in other words, that some
capitalists realize profits beyond that contained in the price of production,
while others realize correspondingly less than the profit implied in the price
of production, as determined by the organic composition of the total social
capital This implies, of course, an impairment of the function of the average
rate of profit as a result of the increasing monopolization of capital, which,
however, does not alter the size of the total social profit, or surplus value,
with respect to the accumulation requirements of the total social capital on
which Marx’s crisis theory is based. Whereas in Marx’s theory the
value relations regulate the price relations, in Hilferding’s
interpretation the actual price relations disrupt the regulatory force of the
value relations, because prices do not register the value requirements for the
equilibrium conditions of the expanded reproduction of capital.

 
4. In a speech delivered at the Social-Democratic Party Congress in Kiel, 1927. Cf. Protokoll der Verhandlungen des sozialdemokratischen Parteitages 1927 in Kiel (Berlin: 1927), pp. 165-224.

 
5. Karl Kautsky, Am Tage nach der sozialen Revolution. (Die soziale Revolution, part II) (Berlin, 1902); English translation, “The Day after the Social Revolution,” in The Social Revolution (Chicago: Kerr, 1902).

 
6. Karl Kautsky, Der Weg zur Macht (1909): English translation, The Road to Power (Chicago: S. A. Bloch, 1909).


* Chapter 2 : Reform and Revolution


The bourgeois political revolution was the culmination of a drawnout process
of social changes in the sphere of production. Where the ascending capitalist
class gained complete control of the state, this assured a rapid unfolding of
the capital-labor relation. Feudalistic resistance to this transformation
varied in different countries. Though capitalism was on the rise generally, its
gestation involved both force and compromise, characterized by an overlapping
of the new and the old both politically and economically. The ruling classes
divided into a reactionary and a progressive wing, the latter striving for
political control through a democratic capitalist state. The division between
an entrenched autocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie reflected the uneven pace
of capitalist development and extended the internal distinctions between
reaction and progress to the nations themselves and to their political
institutions.

The socialist movement arose in an incompletely bourgeois society in a world
of nations still more or less in the thrall of the reactionary forces of the
past. This situation led to an expedient but unnatural alliance between
bourgeoisie and proletariat. Historically, the opposition of labor and capital
had first to appear as an identity of interests, so as to release the forces of
production that would turn the proletariat into an independent social class. To
partake in the bourgeois revolutions with their own demands did not contradict
the postulated “historical goal” of the working class, but was an
unavoidable precondition of its future struggle against the bourgeoisie.

Although it has often been asserted that it was fear of the proletariat that
induced the bourgeoisie to limit its own struggle against the feudal autocracy,
it was rather the recognition of its own as yet restricted power vis-a-vis the
reactionary foe that made it draw back from radical measures in favor of its
own political aspirations. While the bourgeoisie found support in the laboring
population, it was certain that it would find the assistance of the reactionary
forces should this prove necessary to destroy the revolutionary initiative of
the working class. In any case, time was on the side of the bourgeoisie, as the
feudal layers of society adapted to the capitalization process and integrated
themselves into the capitalist mode of production. The integration of the
apparently irreconcilable interests of the conservative elements, largely based
on agriculture, and the progressive democratic forces, representing industrial
capital, finally realized the goals of the failed bourgeois revolutions of
1848, which had gripped almost all the nations of Western Europe. Eighteen
forty-eight had raised hopes for an early proletarian revolution, particularly
because of the devastating economic crisis conditions that had caused the
political ferment in the first place. But the years of depression passed and
with them also the social upheavals against everything thought to stand in the
way of social change. Capital accumulated no less within countries ruled by
politically reactionary regimes than in those where the state favored the
liberal bourgeoisie.

The modern nation-state is a creation of capitalism, which demands the
transformation of weak into viable states, so as to create the conditions of
production that allow for successful competition on the world market.
Nationalism was then the predominant concern of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
Capitalist expansion and national unification were seen as complementary
processes, although nationalism in its ideological form was held to be a value
in its own right. In this form, it took on revolutionary connotations wherever
particular nations, such as Ireland and Poland, had come under foreign rule.
Because capitalism implied the formation of nations, those who favored the
first necessarily favored the second, even if only as another presupposition of
a future proletarian revolution which, for its part, was supposed to end the
national separations of the world economy. It was in this sense that Marx and
Engels advocated the formation of nations powerful enough to assure a rapid
capitalistic development.

Of course, it did not really matter whether or not Marx and Engels favored
the formation of capitalistically viable nation-states, for their influence
upon actual events was less than minimal. All they could do was express their
own sentiments and preferences with regard to the various national struggles
that accompanied the capitalization of the European continent. In these
struggles the workers could as yet provide only cannon fodder for class
interests that were not their own, or were so only indirectly, in that a rapid
capitalist development promised to improve their conditions within their
wage-labor dependency. Only in a historical sense was their participation in
the national-revolutionary upheavals of the time, and in the ensuing national
wars, justifiable, for at the time, they could serve only the specific class
interests of the rising and competing bourgeoisie. However, even though history
was made by the bourgeoisie, the fact that the latter’s existence implied
the existence and development of the proletariat made it obligatory to view
this process also from the position of the working class and to formulate
policies that would presumably advance its interests within the capitalistic
development.

As the formation of viable national states involved the absorption of less
viable national entities, a distinction was made between nations possessing the
potential for a vast capitalistic development and others not so endowed.
Friedrich Engels, for instance, differentiated between nations destined to
affect the course of history and others unable to play an independent role in
historical development.(1) In his opinion, nationalism as
such was not a revolutionary force, except indirectly in situations where it
served a rapid capitalist development. There was no room for small or backward
nations within the unfolding capitalist world. National aspirations could thus
be either revolutionary or reactionary, depending upon their positive or
negative impact on the growing social powers of production. Only insofar as
national movements supported the general capitalist development could these
movements be seen as progressive and so of interest to the working class, for
nationalism was only the capitalistically contradictory form of a development
preparing the way for the internationalization of capital production and
therefore also for proletarian internationalism.

Of course, this general conception had to be spelled out empirically, by
taking sides, at least verbally, in the actual national movements and national
wars of the nineteenth century. According to the degree of their capitalist
development, or the clear need and desire for such nation’s competitive
position within the world economy, their defense implied the defense of the
nation, if only to safeguard what had already been gained. The more advanced
the working class thought itself to be, the more outspoken its identification
with the prevailing nationalism. Where the workers did not challenge capitalist
social relations at all, as in England and the United States, their acceptance
of bourgeois nationalism with its imperialist implications was complete. Where
there was at least ideological opposition to the capitalist system, as in the
Marxist movement, nationalist sentiments were extolled in a more hypocritical
fashion, namely as a means to transform the nation into a socialist nation
powerful enough to withstand a possible onslaught of external
counterrevolutionary forces. A distinction was now made between nations clearly
on the road to socialism, as attested by the increasing power of the socialist
organizations and their growing influence upon society at large, and nations
still completely under the sway of their traditional ruling classes and
trailing behind the general social development along the socialist path.

A particular nation could thus become a kind of “vanguard
nation,” destined by its example to lead other nations. This role, played
by France in the bourgeois revolution, was now claimed, with respect to the
socialist revolution, for Germany, thanks to her quick capitalist development,
her geopolitical location, and her labor movement, the pride of the Second
International. A defeat of this nation in a capitalist war would set back not
only the development of Germany and its labor movement, but along with it the
development of socialism as such. It was thus in the name of socialism that
Friedrich Engels, for instance, advocated the defense of the German nation
against less advanced countries such as Russia, and even against more advanced
capitalist nations, such as France, were they to ally themselves with the
potential Russian adversary. And it was August Bebel, the popular leader of
German Social Democracy, who announced his readiness to fight for the German
fatherland should this be necessary to secure its uninterrupted socialist
development.

In a world of competing capitalist nations the gains of some nations are the
losses of others, even if all of them increase their capital with the
enlargement of the world market. The capital concentration process proceeds
internationally as well as nationally. As competition leads to monopolization,
the theoretically “free world market” becomes a partially
controlled market, and the instrumentalities to this end – protectionism,
colonialism, militarism, and imperialism – are employed to assure
national privileges within the expanding capitalist world economy.
Monopolization and imperialism thus provide a degree of conscious interference
in the market mechanism, though only for purposes of national aggrandizement.
However, as conscious control of the economy is also a goal of socialism, the
economic regulation due to the monopolization of capital and its imperialist
activities was held by some socialists and social reformers, such as the
Fabians of England, to be a progressive step toward the development of a more
rational society.

Because a relatively undisturbed growth of labor organizations in ascending
capitalism presupposes a rate of capital accumulation allowing at the same time
for sufficient profits and for the gradual improvement of the conditions of the
laboring classes, the nationally organized labor movement, bent on social
reforms or merely on higher wages, cannot help favoring the expansion of the
national capital. Whether the fact is acknowledged or not, international
capital competition affects the working class as well as capital. Even the
socialist wing of the labor movement will not be immune to this external
pressure, in order not to lose contact with reality and to maintain its
influence upon the working class, regardless of all the ideological lip service
paid to proletarian internationalism as the final but distant goal of the
socialist movement.

The national division of capitalist production also nationalizes the
proletarian class struggle. This is not a mere question of ideology –
that is, of the uncritical acceptance of bourgeois nationalism by the working
class – but is also a practical need, for it is within the framework of
the national economy that the class struggle is fought. With the unity of
mankind a distant and perhaps utopian goal, the historically evolving
nation-state and its success with respect to the competitive pursuit of capital
determine the destiny of its labor movement together with that of the working
class as regards the conditions of its existence. Like all ideologies, in order
to be effective nationalism too must have some definite contact with real needs
and possibilities, not only for the class interests directly associated with it
but also for those subjected to their rule.

Once established and systematically perpetuated, the ideology of
nationalism, like money, takes on an independent existence and asserts its
power without disclosing the specific material class interests that led to its
formation in the first place. As it is not the social production process but
its fetishistic form of appearance that structures the conscious apprehension
of capitalist society, so it is the nationalist ideology, divorced from its
underlying class-determined social relations, that appears as a part of the
false consciousness dominating the whole of society. Nationalism appears now as
a value in itself and as the only form in which some sort of “sociality”
can be realized in an otherwise asocial and atomized society. It is an abstract
form of sociality in lieu of a real sociality, but it attests to the subjective
need of the isolated individual to assert his humanity as a social being. As
such, it is the ideological reflex of capitalist society as a system of social
production for private gain, based on the exploitation of one class by another.
It supplements or replaces religion as the cohesive force of social existence,
since no other form of cohesion is possible at this stage of the development of
the social forces of production. It is thus a historical phenomenon, which
seems to be as “natural” as capitalist production itself and lends
to the latter an aura of sociality it does not really possess.

The ambiguities of ideologies, including nationalism, are both their
weakness and their strength. To retain its effectiveness over time, ideology
must be relentlessly cultivated. The internalization of ideological nationalism
cannot be left to the contradictory socialization process itself, but must be
systematically propagated to combat any arising doubt as to its validity for
society as a whole. But as the means of indoctrination, together with those of
production and of direct physical control, are in the hands of the bourgeoisie,
the ideas of the ruling class are the socially ruling ideas and in that form
answer the subjective need for the individual’s integration into a larger
and protective community.

Capital operates internationally but concentrates its profits nationally.
Its internationalization appears thus as an imperialistic nationalism aiming at
the monopolization of the sources of surplus value. This is at once a political
and an economic process, even though the connection between the two is not
always clearly discernible because of the relatively independent existence of
nationalist ideology, which hides the specifically capitalistic interests at
its base. This camouflage works the better because the whole of known history
has been the history of plunder and war of various people engaged in building
up, or in destroying, one or another ethnic group, one or another empire.
“National” security, or “national” security by way of
expansion, appears to be the stuff of history, a never-ending
“Darwinian” struggle for existence regardless of the historical
specificity of class relations within the “national” entities.

Just as monopolization and competition, or free trade and protectionism, are
aspects of one and the same historical development, nationalism and imperialism
are also indivisible, although the latter may take on a variety of forms, from
direct domination to indirect economic and financial control. Politically, the
accumulation of capital appears as the competitive expansion of nations and so
as an imperialistic struggle for larger shares of the exploitable resources of
the world, whether real or imaginary. This process, implicit in capitalist
production, divides the world into more or less successful capitalist nations.
The specifically capitalist imperialist imperative, or even the mere
opportunity for imperialist expansion, was taken up by some nations sooner than
by others, such as England and France in the eighteenth century, and was
delayed by nations such as Germany and the United States until the nineteenth
century. Some smaller nations were not at all able to enter into imperialist
competition and had to fit themselves into a world structure dominated by the
great capitalist powers. The changing fortunes of the imperialist nations in
their struggle for larger shares of the world’s profits appear
economically in the concentration of the world’s growing capital in a
diminishing number of nations. This would also result eventually from the
expansion of capital without imperialistic interventions on the part of the
competing national capitals: it is not competition which determines the course
of capitalist development, but capitalist production which determines the
course of competition and capitalism’s bloody history.

The object of national rivalries is the amassing of capital, on which all
political and military power rests. The ideology of nationalism is based not on
the existence of the nation but on the existence of capital and on its
self-expansion. In this sense, nationalism mediates the internationalization of
capital production without leading to a unified world economy, just as the
concentration and monopolization of the national capitals does not eliminate
their private property character. Nationally as well as internationally
capitalist production creates the world economy via the creation of the world
market. At the base of this general competitive process lies an actual, if
still abstract, need for a worldwide organization of production and
distribution beneficial to all of humanity. This is not only because the earth
is far better adapted to such an organization, but also because the social
productive forces can be further developed and society freed from want and
misery only by a fully international cooperation without regard to
particularistic interests. However, the compelling interdependency implied in a
progressive social development asserts itself capitalistically in an unending
struggle for imperialist control. Imperialism, not nationalism, was the great
issue around the turn of the century. German “nationalist” interests were
now imperialist interests, competing with the imperialisms of other nations.
French “national” interests were those of the French empire, as
Britain’s were those of the British empire. Control of the world and the
division and re-division of this control between the great imperialist powers,
and even between lesser nations, determined “national” policies and
culminated in the first worldwide war.

As crisis reveals the fundamental contradictions of capital production,
capitalist war reveals the imperialistic nature of nationalism. Imperialism
presents itself, however, as a national need to prevent, or to overcome, a
crisis situation in a defensive struggle against the imperialistic designs of
other nations. Where such nations do not exist imperialism takes on the guise
of a measure to maintain the well-being of the nation and, at the same time, to
carry its “civilizing” mission into new territories. It is not too
difficult to get the consent of a working class more or less habituated to
capitalist conditions, and thus under the sway of nationalism, for any
imperialist adventure. The workers’ state of absolute dependency allows
them to feel that, for better or worse, their lot is indissolubly connected
with that of the nation. Unable as yet and therefore unwilling to fight for any
kind of self-determination, they manage to convince themselves that the
concerns of their masters are also their own. And this the more so, because it
is only in this fashion that they are able to see themselves as full-fledged
members of society, gaining as citizens of the state the “dignity”
and “appreciation” denied to them as members of the working
class.

There is no point in being annoyed by this state of affairs and in
dismissing the working class as a stupid class, unable to distinguish its own
interests from those of the bourgeoisie. After all, it merely shares the
national ideology with the rest of society, which is equally unaware that
nationalism, like religion at an earlier time, and like the faith in the
beneficence of market relations, is only an ideological expression for the
self-expansion of capital, that is, for the helpless subjection of society to
“economic laws” that have their source in the exploitative social
relations of capitalist production. It is true that the ruling class, at least,
benefits from society’s antisocial production process, but it does so
just as blindly as the working class accepts its suffering. It is this
blindness which accounts for the apparently independent force of ideological
nationalism, which is thus able to transcend the social class relations.

The materialist conception of history attempts to explain both the
persistence of a given societal form and the reasons for its possible change.
Its supporters ought not to be surprised by the resiliency of a given society,
as indicated by its continual reproduction and the consequent recreation of its
ruling ideology. Changes within the status quo may be for long times almost
imperceptible, or unrecognizable as regards their future implications. The
presence of class contradictions explains both social stability and
instability, depending upon conditions outside the control of either the rulers
or the ruled. In distinction to preceding societal forms, however, the
capital-labor relation of social production continually accelerates changes in
the productive forces, while maintaining the basic social relations of
production, and thus allows for the expectation of an early confrontation of
the contending social classes. At any rate, this was the conclusion the Marxist
movement drew from the increasing polarization of capitalist society and from
the internal contradictions of its production process. Class interests would
come to supersede bourgeois ideology and thus counterpose the class
consciousness of the bourgeoisie with that of the proletariat.

As stated before, these expectations were not unrealistic and were held by
the bourgeoisie as well, which reacted to the rise of socialist movements and
the increasing militancy of wage struggles with repressive measures that
betrayed its fears of the possibility of a new social revolution. Class
consciousness seemed indeed to destroy the national consensus and the hold of
bourgeois ideology over the working population. Until about 1880 the theory of
the impoverishment of the working class in the course of capital accumulation,
and the consequent sharpening of the class struggle, found verification in
actual social conditions, and accounted for the radicalization of the laboring
masses. This same period, however, which resembled a prolonged social crisis
situation, also laid the foundation for a new and accelerating phase of capital
expansion which lasted, with occasional interruptions, almost to the eve of the
first world war. It provided the objective conditions for the legalization of
organized labor and its integration into the capitalist system in economic as
well as in political terms.

Of course, the acceptance of organized labor and socialist organizations was
not a gift freely offered the working class by a more generous bourgeoisie, but
was the result of class struggles – albeit of a limited nature –
which wrested concessions from the bourgeoisie and its state, improving the
material conditions of the workers and elevating their social status within
bourgeois democracy. These concessions could not have been made without a rapid
increase in the productivity of labor and a consequent quickening of the
accumulation process. But they appeared nonetheless as results of the
self-exertion of the laboring population, a class rising within the confines of
capitalism, which encouraged the growing illusion that the increasing power of
organized labor would eventually turn the working class into the socially
dominant class, displacing the bourgeoisie. In reality, the improving
conditions of the working class implied no more than its increasing
exploitation, i.e., the decrease of the value of labor power with respect to
the total value of the social product. However, both the capitalists and the
workers think in everyday life not about social value relations but in terms of
quantities of products at their disposal for purposes of capital expansion or
general consumption. That the improvement in the conditions of the working
class resulted from the accelerated growth of their productivity did not
diminish the importance of the betterment of their living standards and its
reflection in their ideological commitments.

Disappointed by the slow development of proletarian class consciousness in
the leading capitalist nations and upset by the latter’s ability to
weather their crisis situations, and thus to reach always greater heights of
self-expansion, the socialists had to admit that Marx’s predictions of
the impoverishment of the working class and the development of revolutionary
class consciousness, as an outgrowth of its class struggle, seemed
unsubstantiated by actual events. Friedrich Engels, for instance, tried to
explain this dismal condition with the assertion (later to be parroted by
Lenin) of a deliberately fostered “corruption” of the working class
on the part of the bourgeoisie, which allowed a growing section of the
industrial proletariat to partake to some extent of the spoils of imperialism.
In this view, a rising “labor aristocracy” within the international
working class weakened the class solidarity necessary for a consistent struggle
against the bourgeoisie and carried the bourgeois ideology, and here
particularly its nationalist aspect, into the ranks of the proletariat. The
decline of revolutionary class consciousness showed itself in the steady growth
of an opportunistic reformism based on the acceptance of the capitalist
relations of production and bourgeois democracy.

In any case, there was no direct connection between the economic class
struggle and the revolutionizing of the workers’ consciousness. The
expectation that the recurrent confrontations of labor and capital over profits
and wages would lead to the recognition that the wage system must itself be
abolished to end the workers’ Sisyphean activities on its behalf was
disappointed, due to the simple fact this was not possible at this particular
stage of capitalistic development. As long as profits and wages could rise
simultaneously – however disproportionately – and the class
division of the social product be affected by social legislation, even though
this involved economic and political struggles, the character of these
struggles was set by the limited demands made by the part of the laboring
population still under the sway of bourgeois ideology. Although growing in
numbers and in social influence, trade unions and socialist parties remained in
a minority position within the population at large and even within the working
class as a whole.

Not only were expectations of a possible revolutionary change now relegated
to a more remote future, but even the growth of the socialist movement was seen
as a long term, prosaic educational effort to win the laboring population to an
acceptance of socialist ideology. Notwithstanding the struggles for wages and
social reforms, which were themselves conceived of as learning processes, the
class struggle was mainly seen as ideological in nature: in the end people
would favor socialism because of its more accurate comprehension of the
developing reality. One simply had to wait for the time when objective
conditions themselves verified the socialist critique of the capitalist system,
thus ending the subjective submission of the proletariat to the ruling
ideology.

As an organized ideology, socialism opposed the dominant bourgeois ideology;
the class struggle became by and large a struggle of ideas and thus the
preserve of the proponents of ideologies. Ideologies competed for the
allegiance of the masses, who were seen as recipients, not as producers, of the
contesting ideologies. Ideologists found themselves in search of a following,
in order to effectuate their goals. The working class – apparently unable
to evolve a socialist ideology on its own – was seen as dependent upon
the existence of an ideological leadership able to combat the sophistries of
the ruling class. Due to the social class structure and the associated division
of labor, ideological leadership was destined to be in the hands of educated
middle-class elements committed to serve the needs of the workers and the goals
of socialism.

However limited they were, the parliamentary successes of the socialist
parties, which brought an increasing number of representatives of the working
class into capitalism’s political institutions, not only induced a
growing number of educated professionals to enter the socialist organizations
but also provided the latter with a degree of respectability unknown at an
earlier stage of the developing socialist movement. Leaving economic struggles
to the trade unions, the spreading of the socialist ideology was now measured
by the number of its representatives in parliament and by their ability to
present “the case for socialism” to the nation and to initiate and
support social legislation for the improvement of the conditions of the
laboring class. Political actions were now conceived of as parliamentary
activities, made for the workers by their representatives, with the “rank
and file” left no other role than that of passive support. In a rather
short time, the workers’ submission to their intellectual superiors in
the parliaments and the party hierarchy was complete enough to turn this
incipient class consciousness into a political consciousness derived from that
of their elected leadership.

What was at first a tendency within the socialist movement, namely the
substitution for proletarian self-determination of a nonproletarian leadership
acting on behalf of the working class, later became the conviction and the
practice of all branches of socialism, both reformist and revolutionary. Not
only its right-wing revisionists but the so-called centrist Karl Kautsky and
the leftist Lenin were convinced that the working class by itself was not able
to evolve a revolutionary consciousness, and that this had to be brought to it,
from outside, by members of the educated bourgeoisie, who alone had the
capacity and opportunity to understand the intricacies of the capitalist system
and thus to develop a meaningful counter-ideology to the ruling capitalist
ideology and so lead the struggle of the working class. Of course, this elitist
idea was itself a product of the rapid rise of the labor movement, which
attracted a growing number of middle-class elements into its ranks.
Ideologically, at any rate, socialism ceased to be the exclusive concern of an
awakening proletariat, but became a social movement with some appeal for
members of the middle class.

This class found itself in a process of transformation, caught between the
millstones of capital concentration and social polarization. The old middle
class lost its property-owning character and became in increasing measure a
salaried class in the service of the big bourgeoisie and its state apparatus.
It became a managerial class filling the gap that divided the bourgeoisie from
the proletariat and, in the various professions, a class serving the personal
and cultural needs of the divided society. The mediating functions of the new
middle class in support of the existing social production relations was
reflected in the socialist movement by the determination of its theory and
practice by its intellectual leadership. Although some workers were able to
advance into leading positions within their organizations, the tone of their
politics, as suggested by an alleged predominance of theory over practice, was
set by the intellectually emancipated leadership stemming from the middle
class. This was a question not so much of the relationship between theory and
practice as of the relationship between the leaders and the led. Policies were
made by an elected leadership and found their parliamentary and
extraparliamentary support in the disciplined adherence of the mass of workers
to their organizations’ programs and their time-conditioned variations.
The division between mental and manual labor, so necessary for the capitalist
system, was thus also a characteristic of the labor movement.

The rapid influx of middle-class elements into the leading positions of the
socialist movement disturbed even its intellectual founders. Notwithstanding
his own reformist inclinations, Friedrich Engels, for instance, was greatly
worried about the increasing subjugation of the self-activity of the working
class to the political initiative of the well-meaning petite bourgeoisie. His
own reformism, as he saw it, was after all a mere strategem, not a matter of
principle, whereas the reformism of the petite bourgeoisie tended to eliminate
the class struggle altogether in obeisance to the rules” of bourgeois
democracy. “Since the foundation of the International,” he wrote to
August Bebel, “our war cry has been: the emancipation of the working
class can only be the work of the workers themselves. We simply cannot
collaborate with people who declare openly that the workers are not
sufficiently educated to be able to liberate themselves, and for that reason
have to be freed from above by a philanthropic bourgeoisie.”(2) He suggested throwing these elements out of the socialist
organizations so as to safeguard its proletarian character.

The workers themselves, however, were unperturbed if not flattered by the
attention given to them by some of the “better kind” of people. In
addition, they felt the need for allies in their rather unequal class
struggle.

But in any case the revolutionary character of socialism was not lost
because of the class-collaborationist ideas evolved by its nonproletarian
leadership, but because the “strategy” of reformism, as the only
possible practical activity, became the principle of the organizations in their
attempts to consolidate and to enlarge their influence within capitalist
society. With respect to German Social Democracy, for instance, it had by 1913
a membership of close to a million and was able to muster 4.5 million votes in
national elections. It sent 110 members to the Reichstag. The trade unions had
a membership of about 2.5 million and their financial assets amounted to 88
million Marks. The Social Democratic Party itself invested 20 million Marks in
private industry and in state loans. It employed more than 4,000 professional
officials and 11,000 salaried employes, and controlled 94 newspapers and
various other publications. To maintain the party and to assure its undisturbed
further growth was the first consideration of those who controlled it, an
attitude even more pronounced in the purely proletarian trade unions.

There is no point in describing this process in other nations, even though
their labor movements varied in one or another respect from that in Germany.
Social Democracy and trade unionism advanced – although more often than
not at a slower pace than in Germany – in all the developed capitalist
nations, thus raising the specter of a socialist movement that might
eventually, by reformist or revolutionary means, or both, transform capitalism
into a classless, nonexploitative society. Meanwhile, however, this movement
was allowed, and indeed compelled by circumstances, to integrate itself as
thoroughly as it could into the capitalist fabric as one special interest group
among those which together constitute the capitalist market economy. The
specter of socialism, though used by the bourgeoisie to delimit the political
and economic aspirations of the working class, remained a mere apparition,
unable to destroy the self-confidence of the ruling classes with regard to
either their material or their ideological control of society. Dressed in
whatever garb, the organized labor movement remained a small minority within
the working classes, thus indicating that a decisive weakening of bourgeois
ideology presupposes the actual decay of capitalism. Only when the discrepancy
between ideology and reality finds an obvious display in persistently
deteriorating economic and social conditions, will the otherwise rather
comfortable ideological consensus give way to new ideas corresponding to new
necessities.

There is also quite a difference between an ideology based on tradition and
on actual circumstances, and one based on nonexisting conditions, with
relevance to a future which may or may not be a reasonable expectation. In this
respect, socialist ideology is at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the ruling
capitalist ideology. A powerful exertion of the latter, for purposes of waging
war, or even for internal reasons, will create serious doubts regarding the
validity or the effectiveness of the socialist ideology even in some of its
more consistent supporters. The emerging feeling of uncertainty mixed with the
fear of the unknown, which accounts for the mass hysteria accompanying the
outbreak of war, will affect the socialists too and induce them to question
their own ideological commitments anew. Their critical attitude towards the
ruling ideology, to reiterate, does not free them from acting as if they were
under its sway, while their socialist convictions cannot be actualized within
the given conditions of their existence. They can be carried away by the
apparent euphoria of the agitated masses and drown their own ambiguities in the
murky sea of nationalism in a spontaneous reassertion of loyalties latent but
not yet lost.

Furthermore, there is the objective fact of the national form of capitalism,
and therefore of its labor movement, which cannot be overcome by a mere
ideological commitment to internationalism, such as can be gained by a loose
consultative body as was the Second International. The various national
organizations comprising this institution differed among themselves with regard
to their effective powers in their respective countries and thus also with
regard to their opportunities to influence national policies. What would happen
if the socialist movement of a particular country should succeed in preventing
its bourgeoisie from waging war while that of another country did not? Even
though “the main enemy resides in one’s own country,” a
foreign enemy may nonetheless attack a nation made defenseless by its socialist
opposition.

It was the recognition that the road to socialism finds a barrier in unequal
capitalist development, which also shows itself in the unequal class
consciousness of the laboring population, that induced Marx and Engels to favor
one or another country in imperialistic conflicts, siding with those bearing
the greatest promise for a socialist future. They could not envision a
capitalist development without national wars and they did not hesitate to state
their preferences as to their outcome. Pacifism is not a Marxist tradition. It
was then not too difficult to rationalize the socialist acceptance of war and
even to invoke the names of Marx and Engels in its support.

Notwithstanding the apparently general recognition that in the age of
imperialism all wars are wars of conquest, it was still possible for socialists
to assert that, from their point of view, they may also be defensive in nature
insofar as they prevent the destruction of more progressive nations by socially
less-advanced countries, which would be a setback for socialism in general. In
fact, this became the flaccid justification for participation in the
imperialist war for the majority of socialists in all the warring nations, each
national organization defending its own more advanced conditions, against the
backwardness of the enemy country. Supposedly, it was the barbarism of the
Russian autocratic adversary that demanded the defense of a cultured nation
such as Germany, as it was the barbaric aggressive militarism of the still
semifeudal Germany that justified the defense of more democratic nations such
as England and France. But such rationalizations merely covered up an actual
inability as well as unwillingness to oppose the capitalist war in the only
effective way possible, namely by revolutionary actions. The international
labor movement was no longer, or not as yet, a revolutionary movement, but one
fully satisfied with social reforms and for that reason tolerated by a
bourgeoisie still able to grant these concessions without any loss to itself.
The antiwar resolutions passed at the International’s congresses meant no
more than a whistle in the dark and were composed in such an opaque fashion as
to be practically noncommittal.

In 1909, in the first bloom of his socialist conversion, Upton Sinclair
wrote a manifesto calling upon socialists and the workers of Europe and the
United States to realize the peril of the approaching world war and to pledge
themselves to prevent this calamity by the threat of a general strike in all
countries. He sent the manifesto to Karl Kautsky for publication in the
socialist press. Here is Kautsky’s reply:

Your manifesto against war I have read with great interest
and warm sympathy. Nevertheless I am not able to publish it and you will not
find anybody in Germany, nor in Austria or Russia, who would dare to publish
your appeal. He would be arrested at once and get some years imprisonment for
high treason.... By publishing the manifesto we would mislead our own comrades,
promise to them more than we can fulfill. Nobody, and not the most
revolutionary among the socialists in Germany, thinks to oppose war by
insurrection and general strike. We are too weak to do that.... I hope, after a
war, after the debacle of a government, we may get strength enough to conquer
the political power.... That’s not my personal opinion only, in that
point the whole party, without any exception, is unanimous.... You may be sure
there will never come the day when German socialists will ask their followers
to take up arms for the Fatherland. What Bebel announced will never happen,
because today there is no foe who threatens the independence of the Fatherland.
If there will be war today, it won’t be a war for the defense of the
Fatherland, it will be for imperialistic purposes, and such a war will find the
whole socialist party of Germany in energetic opposition. That we may promise.
But we cannot go so far and promise that this opposition shall take the form of
insurrection or general strike, if necessary, nor can we promise that our
opposition will in every case be strong enough to prevent war. It would be
worse than useless to promise more than we can fulfill. (3)

While Kautsky’s pessimism with respect to the possibility of
preventing the approaching war proved to be correct, his optimistic assessment
of the antiwar position of the German labor movement turned out to be totally
erroneous. Moreover, this was not a German peculiarity but had its equivalent,
with some slight modifications, in all the warring nations. There were of
course exceptions to the rule, but the actual outbreak of war found the large
majorities within organized labor, and within the working class as a whole, not
only ready to support the imperialist war but ready to do so enthusiastically,
which impelled Kautsky to resign himself to the fact that “the
International was an instrument of peace but unworkable in times of war.”
As easy as it had been to discuss the prevention of war, so difficult it proved
to act when it arrived. The fait acompli of the ruling classes was
enough to create conditions that destroyed overnight an international movement
that had tried for decades to overcome bourgeois nationalism through the
development of proletarian class consciousness and internationalism.

Paraphrasing an old slogan referring to the French nation, Marx once
declared that “the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing.”
In 1914 it was obviously nothing, as it prepared to lay down its life for the
imperialist notions of the bourgeoisie. The socialist ideology proved to be
only skin-deep, powerless to withstand the concerted onslaught of the
accustomed bourgeois ideology, which identifies the national with the general
interests. As for the working class as a whole, it put itself at the disposal
of the ruling classes for purposes of war, as it accepted its class position in
times of peace. The capitalist reality weighed heavier than the socialist
ideology, which as yet represented not an actual but only a potential social
force. However difficult it is to understand the unifying power of bourgeois
ideology and its hold upon the broad masses, this difficulty itself in no way
alters the force of the traditional ideology. What was more astonishing was the
rapidity with which the socialist movement itself succumbed to the requirements
of the imperialist war, and thereby ceased to be a socialist movement. It was
as if there had been no socialist movement at all but merely a make-believe
movement with no intention to act upon its beliefs.

The collapse of the socialist movement and the Second International has been
propagandistically described as a “betrayal” of principles and of
the working class. This is of course a recourse to idealism and a denial of the
materialist conception of history. Actually, as we observed above, the changes
the movement had gone through, within the general capitalist development, had
long since relegated all programmatic principles to the purely ideological
sphere, where they lost any connection with the opportunistic behavior of the
movement. The pragmatic opportunism of the reformist movement no longer
possessed principles it could “betray,” but adjusted its activities
in conformity with what was possible within the frame of capitalism. No doubt,
the antiwar sentiments displayed at international congresses, and in each
nation separately, were true convictions and the longing for perpetual peace a
genuine desire, already because of widespread fear that war would lead to the
destruction of the socialist movement, as the bourgeois state might suppress
its internal opposition in order to wage war more effectively. Not to oppose
the war seemed to be one way to assure personal and organizational security,
but this alone does not explain the eagerness with which the socialist parties
and trade unions offered their services to the war effort and its hoped-for
victorious end. Behind this lay the fact that these organizations had become
quite formidable bureaucratic institutions, with their own vested interests in
the capitalist system and the national state. This accomplishment in turn had
changed both the lifestyle and the general outlook of those who filled the
bureaucratic positions within the labor organizations. If they had once been
proletarians conscious of their class interests, they were so no longer but
felt themselves to be members of the middle class and changed their mores and
habits accordingly. Set apart from the working class proper, and addicted to a
comfortable routinism, they were neither willing nor able to lead their
following into any serious antiwar activity. Even their harmless exhortations
in favor of peace found an abrupt end with the declaration of war.

To be sure, there were minorities within the leadership, the rank and file,
and the working class that remained immune to the war hysteria gripping the
broad masses, but they found no way to turn their steadfastness into
significant actions. With the war a reality, even the more consistent
international socialists, such as Keir Hardie of the British Independent Labor
Party, found themselves forced to admit “that once the lads had gone
forth to fight their country’s battles they must not be disheartened by
dissension at home.”(4) With socialists and
nonsocialists together in the opposing trenches, it seemed only reasonable to
rally to “the lads” support and to provide them with the essentials
for waging war. The war against the foreign foe, in short, required the end of
the class struggle at home.

The triumph of the bourgeoisie was absolute as it was general. Of course,
that minority that upheld socialist principles began at once, if only
clandestinely, to organize opposition to the war and to reconstitute the
international socialist movement. But it took years before their efforts found
an effective response, first in the working class than then in the population
at large.

NOTES

 
1. Engels’s position on this question has been passionately criticized by the
Leninist and Ukrainian nationalist Roman Rosdolsky in his book Friedrich
Engels und das Problem der “Geschichtslosen Völker” (Frankfurt: Archiv für
Sozialgeschichte, Bd. 4, 1964).

 
2. F. Engels, Briefe an Bebel (1879) (Berlin: Dietz, 1958), p. 41.

 
3. Upton Sinclair, My Lifetime in Letters (Columbia, Mo.: University of
Missouri Press, 1960), pp. 75-76.

 
4. W. T. Rodgers and B. Donoughue, The People into Parliament (New
York: Viking, 1966), p. 73.


* Chapter 3 : The Limits of Reform


However reformable capitalism may prove to be, it cannot alter its basic wage
and profit relations without eliminating itself. The age of reform is an age of
spontaneous capital expansion, based on a disproportional but simultaneous
increase of both wages and profits. It is an age wherein the concessions made to
the working class are more tolerable to the bourgeoisie than the upheavals of
the class struggle that would otherwise accompany capitalist development. As a
class, the bourgeoisie does not favor minimum wages and intolerable working
conditions, even though each capitalist, for whom labor is a cost of production,
tries to reduce this expense to the utmost. There can be no doubt that the
bourgeoisie prefers a satisfied to a dissatisfied working class and social
stability to instability. In fact, it looks upon the general improvement of
living standards as its own accomplishment and as the justification for its
class rule. To be sure, the relative well-being of the laboring population must
not be carried too far, for its absolute dependency on uninterrupted wage labor
must be maintained. But within this limit, the bourgeoisie has no subjective
inclinations to reduce the workers to the lowest state of existence, even where
this might be objectively possible by means of appropriate measures of
repression. As the inclinations and actions of the workers are determined by
their dependency on wage labor, those of the bourgeoisie are rooted in the
necessity to make profit and to accumulate capital, quite apart from their
diverse ideological and psychological propensities.

The limited reforms possible within the capitalist system become the
customary conditions of existence for those affected by them and cannot easily
be undone. With a low rate of accumulation they turn into obstacles to profit
production, overcoming which effect requires exceptional increases in the
exploitation of labor. On the other hand, times of depression also induce
various reform measures, if only to withstand the threat of serious social
upheavals. Once installed, these also tend to perpetuate themselves and must be
compensated for by a correspondingly greater increase in the productivity of
labor. Of course attempts will be made, some of them successfully, to whittle
down what has been gained by way of social legislation and better living
standards, in order to restore the necessary profitability of capital. Some of
these gains will remain, however, through periods of depression as well as
prosperity, with the result of a general improvement of the workers' conditions
through time.

The hand-to-mouth existence of the workers made it never easy to strike for
higher wages and better working conditions. Only the most brutal provocations of
their employers would move them to action, as a lesser evil than a state of
unmitigated misery. Aware of the workers' dependence on the daily wage, the
bourgeoisie answered their rebellions with lockouts, as a most efficient means
to enforce the employers' will. Lost profits can be regained, lost wages not.
However, the formation of trade unions and the amassing of strike funds changed
this situation to some extent in favor of the workers, even though it did not
always overcome their conditioned reluctance to resort to the strike weapon. For
the capitalists, too, the readiness to defy their workers' demands waned with
the increasing profit loss on an enlarged but unutilized capital. With a
sufficient increase in productivity, concessions made to the workers could prove
more profitable than their denial. The gradual elimination of cutthroat
competition by way of monopolization and the generally increasing organization
of capitalist production also entailed regulation of the labor market.
Collective bargaining over wages and working conditions eliminated to some
extent the element of spontaneity and uncertainty in the contests between labor
and capital. The sporadic self-assertion of the workers made room for a more
orderly confrontation and a greater “rationality” in capital-labor relations.
The workers' trade union representatives turned into managers of the labor
market, in the same sense as that in which their political representatives
attended to their farther-reaching social interests in the parliament of
bourgeois democracy.

Slowly, but relentlessly, control over working-class organizations escaped
the hands of the rank and file and was centralized in those of professional
labor leaders, whose power rested on a hierarchically and bureaucratically
organized structure, the operation of which, short of the destruction of the
organization itself, could no longer be determined by its membership. The
workers' acquiescence in this state of affairs required of course that the
activities of “their” organizations provide some tangible benefits, which were
then associated with the increasing power of the organizations and their
particular structural development. The centralized leadership now determined the
character of the class struggle as a fight over wages and for limited political
goals that had some chance of being realized within the confines of capitalism.

The different developmental stages of capital production in different
countries, as well as the divergent rates of expansion of particular industries
in each nation, were reflected in the heterogeneity of wage rates and working
conditions, which stratified the working class by fostering specific group
interests to the neglect of proletarian class interests. The latter were
supposedly to be taken care of by way of socialist politics, and where such
politics were not as yet a practical possibility – either because the bourgeoisie
had already preempted the whole sphere of politics through its complete control
of the state machinery, as in the Anglo-Saxon countries, or because autocratic
regimes precluded any participation in the political field, as in the Eastern
capitalistically undeveloped nations – there was only the economic struggle.
This, while uniting some layers of the working class, divided the class itself,
which tended to frustrate the development of proletarian class consciousness.

The breaking up of the potential unity of the working class by way of wage
differentials, nationally as well as internationally, was not the result of a
conscious application of the ages-old principle of divide and rule to secure the
reign of the bourgeois minority, but the outcome of the supply and demand
relations of the labor market, as determined by the course of social production
as the accumulation of capital. Occupations privileged by this trend tried to
maintain their prerogatives through their monopolization, by restricting the
labor supply in particular trades not only to the detriment of their
capitalistic adversaries but also to that of the great mass of unskilled labor
operating under more competitive conditions. Trade unions, once considered
instruments for a developing class consciousness, turned out to be organizations
concerned with no more than their special interests defined by the capitalist
division of labor and its effects upon the labor market. In time, of course,
trade organizations were superseded by industrial unions, incorporating a number
of trades and uniting skilled with unskilled labor, but only to reproduce the
strictly economic aspirations of the union membership on an enlarged
organizational base. In addition to wage differentials, which are a general
feature of the system, wage discrimination was (and is) widely cultivated by
individual firms and industries in the attempt to break the homogeneity of their
labor force and to impair their ability for concerted action. Discrimination may
be based on sex, race, or nationality, in accordance with the peculiarities of a
given labor market. Persistent prejudices associated with the ruling ideology
are utilized to weaken workers' solidarity and with it their bargaining power.
In principle, it is of course immaterial to the capitalists to what particular
race or nationality its labor force belongs, so long as their skill and
propensity to work does not fall below the average, but in practice a mixed
labor force with unequal, or even with equal, wage scales engenders or
accentuates already existing racial or national antagonisms and impairs the
growth of class consciousness. For instance, by reserving the better paid or
less obnoxious jobs for a favored race or nationality, one group of workers is
pitted against another to the detriment of both. Like job competition in
general, discrimination lowers the general wage rate and increases the
profitability of capital. Its use is as old as capitalism itself; the history of
labor is also the history of competition and discrimination within the working
class, dividing the Irish from the British workers, the Algerian, from the
French, the black from the white, new immigrants from early settlers, and so on,
almost universally.

While this is a consequence of the prevalence of bourgeois nationalism and
racism in response to the imperialistic imperative, it affects the working class
not only ideologically but also through their competition on the labor market.
It strengthens the divisive as against the unifying elements of the class
struggle and offsets the revolutionary implications of proletarian class
consciousness. At any rate, it carries the social stratification of capitalism
into the working class. Its economic struggles and organizations are designed to
serve particular groups of workers, without regard to general class interests,
and the confrontations between labor and capital remain necessarily within the
frame of market and price relations.

Far-reaching wage differentials allow for different living standards, and it
is by the latter, not by the labor done, that workers prefer to assess their
status within capitalist society. If they can afford to live like the petite
bourgeoisie, or come close to doing so, they tend to feel more akin to this
class than to the working class proper. Whereas the working class as a whole can
only escape its class position through the elimination of all classes,
individual workers will try to break away from their own class to enter another,
or to adopt the lifestyle of the middle class. An expanding capitalism offers
some upward social mobility, just as it submerges individuals of the dominating
or the middle class into the proletariat. But such individual movements do not
affect the social class structure; they merely allow for the illusion of an
equality of opportunity, which can serve as an argument against criticism of the
unchangeable class structure of capitalist production.

In prosperous times, and because of the increase in families with more than
one wage earner, better paid workers can save some of their income and thus draw
interest as well as receive wages from their work. This gives rise to the
delusion of a gradual breakdown of the class-determined distribution of the
national income, as workers partake in it not only as wage earners but also as
recipients of interest out of surplus value, or even as stockholders in the form
of dividends. Whatever this may mean in terms of class consciousness for those
thus favored, it is quite meaningless from a social point of view, as it does
not affect the basic relationship between value and surplus value, wages and
profits. It merely means that some workers realize an increase of their income
out of the profit and interest produced by the working class as a whole. While
this may influence the distribution of income among the workers, accentuating
the already existing wage differentials, it does not affect in any way the
social division of wages and profits represented by the rate of exploitation and
the accumulation of capital. The rate of profit remains the same, whatever part
of the mass of profit may reach some workers through their savings. The number
of shares held by workers is not known, but judging by the number of
shareholders in any particular country and by prevailing average wage rates, it
could only be a negligible one. Interest on savings, as part of profit, is of
course compensated for by the fact that while some workers save, others borrow.
Interest thus increases but also reduces wages. With the great increase of
consumer credit, it is most likely that, on balance, the interest received by
some workers is more than equaled by the interest paid by others.

As their class is not homogeneous as regards income, but only with respect to
its position in the social production relations, wage workers are apt to pay
more attention to their immediate economic needs and opportunities than to the
production relations themselves, which, in any case, appear to be unshakable in
a capitalism on the ascendant. Their economic interests involve, of course, not
only the privileges enjoyed by special layers of the working class but also the
general need of the great mass of workers to maintain, or to raise, their living
standards. Higher wages and better working conditions presuppose increased
exploitation, or the reduction of the value of labor power, thus assuring the
continuous reproduction of the class struggle within the accumulation process.
It is the objective possibility of the latter which nullifies the workers'
economic struggle as a medium for the development of revolutionary class
consciousness. There is no evidence that the last hundred years of labor strife
have led to the revolutionizing of the working class in the sense of a growing
willingness to do away with the capitalist system. The strike patterns in all
capitalist nations vary with the business cycle, which is to say that the number
of strikes, and the number of workers involved in them, decline in periods of
depression and increase with every upward trend of economic activity. It is the
accumulation of capital, not the lack of it, that determines the workers'
militancy with regard to their wage struggles and their organizations.

Obviously, a serious downward trend of the economy, which reduces the total
number of workers, also reduces the working time lost through strikes and
lockouts, not only because of the smaller number of workers employed but also
because of their greater reluctance to go on strike despite deteriorating
working conditions. Likewise, trade or industrial unions decline not only
because of the rising unemployment but also because they are less able, or not
able at all, to provide the workers with sufficient benefits to warrant their
existence. In times of depression no less than those of prosperity, the
continuing confrontations of labor and capital have led not to a political
radicalization of the working class, but to an intensified insistence upon
better accommodations within the capitalist system. The unemployed have demanded
their “right to work,” not the abolition of wage labor, while those still
employed have been willing to accept some sacrifices to halt the capitalist
decline. The rhetoric of the existing, or newly founded, labor organizations no
doubt has become more threatening, but their concrete demands, whether
realizable or not, have been for a better functioning capitalism, not its
abolition.

Every strike, moreover, is either a localized affair with a limited number of
workers engaged in it, or an industry-wide struggle involving large numbers of
workers spread over various localities. In either case, it concerns only the
time-conditioned special interests of small sections of the working class and
seldom affects society as a whole to any important extent. Every strike must end
in the defeat of one or the other side, or in a compromise suitable to the
opponents. In every case it must leave the capitalist enterprises profitable
enough to produce and to expand. Strikes leading to bankruptcies of capitalist
firms would also defeat the goals of the workers, which presuppose the continued
existence of their employers. The strike weapon as such is a reformist weapon;
it could only become a revolutionary instrument through its generalization and
extension over the whole society. It was for this reason that revolutionary
syndicalism advocated the General Strike as the lever to overthrow capitalist
society, and it is for the same reason that the reformist labor movement opposes
the General Strike, save as an extraordinary and controlled political weapon to
safeguard its own existence. (1) Perhaps the only fully successful nationwide
general strike was that called by the German government itself in order to
defeat the reactionary Kapp Putsch of 1920.

Unless a mass strike turns into civil war and a contest for political power,
sooner or later it is bound to come to an end whether or not the workers win
their demands. It was of course expected that the critical situations brought
about by such strikes, and the reactions to them on the part of capital and its
state, would lead to a growing recognition of the unbridgeable antagonism of
labor and capital and thus make the workers increasingly more susceptible to the
idea of socialism. This was not an unreasonable assumption but it failed to be
substantiated by the actual course of events. No doubt the turmoil of a strike
itself brings with it a sharpened awareness of the full meaning of class society
and its exploitative nature, but this, by itself, does not change reality. The
exceptional situation degenerates again into the routinism of every life and its
immediate necessities. What class consciousness awakened turns once more into
apathy and submission to things as they are.

The class struggle involves the bourgeoisie no less than the workers, and it
will not do to consider exclusively the latter with regard to the evolution of
their consciousness. The ruling bourgeois ideology will be reformulated and
greatly modified in order to counteract noticeable changes in working-class
attitudes and aspirations. The early open contempt of the bourgeoisie for the
laboring population makes way for an apparent concern for their well-being and
an appreciation for their contributions to the “quality of social life.” Minor
concessions are made before they are forced upon the bourgeoisie by independent
working-class actions. Collaboration is made to appear beneficial to all social
classes, and the road to harmonious social relations. The class struggle itself
is turned to capitalist account, through the reforms thrust upon the ruling
class and the resulting expectations of a possible internal transformation of
capitalist society.

The most important of all the reforms of capitalism was of course the rise of
the labor movement itself. The continuous extension of the franchise until it
covered the whole adult population, and the legalization and protection of trade
unionism, integrated the labor movement into the market structure and the
political institutions of bourgeois society. The movement was now part and
parcel of the system, as long as the latter lasted, at any rate, and it seemed
to last just because it was able to mitigate its class contradictions by way of
reforms. On the other hand, these reforms presupposed stable economic conditions
and an orderly development, to be achieved through increasing organization, of
which the reforms themselves were an integral part. This possibility had of
course been denied by Marxian theory; the justification of a consistent
reformist policy thus required abandonment of this theory. The revisionists in
the labor movement were able to convince themselves that, contrary to Marx, the
capitalist economy had no inherent tendency toward collapse, while those who upheld
the Marxian theory insisted upon the system's objective limitations. But as
regards the immediately given situation, the latter too had no choice but to
struggle for economic and political reforms. They differed from the revisionists
in their assumption that, due to the objective limits of capitalism, the fight
for reforms will have different meanings at different times. On this view, it
was possible to wage the class struggle in both the parliaments and in the
streets, not only through political parties and trade unions, but with the
unorganized workers as well. The legal foothold gained within bourgeois
democracy was to be secured by the direct actions of the masses in their wage
struggles, and the parliamentary activities were supposed to support these
efforts. While this would have no revolutionary implications in periods of
prosperity, it would be otherwise in crisis situations, particularly in a
capitalism on the decline. As capitalism finds a barrier in itself, the fight
for reforms would turn into revolutionary struggles as soon as the bourgeoisie
was no longer able to make concessions to the working class.

Just as the capitalists are (with some exceptions) not economists but
business people, the workers also are not concerned with economic theory. Quite
aside from the question as to whether or not capitalism is destined to collapse,
they must attend to their immediate needs by way of wage struggles, either to
defend or to improve their living standards. If they are convinced of the
decline and fall of capitalism, it is because they already adhere to the
socialist ideology, even though they might not be able to prove their point
"scientifically.” It is hard, indeed, to imagine that an asocial system such as
capitalism could last for very long, unless, of course, one were totally
indifferent to the chaotic conditions of capital production and to its total
corruption. However, such indifference is only another name for bourgeois
individualism, which is not only an ideology but also a condition of the market
relations as social relations. But even under its spell the workers'
indifference does not spare them the class struggle, although it is at times
only one-sidedly waged through the violent repression of all independent working
class actions.

Thus far, reformism has nowhere led to an evolutionary transformation of
capitalism into a more palatable social system, nor to revolutions and
socialism. It may, on the other hand, require political revolutions in order to
achieve some social reforms. Recent history provides numerous examples of
political revolutions which exhausted themselves in the overthrow of a nation's
despised governmental structure, without affecting its social production
relations. Such revolutionary upheavals, insofar as they are not mere
revolutions, which exchange one dictatorial regime with an aim at institutional
changes and, by implication, economic reforms. Political revolutions are here a
precondition for any kind reformist activity and not an outcome of the latter.
They are not socialist revolutions, in the Marxian sense, even if they are
predominantly initiated and carried through by the working classes, but reformist
activities by more direct political means.

The possibility of revolutionary change cannot be questioned, for there have
been political revolutions that altered social production relations and
displaced the rule of one class by that of another. Bourgeois revolutions
secured the triumph of the middle class and the capitalist mode of production. A
proletarian revolution-that is, a revolution to end all class relations in the
social production process – has not as yet taken place, although attempts in this
direction have been made within and outside the framework of bourgeois politics.
Whereas social reform is a substitute for social revolution and the latter may
dissipate into mere capitalist reforms, or nothing at all, a proletarian
revolution can only win or lose. It cannot be based on any kind of class
compromise, as it is its function to eliminate all social class relations. It
will thus find all classes outside the proletarian class arrayed against itself
and no allies in its attempts to realize its socialist goals. It is this special
character of proletarian revolution that accounts for the exceptional
difficulties in its way.

Notes

 
1. In his book In Place of Fear (New York, 1952, pp. 21-23), Aneurin Bevan
relates that in 1919 – with the British trade unions threatening a nationwide
strike – the then Prime Minister David Lloyd George told the labor leaders that
they must be aware of the full consequences of such an action, for “if a force
arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be
ready to take on the functions of the State, or withdraw and accept the
authority of the State.” From that moment on, one of the labor leaders said, “we
were beaten and we knew we were.” After this, Bevan continues, “the General
Strike of 1926 was really an anticlimax. The leaders in 1926 ... had never
worked out the revolutionary implications of direct action on such a scale. Nor
were they anxious to do so. ... It was not so much the coercive power of the
State that restrained the full use of the workers' industrial power. ...The
workers and their leaders paused even when their coercive power was greater than
that of the State. ... The opportunity for power is not enough when the will to
seize it is absent, and that will is attendant upon the traditional attitude of
the people toward the political institutions that form part of their historical
heritage.” This may be so, but actually, in this particular case, it was not the
attitude of the workers with regard to their historical heritage, but merely
their submission to their own organizations and their leaderships that allowed
the latter to call off the General Strike, out of fear that it might lead to
revolutionary upheavals because of the government's apparently intractable
determination to break the strike by force.


* Chapter 4 : Lenin's Revolution


Those in the socialist movement who were thinking in terms of a proletarian
revolution were obliged to take all these facts into consideration. In their
view, the revolution would not result from a gradual growth of proletarian class
consciousness, finding its expression in the increasing might of working class
organization and the eventual “legal” usurpation of the bourgeois state
machinery, but would be the result of the self-destruction of the capitalist
system, leaving the working class no other choice than the revolutionary
solution of its own problems through a change of the social structure. And
because this choice was restricted to the working class, in opposition to all
other class interests, it had to lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat as
the precondition for its realization.

In other words, the change in working-class ideology, being by and large a
reflection of bourgeois ideology, would be the result of capitalism’s decay and
collapse. The dissipation of bourgeois self-confidence and class consciousness
through the uncontrollable decomposition of its economic base, and therewith its
political power, would also break its ideological hold over the working
population. However, this was not a question of merely waiting for the expected
economic and political catastrophe of bourgeois society; it involved preparation
for such an eventuality through the organization of that part of the proletariat
already possessed of revolutionary consciousness. The larger this organization,
the less difficult it would be to instill its own ideas into the minds of the
rebellious masses to aid their reactions to the disintegrating capitalism.
Waiting did not imply passivity, but the legal or illegal forging of ideological
and practical instruments of revolution.

The objective conditions for a proletarian revolution were to found in
devastating economic crisis conditions from which the bourgeoisie would be
unable to extricate itself in time to allay their social consequences. As the
social upheavals would be of a violent nature, it would be necessary to arm the
proletariat for the destruction of the bourgeois state machinery. The problem
was how to get the arms required to this end. But as a severe international
crisis would most likely lead to imperialistic wars, or the latter issue into
economic crisis conditions, which could not be dealt with in the usual “normal”
ways, it was conceivable that an aroused and armed working class might turn its
weapons against the bourgeoisie. Even short of war, it was not entirely
precluded that a part of the armed forces of the bourgeoisie would side with the
rebellious workers if they displayed enough energy to initiate civil war. And
because imperialism was itself a sign of the deepening contradictions of capital
production, its wars could be regarded as gigantic crisis conditions and as so
many attempts at their solution by political means. In any case, what
revolutions have taken place – the Paris Commune and the revolutions of the
twentieth century in Russia and Central Europe – grew not out of purely economic
crises but out of war and defeat and the general miseries associated with them.

We may recall here Karl Kautsky’s answer to Upton Sinclair, referred to
earlier, which expressed the rather vague hope that “after the war, after the
debacle of a government, we may get strength enough to conquer the political
power.” At that time, as the official defender of Marxian orthodoxy, Kautsky
still spoke of the conquest of power by revolutionary means and of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. While a proletarian revolution, as a
consequence of the sharpening of the existing class contradictions, was for
Kautsky not a determinable occurrence, a revolution growing out of war and
defeat seemed to him a certainty, even though its success remained
questionable.(1)Kautsky’s most faithful disciple, Lenin (2) – at the same time,
and with the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1905 behind him – likewise
associated war with revolution. In a letter to Maxim Gorky in 1913, he pointed
out that “a war between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the
revolutions throughout Eastern Europe, but it is not very probable that
Franz-Josef and Nicky will give us this pleasure.” (3) Soon thereafter
identifying the “age of imperialism” as “capitalism’s last stage of development”
and as “the eve of the proletarian revolution,” Lenin saw the first world war as
the beginning of an international revolution and consistently called not for the
restoration of the capitalist peace but for turning the imperialist war into
civil war.

If somewhat belatedly, Franz-Josef, Nicky, and all the other potentates of
Europe finally provided the revolutionaries and all their other subjects with
the pleasures of war. The pleasure did not last long, due to the war’s
destructiveness with respect to human lives and capitalist property. But once it
started the bourgeoisie could not conceive of an end to it except in terms of
positive results, that is, victory, expropriation, and annexation. Like business
in general, the war had to be profitable and to that end concentrate more
capital into fewer hands on an international scale. However, the expectation
that the war would turn into revolution, at least in the defeated nations, also
had to wait some time for its realization. As envisioned by Lenin and other
revolutionaries, this happened first in Russia, because it was the “weakest link
in the chain of imperialist powers.” And it happened not because it provided the
Russian revolutionaries with objective conditions to be utilized to win the
workers to their side, but because of the population’s own war-weariness and the
breakdown of both the war machinery and the economy on which it depended.

Unlike its aftermath in October 1917, Russia’s February Revolution of the
same year was a truly spontaneous event, even though it was preceded by a series
of increasingly more ominous social and political conflicts involving all social
classes and the autocratic government.(4) The military defeats and a relentless
deterioration of economic conditions led to lock-outs, strikes, hunger riots,
and mutinies in the army, culminating in enormous mass demonstrations,
confrontations with the authorities, and finally in the fraternization of
decisive groups of the military with the rebellious masses. There were of course
also politically organized forces at work, attempting to inject their definitely
demarcated goals into the disaffected masses and to give them a socialist
direction, but at that time they were too small and ineffective to make much of
a difference. On the contrary, instead of leading the upheaval, they were led by
it, and adapted themselves to its elemental force.

The Russian revolution could not be a socialist revolution, something that,
in a sentence, implies the abolition of wage labor and the socialization of all
the means of production. Such a revolution presupposes a developed capitalism
and the existence of a proletariat able to determine the social production
process. Such conditions did not exist in Russia except in the first stages of
their development. But they appeared to exist in Western Europe, which,
consequently, was that part of the world in which a socialist revolution could
conceivably take place. A Russian revolution could lead only to the overthrow of
czardom and the institution of bourgeois rule. On the other hand, a socialist
revolution in Western Europe would most likely preclude the continued existence
of a bourgeois Russia, just as it had not been possible to preserve Russian
serfdom within a bourgeois Europe. The relationship between the expected
socialist revolution in the West and a possible revolution in Russia had already
agitated Marx and Engels, both coming to the time-conditioned and speculative
conclusion that a revolution in Russia, if it spilled over into Western Europe,
might lead to conditions that could prevent the rise of a full-fledged Russian
capitalism. In that case, the still existing communal form of agricultural
production, the mir, might prove an asset for the socialization of the Russian
economy. However, the assertion of this faint possibility was more a concession
to the Russian Populists (Narodniks), who were at that time the only
revolutionary force in Russia, than a real conviction and it was therefore
allowed to be forgotten.

With the rise of a Social Democratic movement and the formation of trade
unions in Russia, the Populists’ idea of a people’s revolution based on the
peasantry made way for the Marxist conception of revolution by the industrial
proletariat. This meant, of course, the revolution’s postponement, as it
presupposed the further unfolding of the capitalist system of production. The
approaching social revolution was thus almost generally anticipated as a
bourgeois revolution, to be supported by the socialist movement and the
industrialist proletariat. And it could be supported best by making demands of a
more radical nature than those the liberal bourgeoisie was able to formulate, or
even think of. The workers were to lead this revolution, even though it could
reach no more than a capitalistic bourgeois democracy, that is, conditions such
as prevailed in the West.

This seemed to be all the more necessary because the liberal bourgeoisie was
itself very weak and, as Alexander Herzen remarked, preferred, “against its own
convictions, to walk on a leash, if only the mob is not released from it.” (5)
Quite apart from the question as to whether or not it was capable of initiating
a bourgeois revolution, it was not willing to do so, out of fear of the blind
rage of the peasant masses, which might destroy not only the autocratic regime
but the bourgeoisie as well. It seemed so much better to gain political power
gradually through the social transformation induced by capitalist development
under the auspices of a strong state such as was provided for by a modified
czarist regime.

Capital accumulation itself would slowly change the nature of the regime and
force it to adapt itself to the requirements of modern society. While it was
clear that it was the Revolution of 1905 which had led to the first, though
meager, reforms of czarism, such as the establishment of the Duma, this
revolution, released by the industrial working class, also had opened the
Pandora’s box of the capital-labor relation and revealed the threat of an
anti-bourgeois revolution.

For the Social Democrats, the development of capitalism in Russia, whatever
its course, would at the same time, through its creation of an industrial
proletariat, be a development toward socialism. And because capitalist
development accelerated rather rapidly at the turn of the century, involving
both the capitalization of agriculture and the formation of a proprietary
peasantry, the expected revolutionary changes were no longer thought of as based
on the liberation of the peasantry and the preservation and utilization of the
remaining communal forms of agricultural production, but as based on the
extension of capitalist market relations and their political reflections in
bourgeois democracy. With this, Marxism came to look toward a socialist
revolution in the wake of a successful bourgeois revolution.

For all practical purposes, however, Western socialism had already jettisoned
its Marxian heritage. In the revisionist-reformist point of view, the extension
of bourgeois democracy eliminated not only the possibility but also the need for
a socialist revolution to be replaced by evolutionary changes in the capitalist
class and exploitation relations. But if socialist revolution had already become
an anachronism in the Western world, there was no point in expecting its arrival
in Russia. And as the steady capitalization of the Russian economy promised a
reluctant but nonetheless necessary democratization of its political structure,
there was, perhaps, not even room for a bourgeois revolution in the Western
sense of term. Marxist revisionism was adapted to Russian conditions, the one
hand in the “legal Marxism” of the liberal bourgeoisie for whom it merely
implied the capitalization of Russia and its integration into the world market,
together with all the paraphernalia of bourgeois democracy, such as political
parties and trade unions – and, on the other hand in the reformist Social
Democratic conviction that the impending revolution in Russia could issue into a
bourgeois state, which would first provide the basis for a vast socialist
movement striving to transform the capitalist into a socialist society through a
constant struggle for social reforms.

In the latter view, meaningful reforms in Russia presupposed a political
revolution, and this revolution would, by force of circumstances, have a
bourgeois character. This view was shared by the left wing of Russian Social
Democracy, as represented since 1903 by its Bolshevik faction, but with the
difference that this wing believed that such a revolution would have to be
brought about by a political party based on the working class and the poor
peasantry, for the liberal bourgeoisie itself, even apart from the question of
its practical capabilities, was only too ready to stop short at some compromise
with the czarist regime. The impending revolution would be a worker-peasant
revolution, or perhaps even a purely working-class revolution, even though it
could accomplish no more within the Russian context than the creation of a
modern state and the full release of the capitalist forces of production.

But, the left argued, even such a revolution might conceivably induce a
revolution in Western Europe and through its internationalization alter the
character of the Russian revolution. After all, such a possibility had entered
the minds of Marx and Engels and still had an ideological basis in the West,
thanks to the defense of “Marxian orthodoxy” by Karl Kautsky and his followers.
This concept of “orthodoxy” was therefore based on a false apprehension of the
nature of Western socialism, which mistook its ideology for reality, and on an
incomprehension of the transformation this movement had undergone around the
turn of the century. These illusions were lost at one stroke with the war of
1914, which revealed that not even Kautsky himself cared much for “Marxian
orthodoxy,” for which he had been the symbol within the Second International.
The “trustee of revolutionary Marxism” overnight became the “renegade” Kautsky
for the Bolsheviks in general and for his most devoted pupil, Lenin, in
particular. Prior to this revelation, the Russian socialists had paid far more
attention to the conditions of the czarist regime than to the actual state of
international socialism. The latter, at least in an ideological sense, seemed to
foreordain the course of the impending Russian revolution, just as Western
capitalism prefigured the development of Russian capitalism. “Marxian
orthodoxy,” as Kautsky interpreted it, in opposition to the pure reformism of
the revisionists, provided the ideology of Bolshevism, in opposition to the
Menshevik, or reformist, wing of Russian Social Democracy. Whereas the latter
did not expect more from the hoped-for Russian revolution than the undiluted
rule of the bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks envisioned the transcendence of this
revolution through its internationalization, culminating in the rule of the
proletariat. Of course, this was not a certainty, which may explain the
ambiguities on the part of the Bolshevik Party as regards the character of the
Russian revolution. While admitting its bourgeois nature, they employed at the
same time a terminology referring to a socialist revolution, as if these could
be one and the same thing.

These ambiguities had their origin in the prevailing Russian conditions,
which seemed to rule out either a consistently bourgeois or a proletarian
revolution, because of the unresolved quasi-feudal agricultural system and its
dependence on the autocratic state. Any revolution must involve the great mass
of the population; in this case that meant the peasantry, which, however, could
not be expected to subordinate its own interests to those of the bourgeoisie or
the industrial proletariat. These three classes would have to partake in the
revolution, but could do so only with different ideas and different goals, which
could hardly be brought under one hat. While their combined efforts were needed
to end the czarist regime, this could only lead to a reassertion of their
particular class interests in the post-revolutionary situation. One class would
have to dominate to hold the class-divided society together. Logically, and to
judge by historical precedent, the bourgeoisie would have to be the ruling
class.

However, as soon as the revolution was seen in an international context, the
"historical precedents” and the “logical” rule of ascendance were no longer
convincing. While two different social revolutions cannot occur together in a
particular nation, they occur simultaneously in an international setting, which
may change the international class structure in such a way as to lead to
dominance of the proletariat over the whole of the revolutionary process, just
as the diversity of the developmental stages of the national entities does not
prevent capitalism’s over-all rule the world economy. In view of this
possibility, it made some sense to change the “rule” of historical ascendance
and to try to base the Russian revolution on the political dominance of the
working class, especially since the Russian bourgeoisie was itself an
ineffective minority. The peasantry would have to be “neutral” in one way or
another, no matter which class, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, should come
in possession of the Russian state.

A social revolution cannot be organized, as it depends on conditions which
escape conscious control. It can only be awaited, as the result of an observable
intensification of the class contradictions existing within the given social
relations of production. What can be organized in advance is the leadership
required to give the expected revolution a definite direction and a particular
goal. Any political party that thinks in terms of revolution concerns itself not
with its preparation but with the organization of its leadership, the only thing
that is organizable. This involves, of course, a continuous assessment and
reassessment of the changing political and economic conditions, so as to make
its control of the awaited revolution as effective as possible. Propaganda and
agitation serve the formation of organizations aspiring to revolutionary
leadership, but once these organizations exist, they see themselves as the
irreplaceable presupposition of a successful revolution.

But how to lead a revolution that lacked any sort of homogeneity of interests
within its revolutionary forces, as exemplified by the variety of organizations
opposed to the social status quo? The situation in Russia at large, with its
different specific class interests, was repeated within the revolutionary camp.
All its organizations – the right and the left wing of the Social Revolutionaries,
(6) the reformists and the revolutionaries of Russian Social Democracy, and the
various ideological groupings between these major organizations – had their own
ideas with respect to procedures and the desired outcome of the revolutionary
process, thus precluding a unified revolutionary policy. Just as one class had
to dominate the revolution itself, so one of the competing revolutionary
organizations had to strive for supremacy if it was to realize its own program.

As Lenin and the Bolsheviks had opted for the industrial proletariat as the
leading element of the revolution, it followed that the party of the
proletariat, that is, the Bolshevik Party, must strive to monopolize political
power, if only to safeguard the proletarian character of the revolution. Quite
apart from Lenin’s assumption that the working class is unable to evolve a
political revolutionary consciousness on its own accord, the fact was that the
minority position of this class, together with the existence and aspirations of
other classes and their organizations, precluded a democratic revolutionary
development with an outcome favorable to the working class and socialism. Only a
dictatorship, as Lenin saw it, could maintain the proletarian impetus of the
revolution and create preconditions for a socialist development in conjunction
with the expected socialist revolutions in the developed nations of the West.
However, the very existence of the czarist regime demonstrated that it was
possible to hold political power in spite of the existence of the most varied
political and economic interests that in one way or another opposed the
anachronistic autocratic government. If a backward and decaying political regime
had been able to keep itself in power, this should be even more possible for a
dictatorial regime geared to a progressive social development in harmony with
the global course of evolution. Russia, Lenin once said, “was accustomed to
being ruled by 150,000 land owners. Why can 240,000 Bolsheviks not take over the
task?” (7) In any case, establishing such a dictatorship would mean having at
least a foot in the door leading to world revolution.

Already before the Menshevik-Bolshevik split of Russian Social Democracy in
1903, Lenin had shifted the question of the Russian revolution away from purely
theoretical considerations toward its practical problems, that is, the
organization of its leadership. In his book What Is to Be Done?(8) however, he
presented his concern with organization as a theoretical problem, for, in his
view, “there can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory.”
By this he did not mean that men conceptualize their activities, but referred to
the social division of labor, as a division between mental and manual work, as
it prevails in capitalist society. Like all theory, the theory of socialism,
according to Lenin, “grew out of the philosophical, historical and economic
theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of propertied
classes, the intellectuals."(9) Due to its subordinate position in society, the
working class may spontaneously evolve a trade-union consciousness, but not a
revolutionary theory able to lead to a change of society. The revolutionary
theory is not an outgrowth of the social production relations, but a result of
science and philosophy and their practitioners’ own dissatisfaction with these
relations and the privileges bound up with them. It is, then, the conscience,
the moral scruples, the idealistic disposition, the knowledge of the
intellectuals that provide the proletariat the revolutionary consciousness it is
unable to develop by itself. Thus the unhappiness of the intellectuals with the
realities of capitalist society yields the revolutionary theory on which all
revolutionary practice is based.

Lenin did not, as is often assumed, derive this strange inversion of Marxian
theory from the peculiar conditions prevailing in Russia, but from a general
principle, as is obvious in his application of this analysis to Western
socialism. Here too, in Lenin’s view, the labor movement restricted itself to
purely reformist forms of class struggle because their intellectual leaders had
“betrayed” their comrades and the ideas of revolution by leaving the path of
revolutionary Marxism. Although the revolutionary intelligentsia is a necessary
presupposition of any revolutionary activity, apparently it can lose its
revolutionary inclinations and cease being the ferment of revolutionary theory.
To avoid such “betrayals,” it would be necessary to forge a type of
revolutionary organization that allowed only the most steadfast revolutionaries
into its ranks. In Lenin’s view, this was made possible through the creation of
the “professional revolutionary,” whose whole existence depends on his
revolutionary activity – in other words, someone like himself, who knows of no
distinction between his individual and his organizational life and whose sole
function is the promotion of revolution. It is true that Lenin also pointed to
the requirement of illegality within the Russian setting, but as an additional
argument, not as the basic rationale for his organizational concept. For him,
the organizations of revolutionists are not identical with working-class
organizations but are necessarily separated from the latter precisely because of
their professional character. The effectiveness of such an organization,
representing the “vanguard” of the revolution, depends on centralized
leadership, endorsed by all its members, thus combining intraparty democracy
with centralization, or, in brief, embodying to the principle of “democratic
centralism.” What all this amounted to was the formation of a party operating as
a kind of state machinery, long before the question of the actual capture of
state power arose. The party was to be built up as a counter-state to the
existing state, ready to displace the latter at the first opportunity. The
construction of this type of party was thus the practical preparation for its
assumption of the power of the state. Here theory and practice fell together.

Because of the apparent remoteness of the Russian, or any other, revolution,
Lenin’s concept of the party-state was not grasped in its full meaning by the
Social Democratic movement, but only as a rather queer idea of the relationship
between spontaneity and organization, party and class, democratic and
centralized leadership, and was largely adjudged as an aberration from a truly
Marxian position. Western Social Democracy was itself highly centralized, as are
all organizations in the capitalist system. Lenin’s quest for an even more
stringent centralization could hardly be understood, except as an argument for
authoritarian control and one-man rule. Everyone knew from his own experience
that “democratic centralism” is a contradiction in terms, as it is a practical
impossibility to reach a real consensus in a centralized organization wherein
the power of persuasion is also vested in the organized leadership. It made in
particular no sense from Lenin’s own point of view, which denied the “plain and
simple” worker the ability to form his own revolutionary opinions and thus
condemned him in advance to accept whatever the educated leadership proposed.
Moreover, the many thousands of paid organizers and functionaries in the
socialist parties and trade unions could see not much difference between
themselves and the “professional revolutionaries” of Lenin’s organization. The
organization was also their livelihood, but it did not follow that this
determined their revolutionary or anti-revolutionary attitudes. In the face of
this opposition, from the right as well as the left wing of international
socialism, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not overstress their organizational
principles but followed them nonetheless in the building up of the Bolshevik
faction of Russian Social Democracy – a process that also assured Lenin’s unique
position within this organization. The pyramidal structure of organizations is
not simply the way they are formed but also a means to their control. The higher one
climbs up the organizational ladder, the greater the influence he can exert and
the more difficult it becomes to be replaced by those occupying the lower rungs.
This is not automatically so, but is deliberately built into the organization,
so as to assure its control by those who are near, or have reached, its top.
Although not totally foolproof the system works well, for which the whole of
capitalism bears witness as well as its manifold separate organizations which
include those of the labor movement. Control of the organization once gained,
this domination is rarely, if ever, relinquished through pressures from below.
Unless the organization is destroyed, in most cases, only death can part it from
its established leadership. According to Lenin, this is as it should be, for if
the leadership is the correct one, it would be silly to replace it a new and
untried one. Observe, he wrote, how in Germany this vast crowd of
millions values its “dozen” tried political
leaders, how firmly it clings to them. Members of the hostile parties in
parliament often tease the socialists by exclaiming:

"Fine democrats you are
indeed! Your movement is a working-class movement only in name; as a matter of
fact it is the same clique of leaders that is always in evidence, Bebel and
Liebknecht, year in year out, and that goes on for decades. Your deputies are
supposed to be elected from among the workers, but they are more permanent
than the officials appointed by the Emperor.

"But the Germans only smile with contempt at these demagogic
attempts to set the “crowd” against the ’leaders,’ to arouse turbid and vain
instincts in the former, and to rob the movement of its solidity and stability
by undermining the confidence of the masses in the ’dozen of wise men.’ The
political ideas of the Germans have already developed sufficiently, and they
have acquired enough political experience to enable them to understand that
without the ’dozen’ of tried and talented leaders, professionally trained,
schooled by long experience and working in perfect harmony, no class in modern
society is capable of conducting a determined struggle. ... Our (Russian)
wise-acres, however, at the very moment when Russian Social Democracy is
passing through a crisis entirely due to our lack of a sufficient number of
trained, developed and experienced leaders to guide the spontaneous ferment of
the masses, cry out with the profundity of fools, it is a bad business when
the movement does not proceed from the rank and file.” (10)

It would of course be unfair to point to Lenin’s early and rather silly
ruminations on the question of organization, as presented in What Is to Be
Done? were it not for the fact that they continued to motivate him
throughout his life and guided the activities of the Bolshevik Party. On this
point, which formed the starting point of the Leninist type of organization, and
which occasioned the split within Russian Social Democracy, Lenin never wavered,
bringing it to its full realization in the strictly centralized structure of his
party and the latter’s dictatorship over the working class in the name of
socialism. However strange these ruminations may have sounded in the ears of
socialists, for whom the labor movement implied the self-determination of the
working class, they were at the same time devoid of all originality, as they
merely copied the prevalent political procedures within the capitalist system
and tried to utilize them for its overthrow. What Lenin proposed appeared to him
to be a realistic approach to the practical needs of the revolution, the
effectiveness of which could be questioned only by those who merely talked about
revolution but did nothing to bring it about. As the bourgeois ideology had to
be countered by a socialist ideology, so the centralism of bourgeois political
rule had to be combated by the centralized determination of the revolutionary
party. Although within the general setting of the capital-labor relations, the
revolutionary struggle which could yield practical results was, according to
Lenin, mainly a fight between the existing state machinery and the party
determined to destroy it. The latter was thus the precondition for the
anticipated new state and the guarantee that the revolution would not dissipate
into formless upheavals but would issue into the dictatorship of the party as a
presupposition for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The means and methods of
this struggle were determined by the previous structure of bourgeois society
itself, but could be turned against it, if used intelligently by a truly
revolutionary party and a truly revolutionary leadership, such as Lenin and the
Bolsheviks endeavored to construct.

There was of course a wide gap between the Bolsheviks’ intentions and their
actual achievements. If statistics can be trusted, around 1905 there were about
8,400 organized Bolsheviks and most probably the same number of Mensheviks. By
1906, membership had grown to 13,000 for the Bolsheviks and 18,000 for the
Mensheviks – “one may fairly safely conclude that both factions comprised about
40,000 members in 1907. [Thus] one ought not to view Russian Social Democracy as
something centered on the cafes of Geneva and composed of an ’elite mostly in
exile’” (11) But it is still astonishing that this small number, spread over of
Russia, should be considered the “vanguard” of the revolution. Of course, a
rapid growth in numbers could be expected with increasing industrialization,
capitalization, and radicalization but even so this growth was limited by the
general backwardness of Russian society.

As to the social composition of Russian Social Democracy, it could be
considered a working-class movement, even if top-heavy with elements from the
middle class. But Lenin’s concern was not with what he called the “plain and
simple” workers, but with the “wise men,” designated to lead those workers away
from the reformist into the revolutionary path of activity. Apart from the
impossibility of transforming all party members into “professional
revolutionaries,” which would release them from their working-class status, and
which was anyway precluded for financial reasons, the principle of
centralization itself excluded more than concentration upon the leadership.
Lenin trusted in the rise of revolutionary situations, brought about through
society’s contradictory development, but he mistrusted the idea that the
objective conditions would also bring forth a subjective readiness for
revolutionary change. By and large, the working class was for him a part of the
objective conditions, not of the subjective requirements of the revolution.
However necessary the aroused masses were, their want of proper knowledge and
ideological consistency could easily lead to a failure to recognize their
“historic mission,” or to the submission to and betrayal by misleaders of the
working class, who either consciously or unconsciously put themselves at the
service of the bourgeoisie.

In the prerevolutionary phase of Bolshevism, Lenin’s organizational concepts
must have had a rather comical tinge, because of the enormous distance the party
would still have to travel to reach its revolutionary goal. Although actually it
functioned not much differently from any other socialist organization, it
presented itself from its very beginning as the party that would actually lead
the revolution, because it was the only one in possession of the theory that
assured its success. This claim already implied a relentless struggle against
all other organizations and the demand for sole control of the revolution. The
party’s authoritarianism can thus not be blamed on unexpected difficulties that
arose during the revolution, for it constituted the principle of Bolshevism from
the day of its initiation.

At the top of the organizational ladder there is only room for one. But this
may have only ornamental meaning and need not imply an ultimate center of
decision-making power. In noticeable contrast to other socialist organizations
of the time, the Bolshevik Party was from the very outset under Lenin’s complete
and undivided control. It was not thinkable under any other leadership. Most
theoreticians leave the practical execution of their ideas to others, but in
Lenin the theoretical and the practical were combined in his own person. He
watched over both with equal fervor, as if incapable of delegating any degree of
responsibility to other people. There was of course dissension in the party, but
it was always resolved to Lenin’s satisfaction. An alternative solution could
only split the party, as Lenin seemed to be unable to admit to errors detected
by others than himself. He was capable of self-criticism and sudden reversals
but not of accepting corrections by other people. But even so, A. N. Potresov,

who had known Lenin since 1894, and organized and edited Iskra
together with him, but later on, during the first and second revolutions, came
to detest him, and was thrown into prison under Lenin’s dictatorship, was
impartial enough to write the following words about him ...:

"No one could sweep people away so much by his plans, impress them
by his strength of will, and win them over by his personality as this man, who
at first sight seemed so unprepossessing and crude, and, on the face of it,
had none of the things that make for personal charm.” Neither Plekhanov nor
Martov, nor anyone else had the secret of that hypnotic influence on or rather
ascendancy over people, which Lenin radiated. Only Lenin was followed
unquestionably as the indisputable leader, as it was only Lenin who was that
rare phenomenon, particularly in Russia – a man of iron will and indomitable
energy, capable of instilling fanatical faith in the movement and the cause,
and possessed of equal faith in himself"’ (12)

There are such men, fortunately not always at the head of a movement. The
competitive aggressive character of Lenin cannot be denied; it comes to the fore
not only in his total rule over his own organization, but in all his writings,
which – no matter what the subject matter – were always of a polemical nature,
designed to destroy real or imaginary enemies of the revolution. Most probably
he suffered from some form of paranoia, for his self-confidence was as excessive
as his fear of political rivals. But this is neither here nor there, as it is
quite possible to share his attitudes and convictions without being obsessed by
them to the same degree. The world is swarming with “charismatic” people, sane
or insane who would like to head a social movement and to symbolize it in their
own person. But each movement can have only one supreme leader, who must claw
his way to the top and must command the necessary qualifications. Thus men with
dispositions totally different from those characteristic of Lenin, such as
Trotsky or Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini, may do as well in reaching and holding
supreme power and in winning the admiration of the multitude as well as that of
their underlings.

There must of course also be people who accept their subordination willingly
and are ready to “follow the line” drawn by leadership. But in a party that
expects to become the ruling party, even subordination may appear as a good
thing, to assure concerted actions leading to the desired goal. After all, this
is how business is done and is the principle upon which state power rests, a
situation to which most people have been habituated and which they regard as
unavoidable. Just as the world of business competition leads to monopolization,
the struggle for political leadership engenders a political monopoly, which must
then be defended through the exclusion of any further opposition. In other
words, political monopoly must be organized, and thus while the struggle for
power may issue into one-man rule, the latter must be retained by ending all
serious contention within the organization. In this respect, the Leninist
organization was a full success, for it was able to reach a consensus of its
membership despite its high centralization dominated by a singular will. More
than that, the situation was idealized by a ritual adulation of Lenin that was
both earnestly felt and deliberately fostered as an expedient way to maintain
internal cohesion. What seemed abnormal for a socialist movement became the
norm, foreshadowing the future terror of Stalin’s “personality cult,” and was
adopted by all the Marxist-Leninist organizations formed after the Bolshevik
Revolution.

It is the Bolshevik type of organization that explains Lenin’s extraordinary
personal role in the determination of Bolshevik policy after the February
Revolution of 1917. Lenin’s uncontested leadership implied of course political
paralyzes on the part of those Bolsheviks accustomed to follow the cherished
“old man’s” advice and bound to it by party discipline. There can be little
doubt that there would not have been the coup d’etat of October without Lenin’s
determination to grasp political power, which, he thought, was there for the
asking, and in which he was proven right. The events of October must be credited
to Lenin’s leadership, although executed by Trotsky, the party, and its many
sympathizers. After that, as the saying goes, nothing succeeds like success.

The will to assume political power by revolutionary means may always be
present but has to await a historical opportunity to be exercised. What makes a
revolutionary is of course his impatience with the slow course of social
development and his desire to hasten its pace. He will therefore often endow his
anticipations in regard to the existing social conflicts with a greater
revolutionary potentiality than they actually possess. Although Lenin and his
colleagues did not object to the policies adopted by Western socialism, which,
for the time being, consisted in the utilization of bourgeois democracy and the
labor market for purposes of fostering proletarian class consciousness and
building up an independent labor movement, they saw this as a time-conditioned
endeavor which did not exhaust the possibilities for working-class action.
Although vaguely, Lenin recognized after the experience of 1905 that just as it
seemed not impossible to take power in the context of a bourgeois revolution,
and in conjunction with a Western revolution to annul the bourgeois character of
such a revolution, so it would also be possible to set aside the traditional
activities of Western socialism and to replace bourgeois democracy with a
socialist dictatorship, which would turn the nominal into a real democracy. This
view was also shared, with greater consistency, by people outside the Bolshevik
Party, such as for instance, A. I. Helphand (Parvus) and L. Trotsky in their
concept of the “permanent revolution.”

As pointed out before, Russian Social Democracy around 1905 was too small an
organized force to have more than a marginal effect upon the social upheavals of
that year. There were about 3 million industrial workers, more than 2 million of
whom participated in a wave of strikes which soon took on a political character
as they took place within general crisis conditions aggravated by the Russian
defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. Although the revolution involved
nonproletarian layers of the population, as well as segments of the peasantry,
the army, and the navy, it found in the striking workers in the big cities,
particularly St. Petersburg and Moscow, its most decisive element. The strikes
were spontaneous in the sense that they were not called by political
organizations or trade unions but in the main were launched by workers who had
no choice but to look upon their workplace as the springboard of their actions
and the center of organizational efforts. The local coordination of the
activities demanded representation through city-wide soviets, workers’ councils
or workers’ deputies, to formulate policies and to negotiate with the
authorities. Of all the soviets formed in Russia during the revolutionary
events, the St. Petersburg Soviet, which lasted from October to December 1905,
was perhaps the most representative. It found its first historian in Leon
Trotsky – himself one of the leading members – who saw the soviets

“as a response to an objective need – a need born of the course of
events. It was an organization which was authoritative and yet had no
tradition, which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of
thousands of people while having virtually no organizational machinery; which
united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of
initiative and spontaneous self-control – and most important of all, which
could be brought out from underground within twenty-four hours.”
(13)

The soviets attracted the most articulate and therefore, generally, the most
politically alert of the laboring population, and they found support in the
socialist organizations and incipient trade unions.(14) The city-wide soviets
comprised delegates of various factories, forming a kind of “workers’
parliament” with an elected executive committee. The delegates could at any time
be recalled. The soviets were impartial with respect to socialist organizations,
allowing them to send delegates who could advise but had no voting rights. The
difference between these traditional organizations and the soviets was summed up
in Trotsky’s remark, that while the socialist parties were organizations
within the proletariat, and their immediate aim was to achieve influence
over the masses, the soviet was, from the start, “the organization of the
proletariat, and its aim was the struggle for revolutionary power.” (15)

For Lenin, the soviets of 1905 were "organs of direct mass struggle".
They originated as organs of the strike struggle. By force of
circumstances they very quickly became the organs of the general
revolutionary struggle against the government.... It was not some theory,
not appeals on the part of someone, or tactics invented by someone, not party
doctrine, but the force of circumstances that led these nonparty mass organs to
realize the need for an uprising and transformed them into organs of an
uprising.” (16) Lenin saw the soviets as “the embryos of a provisional
government” because “power would inevitably have passed to them had the
uprising been victorious,” and spoke of the need to shift the center of
attention “to studying these embryonic organs of a new government that history
has brought into being, to studying the conditions for their work and their
success.” (17) But he still insisted on the undivided revolutionary
leadership of the Social Democratic Party. The soviets were for Lenin “not an
organ of proletarian self-government, nor an organ of self-government at all,
but a fighting organization for the achievement of definite aims.” (18) Although
the party “has never renounced its intention of using nonparty organizations,
such as the soviets,” he said, “it should do so in order to strengthen its own
influence in the working class and to increase its own power.” (19)

From this position Lenin never deviated even when he proclaimed the slogan
“All power to the soviets” in order to break up the dual power of the soviets
and the liberal Provisional Government established by the February Revolution
of 1917. The soviets were, in Lenin’s view, to be induced to eliminate the
provisional government, but only to form a new government, based on the soviets
instead of on the contemplated Constituent Assembly. This would exclude the
nonworking population from direct or indirect participation in state activities
and thus realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. The new government would
be subject to the control of the soviets, not to that of any particular party.
But at the same time, while asking for a soviet government, Lenin was still
thinking in terms of a Bolshevik government, with or without the consent of the
soviets. At the First Congress of Soviets on June 3, 1917, Tseretelli, a
Menshevik Minister in the Provisional Government, made the remark that in Russia
at that time there existed not one political party that would say, give us the
power into our hands. “I answer there is,” Lenin retorted. “No party can decline
to do that, and our party does not decline. It is ready at any minute to take
the whole power."’ (20)

At this time the situation was still in flux; the war was continuing despite
the progressive dissolution of the army; counter-revolutionary plots were being
hatched; the economy was disintegrating with increasing speed; and the Bolshevik
faction in the soviets was still a small minority, unable to turn the situation
to its own account. It was not possible to tell, from the existing political
constellation, which way the wheel would turn. Would the coalition of the
soviets with the Provisional Government last until the calling of the
Constituent Assembly – to which all parties had committed themselves – and lead to
the formation of a bourgeois government and the completion of the bourgeois
revolution? Or would a change in the external situation, or in the composition
of the soviets, end the coalition and issue into a renewal of the civil war? Or
would the provisional government, with the aid of loyal parts of the army,
subdue the soviets to its own will through some form of dictatorship? The many
parties operating within the soviets and their widely diverging political and
economic programs, as well as frictions within the government itself, made for a
chaotic political situation in which everything and nothing seemed possible.
Under these conditions, the Bolsheviks could come to power either by gaining the
majority in the soviets and then trying to dislodge the Provisional Government,
or by risking a military uprising with their own limited forces, without
counting on the soviets’ support. Either way was feasible and the best solution
would be to prepare for both. This involved a certain ambivalence toward the
soviets, which Lenin thus at times found indispensable and at other times saw as
a hindrance to the execution of a second revolution. But no matter what role the
soviets would come to play, it was power for the party that determined Lenin’s
policy, as may easily be surmised from all the subsequent developments. This was
of course only consistent with both his general philosophy and his conception of
the party as the determining element of the socialist revolution.

Because in February 1917 soldiers went over to the revolution, the first
soviets were composed of soldiers’ and workers’ councils with the former in the
great majority. The Petrograd Soviet in the second part of March 1917, for
instance, had 3,000 delegates, 2,000 of whom were soldiers. The influence of the
revolutionary intelligentsia was far greater in 1917 than in 1905, as may be
seen from the fact that of the 42 members of the Petrograd Soviet’s Executive
Committee only seven were factory workers. Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries
were at first predominant. The Bolshevik fraction in the Petrograd Soviet
consisted of 40 out of the 3,000 delegates. By September 1917, however, the
Bolsheviks had gained the majority. Their growing strength within the
revolutionary development was due to their own unconditional adaptation to the
real goals of the rebellious masses. Apart from the latter’s narrower demands
for the relief of immediate miseries, their wider demands embraced the ending of
the war and the expropriation and distribution of the landed estates. The
February Revolution was at once a bourgeois, a proletarian, and a peasant
revolution, but it was its peasant aspect that assured its success. Of Russia’s
174 million population only 24 million lived in cities, and it was the terrible
plight of the peasantry that allied it to the industrial proletariat. Although
the Provisional Government was ready to institute a series of agricultural
reforms, it was not willing to assent to the expropriation of the big landowners
without compensation, for this would violate the principle of private property
on which the rule of the bourgeoisie is based. Neither was it willing to sue for
peace, for it still hoped for an allied victory and participation in the spoils
of war. The Bolsheviks, however, were for the immediate ending of the war and
for the distribution of land to the peasantry. Because the majority of the
soldiers came from the peasantry, the soldiers’ councils no less than the
workers’ councils shifted their allegiance from the bourgeoisie and social
reformist parties to the Bolsheviks.

It was not the Marxist agrarian program that attracted the peasants but that
of the Social Revolutionaries, which demanded the nationalization of all land
under the control of democratically organized village communes on the basis of
equal land holdings. From a Marxian point of view such a program was utopian.
Marxism favors large-scale production that does away with individual peasant
farming. Because it envisioned socialism as the successor to capitalism, and
because in its view capitalism itself is doing away with small-scale peasant
farming, it expected that the peasant question would largely be solved within
capitalism so as not to constitute a major problem for socialism. Lenin’s early
opposition to Narodnism and its Social Revolutionary heirs was based on the
belief that an equal distribution of land to the peasants was not only highly
unrealistic but in contradiction to a socialist mode of production. He also
favored the breaking up of the semifeudal estates but only to hasten the
development of capitalistic agriculture, which would restore the concentration
of landownership under progressive conditions. At any rate, this was a problem
of the future, of further capitalistic development. The peasantry, Lenin said,
"can free itself from the yoke of capital by associating with the working-class
movement, by helping the workers in their struggle for the socialist system, for
transforming the land, as well as the other means of production (factories,
works machines, etc) into social property. Trying to save the peasantry by
protecting small-scale farming and small holding from the onslaught of
capitalism would be a useless retarding of social development.” (21)

Apart from all programs, however, soon after the February Revolution, the
peasants began to expropriate and divide the land on their own accord. Until
then, the Provisional Government had paid little attention to the peasant
question. It only began to consider it seriously in the face of upheavals in the
countryside. But even so, it only brought forth vague suggestions regarding the
expropriation and distribution of the land, the enactment of which into law was
left to the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. Because Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries were now represented the Provisional Government, the latter’s
ambiguous attitude and inactivity regarding the land problem cost these parties
the active support of the peasants."We were victorious in Russia, and with such
ease,” Lenin pointed out at a later date,

because we prepared our revolution during the imperialist
war... Ten million workers and peasants in Russia were armed, and our slogan
was an immediate peace at all costs. We were victorious because the vast
masses of the peasants were revolutionarily disposed against the land-owners.
The Social Revolutionaries ... demanded revolutionary methods, ... but lacked
the courage to act in a revolutionary way. We were victorious ... not only
because the undisputed majority of the working class was on our side ... but
also because half the army, immediately after our seizure of power, and
nine-tenths of the peasants, in the course of some weeks, came over to our
side; we were victorious because we adopted the agrarian program of the
Social Revolutionaries instead of our own.” (22)

In the quest for state power, it was clear to Lenin that it was absolutely
essential to win the peasants’ support, even if only their passive support. The
Marxist agrarian program had been developed in opposition to that of the Social
Revolutionaries, but at a time when the practical questions of the revolution
were not yet acute. Under Russian conditions this program was totally
unrealistic. All abstract considerations of the agrarian problem became
meaningless when the peasants simply seized what was seizable. It was not
because “the Bolsheviks availed themselves of the agrarian program of the Social
Revolutionaries that they were victorious,” but because they merely sanctioned
what was taking place anyway. It is true, of course, that in this way they won
the “good will” of the peasants and thus had an easier time of gaining and
holding state power. But Lenin’s presentation makes it appear as if a timely
opportunistic move, a part of a general strategy, led to the Bolsheviks’
triumph, thus justifying opportunism as a weapon of revolution. The acquiescence
in the peasants’ seizure of land, though recognized as a violation of Marxian
principles, was nonetheless seen as a clever ruse to help the “Marxist”
revolution along. Although relentlessly denouncing the opportunism of their
political adversaries, Lenin and the Bolsheviks prided themselves on their
general willingness to resort to all kinds of temporary concessions and
compromises, sacrificing their own principles to gain a greater advantage in the
long run.

Although Lenin was the deadly enemy of the bourgeois revolution, his politics
were those of the bourgeois mind; that is, he saw the struggle between classes
and nations as dependent upon the strategies and tactics of political leaders
and statesmen, who determine the movements of the populations. It was a question
of outmaneuvering and outwitting one’s adversaries, a game to be won by those
most adept in the manipulation of events. Politics and revolution were an “art,”
which would give the palm of victory to the most versatile and most
knowledgeable of the competing contestants – not an “art” in contrast to the
rigidities of science, or the dullness of the commonplace, but as a matching of
talents that would bring the best man to the top. To be sure, the game had to be
played under the varying handicaps set by the prevailing objective social
conditions, but even so, within these conditions it was still a question of “who
was going to destroy whom” in the struggle for political power. It was this that
Lenin meant by the preponderance of theory over practice, or that of the leaders
over the more or less uneducated masses, who could only react blindly to
situations beyond their comprehension.

Not denying the objective limitations set for the history-making social
process by class relations and the level of economic development, Lenin
succeeded in convincing himself that though history is made by men, it is
actually made by only a few of them, who by identifying themselves with
particular class interests, alter the course of events through their powers of
persuasion and their exceptional abilities. But every bourgeois knows that sheer
arbitrariness is an impossibility, even though he may insist upon the
history-making capacity of individuals and credit historical developments to the
existence of great men. He overlooks the fact that the great man is such only
because the apex of the pyramidal social structure demands his existence, no
matter what his particular qualifications (although competition may on occasion
bring some outstanding personality to the top of the pyramid). In a class-ridden
society the role of the great man is not only filled automatically, it must be
insisted upon to keep the social fabric together. No class society can exist
without its great men, for this is only the other side of the same coin. By the
same token, however, the great men are limited in their reach by the general
socioeconomic conditions which they come to symbolize. Their interference in
events is circumscribed by what is historically possible. But what is
historically possible is not determined by what may be politically
possible, but by the actual level of the social forces of production and the
social relations associated with them.

It was political events that favored the Bolsheviks. At the First All-Russian
Soviet Congress, in June 1917, the Bolsheviks controlled 13 percent of the 790
delegates; at the second congress, in October 1917, they controlled 51 percent
of the 675 delegates. However, though the Bolsheviks had the majority in the
soviets of Petrograd and Moscow as early as September 1917, Lenin would have
been ready to take power even if it had been otherwise. “It would be naive,” he
wrote, “to wait for a ‘formal’ majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever
waits for that.” (23) Despite opposition within his own party, he
demanded an armed insurrection prior to the convocation of the Second
All-Russian Congress of Soviets. A fait acompli would make it easier to
get the congress’s support for the elimination of the Provisional Government. To
that end, the Petrograd Soviet organized a military-revolutionary committee
under the leadership of Trotsky, which went into action on the twenty-fifth of
October. Within a few hours of the coup d’état, Lenin was able to claim victory
for the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, and, later in the day, to win the
approval of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. This was the easier because the
right Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks had left the congress in protest
against the coup d’etat. On the following day the first Workers’ and Peasants’
Government was formed.

Lenin’s timing of the insurrection proved to be correct. It found the
Provisional Government defenseless and assured an almost bloodless transfer of
power to the Soviet government. Supposedly, it also changed the hitherto
bourgeois into a proletarian revolution, even though this was brought about not
by a spontaneous rising of the working class but by a conspiratorially organized
military force of armed Bolshevik workers and military detachments siding with
the Bolsheviks. Although a party affair, it undoubtedly coincided with the real
demands of the workers, as expressed in the shift of political allegiances
within the soviets and in the general attitude of the working population. Lenin
had actually succeeded in making the proletarian revolution for the
workers, thus substantiating his own revolutionary concepts. However, when he
demanded the preparation for the insurrection, he did not speak of the exercise
of state power by the soviets but of that by the party. With the majority of the
soviet deputies being Bolshevik, or supporting the Bolsheviks, he took for
granted that the new government would be a Bolshevik government. And that was
the case of course, even though some left Social Revolutionaries and left
Socialists obtained positions in the new government.

At first, however, the Bolsheviks proceeded rather cautiously, emphasizing
the democratic nature of their new regime and their willingness to accept the
decisions of the popular masses even if not in agreement with them. They did not
at once repudiate the election of the Constituent Assembly, which, as it turned
out, gave a large majority to the Social Revolutionaries and put the Bolsheviks
in the minority. But despite their election success, due to their traditional
empathy with the peasants, the Social Revolutionaries were not a unified party,
particularly with regard to the question of the continuation of war. The left
Social Revolutionaries were in closer accord with the Bolsheviks than with the
right wing of their own party. While the elections for the Constituent Assembly
were being held, an All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies was also in
progress. The congress split the Social Revolutionaries and the left wing
entered a coalition with the Bolsheviks. The election results had made clear
that the Constituent Assembly would destroy the Bolshevik Party’s political
dominance and the accomplishments of the revolution as well. With the consent of
the Social Revolutionaries and some left Socialists, the Bolsheviks simply drove
the assembly away.

The will of the majority of the population, workers and peasants, to reach
for peace, land, bread, and liberty, found a complete counterpart in the
political program of the Bolshevik Party. The early bourgeois democratic
aspiration for a Constituent Assembly had lost its apparent importance, not only
for the Bolsheviks but for the broad masses as well. Not only in Russia but
internationally revolutionaries hailed soviet rule as an accomplishment of
historical significance. Even such a skeptical socialist as Luxemburg stated
that by seizing power, the Bolsheviks had “for the first time proclaimed the
final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical policies.” (24) They
had done so by “solving the famous problem of winning a majority of the people”
by revolutionary tactics that led to a majority, instead of waiting for latter to
evolve a revolutionary tactic.(25) In her view, at least far as the urban
masses were concerned, Lenin’s party had grasped their true interests by playing
all power into the hands of soviets.

From his own point of view, however, Lenin equated soviet power with the
power of the Bolshevik Party; he saw in the latter’s monopoly of the state the
realization of the rule of the soviets. After all, there was only the choice
between a capitalist government and a workers’ and peasants’ government able to
prevent the return of the bourgeois rule. But to continue Bolshevik domination
of the government and its state apparatus, the workers and peasants would have
to continue to elect Bolsheviks to the soviets. For that there was no guarantee.
Just as the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, once in the majority, now
found themselves in a minority position, so things could change again for the
Bolsheviks. It was thus necessary to prevent a reemergence of the soviets, which
might favor a return to bourgeois political institutions. Left to themselves,
the soviets were quite capable of abdicating their power position for the
promises of the liberal bourgeoisie and their social reformist allies. To secure
the socialist character of the revolution demanded, then, the suppression of all
anti-Bolshevik forces within and outside the soviet system. In a short time the
soviet regime became the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party. The emasculated
soviets were retained, though only formally, to hide this fact.

Quite apart from the tactical participation in the elections to the
Constituent Assembly, and the occasional lip service paid to this bourgeois
institution, Lenin had already, in the so-called “April Theses” proposed to his
organization after his return to Russia, argued that a parliamentary republic
was unnecessary because of the existence of the soviets, which in his
view would allow for a type of state such as had been brought about by the Paris
Commune. In accordance with this idea, he did not think that socialism was the
immediate task, but that the “transition to the control of production and the
distribution of products by the soviet of workers’ deputies” sufficed to serve
the immediate needs of the revolution. What was of foremost importance was the
nature of the state, of political power, from which everything else would flow
in the direction of socialism. “All power to the soviets,” did not include
possession of the means of production, or the abolition of wage labor. The
workers were not expected to administer but merely to oversee the industrial
enterprises. The first decree of Workers’ Control extended it

over the production, storing, buying and selling of raw materials
and finished goods as well as over the finances of the enterprises. The
workers exercise this control through their elected organizations, such as
factory and shop committees, soviet elders, etc. The office employes and the
technical personnel are also to have representation in these committees. ...
The organs of workers’ control have the right to supervise production.
Commercial secrets are abolished. The owners have to show to the organs of
workers’ control all their books and statements for the current year and for
the past year.” (26)

However, capitalist production and workers’ control are incompatible and this
makeshift affair, whereby the Bolsheviks hoped to retain the aid of the
capitalist organizers of production and yet satisfy the yearnings of the workers
to take possession of industry, could not last for long. “We did not decree
socialism all at once throughout the whole of industry,” Lenin explained a year
later,

because socialism can take shape and become finally established
only when the working class has learned to run the economy. ... That is why we
introduced workers’ control, knowing that it was a contradictory and partial
measure. But we consider it most important and valuable that the workers have
themselves tackled the job, that from workers’ control, which in the principal
industries was bound to be chaotic, amateurish and partial, we have passed to
workers’ administration of industry on a nation-wide scale.” (27)

The change from “control” to “administration” turned out entail the abolition
of both. To be sure, just as the emasculation the soviets took some time, for it
required the formation and consolidation of the Bolshevik state apparatus, so
the workers influence in factories and workshops was only gradually eliminated
through such methods as shifting the controlling rights from the factory
committees to the trade unions and then transforming the latter into agencies of
the state. In fact, workers’ control by factory councils or shop stewards
preceded the governmental decree. These committees arose spontaneously during
the Revolution, as the only possible form of workers’ representation due to the
destruction of the trade unions during the war. The latter had been, of course,
the counterpart of Russian Social Democracy and were a stronghold of its
Menshevik wing. They rapidly revived after the February Revolution but found now
strong opposition in the factory committees, which held the unions to be
superfluous under the changed conditions. Generally the factory councils sided
with the Bolsheviks and considered themselves a more adequate form of
organization, not only in the fight for immediate demands, for workers’ control,
but also as newly founded system for the administration of production in the
enterprise and in the economy as a whole.

With the overthrow of the Provisional Government, and even before serious
attempts were made to integrate the factory councils into a centralized network
so as to secure both the existence of the national economy and the undivided
control of production and distribution by the producers themselves, which would
practically mean the abolition of wage labor. But even as a mere tendency, and a
rather weak one, considering the Russian conditions, this project was at once
outlawed by the Bolshevik regime under the subterfuge that it would impair
economic revival and reduce the productivity of labor. Although the factory
committees had been one of the conditions of the Bolshevik assumption of power,
their contemplated self-determination now endangered and contradicted the
dictatorial rule of the Bolshevik government. With the Mensheviks’ loss of power
went also their control of the trade unions, which were taken over by the
Bolsheviks. The factory councils were induced to subordinate themselves to the
trade unions, in fact, to turn themselves into a trade-union instrument for the
assertion of the latter’s will in the factories. The trade unions, with their
bureaucratic centralization, were less susceptible to independent actions and
could more easily be integrated into the emerging Bolshevik state. And, as it
was pointed out at the time, “the objective course of the revolution demanded
the transition to government control and regulation of industry.” (28)

In this way, workers’ control reversed itself, becoming control over the
workers and their production. The basic need was for greater production and,
because mere exhortation could not induce the workers to exploit themselves more
than had been customary, the Bolshevik state extended itself into the economic
sphere, insisting all the while that economic control by the state actually
meant control by the proletariat. This did not hinder Lenin from declaring that
it was absolutely essential that the technical and organizational direction of
production must be the exclusive right of the state-appointed managers and
directors, for

the foundation of socialism calls for absolute and strict unify of
will which directs the joint labors of hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands
of people ... How can strict unity of will be assured? By thousands
subordinating their wills to the will of one. Given ideal class-consciousness
and discipline on the part of those taking part in the common work, this
subordination would be quite like the mild leadership of a conductor of an
orchestra. It may assume the sharp form of dictatorship if ideal discipline
and class consciousness are lacking. But be that as it may, unquestioning
subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of
processes organized on the pattern of large-scale industry. (29)

If this statement is taken seriously, class consciousness must have been
totally lacking in Russia, for control of production, and of social life in
general, took on dictatorial forms exceeding anything experienced in capitalist
nations and excluding any measure of self-determination on the part of the
workers down to the present day.

Notes

 
1. Cf. Kautsky, The Road to Power (1909).

 
2. The individuals referred to here represent not only themselves but
currents within the labor movement, in which they played outstanding roles
through their contributions to the movement’s theory and practice.

 
3. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 35 (Moscow: Progress, 1966), p. 76.

 
4. The literature and documentation of the Russian revolution is so immense
that hardly anything can or need be added to it apart from the work of
professional historians, especially as this upheaval has been treated from every
conceivable point of view, pro and contra, as well as with respect to its impact
upon the world at large and the development of capitalism. We will therefore
deal only with aspects of this revolution relevant to understanding its effect
upon the labor movement in general and the theory and practice of Marxism in
particular.

 
5. My Past and Thoughts. The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973), p. 500.

 
6. The Social-Revolutionary Party represented the interests of the peasantry
in the Russian revolution. It was organized in 1905 through the unification of a
number of Populist groups. Its program demanded a federated republic based on a
general franchise, and stressed the “socialization” of all land, that is, its
ownership and control by democratically organized communities on the basis of
equal holdings and the abolition of hired labor. Although it included workers
and intellectuals, the party did not concern itself with the nationalization of
industry, on the assumption that the abolition of landownership would by itself
prevent the further development of the capitalist relations of production.
However, its left wing, the “Maximalists,” advocated the inclusion in its
program of the socialization of industry under the egis of a Workers’ Republic.
It also differentiated itself from the pro-war right wing of the party by its
internationalist stand on the war issue. Forming a political bloc with the
Mensheviks, the Social-Revolutionaries dominated the Petrograd Soviet; by
themselves they controlled the Soviet of Peasant Deputies. In the election for
the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, in November 1917, they received 17 million
out of 41,700,000 votes, and the party’s chairman, V. M. Chernov, was elected
President of the Assembly. Prior to this, the party was represented in the
Provisional Government formed at the time of the February Revolution. Its left
wing supported the Bolsheviks and took part in the first Bolshevik government,
as well as in the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly.

 
7. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress, 1964), p. 336.

 
8. What is to Be Done? (New York, 1929), written in February 1902.

 
9. Ibid., p. 33.

 
10. Ibid., pp. 1134.

 
11. David Lane, The Roots of Russian Communism (State College,
Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), pp. 12-15. This is an extensive
analysis – with respect to the country as a whole and to specific districts – of
the social composition, structure, membership, and political activity of Russian
social democratic groups from 1889 to 1907.

 
12. As quoted by N. Valentinov in his book Encounters With Lenin (1968) p.
42. See also A. Balabanoff, My Life As a Rebel (1968), and other memoirs.

 
13. L. Trotsky, 1905 (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 104.

 
14. For a detailed history of the soviets see O. Anweiler, The Soviets: The
Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921 (New York: Pantheon,
1974).

 
15. Trotsky, 1905, p. 251.

 
16. Lenin, “The Dissolution of the Duma and the Tasks of the Proletariat”
(1906) in Collected Works, Vol. 11 (Moscow: Progress, 1962), pp. 124-5.

 
17. Ibid., pp. 128-9.

 
18. “Socialism and Anarchism” (1905), in Collected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow:
Progress, 1962), p. 72.

 
19. “Draft Resolutions for the Fifth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.” (1907), in
Collected Works, Vol 12(Moscow: Progress, 1962), pp. 142-4.

 
20. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. I (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1932), p. 479. Cf. M. Ferro, The Russian
Revolution of February 1917 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p.
308.

 
21. “The Workers’ Party and the Peasantry” (1902) in Collected Works Vol. 4 (Moscow: Progress, 1960), p. 422.

 
22. “Speech in Defense of the Tactics of the Communist International” at the
Third Congress of the Communist International (July 1921), Against Dogmatism and
Sectarianism in the Working-Class Movement (Moscow, 1965), pp. 179-81.

 
23. “The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power” (Letter to the Central Committee of
the Petrograd and Moscow Party Committee, September 1917) in Collected Works,
Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress, 1964), p. 21.

 
24. R. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1961), p. 39.

 
25. Ibid.

 
26. J. Bunyan and H. H. Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1934).

 
27. Questions of the Socialist Organization of the Economy (Moscow: p. 173).

 
28. A. M. Pankratova, Fabrikräte in Russland (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1976), p.
232. This important book, first published in Moscow in 1923, offers a
comprehensive description – albeit from a Bolshevik point of view – of the rise,
activities, and aspirations of the Russian factory councils, their relations to
the trade unions, and their elimination by the Bolshevik state.

 
29. Lenin, Questions of the Socialist Organization of the Economy, p. 127.


* Chapter 5 : The Idea of the Commune


The workers’ failure to maintain control over their own destiny was due
mainly to Russia’s general objective unreadiness for a socialist development,
but also to the fact that neither the soviets, nor the socialist parties, knew
how to go about organizing a socialist society. There was no historical
precedent and Marxist theory had not seriously concerned itself with the problem
of the socialist reconstruction of society. However, past revolutionary
occurrences had some relevance, particularly as regards Russia, because of her
general backwardness. Following Marx and Engels, Russian Marxists were apt to
point to the Paris Commune as an example of a working-class revolution under
similarly unfavorable conditions. Trotsky wrote, for instance, that

it is not excluded that in a backward country with a lesser
degree of capitalist development, the proletariat should sooner reach
political supremacy than in a highly developed capitalist state. Thus, in
middle-class Paris, the proletariat consciously took into its hands the
administration of public affairs in 1871. True it is that the reign of the
proletariat lasted only for two months; it is remarkable, however, that in the
far more advanced centers of England and the United States, the proletariat
never was in power even for the duration of one day.(1)

Lenin, too, found in the Paris Commune a justification for his own attitude
with respect to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet dictatorship. Quoting
Marx, he cited as the great lesson of the Paris Commune that the bourgeois state
cannot simply be taken over by the proletariat but must be destroyed and
replaced by a proletarian state, or semi-state, which would begin to wither away
as soon as majority rule had replaced the minority rule of bourgeois society.
"Overthrow the capitalists,” he wrote, “crush with the iron hand of the armed
workers the resistance of these exploiters, break the bureaucratic machine of
the modern state – and you have before you a mechanism of the highest technical
equipment, freed of ’parasites’, capable of being set in motion by the united
workers themselves who hire their own technicians, managers, bookkeepers, and
pay them all, as, indeed, every ’state’ official, with the usual workers’ wages.
Here is a concrete, practical task, immediately realizable in relation to all
trusts, a task that frees the workers of exploitation and makes use of the
experiences (especially in the realm of the construction of the state) which the
Commune began to reveal in practice.” (2)

The practice of the proletarian state as revealed by the Commune was a rather
limited one, however, not so much “consciously” introduced, as Trotsky asserted,
as spontaneously released by the particular conditions of the Franco-Prussian
war, the siege of Paris, and the great patriotism of the Parisian population.
But whatever the circumstances, the incorporation of the workers into the
National Guard, which they came to dominate, gave them the weapons to express
their opposition to the newly established bourgeois government that was trying
to come to terms with the Prussian invaders. Their great suffering during the
siege of Paris had not diminished the proletariat’s patriotic ardor but merely
intensified their hatred for the bourgeoisie, which was willing to accept the
consequences of the defeat in order to secure its own rule through the disarming
of the working class. In view of the increasingly revolutionary situation in
Paris, the bourgeois government established itself in Versailles, preparing for
the reconquest of the capital. The Paris municipal elections of March 26, 1871,
gave the republican left opposition a majority of four to one and led to the
proclamation of the Commune de Paris. The Commune shared the rule of the city
with the Central Committee of the National Guard, responsible for its defense.

Although the Communal Revolution saw itself as inaugurating a “new political
era” and as marking the “end of the old governmental and clerical world, of
militarism, of monopolism, of privileges to which the proletariat owes its
servitude, the Nation its miseries and disasters,” (3) the force of
circumstances, as well as the variety of opinions which agitated the Communards,
precluded a far-reaching or consistent socialist program. There were, however,
the decrees that abolished the Army in favor of the National Guard, the
limitation of government salaries to the equivalent of workers’ wages, the
expropriation of Church property, the elimination of fines imposed upon workers
by their employers, the abolition of nightwork in bakeries, the nationalization
of workshops abandoned by their bourgeois owners, and so forth. But these
measures did not as yet point to a radical social transformation. In the
Executive Council of the Commune, moreover, workers were still in a minority. Of
its 90 members, only 21 belonged to the working class, while the rest were
middle-class people such as small tradesmen, clerks, journalists, writers,
painters, and intellectuals. Only a few of the leading members of the Commune
were adherents of the First International. The majority was divided between
Proudhonists, Blanquists, and Jacobins of various descriptions, who were
interested mainly in political liberties and the preservation of small property
owners in a decentralized society. The Commune was thus open to different
interpretations by a variety of interests operating within it.

All the shortcomings of the Commune, particularly in the light of Marx’s own
position, could not erase the fact that it was basically an anti-bourgeois
government, one in which some workers actually exercised governmental functions
and expressed their willingness to dominate society. This intrinsic fact weighed
far heavier in Marx’s estimation of the Commune than all its other aspects,
which ran counter to his own concept of socialism.

The Commune was not initiated by the International and had no socialist
character in the Marxian sense. That Marx nonetheless identified himself and the
International with the Commune was seen by his political adversaries as an
opportunist attempt to annex the glory of the Commune to Marxism.(4) There is no
need to question Marx’s motivations in making the cause of the Commune his own.
The very passions released by the Paris Commune among the workers as well as the
bourgeoisie indicate that the social class division can come to overrule and
dominate the ideological and even material differentiations within each separate
class. It was not the particular program adopted by the Commune that mattered –
whether it was of a centralist or a federalist nature, whether it actually or
only potentially implied the expropriation of the bourgeoisie-but the fact alone
that segments of the working class had momentarily freed themselves from
bourgeois rule, had arms at their disposal, and occupied the institutions of
government. In the brutal answer of the bourgeoisie to this rather feeble first
attempt at self-government on the part of the Parisian workers, all
class-conscious workers recognized the ferocity and irreconcilability of the
class enemy, not only in Paris but throughout the world. Instinctively as well
as consciously, they stood at the side of the French workers, quite
independently of all the theoretical and practical issues which otherwise
divided the working-class movement. For this reason Marx described the Commune
as “essentially a working-class government” and as “the political form, at last
discovered, under which to achieve the economic emancipation of labor,” for, as
he argued, “the political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the
perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as the
lever for uprooting the economic foundations upon which rests the existence of
classes, and therefore of class rule.” (5)

The destruction of the bourgeois state and the capture of political power
made sense only on the assumption that it would be used to eliminate the
capital-labor relation as well. One cannot have a workers’ state in a capitalist
society. Marx seemed convinced that, had the Commune survived, its own
necessities would have forced it to shed its many inadequacies. “The
multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the
multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor,” he wrote, “show
that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of
government had been emphatically repressive."(6) The fall of the Commune
precluded further speculation about its expansive quality and the direction it
would take. But Marx saw no need to emphasize his own differences with the
Commune, instead stressing those of its aspects that could serve the future
struggles of the proletariat.

For this purpose, Marx simply side-stepped the problem of federalism and
centralism, which, among others, divided the Marxists from the Proudhonists
whose ideas dominated the Commune. He described the latter and its autonomy as
instrumental in breaking the bourgeois state and realizing the producers’
self-government. The Paris Commune, he wrote, was to serve as a model to all the
great industrial centers in France. The communal regime once established in
Paris and the secondary centers, the old centralized government would in the
provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers. In a
rough sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to develop
it states clearly that the commune was to be the political form of even the
smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was
to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service.
The rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by
an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were
again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be
at any time revocable and bound by the instructions of his constituents. The few
but important functions which still would remain for a central government were
not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be
discharged by communal and, therefore, strictly responsible agents. The unity of
the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the
Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the State
power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and
superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.
(7)

By merely relating the theoretically contemplated national federation of the
autonomous communes, Marx gave the impression of general agreement with the plan
and its workability. But the whole of Marx’s work speaks against this
conclusion, for he had never been able to envision the return of political forms
which had already been superseded by more advanced ones. He thus found it
necessary to state that it is generally the fate of completely new historical
creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of
social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune,
which breaks the modern State power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the
medieval communes, which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum
of, that very State power. The communal constitution has been mistaken for an
attempt to break up into a federation of small states, as dreamed of by
Montesquieu and the Girondins, that unity of great nations which, if originally
brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of
social production. The antagonism of the Commune against the State power has
been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against
overcentralization. (8)

Marx’s opinion, then, the federal character of the Communal Constitution was
not in opposition to a centralized social organization but merely realized the
centralist requirements in ways different from those of the capitalist state, in
ways that assured the self-rule of the producers. In short, as Lenin later
insisted, Marx considered “the possibility of voluntary centralization, of a
voluntary union of the communes into a nation, a voluntary fusion of the
proletarian communes in the process of destroying bourgeois supremacy and the
bourgeois state machinery.” (9)

However, the truth of the matter seems to be that on this point Marx did not
strive for great precision in the formulation of his ideas. Written in great
haste and in commemoration of the defeated Commune, his address on the civil war
was not really designed as a lesson on and solution to the problems of the
proletarian revolution and the formation of a socialist society, especially as
before, during, and after the Commune, Marx did not believe in the possibility
of its success, which alone would have lent some reality to the problems posed
in his address ten years after the Commune he described it as an “uprising of a
single city under very special conditions, with a population which neither was
nor could be socialistic.” (10) Though the struggle had been hopeless, it was
still instructive by pointing to the necessity of a proletarian dictatorship to
break the power of the bourgeois state. But this did not make the Commune, as
Lenin claimed, a model for the construction of the communist state. It is not a
communist state, at any rate, that the proletariat has to build, but a communist
society. Its real goal is not another state, whether federalist or centralist,
democratic or dictatorial, but a classless society and abolition of the state.

The labor movement is no less prone to mythologize its own history than is
the bourgeoisie. Historic events appear different from what they actually were
and their descriptions are directed more to the emotional receptivity of people
than to their need for accuracy. The class struggle, like any other, precludes
objectivity. Marx and Engels were not above myth-making, even if covered up by a
great amount of sophistry. When Lenin conceived of the Russian revolution as an
emulation of the Paris Commune, he was appealing to a mythological Commune, not
to its actual character. The Commune was of so great an interest to Lenin not
because of what it actually implied, but because of what had been said about it
by Marx and Engels. Representing a wing within the Marxist movement, he felt the
need to justify his own position in terms of Marxian ideology. While hiding in
Finland he wrote his pamphlet State and Revolution on a problem he had pondered
many years before but which now, after the February Revolution, seemed to him no
longer merely of theoretical but also of practical importance. Despite his great
respect for theory, Lenin was preeminently a practical politician. While there
could be no practice without theory, only that theory out of many was acceptable
which suited his particular practice – that is, the capture of political power
under the given conditions. At the same time – as an excuse as well as a
support – the acceptance of a theory must be based on authority; even an Emperor
is there by the grace of God. For Lenin, the unquestioned authorities were Marx
and Engels. In this respect he was fortunate because both were dead and unable
to talk back, and also because during their lives they had commented on a great
number of historical events, and had suggested measures to deal with them, in
accordance with their own time-conditioned apprehension of these events. A
dogmatic acceptance of Marxism will thus allow the faithful Marxist to find
support for his own convictions by merely picking one or another statement out
of the founding fathers’ wide-ranging, though often erroneous, pronouncements on
issues that, due to changed economic and political conditions, have long lost
their meaning. Although Lenin wrote a great deal, he did not contribute, and had
no intention to contribute, to the main body of Marxian doctrine – not because of
a lack of ability to do so, but because, for him, Marx and Engels (and even
Kautsky, up to 1914) had said all that needed to be said for the comprehension
of history, capitalism, and the proletarian revolution.

Although there is really nothing positive to be learned from the Paris
Commune except the obvious – that the proletariat can not utilize but must
overthrow the capitalist state – what attracted Lenin to Marx’s comments on the
Commune was the statement that “the political rule of the producers is
incompatible with the eternalization of their social servitude"; that is, that
this political rule, if maintainable, will lead to a socialist society. For
Lenin, this political rule was of course embodied in the new state, emerging out
of the revolution, which would then serve as the vehicle of the socialization
process. Perhaps, carried away by his own revolutionary ardor – and quite in
contrast to his own doctrine, which denied the proletariat the independent
capacity to make a revolution, not to speak of building socialism – Lenin
affirmed in State and Revolution the proletariat’s ability to construct a really
democratic society and to manage its own production under an egalitarian system
of distribution. “Capitalist culture,” he wrote now,

has created large-scale production, factories, the postal
services, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of functions
of the “old state power” has become simplified and can be reduced to such
simple operations of registration, filing and checking, that they will be
quite within the reach of every literate person, and it will be possible to
perform them for “workingmen’s wages,” which circumstances can (and must)
strip those functions of every shadow of privilege, of every appearance of
"official grandeur.” All officials, without exception, elected and subject to
recall at any time, their salaries reduced to ’workingmen’s wages” – these
simple and self-evident democratic measures, while completely uniting the
interests of the workers and the majority of the peasants, at the same time
serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism.” (11)

But, as we have seen before, in Lenin’s view “workers’ management” finds its
actual realization through the political and economic power of the state. It is
the latter that manages the relations of production and distribution; only this
state is now equated with the working class itself. It is necessary, Lenin
wrote,

to organize the whole national economy like the postal system,
in such a way that the technicians, managers, bookkeepers as well as all
officials, should receive no higher wages than “workingmen’s wages"; all under
the control and leadership of the armed proletariat – this is our immediate
aim. This is the kind of state and economic basis we need. All citizens are
transformed into hired employes of the state, which is made up of armed
workers. ... The whole society becomes one office and one factory with equal
pay and equal work.” (12)

Of course, Lenin was too well versed in Marxian theory to leave the matter at
this point. He knew that socialism excludes state rule, and he even quoted
Engels’s remark that “the first act in which the state really comes forward as
the representative of society as a whole – the seizure of the means of production
in the name of society – is at the same time its last independent act as a
state.” (13) It should follow that the socialist organization of production is
a function not of the state, but of social institutions that progressively
eliminate the functions of the state, finally to end them altogether. But Lenin
saw the “withering away” of the state in a quite different light. “From the
moment,” he wrote, “when all members of society, or even only the overwhelming
majority, have learned to govern the state themselves, have taken this business
into their own hands, have established control over the insignificant minority
of capitalists, over the gentry with capitalistic leanings, and the workers
thoroughly demoralized by capitalism-from this moment the need for government
begins to disappear.” (14) Instead of dissolving the state, i.e., the
“dictatorship of the proletariat,” within the socialization process, it is the
proletarian state itself, in Lenin’s view, that actualizes the socialization
process. The state has to govern in order for the great majority to learn how to
govern the state.

Behind this reasoning, if such it is, hides Lenin’s recognition of the
objective difficulties in the way of the socialist reconstruction of Russian
society. All that could be accomplished was the capture of state power and the
state’s intervention in the economy. Lenin was convinced that Russia’s
“modernization” could be more effectively realized through the agency of the
state than by private-enterprise initiative, and he seems to have convinced
himself of the possibility of imbuing the workers with the same idea, so that
they might identify themselves with the Bolshevik state as the latter identified
itself with the proletariat. However, when Lenin was writing State and
Revolution, the Bolshevik state was only a mere possibility that might or might
not become a reality. The existing Provisional Government had first to be
overthrown, and the workers had to be encouraged to undertake this task, or at
least not to interfere with those who would. They had to be convinced that there
was no need to leave the organization of society to the bourgeoisie, but that
they were quite capable, by themselves, of handling the matter. The very
language of State and Revolution, as well as the rather primitive suggestions on
how to go about building the new society, indicate that this pamphlet was not
conceived as a serious discussion of the relations between the state and
revolution, but as a propaganda instrument to induce Lenin’s followers and the
workers generally to make an end of the existing state. As such it came too late
to affect the seizure of power, though it could still serve as a “Marxist”
justification for the Bolshevik initiative.

Everything Lenin wrote prior to State and Revolution, and every step taken
after the seizure of power, turns the apparent radicalism displayed in this
pamphlet into a mere opportunistic move to support the immediate aim of gaining
power for the Bolshevik Party. It is quite possible that Lenin’s identification
with the proletariat was subjectively honest, in that he actually believed that
the latter must come to see in his conception of the revolutionary process their
own true interests and their real convictions.

On the other hand, the ambiguities within his revolutionary proposals
indicate that, while trusting his own revolutionary principles, Lenin did not
trust those of the working class, which would first have to be educated to
continue to do for themselves what, meanwhile, would be done for them by the
Bolshevik state. What he allows the workers with his left hand, he takes away
again with his right. It was then not a momentary emotional aberration on the
part of Lenin that induced him to grant so much revolutionary self-determination
to the workers, but a pragmatic move in the manipulation of the revolution in
accordance with his own party concept of the socialist state.

Notes

 
1. L. Trotsky, Our Revolution (New York, 1918), p. 85.

 
2. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International, 1932), p. 44.

 
3. Quoted by A. Home, The Fall of Paris (New York: Penguin, 1965), P 33).

 
4. According to Bakunin, for instance, the impression made by the Commune was
so powerful that “even Marxists, whose ideas were overthrown by the uprising,
saw themselves forced to lift their hats before it. Not only that, in
contradiction to all logic and their own true feelings, they adopted the program
of the Commune as their own. It was a comical but unavoidable travesty, for
otherwise they would have lost all their followers due to the mighty passion the
revolution aroused all over the world.” Quoted by F. Brupbacher, Marx und
Bakunin (Munich: Die Aktion, 1922), pp. 101-102.

 
5. Marx, The Civil War in France, in Political Writings, Vol. 3
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 212.

 
6. Ibid.

 
7. Ibid., p. 210.

 
8. Ibid., p. 211.

 
9. Lenin, State and Revolution, p. 46.

 
10. Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis, Marx-Engels Werke, Vol. 35, p. 160.

 
11. State and Revolution, pp. 38-40.

 
12. Ibid., pp. 44, 83, 84.

 
13. Ibid., p. 16.

 
14. Ibid., p. 84.


* Chapter 6 : State and Counter-Revolution


Lenin’s state was to be a Bolshevik state supported by workers and peasants.
As the privileged classes could not be expected to support it, it was necessary
to disfranchize them and thus end bourgeois democracy. Once in power, the
Bolsheviks restricted political freedoms – freedom of speech, press, assembly,
and association, and the right to vote and to be elected to the soviets – to the
laboring population, that is, to all people “who have acquired the means of
living through labor that is productive and useful to society, that is, the
laborers and employes of all classes who are employed in industry, trade,
agriculture, etc., and to peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who employ
no help for purposes of making profits.” (1) However, the peasants could not be
integrated into the envisioned “one great factory,” which transformed “all
citizens into the hired employes of the state,” for they had made their
revolution for “private property,” for land of their own, disregarding the fact
that nominally all land belonged to the nation as a whole. The concessions made
to the peasants were the price the Bolsheviks had to pay for their support. “The
Russian peasantry,” wrote Trotsky, “will be interested in upholding proletarian
rule at least in the first, most difficult, period, no less than were the French
peasants interested in upholding the military role of Napoleon Bonaparte, who by
force guaranteed to the new owners the integrity of their land shares.” (2)

But the peasants’ political support of the Bolsheviks was one thing and their
economic interests another. Disorganization through war and civil war reduced
industrial and agricultural production. The large landed estates had been broken
up to provide millions of agricultural laborers with small holdings. Subsistence
farming largely displaced commercial farming. But even the market-oriented
peasantry refused to turn its surpluses over to the state, as the latter had
little or nothing to offer in return. The internal policies of the Bolshevik
state were mainly determined by its relation to the peasantry, which did not fit
into the evolving state-capitalist economy. To placate the peasants was possible
only at the expense of the proletariat, and to favor the latter, only at the
expense of the peasantry. To stay in power, the Bolsheviks were constantly
forced to alter their positions regarding either one or the other class.
Ultimately, in order to make themselves independent of both, they resorted to
terroristic measures which subjected the whole of the population to their
dictatorial rule.

The Bolshevik dilemma with regard to the peasants was quite generally
recognized. Despite her sympathies for the Bolshevik Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg,
for example, could not desist from criticizing their agricultural policies as
detrimental to the quest for socialism. Property rights, in her view, must be
turned over to the nation, or the state, for only then is it possible to
organize agricultural production on a socialistic basis. The Bolshevik slogan
"immediate seizure and distribution of the land to the peasants” was not a
socialist measure but one that, by creating a new form of private property, cut
off the way to such measures. The Leninist agrarian reform, she wrote, “has
created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism in the
countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn
than that of the noble large landowners.” (3) This criticism, however, did no
more than restate the unavoidable dilemma. While she favored the taking of power
by the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg recoiled before the conditions under which alone
this was possible. Lenin, however, expected the peasants’ continuing support not
only because the Bolsheviks had ratified their seizure of land, but also because
the Soviet state intended to be a “cheap government,” in order to ease the
peasants’ tax burden.

It is partly with this “cheap government” in mind that Lenin spoke so
repetitiously of the necessity of “workingmen’s wages” for all the
administrative and technical functionaries. “Cheap government” was to cement
together the “workers’ and peasants’ alliance.” During the first period of
Bolshevik rule, moreover, the egalitarian principles enunciated in State and
Revolution became largely a reality, due to the difficulties in the way of
providing the urban population with the bare necessities of life. The government
saw itself forced to take from the peasantry all their surplus grain, and often
more than that, in the form of “loans,” or in exchange for valueless paper
money. Their violent reactions induced the Bolsheviks to replace the system of
confiscation with a tax in kind, which failed to still the peasants’ opposition.
Finally, in 1921 the government was forced into a New Economic Policy (NEP),
involving a partial return to capitalist market relations and an attempt to
attract capital from abroad.

The invitation to invest in Russian industry was largely ignored by Western
capitalism. The problem remained how to capitalize the country without ending up
with a private-enterprise system – the logical outcome of a development of
peasant farming under free market relations. The New Economic Policy could be
regarded either as a mere interval in the “socialization process” or as a more
permanent policy entailing the risk that the newly generating private capitalist
forces would overtake the state-controlled sector of the economy and even
destroy it. In such an eventuality, the Bolshevik intervention would have been
in vain – a mere incident in a bourgeois revolution. Lenin felt sure, however,
that a partial return to market relations could be politically mastered, i.e.,
that the Bolshevik Party could hold state power and secure enough economic
weight by maintaining control of key positions, such as large-scale industry,
banking, and foreign trade, thus neutralizing the emerging private property
relations in agriculture, small-scale industry, and the retail trade. In time,
the real social power would shift from the peasantry to state-controlled
industry by virtue of the latter’s growth.

In the end, however, the problems of the “mixed economy” of the NEP period
were resolved by the forced collectivization of agriculture, the centrally
planned economy, and the terroristic regime of Stalinism. The fears of Rosa
Luxemburg with respect to Bolshevik peasant policy proved to be unwarranted.
However, the destruction of peasant property by way of collectivization did not
lead to socialism but merely secured the continuance of state capitalism. By
itself, the collectivized form of agriculture has no socialist character. It is
merely the transformation of small-scale into large-scale agricultural
production by political means in distinction to the concentration and
centralization process brought about, though imperfectly, in the capitalist
market economy. Collectivization was to make possible a more effective
extraction of surplus labor from the peasant population. It required a
"revolution from above,” a veritable war between the government and the
peasantry, (4) wherein the government falsely claimed to act on behalf of and to
be aided by the poor peasants, in wiping out the kulaks, or rich peasants, who
were blocking the road to socialism.

Unless for higher wages, implying better living standards, wage workers see
no point in exerting themselves beyond that unavoidable measure demanded by
their bosses. Supervision, too, demands incentives. The new controllers of labor
showed little interest in the improvement of production at “workingmen’s wages.”
The negative incentive, implied in the need for employment in order to live at
all, was not enough to spur the supervisory and technical personnel to greater
efforts. It was therefore soon supplemented with the positive incentives of wage
and salary differentials between and within the various occupations and
professions, and with special privileges for particularly effective
performances. These differentials were progressively increased until they came
to resemble those prevalent in private-enterprise economies.

But to return to the Bolshevik government: Elected by the soviets, it was in
theory subordinated to, and subject to recall by, the All-Russian Congress of
Soviets, and merely empowered to carry on within the framework of its
directives. In practice, it played an independent role in coping with the
changing political and economic needs and the everyday business of government.
The Congress of Soviets was not a permanent body, but met at intervals of
shorter or longer duration, delegating legislative and executive powers to the
organs of the state. With the “carrying of the class struggle into the rural
districts,” i.e., with the state-organized expropriatory expeditions in the
countryside and the installation of Bolshevik “committees of the poor” in the
villages, the “workers’ and peasants’ alliance” that had brought the Bolsheviks
to power promised to deteriorate and to endanger the Bolshevik majority in the
congress as well as its partnership with the left Social Revolutionaries. To be
sure, the Bolshevik government, controlling the state apparatus, could have
ignored the congress, or driven it away, as it had driven away the Constituent
Assembly. But the Bolsheviks preferred to work within the framework of the
soviet system, and to work toward a Congress of Soviets obedient to the party.
To this end, it was necessary to control the elections of deputies to the
soviets and to outlaw other political parties, most of all the traditional party
of peasants, the Social Revolutionaries.

As the Mensheviks and the right Social Revolutionaries had withdrawn from the
congress and opposed the government elected by it, they could easily be
disfranchized, and were outlawed by order of the Central Committee of the
Congress of Soviets in June 1918. The occasion to put an end to the left Social
Revolutionaries arose soon, not only because of the widespread peasant
discontent but also because of political differences, among which was the Social
Revolutionaries’ rejection of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. After the signing
of the treaty, the left Social Revolutionaries withdrew from the Central
Committee. The Fifth Congress of Soviets, in July 1918, expelled the left Social
Revolutionaries. Both the Central Committee and the Council of People’s
Commissars were now exclusively in Bolshevik hands. The latter secured their
majority in the soviets not only because their popularity was still in the
ascendancy, but also because they had learned how to make it increasingly more
difficult for non-Bolsheviks to enter the soviets. In time, the All-Russian
Congress of Soviets became a manipulated body, automatically ratifying the
actions of the government. The abdication of soviet power in favor of
governmental rule, which Lenin had denounced with the slogan “All power to the
soviets,” was now for the first time actually realized in the Bolshevik
one-party government.

With the soviets no longer thought of as the organizational instrument for a
socialist production system, they became a kind of substitute parliament. The
soviet state, it was proclaimed programmatically,

 “while affording the toiling masses incomparably greater
opportunities than those enjoyed under bourgeois democracy and parliamentary
government, to elect and recall deputies in the manner easiest and most
accessible to the workers and peasants,... at the same time abolishes the
negative aspects of parliamentary government, especially the separation of the
legislature and the executive, the isolation of the representative
institutions from the masses.... The Soviet government draws the state
apparatus closer to the masses by the fact that the electoral constituency and
the basic unit for the state is no longer a territorial district, but an
industrial unit (workshop, factory).” (5)

The soviet system was seen by the Bolsheviks as a “transmission belt”
connecting the state authorities at the top with the broad masses at the bottom.
Orders issuing from above would be carried out below, and complaints and
suggestions from the workers would reach the government through their deputies
to the Congress of Soviets. Meanwhile, Bolshevik party cells and Bolshevik
domination of the trade unions assured a more direct control within the
enterprises and provided a link between the cadres in the factories and the
governmental institutions. If so inclined, of course, the workers could assume
that there was a connection between them and the government through the soviets,
and that the latter could, via the electoral system, actually determine
government policy and even change governments. This illusory assumption pervades
more or less all electoral systems and could also be held for that of the
soviets. By shifting the electoral constituency from the territorial district to
the place of production, the Bolsheviks did deprive the nonworking layers of
society of partaking in the parliamentary game, (6) without, however, changing
the game itself. In the name of revolutionary necessity, the government made
itself increasingly more independent of the soviets in order to achieve that
centralization of power needed for the domination of society by a single
political party. Even with Bolshevik domination of the soviets, general control
was to be administered by the party and there, according to Trotsky,

the last word belongs to the Central Committee.... This affords
extreme economy of time and energy, and in the most difficult and complicated
circumstances gives a guarantee for the necessary unity of action. Such a
regime is possible only in the presence of the unquestioned authority of the
party, and the faultlessness of its discipline. ... The exclusive role of the
Communist Party under the conditions of a victorious revolution is quite
comprehensible.... The revolutionary supremacy of the proletariat presupposes
within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of the party, with a
clear program of action. ... We have more than once been accused of having
substituted for the dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party.
Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets
became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks
to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary
organization that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility of
becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labor into the apparatus of
the supremacy of labor. In this “substitution” of the power of the party for
the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality
there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental
interests of the working class. It is quite natural that, in the period in
which history brings up those interests,.., the Communists have become the
recognized representatives of the working class as a whole. (7)

Whereas with regard to the soviets of 1905, Trotsky recognized that their
"substance was their efforts to become organs of public authority,” now, after
the Bolshevik victory, it was no longer the soviets but the party and, more
precisely, its central committee, that had to exercise all public authority. (8)
The Bolsheviks, or at any rate their foremost spokesmen, Lenin and Trotsky, had
no confidence whatever in the soviets, those “shapeless parliaments of labor,”
which, in their view, owed their very existence to the Bolshevik Party. Because
there would be no soviet system at all without the party, to speak of a soviet
dictatorship was to speak of the party dictatorship – the one implying the other.
Actually, of course, it had been the other way around, for without the
revolution made by the soviets the Bolshevik Party could never have seized power
and Lenin would still have been in Switzerland. Yet to hold this power, the
party now had to separate itself from the soviets and to control the latter
instead of being controlled by them.

Notwithstanding the demagogery displayed in State and Revolution,
Lenin’s and Trotsky’s attitude regarding the capacities and incapacities of the
working class were not at all surprising, for they were largely shared by the
leading “elites” of all socialist movements and served, in fact, to justify
their existence and privileges. The social and technical division of labor
within the capitalist system did indeed deprive the proletariat of any control,
and therewith understanding, of the complex production and distribution process
that assures the reproduction of the social system. Although a socialist system
of production will have a division of labor different from that prevalent in
capitalism, the new arrangements involved will only be established in time and
in connection with a total reorientation of the production process and its
direction toward goals different from those characteristic of capitalism. It is
therefore only to be expected that the production process will be disrupted in
any revolutionary situation, especially when the productive apparatus is already
in a state of decay, as was the case in the Russia of 1917. It is then also not
surprising that workers should have put their hopes in the new government to
accomplish for them what seemed extremely difficult for them to do.

The identification of soviets and party was clearly shared by the workers and
the Bolsheviks, for otherwise the early dominance of the latter within the
soviets would not be comprehensible. It was even strong enough to allow the
Bolsheviks to monopolize the soviets by underhanded methods that kept
non-Bolsheviks out of them. For the broad urban masses the Bolsheviks were
indeed their party, which proved its revolutionary character precisely by its
support of the soviets and by its insistence upon the dictatorship of the
proletariat. There can also be no doubt that the Bolsheviks, who were, after
all, convinced socialists, were deadly serious in their devotion to the workers’
cause – so much, indeed, that they were ready to defend it even against the
workers should they fail to recognize its necessary requirements.

According to the Bolsheviks, these necessary requirements, i.e., “work,
discipline, order,” could not be left to the self-enforcement of the soviets.
The state, the Bolshevik Party in this case, would regulate all important
economic matters by government ordinances having the force of law. The
construction of the state served no other purpose than that of safeguarding the
revolution and the construction of socialism. They spread this illusion among
the workers with such great conviction because it was their own, for they were
convinced that socialism could be instituted through state control and the
selfless idealism of a revolutionary elite. They must have felt terribly
disappointed when the workers did not properly respond to the urgency of the
call for “work, discipline, and order” and to their revolutionary rhetoric. If
the workers could not recognize their own interests, this recognition would have
to be forced upon them, if necessary by terroristic means. The chance for
socialism should not be lost by default. Sure only of their own revolutionary
vocation, they insisted upon their exclusive right to determine the ways and
means to the socialist reconstruction of society.

However, this exclusive right demanded unshared absolute power. The first
thing to be organized, apart from party and soviets, was then the Cheka, the
political police, to fight the counterrevolution in all its manifestations and
all attempts to unseat the Bolshevik government. Revolutionary tribunals
assisted the work of the Cheka. Concentration camps were installed for the
enemies of the regime. A Red Army, under Trotsky’s command, took the place of
the “armed proletariat.” An effective army, obedient only to the government,
could not be run by “soldiers’ councils,” which were thus at once eliminated.
The army was to fight both external and internal foes and was led and organized
by “specialists,” by czarist officers, that is, who had made their peace with
the Bolshevik government. Because the army emerged victorious out of war and
civil war, which lasted from 1918 to 1920, the Bolshevik government’s prestige
was enormously enhanced and assured the consolidation of its authoritarian rule.

Far from endangering the Bolshevik regime, war and civil war against foreign
intervention and the White counter-revolution strengthened it. It united all who
were bound to suffer by a return of the old authorities. Regardless of their
attitude toward the Bolsheviks and their policies, the peasants were now
defending their newly won land, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries their
very lives. The Bolsheviks, at first rent by internal dissension, united in the
face of the common enemy and, if only for the duration of the civil war, gladly
accepted the aid of the harassed but still existing Mensheviks, Social
Revolutionaries, and even Anarchists as that of a “loyal opposition.” Finally,
the interventionist character of the civil war gave the Bolshevik resistance the
euphoria of nationalism as the government rallied the population to its side
with the slogan “the fatherland is in danger.” In this connection it must be
pointed out that Lenin’s and so the Bolsheviks’ nationalism and internationalism
were of a peculiar kind, in that they could be used alternatively to advance the
fortunes of the Russian revolution and those of the Bolshevik Party. In
Trotsky’s words, “Lenin’s internationalism needs no recommendation. But at the
same time Lenin himself is profoundly national. Lenin personifies the Russian
proletariat, a young class, which politically is scarcely older than Lenin
himself, but a class which is profoundly national, for recapitulated in it is
the entire past development of Russia, in it lies Russia’s entire future, with
it the Russian nation rises and falls.” (9) Perhaps, being so profoundly
national, mere introspection may have led Lenin to appreciate the national needs
and cultural peculiarities of oppressed peoples sufficiently to induce him to
advocate their national liberation and self-determination, up to the point of
secession, as one aspect of his anti-imperialism and as an application of the
democratic principle to the question of nationalities. Since Marx and Engels had
favored the liberation of Poland and home rule for Ireland, he found himself
here in the best of company. But Lenin was a practical politician first of all,
even though he could fulfill this role only at this late hour. As a practical
politician he had realized that the many suppressed nationalities within the
Russian Empire presented a constant threat to the czarist regime, which could be
utilized for its overthrow. To be sure, Lenin was also an internationalist and
saw the socialist revolution as a world revolution. Still, this revolution had
to begin somewhere and in the context of the Russian multinational state, the
demand for national self-determination promised the winning of “allies” in the
struggle against czardom. This strategy was supported by the hope that, once
free, the different nationalities would elect to remain within the Russian
Commonwealth, either out of self-interest or through the urgings of their own
socialist organizations, should they succeed in gaining governmental power.
Analogous to the “voluntary union of communes into a nation,” which Marx had
seen as a possible outcome of the Paris Commune, national self-determination
could lead to a unified socialist Russian Federation of Nations more cohesive
than the old imperial regime.

Until the Russian Revolution, however, the problem of national
self-determination remained purely academic. Even after the revolution, the
granting of self-determination to the various nationalities within the Russian
Empire was rather meaningless, for most of the territories involved were
occupied by foreign powers. Self-determination had meanwhile become a policy
instrument of the Entente powers, in order to hasten the breakup of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and an imperialistic redrawing of the map of Europe in
accordance with the desires of the victor nations. But “even at the risk of
playing into bourgeois hands, Lenin nevertheless continued to promote
unqualified self-determination, precisely because he was convinced that the war
would compel both the Dual Monarchy and the Russian Empire to surrender to the
force of nationalism.” (10) By sponsoring self-determination and thereby making
the proletariat a supporter of nationalism, Lenin, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed
out, was merely aiding the bourgeoisie to turn the principle of
self-determination into an instrument of counter-revolution. Although this was
actually the case, the Bolshevik regime continued to press for national
self-determination by now projecting it to the international scene, in order to
weaken other imperialist powers, in particular England, in an attempt to foster
colonial revolutions against Western capitalism, which threatened to destroy the
Bolshevik state.

Though Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction, that the granting of self-determination
to the various nationalities in Russia would merely surround the Bolshevik state
with a cordon of reactionary counterrevolutionary countries, turned out to be
correct, this was so only for the short run. Rosa Luxemburg failed to see that
it was less the principle of self-determination that dictated Bolshevik policy
than the force of circumstances over which they had no control. At the first
opportunity they began whittling away at the self-determination of nations,
finally to end up by incorporating all the lost independent nations in a
restored Russian Empire and, in addition, forging for themselves spheres of
interest in extra-Russian territories. On the strength of her own theory of
imperialism, Rosa Luxemburg should have realized that Lenin’s theory could not
be applied in a world of competing imperialist powers, and would not need to be
applied, should capitalism be brought down by an international revolution.

The civil war in Russia was waged mainly to arrest the centrifugal forces of
nationalism, released by war and revolution, which threatened the integrity of
Russia. Not only at her western borders, in Finland, Poland, and the Baltic
nations, but also to the south, in Georgia, as well as in the eastern provinces
of Asiatic Russia, new independent states established themselves outside of
Bolshevik control. The February Revolution had broken the barriers that had held
back the nationalist or regionalist movements in the non-Russian parts of the
Empire. “When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd
and Moscow, nationalist or regionalist governments took over in the non-Great
Russian areas of European Russia and in Siberia and Central Asia. The governing
institutions of the Muslim peoples of the Transvolga (Tatars, Bashkirs), of
Central Asia and Transcaspia (Kirghiz, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkomans), and of
Transcaucasia (Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaidzhanis, Tartars) favored autonomy
in a Russian federation and opposed the Bolsheviks.” (11) These peoples had to
be reconquered in the ensuing civil war.

The nationalist aspect of the civil war was used for revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary purposes. The White counter-revolution began its
anti-Bolshevik struggle soon after the overthrow of the Provisional Government.
Volunteer armies were formed to fight the Bolsheviks and were financed and
equipped by the Entente powers in an effort to bring Russia back into the war
against Germany. British, French, Japanese, and American troops landed in
Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok. The Czech Legion entered the conflict
against the Bolsheviks. In these struggles, territories changed hands frequently
but the counter-revolutionary forces, though aided by the Allied powers, proved
no match for the newly organized Red Army. The foreign intervention continued
even after the armistice between the Allied powers and Germany, and, with the
consent of the Allies, the Germans fought in support of the counter-revolution
in the Baltic nations, which led to the destruction of the revolutionary forces
in these countries and the Soviet government’s recognition of their
independence. Poland regained its independence as an anti-Bolshevik state.
However, the counter-revolutionary forces were highly scattered and
disorganized. The Allied powers could not agree among themselves on the extent
of their intervention and on the specific goals to be reached. Neither did they
trust the willingness of their own troops to continue the war in Russia, nor in
the acquiescence of their own population in a prolonged and large-scale war for
the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. The decisive military defeat of the
various White armies induced the Allied powers to withdraw their troops in the
autumn of 1918, thus opening the occupied parts of Russia to the Red Army. The
French and British troops withdrew from the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the
spring of 1919. American pressure led to the evacuation of the Japanese in 1922.
But the Bolsheviks had definitely won the civil war by 1920. While the
revolution had been a national affair, the counter-revolution had been truly
international. But even so, it failed to dislodge the Bolshevik regime.

Lenin and Trotsky, not to speak of Marx and Engels, had been convinced that
without a proletarian revolution in the West, a Russian revolution could not
lead to socialism. Without direct political aid from the European proletariat,
Trotsky said more than once, the working class of Russia would not be able to
turn its temporary supremacy into a permanent socialist dictatorship. The
reasons for this he saw not only in the opposition on the part of the world
reaction, but also in Russia’s internal conditions, as the Russian working
class, left to its own resources, would necessarily be crushed the moment it
lost the support of the peasantry, a most likely occurrence should the
revolution remain isolated. Lenin, too, set his hopes on a westward spreading of
the revolution, which might otherwise be crushed by the capitalist powers. But he
did not share Trotsky’s view that an isolated Russia would succumb to its own
internal contradictions. In an article written in 1915, concerned with the
advisability of including in the socialist program the demand for a United
States of Europe, he pointed out, first, that socialism is a question of world
revolution and not one restricted to Europe and second, that such a slogan

may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of
socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create
misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others. Uneven
economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence,
the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one
capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organizing
their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country
will arise against the rest of the world – the capitalist world – attracting to
its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in
those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed
force against the exploiting classes and their states. (12)

Obviously, Lenin was convinced – and all his decisions after the seizure of
power attest to this – that even an isolated revolutionary Russia would be able
to maintain itself unless directly overthrown by the capitalist powers.
Eventually, of course, the struggle between socialism and capitalism would
resume, but perhaps under conditions more favorable for the international
working class. For the time being, however, it was essential to stay in power no
matter what the future might hold in store.

The world revolution did not materialize, and the nation-state remained the
field of operation for economic development as well as for the class struggle.
After 1920 the Bolsheviks no longer expected an early resumption of the world
revolutionary process and settled down for the consolidation of their own
regime. The exigencies and privations of the civil war years are usually held
responsible for the Bolshevik dictatorship and its particular harshness. While
this is true, it is no less true that the civil war and its victorious outcome
facilitated and assured the success of the dictatorship. The party dictatorship
was not only the inevitable result of an emergency situation, but was already
implied in the conception of “proletarian rule” as the rule of the Bolshevik
Party. The end of the civil war led not to a relaxation of the dictatorship but
to its intensification; it was now, after the crushing of the
counter-revolution, directed exclusively against the “loyal opposition” and the
working class itself. Already at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, in
March 1919, the demand was made to end the toleration of opposition parties. But
it was not until the summer of 1921 that the Bolshevik government finally
decided to destroy all independent political organizations and the oppositional
groups within its own ranks as well.

In the spring of 1920 it seemed clear that the military balance in the civil
war favored the Bolsheviks. This situation led to a resurgence of the opposition
to the regime and to the draconian measures it had used during the war. Peasant
unrest became so strong as to force the government to discontinue its
expropriatory excursions into the countryside and to disband the “committees of
the poor peasants.” The workers objected to the famine conditions prevailing in
the cities and to the relentless drive for more production through a wave of
strikes and demonstrations that culminated in the Kronstadt uprising. As the
expectations of the workers had once been based on the existence of the
Bolshevik government, it was now this government that had to take the blame for
all their miseries and disappointments. This government had become a repressive
dictatorship and could no longer be influenced by democratic means via the
soviet system. To free the soviets from their party yoke and turn them once
again into instruments of proletarian self-rule required now a “third
revolution.” The Kronstadt rebellion was not directed against the soviet system
but intended to restore it to its original form. The call for “free soviets”
implied soviets freed from the one-party rule of Bolshevism; consequently, it
implied political liberty for all proletarian and peasant organizations and
tendencies that took part in the Russian Revolution. (13)

It was no accident that the widespread opposition to Bolshevik rule found its
most outspoken expression at Kronstadt. It was here that the soviets had become
the sole public authority long before this became a temporary reality in
Petrograd, Moscow, and the nation as a whole. Already in May 1917 the Bolsheviks
and left Social Revolutionaries held the majority in the Kronstadt Soviet and
declared their independence vis-à-vis the Provisional Government. Although the
latter succeeded in extracting some kind of formal recognition from the
Kronstadt Soviet, the latter nonetheless remained the only public authority
within its territory and thus helped to prepare the way for the Bolshevik
seizure of power. It was the radical commitment to the soviet system, as the
best form of proletarian democracy, that now set the Kronstadt workers and
soldiers against the Bolshevik dictatorship in an attempt to regain their
self-determination.

It could not be helped, of course, that the Kronstadt mutiny was lauded by
all opponents of Bolshevism and thus also by reactionaries and bourgeois
liberals, who in this way provided the Bolsheviks with a lame excuse for their
vicious reaction to the rebellion. But this unsolicited opportunistic verbal
“support” cannot alter the fact that the goal of the rebellion was the
restoration of that soviet system which the Bolsheviks themselves had seen fit
to propagandize in 1917. The Bolsheviks knew quite well that Kronstadt was not
the work of “White generals,” but they could not admit that, from the point of
view of soviet power, they had themselves become a counter-revolutionary force
in the very process of strengthening and defending their government. Therefore,
they had not only to drown in blood this last attempt at a revival of the soviet
system, but had to slander it as the work of the “White counter-revolution.”
Actually, even though the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries lent their
“moral” support to the rebellion, the workers and sailors engaged in it had no
intentions of resurrecting the Constituent Assembly, which they regarded as a
stillborn affair of the irrevocable past. The time, they said, “has come to
overthrow the commissarocracy. ... Kronstadt has raised the banner of the
uprising for a Third Revolution of the toilers. ... The autocracy has fallen. The
Constituent Assembly has departed to the region of the damned. The
commissarocracy is crumbling.” (14) The “third revolution” was to fulfill the
broken promises of the preceding one.

With the Kronstadt rebellion the disaffection of workers and peasants had
spread to the armed forces, and this combination made it particularly dangerous
to the Bolshevik regime. But the rebellion held no realizable promise, not
because it was crushed by the Bolsheviks but because, had it succeeded, it would
not have been able to sustain and extend a libertarian socialism based on soviet
rule. It was indeed condemned to be what it has been called: the Kronstadt
Commune. Like its Paris counterpart, it remained isolated despite the general
discontent, and its political objectives could not be reached under the
prevailing Russian conditions. Yet it was able to hasten Lenin’s “strategic
retreat” to the New Economic Policy, which relaxed the Bolshevik economic
dictatorship while simultaneously tightening its political authoritarian rule.

The workers’ dissatisfaction with Lenin’s dictatorship found some
repercussion in his own party. Oppositional groups criticized not only specific
party decisions, such as state control of trade unions, but also the general
trend of Bolshevik policy. On the question of “one-man management,” for
instance, it was said that this was a matter not of a tactical problem but of
two “historically irreconcilable points of view,” for

 “one-man management is a product of the individualistic
conception of the bourgeois class ... This idea finds its reflection in all
spheres of human endeavor – beginning with the appointment of a sovereign for
the state and ending with a sovereign director in the factory. This is the
supreme wisdom of bourgeois thought. The bourgeoisie do not believe in the
power of a collective body. They like only to whip the masses into an obedient
flock, and drive them wherever their unrestricted will desires. The basis of
the controversy (in the Bolshevik Party) is mainly this: whether we shall
realize communism through the workers or over their heads by the hand of the
Soviet officials. And let us ponder whether it is possible to attain and build
a communist economy by the hands and creative abilities of the scions from the
other class, who are imbued with their routine of the past? If we begin to
think as Marxians, as men of science, we shall answer categorically and
explicitly – no. The administrative economic body in the labor republic during
the present transitory period must be a body directly elected by the producers
themselves. All the rest of the administrative economic Soviet institutions
shall serve only as executive center of the economic policy of that
all-important economic body of the labor republic. All else is goose stepping
that manifests distrust toward all creative abilities of workers, distrust
which is not compatible with the professed ideals of our party... There can be
no self-activity without freedom of thought and opinion, for self-activity
manifests itself not only in initiative, action, and work, but in
independent thought as well. We are afraid of action, we have ceased to
rely on the masses, hence we have bureaucracy with us. In order to do away
with the bureaucracy that is finding its shelter in the Soviet institutions,
we must first of all get rid of all bureaucracy in the party itself.
(15)

Apparently, these oppositionists did not understand their own party or, in
view of its actual practice, diverged from its principles as outlined by Lenin
since 1903. Perhaps they had taken State and Revolution at face value,
not noticing its ambivalence, and felt now betrayed, as Lenin’s policy revealed
the sheer demagogery of its revolutionary declarations. It should have been
evident from Lenin’s concept of the party and its role in the revolutionary
process that, once in power, this party could only function in a dictatorial
way. Quite apart from the specific Russian conditions, the idea of the party as
the consciousness of the socialist revolution clearly relegated all decision
making power to the Bolshevik state apparatus.

True to his own principles, Lenin put a quick end to the oppositionists by
ordaining all factions to disband under threat of expulsion. With two
resolutions, passed by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, March
1921, “On Party Unity” and “On the Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in our
Party,” Lenin succeeded in completing what had hitherto only approximately been
accomplished, namely, an end to all factionalism within the party and the
securing of complete control over it through the Central Committee, which, in
addition, was itself reorganized in such a fashion as to get rid of any
opposition that might arise within the party leadership. With this was laid a
groundwork on which nothing else could be built but the emerging omnipotence of
the rising bureaucracy of party and state and the infinite power of the supreme
leader presiding over both. The one-man rule of the party, which had been an
informal fact due to the overriding “moral” authority of Lenin, turned into the
unassailable fact of personal rule by whoever should manage to put himself at
the top of the party hierarchy.

The bourgeois character of Bolshevik rule, as noted by its internal
opposition, reflected the objectively nonsocialist nature of the Russian
Revolution. It was a sort of “bourgeois revolution” without the bourgeoisie, as
it was a proletarian revolution without a sufficiently large proletariat, a
revolution in which the historical functions of the Western bourgeoisie were
taken up by an apparently anti-bourgeois party by means of its assumption of
political power. Under these conditions, the revolutionary content of Western
Marxism was not applicable, not even in a modified form. Whatever one may think
of Marx’s declaration concerning the Paris Commune – that the “political rule of
the proletariat is incompatible with the externalization of their social
servitude” (a situation quite difficult to conceive, except as a momentary
possibility, that is, as the revolution itself) – Marx at least spoke of the
"producers,” not of a political party substituting for the producers, whereas
the Bolshevik concept speaks of state rule alone as the necessary and sufficient
prerequisite for the transformation of the capitalist into a socialist mode of
production. The producers are controlled by the state, the state by the party,
the party by the central committee, and the last by the supreme leader and his
court. The destroyed autocracy is resurrected in the name of Marxism. In this
way, moreover, ideologically as well as practically, the revolution and
socialism depend finally on the history-making individual.

Indeed, it did not take long for the Russian Revolution and its consequences
to be seen as the work of the geniuses Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; not only in
the bourgeois view, to which this comes naturally, but also quite generally by
socialists claiming adherence to the materialist conception of history, which
finds its dynamic not in the exceptional abilities of individuals, but in the
struggle of classes in the course of the developing social forces of production.
Neither Marx nor any reasonable person would deny the role of the “hero” in
history, whether for better or for worse; for, as previously pointed out, the
“hero” is already implicit in class society and is himself, in his thoughts and
actions, determined by the class contradictions that rend society. In his
historical writings, for instance, Marx dealt extensively with such “heroes,”
like the little Napoleon, who brought ruin to his country, or, like Bismarck,
who finished the goal of German unification, left undone by the stillborn
bourgeois revolution. It is quite conceivable that without Napoleon III and
without Bismarck the history of France and Germany would have been different
from what it actually was, but this difference would have altered nothing in the
socioeconomic development of both countries, determined as it was by the
capitalist relations of production and the expansion of capital as an
international phenomenon.

What is history anyway? The bourgeoisie has no theory of history, as it has
no theory of social development. Since it merely describes what is observable or
may be found in old records, history is everything and nothing at the same time
and any of its surface manifestations may be emphasized in lieu of an
explanation, which must always serve the social power relations existing at any
particular time. Like economics, bourgeois history is pure ideology and gives no
inkling of the reasons for social change. And, just as the market economy can
only be understood through the understanding of its underlying class relations,
so does this kind of history require another kind if its meaning is to be
revealed. From a Marxian point of view, history implies changing social
relations of production. That history which concerns itself exclusively with
alterations in an otherwise static society, as interesting as it may be,
concerns Marxism only insofar as these changes indicate the hidden process by
which one mode of production releases social forces that point to the rise of
another mode of production. From this point of view, the historical changes
brought about by the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime have their
place within an otherwise unaltered mode of production, as its social relations
remained capital-labor relations, even though capital – that is, control over the
means of production – and with it wage labor were taken out of the hands of
private entrepreneurs and placed in those of a state bureaucracy performing the
exploitative functions of the former. The capitalist system was modified but not
abolished. The history made by the Bolsheviks was still capitalist history in
the ideological disguise of Marxism.

The existence of “great men” in history is a sure indication that history is
being made within the hierarchical structure of class-ridden competitive
societies. The Lenin cult, the Hitler cult, the Stalin cult, etc., represent
attempts to deprive the mass of the population of any kind of self-determination
and also to ensure their complete atomization, which makes this technically
possible. Such cults have little to do with the “great men” themselves, as
personalities, but reflect the need or desire for complete conformity to allow a
particular class or a particular political movement sufficient control over
broad masses for the realization of their specific objectives, such as war, or
making a revolution. “Great men” require “great times,” and both emerge in
crisis situations that have their roots in the exaggeration of society’s
fundamental contradictions.

The helplessness of the atomized individual finds a sort of imaginary solace
in the mere symbolization of his self-assertion in the leadership, or the
leader, of a social movement claiming to do for him what he cannot do for
himself. The impotence of the social individual is the potency of the individual
who manages to represent one or another kind of historically given social
aspiration. The anti-social character of the capitalist system accounts for its
apparent social coherence in the symbolized form of the state, the government,
the great leader. However, the symbolization must be constantly reinforced by
the concrete forms of control executed by the ruling minority.

It is almost certain that without Lenin’s arrival in Russia the Bolsheviks
would not have seized governmental power, and in this sense the credit for the
Bolshevik Revolution must be given to Lenin – or perhaps, to the German General
Staff, or to Parvus, who made Lenin’s entry into the Russian Revolution
possible. But what would have happened in Russia without the “subjective factor”
of Lenin’s existence? The totally discredited czarist regime had already been
overthrown and would not have been resurrected by a counter-revolutionary coup
in the face of the combined and general opposition of workers, peasants, the
bourgeoisie, and even segments of the old autocratic regime. In addition, the
Entente powers, relieved of the alliance with the anachronistic Russian
autocratic regime, favored the new and ostensibly democratic government, if only
in the hope of a more efficiently waged war against the Central European
“anti-democratic” powers. Although attempts were made to resume the offensive in
the west, they were not successful, and merely intensified the desire for an
early peace, even a separate peace, in order to consolidate the new regime and
to restore some modicum of order within the increasing social anarchy. A
counter-revolution would have had as its object the forced continuation of the
war and the elimination of the soviets and the Bolsheviks, to safeguard the
private-property nature of the social production relations. In short, the
“dictatorship of the proletariat” would most probably have been overthrown by a
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, enforced by a White terror and other fascist
methods of rule. A different political system and different property relations
would have evolved, but on the basis of the same production relations that
sustained the Bolshevik state.

Similarly, there is little doubt that World War II was initiated by Adolf
Hitler in an attempt to win World War I by a second try for German control of
capitalist Europe. Without Hitler, the second war might not have broken loose at
the time it actually did, but perhaps also not without the Stalin-Hitler Pact,
or without the deepening of the worldwide depression, which set definite limits
to the Nazis’ internal economic policies, on which their political dominance
depended. It is clear, however, that Hitler cannot be blamed for World War I or
for the Great Depression preceding World War II. Governments are composed of
individuals, representing definite ideologies and specific economic interests,
for which reason it is always possible to give credit, or to put the blame, for
any particular policy on individual politicians, and to assume that had they not
been there, history would have run a different course. This might even be true,
but the different course would in no way affect the general development insofar
as it is determined by capitalist production relations.

In brief, it is not possible to make any reliable predictions with regard to
historical development on the strength of political movements and the role of
individuals within these movements as they are thrown up by the development of
capitalism and its difficulties, so long as these occurrences do not concern the
basic social production relations but only reflect changes within these
relations. It is true that political and economic phenomena constitute an
entity, but to speak of such an entity may be to refer to no more than erratic
movements within the given social structure, and not to social contradictions
destined to destroy the given political and economic entity by way of
revolutionary changes that bring another society into existence. Just as there
is no way to foresee economic development in its details, that is, at what point
a crisis will be released or be overcome, there is also no way to account for
political development in its details, that is, which social movement will
succeed or fail, or what individual will come to dominate the political scene
and whether or not this individual will appear as a “history-making” individual,
quite apart from his personal qualifications. What cannot be comprehended cannot
be taken into consideration, and political as well as economic events appear as
a series of “accidents” or “shocks,” seemingly from outside the system but
actually produced by this system, which precludes the recognition of its
inherent necessities. The very existence of political life attests to its
fetishistic determination. Outside this fetishistic determination, this helpless
and blind subjection to the capital-expansion process, the entity of politics
and economics would not appear as such, but rather as the elimination of both in
a consciously arranged organization of the social requirements of the
reproduction process, freed of its economic and political aspects. Politics, and
with it, that type of economy which is necessarily political economy, will cease
with the establishment of a classless society.

That even Lenin was somehow aware of this may be surmised by his reluctance
to use the term “wage labor” after the seizure of power. Only once, in deference
to an international audience, at the founding Congress of the Third
International in March 1919, did he speak of “mankind throwing off the last form
of slavery: capitalist or wage slavery.” Generally, however, he made it appear
that the end of private capital implies the end of the wage system; although not
automatically abolishing the wage system in a technical sense, it would free it
from its exploitative connotations. In this respect, as in many others, Lenin
merely harked back to Kautsky’s position of 1902, which maintained that in the
early stages of the construction of socialism wage labor, and therefore money,
(or vice versa) must be retained in order to provide the workers with the
necessary incentives to work. Trotsky, too, reiterated this idea, but with an
exemplary shamelessness, stating that

we still retain, and for a long time will retain, the system of
wages. The farther we go, the more will its importance become simply to
guarantee to all members of society all the necessaries of life; and thereby
it will cease to be a system of wages. [But] in the present difficult period
the system of wages is for us, first and foremost, not a method for
guaranteeing the personal existence of any separate worker, but a method of
estimating what the individual worker brings with his labor to the Labor
Republic.... Finally, when it rewards some (through the wage system), the
Labor State cannot but punish others – those who are clearly infringing labor
solidarity, undermining the common work, and seriously impairing the Socialist
renaissance of the country. Repression for the attainment of economic ends is
a necessary weapon of the Socialist dictatorship.(16)

As the wage system is the basis of capitalist production, so it remains the
basis of “socialist construction,” which first allows people like Lenin and
Trotsky, and their state apparatus, not only to assume the position but also to
speak in the voice of the capitalists when dealing with the working class. As if
the wage system had not always been the only guarantee for the workers to earn a
livelihood, and as if it had not always been used to estimate the amount of
surplus value to be extracted from their work!

As a theory of the proletarian revolution, Marxism does not recognize
alterations within unchanged social production relations as historical changes
in the sense of the materialist conception of history. It speaks of changes of
social development from slavery to serfdom to wage labor, and of the abolition
of the latter, and therewith all forms of labor exploitation, in a classless
socialist society. Each type of class society will have its own political
history, of course, but Marxism recognizes this as the politics of definite
social formations, which will, however, come to an end with the abolition of
classes, the last political revolution in the general social developmental
process. Quite apart from its objective possibility or impossibility, the
Bolshevik regime had no intention to abolish the wage system and was therefore
not engaged in furthering a social revolution in the Marxian sense. It was
satisfied with the abolition of private control over the accumulation of
capital, on the assumption that this would suffice to proceed to a consciously
planned economy and, eventually, to a more egalitarian system of distribution.
It is true, of course, that the possibility of such an endeavor had not occurred
to Marx, for whom the capitalist system, in its private-property form, would
have to be replaced by a system in which the producers themselves would take
collective and direct control of the means of production. From this point of
view, the Bolshevik endeavor, through a historical novelty not contemplated by
Marx, still falls within the history of the capitalist mode of production.

By adhering to the Marxist ideology evolved within the Second International,
Lenin and the Bolsheviks succeeded in identifying their inversion of Marxian
theory as the only possible form of its realization. While the Bolshevik concept
implied no more than the formation of a state-capitalist system, this had been
the way in which, at the turn of the century, socialism had been quite generally
understood. It is therefore not possible to accuse the Bolsheviks of a
"betrayal” of the then prevailing “Marxist” principles; on the contrary, they
actualized the declared goals of the Social Democratic movement, which itself
had lost all interest in acting upon its beliefs. What the Bolsheviks did was to
realize the program of the Second International by revolutionary means. However,
in doing so, that is, by turning the ideology into practice and giving it
concrete substance, they identified revolutionary Marxism with the
state-directed socialist society envisioned by the orthodox wing of
international Social Democracy.

Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the bourgeoisie had looked upon Marxism as
a meaningless utopia, contrary to the naturally given market relations and to
human nature itself. There was of course the class struggle, but this, too, like
competition in general, implied no more than the Darwinian struggle for
existence, which justified its suppression or amelioration, as the case might
be, in accordance with changing circumstances or opportunities. But the very
fact of the existence of the bourgeoisie was proof enough that society could not
prevail without class divisions, as its very complexity demanded its
hierarchical structure. Socialism, in the Marxian sense of the
self-determination of the working class, was not a practical possibility and its
advocacy was not only stupid but also criminal, for its realization would
destroy not only capitalist society but society itself. The adaptation of the
reformist labor movement to the realities of social life and its successful
integration into the capitalist system was additional proof that the capital-labor
relations were the normal social relations, which could not be tampered
with except at the price of social decay.

This argument was put aside by the Bolshevik demonstration that it is
possible to have “socialism” on the basis of capital-labor relations and that a
social hierarchy could be maintained without the bourgeoisie, simply by turning
the latter into servants of the state, the sole proprietor of the social
capital. Although Marx had said that capitalism presupposes the capitalist, this
need not imply the capitalist as bourgeois, as owner of private capital, for the
capital concentration and centralization process indicated the diminishing of
their numbers and the increasing monopolization of capital. If there was an
“end” to this process, it would be the end of private capital, as the property
of many capitalists, and the end of market economy, which would issue into the
complete monopoly of ownership of the means of production. This might as well be
in the hands of the state, which would then become the organizer of social
production in a system in which “market relations” were reduced to the exchange
between labor and capital through the maintenance of wage labor in the
state-controlled economy. This concept might have made “socialism”
comprehensible to the bourgeoisie, were it not for the fact that it involved
their abolition as a ruling class. From the bourgeois point of view, it was
quite immaterial whether they found themselves expropriated by a state, which
was no longer their own, or by a proletarian revolution in the Marxian sense,
that is, the appropriation of the means of production by the working class. The
Bolshevik state-capitalist, or, what amounts to the same, state-socialist
concept was consequently equated with the Marxian concept of socialism. When the
bourgeoisie speaks of Marxism, it invariably refers to its Bolshevik
interpretation, as this is the only one that has found concrete application.
This identification of Marxism with the Leninist concept of socialism turned the
latter into a synonym for Marxism, and as such it has dominated the character of
all revolutionary and national-revolutionary movements down to the present day.

Whereas for the bourgeoisie Bolshevism and Marxism meant the same thing,
Social Democracy could not possibly identify the Leninist regime as a socialist
state, even though it had realized its own long-forgotten goal of reaching
socialism via the capture of state power. Yet because Bolshevism had
expropriated the bourgeoisie, it was equally impossible to refer to it as a
capitalist system, without acknowledging that even legal conquest of the state
by parliamentary means need not lead to a socialist system of production.
Hilferding, for one, resolved the problem simply by announcing that Bolshevism
was neither capitalism nor socialism, but a societal form best described as a
“totalitarian state economy,” a system based on an “unlimited personal
dictatorship.” (17) It was no longer determined by the character of its economy
but by the personal notions of the omnipotent dictator. Denying his own
long-held concept of “organized capitalism” as the inevitable result of the
capital concentration process, and the consequent disappearance of the law of
value as the regulator of the capitalist economy, Hilferding now insisted that
from an economic point of view state-capitalism cannot exist. Once the state has
become the sole owner of the means of production, he said, it renders impossible
the functions of the capitalist economy because it abolishes the very mechanism
which accounts for the economic circulation process by way of competition on
which the law of value operates. But while this state of affairs had once been
equated with the rise of socialism, it was now perceived as a totalitarian
society equally removed from both capitalism and socialism. The one ingredient
that excluded its transformation into socialism was the absence of political
democracy. But if this were so, Hilferding was fundamentally in agreement with
Lenin on the assumption that it is possible to institute socialism by political
means, although there was no agreement as to the particular political means to
be employed. In fact, Lenin was very much indebted to Hilferding, save in his
rejection of the means of formal democracy as the criterion for the socialist
nature of the state-controlled economy.

In this respect it is noteworthy that neither Lenin nor Hilferding had any
concern for the social production relations as capital-labor relations, but
merely for the character of the government presiding over the “new society.” In
the opinion of both, it was the state that must control society, whether by
democratic or dictatorial means; the working class was to be the obedient
instrument of governmental policies. Just the same, it was Lenin’s concept of
“dictatorship” that carried the day, for the Bolsheviks had seized power,
whereas Hilferding’s “democracy” was slowly eroded by the authoritarian
tendencies arising within the capitalist system. Besides, the “Marxism” of the
Second International had lost its plausibility at the eve of World War I,
whereas the success of the Bolshevik Revolution could be seen as a return to the
revolutionary theory and practice of Marxism. This situation assured the rising
prominence of the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, as dependent on the
existence of a vanguard party not only for seizing power but also for securing
the transition from capitalism to socialism. At any rate, in the course of time
the Leninist conception of Marxism came to dominate that part of the
international labor movement which saw itself as an anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist force.

We have dealt with Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution in some detail in
order to bring out two specific points: first, that the policies of the
Bolshevik regime subsequent to Lenin’s death had their cause in the prevailing
situation in Russia and the world at large as well as in the political concepts
of the Leninist party; and second, that the result of this combination of
factors implied a second and apparently “final” destruction of the labor
movement as a Marxist movement. World War I and its support by the socialist
parties of the Second International signified a defeat of Marxism as a
potentially revolutionary workers’ movement. The war and its aftermath led to a
temporary revival of revolutionary activities for limited reformist goals, which
indicated the workers’ unreadiness to dislodge the capitalist system. Only in
Russia did the revolutionary upheavals go beyond mere governmental changes, by
playing the means of production – not at once, but gradually – into the hands of
the Bolshevik party-state. But this apparent success implied a total inversion
of Marxian theory and its willful transformation into the ideology of
state-capitalism, which, by its very nature, restricts itself to the
nation-state and its struggle for existence and expansion in a world of
competing imperialist nations and power blocs.

The concept of world revolution as the expected result of the imperialist
war, which seemingly prompted the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, was dependent
upon Lenin’s notion of the indispensable existence of a vanguard party, able to
grasp the opportunity for the overthrow of the bourgeois state, and capable of
avoiding, or correcting, the otherwise aimless squandering of spontaneously
released revolutionary energies on the part of the rebellious masses. Aside from
the Russian Bolsheviks, however, no vanguard party of the Leninist type existed
anywhere, so that this first presupposition for a successful socialist
revolution could not be met. In the light of Lenin’s own theory, it was
therefore logically inconsistent to await the extension of the Russian into an
international revolution. But even if such vanguard parties could have been
created overnight, so to speak, their goals would have been determined by the
Leninist concept of the state and its functions in the social transformation
process. If successful, there would have been more than one state-capitalist
system but no international socialist revolution. In short, there would have
been accomplished at an earlier time what actually came to pass after World War
II without a revolution, namely the imperialistic division of the world into
monopolistic and state-capitalistic national systems under the egis of unstable
power blocs.

Assuming for the sake of argument that revolutions in Western Europe had gone
beyond purely political changes and had led to a dictatorship of the
proletariat, exercised through a system of soviets controlling economic social
relations, such a system would have found itself in opposition to the
party-state in its Leninist incarnation. Most probably, it would have led to a
revival of Russia’s internal opposition to the Bolshevik power monopoly and to
the dethroning of its leadership. A proletarian revolution in the Marxian sense
would have endangered the Bolshevik regime even more than would a bourgeois and
social democratic counter-revolution, because for the Bolsheviks the spreading
of the revolution was conceivable only as the expansion of the Bolshevik
Revolution and the maintenance of its specific characteristics on a global
scale. This was one of the reasons why the Third International, as a “tool of
world revolution,” was turned into an international replica of the Leninist
party.

This particular practice was based on Lenin’s theory of imperialism. More
polemical than theoretical in character, Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest
Stage of Capitalism paid more attention to the fleeting political aspects of
imperialism than to its underlying socioeconomic dynamics. It was intended to
unmask the imperialist character of the first world war, seen as the general
condition for social revolution. Lenin’s arguments were substantiated by
relevant data from various bourgeois sources, by a critical utilization of the
theoretical findings of J. H. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding, and by a rejection
of Karl Kautsky’s speculative theory of superimperialism as a way toward a
peaceful capitalism. The data and the theories were bound up with a particular
historical stage of capitalist development and contained no clues regarding its
further course.

The compulsion to imperialism is inherent in capitalist production, but it is
the development of the latter which accounts for its specific manifestations at
any particular time. For Lenin, however, capitalism became imperialistic “only
at a definite and very high stage of capitalistic development,” a stage that
implied the rule of national and international monopolies which, by agreement or
force, divided the world’s exploitable resources among themselves. In his view,
this period is characterized not so much by the export of commodities as by that
of capital, which allows the big imperialist powers, and a part of their
laboring populations, an increasingly parasitical existence at the expense of
the subjugated regions of the world. He perceived this situation as the “highest
stage” of capitalism because he expected that its manifold contradictions would
lead directly to social revolutions on an international scale.

However, although World War I led to the Russian Revolution, imperialism was
not the “eve of the proletarian world revolution.” What is noteworthy here
nonetheless is the continuity between Lenin’s early work on the development of
Russian capitalism and his theory of imperialism and the impending world
revolution. Against the Narodniks, as we saw, Lenin held that capitalism would
be the next step in Russia’s development and that, for that reason, the
industrial proletariat would come to play the dominant role in the Russian
revolution. But by involving not only the workers, but also the peasants and even
layers of the bourgeoisie, the revolution would have the character of a
"people’s revolution.” To realize all its potentialities, it would have to be
led by an organization representing the socialism of the working class. Lenin’s
theory of imperialism as “the eve of world revolution” was thus a projection of
his theory of the Russian revolution onto the world at large. Just as in Russia
different classes and nationalities were to combine under proletarian leadership
to overthrow the autocracy, so on an international scale whole nations, at
various stages of development, are to combine under the leadership of the Third
International to liberate themselves from both their imperialistic masters and
their native ruling classes. The world revolution is thus one of subjugated
classes and nations against a common enemy – monopolist imperialism. It was this
theory that, in Stalin’s view, made “Leninism the Marxism of the age of
imperialism.” However, based on the presupposition of successful socialist
revolutions in the advanced capitalist nations, the theory could not be proven
right or wrong as the expected revolutions did not materialize.

This truly grandiose scheme, which puts Bolshevism in the center of the world
revolutionary process and, to speak in Hegelian terms, made the Weltgeist
manifest itself in Lenin and his party, remained a mere expression of Lenin’s
imaginary powers, for with every step he took the “greatest of
Realpolitiker” found himself at odds with reality. Just as he had to
jettison his own agrarian program in exchange for that of his Social
Revolutionary opponents, to rid himself of the “natural economy” practiced with
devastating results during the period of “war communism” and fall back to market
relations in the New Economic Policy, and to wage war against the
self-determination of oppressed nationalities at first so generously granted by
the Bolshevik regime, so he saw himself forced to construct and utilize the
Third International not for the extension of the international revolution but
for no more than the defense of the Bolshevik state. His internationalism, like
that of the bourgeoisie, could only serve national ends, camouflaged as general
interests of the world revolution. But perhaps it was this total failure to
further the declared goods of Bolshevism that really attests to Lenin’s mastery
of Realpolitik, if only in the sense that an unprincipled opportunism did
indeed serve the purpose of maintaining the Bolsheviks in power.

Lenin’s single-mindedness in gaining and keeping state power by way of
compromises and opportunistic reversals, as dictated by circumstances outside
his control, was not a practice demanded by Marxist theory but an empirical
pragmatism such as characterizes bourgeois politics in general. The professional
revolutionary turned into a statesman vying with other statesmen to defend the
specific interests of the Bolshevik state as those of the Russian nation. Any
further revolutionary development was now seen as depending on the protection of
the first “workers’ state,” which thus became the foremost duty of the
international proletariat. The Marxist ideology served not only internal but
also external purposes by assuring working-class support for Bolshevik Russia.
To be sure, this involved only part of the labor movement, but it was that part
which could disrupt the anti-Bolshevik forces, which now included the old
socialist parties and the trade unions. The Leninist interpretation of Marxism
became the whole of Marxian theory, as a counter-ideology to all forms of
anti-Bolshevism and all attempts to weaken or to destroy the Russian government.
Simultaneously, however, attempts were also made to bring about a state of
coexistence with the capitalist adversaries. Various concessions were proposed
to demonstrate the mutual advantages to be gained through international trade
and other means of collaboration. This two-faced policy served the single end of
preserving the Bolshevik state by serving the national interests of Russia.

Notes

 
1. Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (1918),
Article 4, Chapter XIII.

 
2. Trotsky, Our Revolution, p. 98.

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

 
4. Lord Moran reports the following dialogue between Churchill and Stalin in
Moscow in 1942: Churchill: “When I raised the question of the collective farms
and the struggle with the kulaks, Stalin became very serious. I asked him if it
was as bad as the war. ’Oh, yes,’ he answered, ’Worse. Much worse. It went on
for years. Most of them were liquidated by the peasants, who hated them. Ten
millions of them. But we had to do it to mechanize agriculture. In the end,
production from the land was doubled. What is a generation?’ Stalin demanded as
he paced up and down the length of the table.” C. Moran, Churchill: The Struggle
for Survival, 1940-1965 (Boston: Houghton, 1966), p. 70.

 
5. Lenin, Program of the CPSU (B), adopted 22 March 1919 at the Eighth
Congress of the Party.

 
6. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 reestablished the universal right to vote,
but combined it with a number of controls that preclude the election to state
institutions of anyone not favored by the Communist Party, thus demonstrating
that universal franchise and dictatorship can exist simultaneously.

 
7. Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy (New York, 1922), pp. 107-9.

 
8. Trotsky, undoubtedly as outstanding a revolutionary politician as Lenin,
is nonetheless of no interest with respect to the Bolshevik Revolution, either
as a theoretician or as a practical actor, because of his total submission to
Lenin, which allowed him to play a great role in the seizure of power and the
construction of the Bolshevik state. Prior to his unconditional deference to
Lenin, Trotsky opposed both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, the first because
of their passive acceptance of the expected Russian Revolution as a
bourgeois revolution in the traditional sense, and the second because of Lenin’s
insistence on a “peasant-worker alliance,” which in Trotsky’s view could not
lead to a socialist revolution According to Trotsky, moreover, the socialist
revolution, dominated by the industrial proletariat, cannot be contemplated at
all within the framework of a national revolution, but must from the start be
approached as an international revolution, united the Russian revolution with
revolutions in Western Europe, that is, as a “permanent revolution” under the
hegemony of the working class. Changing over to Lenin’s ideas and their apparent
validity in the context of the Russian situation, Trotsky became the prisoner of
a dogmatized Leninism and thus unable to evolve a Marxist critique of the
Bolshevik Revolution.

 
9. Trotsky, “Lenin on his 50th Birthday,” in Fourth International
(January-February 1951), pp. 28-9.

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

 
11. H.H. Fisher, “Soviet Policies in Asia,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (May 1949), p. 190.

 
12. “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe” (1915), in Collected Works,
Vol 21 (Moscow: Progress, 1964), p. 342.

 
13. This found its expression in the program adopted by the sailors,
soldiers, and workers of Kronstadt: 1) Immediate new elections to the soviets.
The present soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants.
The new elections should be by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free
electorial propaganda. 2) Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and
peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the left socialist parties. 3) The right
of assembly, and freedom of trade union and peasant organizations. 4) The
organization, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a conference of nonparty
workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd
district. 5) The liberation of all political prisoners of the socialist parties,
and of all imprisoned workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to
working class and peasant organizations. 6) The election of a commission to look
into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps. 7)
The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No political party
should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State
subsidies to this end. In the place of the political sections, various cultural
groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State. 8) The immediate
abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside. 9)
The equalization of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous
or unhealthy jobs. 10) The abolition of party combat detachments in all military
groups. The abolition of party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards
are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the
workers. 11) The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil
and the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not
employ hired labor. 12) We request that all military units and officer trainee
groups associate themselves with this resolution 13) We demand the press give
proper publicity to this resolution 14) We demand that handicraft production be
authorized provided it does not utilize wage labor. Quoted by Ida Mett, The
Kronstadt Commune (London: Solidarity, 1967), pp. 6-7. For a detailed history of
the Kronstadt rebellion, see Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970).

 
14. In Izvestiya. Journal of Kronstadt’s Temporary Revolutionary Committee, 12
March 1921; quoted in The Truth about Kronstadt (Prague, 1921).

 
15. A. Kollontai, The Workers’ Opposition (1921).

 
16. Dictatorship vs. Democracy, p. 149.

 
17. Article written for Sotsialistichesky Viestnik; English version in
Proletarian Outlook 6:3 (1940).


* Chapter 7 : The German Revolution


Contrary to Bolshevik expectations, the Russian Revolution remained a
national revolution. Its international repercussions involved no more than a
growing demand for the ending of the war. The Bolsheviks’ call for an immediate
peace without annexations and reparations found a positive response among the
soldiers and workers in the Western nations. But even so, and apart from
short-lived mutinies in the French and British armed forces and a series of mass
strikes in the Central European countries, it took another year before the
military defeat of the German and Austrian armies and general war weariness led
to the revolutionary upheavals that brought the war to a close.

The here decisive German Revolution of 1918 was a spontaneous political
upheaval, initiated within the armed forces but embracing at once, either
actively or passively, the majority of the population, to bring the war and
therewith the monarchical regime to an end. It was not seriously opposed by
either the bourgeoisie or the military, especially as it allowed them to place
the onus of defeat upon the revolution. What was important was to prevent the
political revolution from turning into a social revolution and to emerge from
the war with the capitalist system intact.

At this time, neither the bourgeoisie nor the workers were able to
differentiate between Marxism and Bolshevism, except in the political terms of
democracy and dictatorship. Notwithstanding the military dictatorship in
capitalist countries, it was the dictatorial nature of Bolshevism that the
Social Democratic leadership used in order to defend the capitalist system in
the name of democracy. Long before the November Revolution, the Social
Democratic Party had been the spearhead in the struggle against Bolshevism,
directly and indirectly opposing all working-class actions that might impair the
war effort or break up the class collaboration on which its continuation
depended. But all these efforts failed to prevent the revolution from
overthrowing the old state and its war machine. So as not to lose all influence
upon the unfolding political events, the Social Democrats were compelled to take
part in them and to try to gain control of the revolutionary movement. To that
end, the Social Democratic Party recognized the overthrow of the old regime and
accepted the workers’ and soldiers’ councils as a provisional social
institution, which was to lead to the formation of a republican democratic state
in which Social Democracy could continue to operate as of old.

The collapse of the German Army in the autumn of 1918 had led to some
constitutional and parliamentary reforms and the bringing of Social Democrats
into the government as a measure to liquidate the war with the fewest internal
troubles and, perhaps, to gain better armistice conditions. While the workers’
and soldiers’ councils in Russia were already beginning to lose their
independent powers to the emerging Bolshevik state apparatus, they still
inspired the spontaneous formation of similar organizations in the German
revolution and, to a lesser extent, the social upheavals in England, France,
Italy, and Hungary. In Germany, it was not the lack of effective labor
organizations but their class-collaborationist character and their social
patriotism that induced the workers to emulate the Russian example. Opposition to
the continuation of the war, and preparations for the revolutionary overthrow of
the existing systems had to be clandestinely organized, outside the official
labor movement, at the places of work, linked with each other by means of
committees of action. But before these planned organizations could enter the
revolutionary fray, the spontaneously formed workers’ and soldiers’ councils had
already put an end to the government by establishing their own political
dominance.

The Social Democratic Party found itself forced to enter the council
movement, if only to dampen its possible revolutionary aspirations. This was not
too difficult, since the workers’ and soldiers’ councils were composed not only
of radical socialists, but also of right-wing socialists, trade unionists,
pacifists, nonpoliticals, and even bourgeois elements. The radicals’ slogan of
the day, “All power to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils,” was therefore
self-defeating, unless, of course, events should take such a turn as to alter
the character and the composition of the councils. However, the great mass of
the socialist workers mistook the political for a social revolution. The
ideology and organizational strength of Social Democracy had left its mark; the
socialization of production, if considered at all, was seen as a governmental
concern, not as the task of the workers. “All power to the workers’ councils”
implied the dictatorship of the proletariat, for it would leave the nonworking
layers of society without political representation. Democracy was still
understood, however, as the general franchise. The mass of the workers demanded
both workers’ councils and a National Assembly. They got both – the councils as a
meaningless part of the Weimar Constitution, and a parliamentary regime securing
the continued existence of the capitalist system.

Whatever the differences between Bolshevism and Social Democracy, as
political parties both thought themselves entitled to lead the working class and
to determine its activities. Both assumed that if was the party through which
the working class became aware of its class interests and was thus enabled to
act upon them. While the Social Democratic Party was content with the control of
working-class movements within bourgeois society, the Bolsheviks demanded the
exclusive right to this control through the party state. But both these branches
of Social Democracy saw themselves as the legitimate and indispensable
representatives of the working class. A system of workers’ and soldiers’
councils, and new social institutions derived therefrom, was incomprehensible
within the party concepts that had ruled the political labor movement prior to
the revolution. And because opposition to capitalism had hitherto found its
expression in the socialist parties, it is not surprising that they should have
come to play a special and, as it turned out, the decisive role in the
formulation of policy objectives for the emerging council movement.

In Russia too, as we have seen, the competition between the various socialist
organizations within the soviets for control of the revolutionary movement
excluded from the very beginning self-rule of the soviets, which, in fact,
proclaimed as their political goal a democratic constitution and economic
reforms compatible with the capitalist system. The Bolshevik coup d’état changed
this situation by basing the rule of the party on the soviets, in which it had
gained a majority, even though this majority was as accidental as that of 1903,
which gave to Lenin’s faction within Russian Social Democracy the name
“Bolshevik.” This situation repeated itself in 1917 with the protesting
departure of the right-wing socialists and Social Revolutionaries from the
Second Congress of Soviets. The Bolshevik government emerged from the congress
as the self-appointed “Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars,” although the congress
went through the formality of ratifying the new government.

Similarly, at the German First Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils,
the Social Democratic leaders were able to appoint themselves to governmental
positions because they controlled the voting majority of the hastily gathered
delegates, mainly functionaries of the two socialist parties, the Majority
Socialists and the Independent Socialists. This majority was retained also at
the Second Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils and assured that the
political program adopted was that of the Social Democratic parties. The
self-liquidation of the councils in favor of the National Assembly was a
foregone conclusion, because of the continued hold of these parties on their
members and their unbroken influence upon the unorganized mass of the working
population. The revolution, insofar as it had a clear-cut political character,
was thus a social democratic revolution, with an emphasis on democracy and a
total neglect of the socialist aspect of the Social Democratic movement.

While in both Russia and Germany the workers’ and soldiers’ councils had been
instrumental in making the revolution, they were unable to turn themselves into
a means for the reorganization of the social production relations and thus left
the reordering of society to the traditional labor movement. As far as Western
Europe was concerned, this movement had long ceased to be a revolutionary
movement, but it had not ceased to express specific class interests and their
defense within bourgeois society. The socialist parties were still workers’
organizations, despite their inconsistencies in class struggle situations and
their violations of the socialist principles of the past. As institutions making
their way within capitalism, their leaders and bureaucracies were no longer
interested even in the programmatic “long-term” democratic transformation of
capitalism, but concentrated upon the “short-term” enjoyments of their
particular privileges within the status quo. Behind their effusive celebration
of democracy as the “road to socialism” there stood no more than the desire to
be fully integrated into the capitalist system, a desire shared by the
bourgeoisie, which also favors social harmony.

It was then only to be expected that the class collaboration exercised
throughout the war should be continued within and after the revolution. This was
understood not only by the bourgeoisie but also by the military authorities, who
accepted and supported the new “revolutionary government” even though its
legitimation was still based on the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, seen as an
unavoidable interregnum between the pre and a postrevolutionary capitalist
government. In order to proceed to the latter, the whole existing state
apparatus was left undisturbed by the “socialist government” and continued to
function in its usual ways. All that the revolution was supposed to accomplish
was a change from the as yet imperfect to a more perfect bourgeois parliamentary
regime, or the completion of the bourgeois revolution, so long delayed by the
persistence of feudalistic elements within the rising capitalism. This was the
immediate and only goal of German Social Democracy. Its reluctance to extend the
revolution into the economic sphere was even more pronounced in the trade-union
leadership, which set itself in opposition “to any socialist experiment and any
form of socialization at a time when the population required work and food.”
The close wartime cooperation between the trade unions and private industry was
reinforced, in order to prevent and to break strikes and to combat the
politicization of the workers via the factory councils in large-scale
enterprises. In brief, the old labor movement in its entirety became an
unabashed counter-revolutionary force within a revolution that had played
political power into its hands.

Insofar as the November Revolution was a genuine revolutionary movement, it
found its inspiration in the Bolshevik Revolution, seen as the usurpation of
power by the soviets, and was therefore opposed to the convocation of a National
Assembly and the restoration of bourgeois democracy. It stood thus in opposition
both to the prerevolutionary labor movement and to the spontaneously formed
workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which had made the Social Democratic policies
their own. There was, however, the possibility that this immediately given
situation might change, not only because of the generally unsettled conditions,
but also because of the openly counter-revolutionary activity of the Social
Democratic leadership, which might discredit it sufficiently to destroy its
influence in its own organization and in the working class as a whole. This was
not an unreasonable expectation, as the Social Democratic Party had been split
on the issue of war aims in 1917; this had led to the formation of the
Independent Socialist Party (U.S.P.D.), as a first indication of the
radicalization of the socialist movement. Until then, organizational fetishism,
with its insistence upon unity and discipline, had been strong enough to prevent
an internal break. Even the Spartacus League, which came to the fore in 1915,
did not attempt to form a new party, but contented itself with the position of a
left opposition, first in the old party and later within the framework of the
Independent Socialists, so as not to lose contact with the organized socialist
workers. Although the 1eaderships of socialist parties were considered to be
beyond repair, this was held not to be true for the rank and file, who might be
won over to the revolution. However, the Independent Socialists themselves
encompassed a right wing, a center, and a left wing, reaching from E. Bernstein,
K. Kautsky, and R. Hilferding to K. Liebknecht, R. Luxemburg, and F. Mehring,
the latter three representing the Spartacus League. As an opposition party to the
social-patriotic Majority Socialists, the U.S.P.D. was seen as the leading
revolutionary organization with the greatest influence upon the radical elements
of the working class. But because of the divisive structure of the party it was
not able to play a consistently revolutionary role and left the determination of
events to the social reformists. Only after these experiences, at the end of
1918, did the Spartacus League, together with some other local radical
groupings, constitute itself as the Communist Party, calling for a soviet
republic.

Just as little as the bourgeoisie and its Social Democratic allies were able
to assess their chances for survival during the first weeks of the revolution,
but could only try to prevent its radicalization through the immediate
organization of all anti-revolutionary forces in a counter-revolution against
the mere possibility of a true socialist revolution, so the revolutionary
minority could not assess the probability of success or failure within a
situation still in flux and capable of going beyond its initial, limited,
political goals. For neither side, since both comprised social minorities
insofar as their conscious goals were concerned, was there a way to weigh its
chances, except by trying to realize its objectives. Only by probing the strength
or weakness of the opponent was it possible to influence events and to gain some
insight into the otherwise unpredictable course of the revolution. But this was
no longer a question of competing political programs on a purely ideological
level, but one of a confrontation of the armed revolution with the armed
counter-revolution – a question of civil war. It was only in retrospect, after the
defeat of the revolutionary minority, that it became clear that the
revolutionary upheavals had been a cause lost in advance.

In organizing the defense of the capitalist system, the social reformists
prepared for and provoked the civil war, all the while calling for its
prevention, in order to arrest the rise of “Bolshevik anarchy” and to assure an
orderly and bloodless transfer from the old to the new government. But civil
war, Rosa Luxemburg wrote,

is only another name for class struggle. The idea of reaching
socialism without class struggle through the Parliament is a laughable petty-
bourgeois illusion. The National Assembly belongs to the bourgeois revolution.
Whoever wants to use it today throws the revolution back to the historical
stage of the bourgeois revolution; he is merely a conscious agent of the
bourgeoisie or an unconscious ideologist of the petty-bourgeoisie. (2)

But though this is true, it did not bother the majority of the socialist
workers, who had shared for so long in this petit bourgeois ideology, and who
had no desire to turn the revolution into civil war now that the war had
actually ended. In distinction to the situation in Russia, where the revolution
was to bring the war to an end, in the Central European nations the war was
liquidated by the bourgeoisie itself and the revolution was a consequence of
this liquidation. There was no longer a war to be turned into civil war. There
was also no peasantry utilizing the breakdown of autocracy for the appropriation
and division of the landed estates, but rather, except perhaps in Hungary, a
capitalistic agriculture with a reactionary peasant population. For the
revolution to succeed it would have to be one made by the industrial
proletariat, set against all other classes in society, and would therefore
require the participation of the working class as a whole. It could not succeed
if carried out only by a minority.

In their revolutionary elan and audacity the minority of German revolutionaries
were, in a sense, even more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks in their attempts to
set an example to the working class. But although they did not hesitate to react
to the persistent provocations of the counter-revolution, and though they did
initiate revolutionary actions on their own accord, it was not in order to gain
control over the revolution and to install their own dictatorship, but to bring
about the class rule of the workers’ councils. While they did not want to make
the revolution for the proletariat, they thought it possible that the sharpening
of the class struggle would activate always greater masses of workers and draw
them into the fight against the counter-revolutionary forces masquerading as
defenders of democracy. Although their efforts ended in defeat, they had been
inescapable, short of leaving the field entirely uncontested to the
counter-revolution whose main stronghold, at this time, was German Social
Democracy. Ironically, the Marxian aspect of the revolution was defeated in the
name of “Marxism” in its purely ideological social democratic cast.

Notes

 
1. Korrespndenzblatt der Generalkomission der Gewerkschaften 28:46 (16
November 1918)

 
2. In Rote Fahne, November 20 1918.


* Chapter 8 : Ideology and Class Consciousness


In retrospect all lost causes appear as irrational endeavors, while those
that succeed seem rational and justifiable. The goals of the defeated
revolutionary minority have invariably been described as utopian and thus as
indefensible. The term “utopian” does not apply, however, to objectively
realizable projects, but to imaginary systems, which may or may not have
concretely given material underpinnings that allow for their realization. There
was nothing utopian in the attempt to gain control of society by way of workers’
councils and to end the market economy, for in the developed capitalist system
the industrial proletariat is the determining factor in the social reproduction
process as a whole, which is not necessarily associated with labor as wage
labor. Whether a society is capitalist or socialist, in either case it is the
working class that enables it to exist, production can be carried on without
regard to its expansion in value terms and the requirements of capital
accumulation. Distribution and the allocation of social labor are not dependent
upon the indirect exchange relations of the market, but can be organized
consciously through appropriate new social institutions under the open and
direct control of the producers. Western capitalism in 1918 was not the
necessary social production system but only the existing one, whose overthrow
would merely have released it from its capitalist encumbrances.

What was missing was not the objective possibility for social change, but a
subjective willingness on the part of the majority of the working class to take
advantage of the opportunity to overthrow the ruling class and to take
possession of the means of production. The labor movement had changed with
changing capitalism, but in a direction contrary to Marxian expectations.
Despite the pseudo-Marxist ideology, it tended toward the apolitical position
that characterizes labor movements in the Anglo-Saxon countries and toward their
positive acceptance of the capitalist system. The movement had become
politically “neutral,” so to speak, by leaving political decisions to the
accredited political parties of bourgeois democracy, of which the Social
Democratic Party was one among others. The workers supported the party that
promised, or seemingly intended, to take care of their particular immediate
needs, which now comprised all their needs. They would not object to the
nationalization of industries, were this the goal of their favored party, but
neither did they object to reneging on this principle in favor of the
private-property system. They simply left such decisions to their elected and
more or less trusted leaders, just as they awaited the managers’ or
entrepreneurs’ orders in the factories. They continued to deny themselves any
kind of self-determination by simply leaving things as they had been, which
seemed preferable to the turmoil and the uncertainties of a prolonged struggle
against the traditional authorities. It is thus not possible to say that Social
Democracy “betrayed” the working class; what its leaders “betrayed” was their
own past, now that they had become an appreciated part of the capitalist
establishment.

The failure of the German Revolution seems to vindicate the Bolshevik
assertion that, left to itself, the working class is not able to make a
socialist revolution and therefore requires the leadership of a revolutionary
party ready to assume dictatorial powers. But the German working class did not
attempt to make a socialist revolution and thus its failure to do so cannot
prove the validity of the Bolshevik proposition. Moreover, there was a
revolutionary “vanguard” that tried to change the purely political character of
the revolution. Although this revolutionary minority did not subscribe to the
Bolshevik party concept, it was no less ready to assume leadership, but as a
part, not as the dominator, of the working class. Under Western European
conditions, a socialist revolution depended clearly on class and not on party
actions, for here it is the working class as a whole that has to take over
political power and the means of production. It is true of course – but true for
all classes, the bourgeoisie as well as the proletariat – that it is always only
a part of the whole that actually engages itself in social affairs, while
another part remains inactive. But in either case, it is the active part that is
decisive as regards the outcome of the class war. It is thus not a question of
the whole of the working class literally partaking in the revolutionary process,
but of a mass sufficient to match the forces mobilized by the bourgeoisie. This
relative mass did not aggregate fast enough to offset the growing power of the
counter-revolution.

The whole counter-revolutionary strategy consisted in forestalling a possible
increase of the revolutionary minority. The great rush into the National
Assembly, as the political goal of Social Democracy, was at the same time
dictated by the fear that a prolonged existence of the workers’ councils could
lead to their radicalization in the direction of the revolutionary minority.
With the demobilization of the army, the political diversity of the soldiers’
councils would disappear, and the composition of the councils, based now
exclusively in the factories, might take on a more consistently revolutionary
character. That this fear was uncalled for came to light in the results of the
election to the National Assembly, which gave the Majority Socialists 37.9
percent of the total vote, whereas the more radical Independent Socialists
received only 7.6 percent. Social Democracy still had the confidence of the mass
of the working class, despite, or perhaps because of, its anti-revolutionary
program. Yet the fear persisted that the victory of bourgeois democracy might
not be the last act of the revolution. With revolutionary Russia in the
background, a new revolutionary upsurge remained a possibility – a situation
calling for the systematic destruction of revolutionary forces that refused to
accept the reconsolidation of the capitalist regime.

Although it demanded the end of the war, not the whole of the army joined the
revolution. Nonetheless, so as to facilitate the orderly retreat from the
frontlines and to avoid a large-scale civil war, the Military High Command
accepted both the soldiers’ councils and the provisional Social Democratic
government. In close cooperation with the Military High Command, the newly
established government began at once to select and to organize the more
trustworthy elements from the dissolving army into voluntary formations
(Freikorps) to challenge, disarm, and destroy the revolutionary minority. Under
the command of the Social Democratic militarist Gustav Noske, these military
forces succeeded in piecemeal fashion in eliminating the armed revolutionaries
wherever they tried to drive the revolution beyond the confines of bourgeois
democracy. The resort to White terror disturbed the complacency of the Social
Democratic masses somewhat more than the revolutionary agitation of the
Communists. However, this loss of confidence in the Social Democratic leadership
did not benefit the Communists but merely increased the ranks of the divided
oppositional Independent Socialists. Between the elections to the National
Assembly in January 1919 and the election of the Reichstag in June 1920, the
votes for the Majority Socialists declined from 37.9 percent to 21.6 percent,
while those of the Independent Socialists increased from 7.6 percent to 18
percent.

Just as the Social Democratic Party utilized the council movement in order to
sustain its own political influence, so it did not object to the nationalization
of large-scale industry called for by the Second Congress of Workers’ Councils.
This was to be taken up by the National Assembly, which, of course, offered no
guarantee that the demand would also be heeded. But this apparent commitment to
the actualization of a program of nationalization-as a synonym for
socialization-allowed the Provisional Government to camouflage its
counter-revolutionary course with the promise to further the socialization
process by peaceful, legal means, in contrast to the Communist endeavors to
reach it by way of civil war. While the White terror ruled, this was only
because “socialism was on the march” and found no other obstacle in its path
than “Bolshevik anarchism.” Wherever this promise was taken seriously, as for
instance by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils in the Ruhr district, who made a
first step toward socialization by assuming control over industries and mines in
the expectation that the government would complete and ratify their actions,
their independent initiative was quickly brought to an end by military means. In
any case, the Social Democratic concept of nationalization did not include
proletarian self-determination but merely, and at best, the taking over of
industries by the state. It was in this sense only – that is, in the Bolshevik
sense – that nationalization was debatable at all, and it was soon to be
discarded as an object of discussion, together with the duly instituted
parliamentary committee on socialization.

The November Revolution itself was thus its one and only result. Apart from
the toppling of the monarchy, some changes in electoral procedures, the
eight-hour day, and the transformation of the factory councils into nonpolitical
shop stewards’ committees under trade-union auspices, the liberal capitalist
economy remained untouched and the state remained a bourgeois state. All the
revolution had accomplished were some meager reforms that in any case could have
been reached within the framework of capitalism’s “normal” development. In the
minds of the reformist Social Democrats social change had always been a purely
evolutionary process of small progressive improvements which would eventually
issue into a quantitatively different social system. They saw themselves, in
1914 and again in 1918, not as “counter-revolutionaries” or as “betrayers” of
the working class but, on the contrary, as its true representatives, who cared
for both the workers’ most immediate needs and their final social emancipation.
This is nothing to be wondered at, for, more often than not, even the
capitalists see themselves as benefactors of the working class. With far more
justification could the Social Democratic leadership imagine that its
interventions in the revolutionary process would in the end be more beneficial
to the working class than a radical overturn of all existing conditions, with
its accompanying interruption of the routinely necessary social and productive
functions. Gradualism seemed the only assurance that the social transformation
could proceed with the least cost in human misery, and, of course, the least
risk for the Social Democratic leadership. Moreover, the political revolution
afforded, at least in theory, an opportunity to speed up the process of social
reform by bridging the antagonism of labor and capital through a more democratic
state and government.

In this view class conflict could be continuously softened through
government-induced concessions made to the working class at the expense of the
bourgeoisie. There could be an extension of political democracy into the
economic sphere and “codetermination” of the social production and distribution
process. There was no need for the dictatorship of a class, whether of the
bourgeoisie or the proletariat. There could be a continuation of the class
collaboration practiced during the war, now to serve peaceful ends, benefiting
the whole of society. A condition was imagined, such as came to pass some
decades later with the “welfare state” and the “social market economy,” in which
all conflicts could be arbitrated instead of being fought out, and a social
harmony established that would be advantageous to all. The prewar confidence in
the economic viability of the capitalist system was still alive: the setbacks of
the war could be overcome through an increasing production, unhampered by
time-consuming and dislocating social experiments. A bankrupt capitalism was not
considered a proper base for socialism; as before, the latter would be a problem
of the future, when the economy was once again in full flourish. If some workers
did not see it this way, their folly should not be allowed to deprive the rest
of society of the possibility to emerge from the shambles left by the war and to
meet its more immediate needs in terms of bread and butter.

The reformists had no principles to “betray.” They remained what they had
been all along, but they were now obliged first of all to safeguard the system
in which their cherished practice could continue. The revolution had to be
reduced to a mere reform, so as to satisfy their deepest convictions and,
incidentally, secure their political existence. The only thing to be wondered at
was the great number of socialist workers for whom, at least ideologically,
reforms were supposed to be only an intermediate stage in the march to the
social revolution. Now that the opportunity was given to realize their
“historical mission,” they failed to take advantage of it, preferring instead
the “easy way” of social reform and the liquidation of the revolution. Again,
this is not a verification of the Kautsky-Lenin proposition that the working
class is incapable of raising its class consciousness beyond mere trade
unionism, for the German working class was a highly socialistically educated
working class, quite able to conceive of a social revolution for the overthrow
of capitalism. Moreover, it was not “revolutionary consciousness” that the
middle-class intellectuals had carried into the working class, but only their
own reformism and opportunism, which undermined whatever revolutionary
consciousness evolved within the working class. Marxist revisionism did not
originate in the working class but in its leadership, for which trade unionism
and parliamentarism were the sufficient means for a progressive social
development. They merely turned the historically restricted practice of the
labor movement into a theory of socialism and, by monopolizing its ideology,
were able to influence the workers in the same direction.

Still, the workers proved only too willing to share the leaders’ reformist
convictions. For Lenin, this was proof enough of their congenital incapacity to
develop a revolutionary consciousness, which thus condemned them to follow the
reformist lead. The solution was thus the replacement of reformist by
revolutionary leaders, who would not “betray” the revolutionary potentialities
of the laboring class. It was a question of the “right leadership,” a struggle
among intellectuals for the minds of the workers, a competition of ideologies
for the allegiance of the proletariat. And thus it was the character of the
party that was deemed the decisive element in the revolutionary process, even
though this party would have to win the confidence of the masses through their
intuitive recognition that it represented their own interests, which the masses
themselves were not able to express in effective political action.

Simultaneously, the differentiation between class and party was seen as their
identity, because the latter would compensate for the lack of political
awareness on the part of the less-educated proletariat. Contrary to the Marxian
theory that it is material conditions and social relations that account for the
rise of a revolutionary consciousness within the proletariat, in the Social
Democratic view (whether reformist or revolutionary) these very conditions
prevent the workers from recognizing their true class interests and from finding
ways and means to realize them. They are able to rebel, no doubt, but not to
turn their wrath into successful revolutionary actions and meaningful social
change. For this they need the aid of middle-class intellectuals who make the
cause of the workers their own, even though, or because, they do not share in
those deprivations of the working class which, in the Marxian view, would turn
the workers into revolutionaries. This elitist notion implies, of course, that
though ideas find their source in material social conditions, they are
nonetheless the irreplacable and dominating element in the process of social
change. But as ideas they are the privilege of that group in society which, with
the given division of labor, attends to its ideological requirements.

But what is class consciousness anyway? Insofar as it merely refers to one’s
position in society it is immediately recognizable: the bourgeois knows that he
belongs to the ruling class; the worker, that his place is among the ruled; and
the social groups in between count themselves in neither of these basic classes.
There is no problem so long as the different classes adhere to one and the same
ideology, namely, the idea that these class relations are natural relations that
will always prevail as a basic characteristic of the human condition. Actually,
of course, the material interests of the various classes diverge and lead to
social frictions that conflict with the common ideology. The latter is
increasingly recognized as the ideology of the ruling class in support of the
existing social arrangements and will be rejected as a statement of the
inescapable destiny of human society. The ruling ideology is thus bound to
succumb to the extension of class consciousness into the ideological sphere. The
differences of material interests turn into ideological differences and then
into political theories based on the concrete social contradictions. The
political theories may be quite rudimentary, because of the complexities of the
social issues involved, but they nonetheless constitute a change from mere class
consciousness to a comprehension that social arrangements could be different
from what they are. We are then on the road from mere class consciousness to a
revolutionary class consciousness, which recognizes the ruling ideology as a
confidence game and concerns itself with ways and means to alter the existing
conditions. If this were not so, no labor movement would have arisen and social
development would not be characterized by class struggles

However, just as the presence of the ruling ideology does not suffice to
maintain existing social relations, but must in turn be supported by the
material forces of the state apparatus, so a counter-ideology will remain just
this unless it can produce material forces stronger than those reflected by the
ruling ideology. If this is not the case, the quality of the counter-ideology,
whether it is merely intuitive or based on scientific considerations, does not
matter and neither the intellectual nor the worker can effect a change in the
existing social relations. Revolutionaries may or may not be allowed to express
their views, depending on the mentality that dominates the ruling class, but
under whatever conditions they will not be able to dislodge the ruling class by
ideological means. In this respect the ruling class has all the advantage, since
with the means of production and the forces of the state it controls
instrumentalities for the perpetuation and dissemination of its own ideology. As
this condition persists until the actual overthrow of a given social system,
revolutions must take place with insufficient ideological preparation. In short,
the counter-ideology can triumph only through a revolution that plays the means
of production and political power into the hands of the revolutionaries. Until
then, revolutionary class consciousness will always be less effective than the
ruling ideology.


Events :
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     Reform or Revolution -- Added : March 03, 2021

     Reform or Revolution -- Updated : January 08, 2022

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