MARX AND THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION
rab
MARX AND THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION
Marx and Engels in the printshop of the ‘Neue Rheinishe Zeitung’
http://www.wrp.org.uk/images/photos/10-12-23-5914.jpg
PART ONE: ‘Fraternity found its true unadulterated and prosaic
expression in the war of Labour against capital’
AS French and European workers are once again striking and
demonstrating in their millions, at the same time singing the
Internationale under conditions where fellow workers across the
continent and the world all face the same class onslaught, there can
be no better time to recall Karl Marx’s class analysis of the events
that took place, mainly in Paris, between the February revolution of
1848 and the reversion to the empire of 1851.
‘With the exception of only a few chapters’, began his account of the
first of the events in The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850,
‘every more important part of the annals of the revolution from 1848
to 1849 carries the heading: Defeat of the Revolution!’
But he insisted: ‘What succumbed in these defeats was not the
revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages,
results of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of
sharp class antagonisms – persons, illusions, conceptions, projects
from which the revolutionary party before February was not free, from
which it could be freed not by the victory of February, but only by a
series of defeats.
‘In a word: the revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its
immediate tragi-comic achievements, but on the contrary by the
creation of an opponent in combat with whom alone the party of
insurrection ripened into a really revolutionary party.’
A few pages later he was already adding: ‘Just as the workers thought
they would be able to emancipate themselves side by side with the
bourgeoisie, so they thought they would be able to consummate a
proletarian revolution within the national walls of France, side by
side with the remaining bourgeois nations. But French relations of
production are conditioned by the foreign trade of France, by her
position on the world market and the laws thereof; how was France to
break them without a European revolutionary war, which would strike
back at the despot of the world market, England?’
Nothing quite like this class-based analysis of a conflict, still less
a revolutionary conflict, had ever been written in history before – as
in fact nothing like the 1848 events themselves had happened before.
Marx was referring above all to the defeat of the June 1848
insurrection in France, when over 3,000 Parisian workers were
slaughtered, with a further 15,000 deported overseas, by the forces of
the Provisional Government established in apparent submission to the
workers in February.
And mention of England underlines a second important point, also
inseparable from the interests of classes and the way these condition
all social life. Every English reader will know that the comparable
revolutionary uprising in England had happened 140 years earlier –
even though those differently momentous events are still presented to
us not as a revolution, but as a rebellion and a civil war. Following
the state execution of Charles I in 1649, eleven revolutionary years
passed under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and, briefly, his son
Richard; after that monarchy was ‘restored’. But the world’s first
extended period of bourgeois rule had to arrive, even if the
bourgeoisie could no longer themselves agree on whether to sustain it;
and in 1688/9 a combination of a crisis, an ‘interregnum’, and a piece
of dynastic theatre, which the British establishment to this day call
a ‘glorious revolution’, was set in motion in order to carry forward
the development of productive forces to which the real revolution had
already opened the door.
In France in 1789 the victory of the bourgeois revolution left it with
even sharper contradictory problems to overcome, owing both to the
rising strength in the cities of an industrial bourgeoisie whose
interests challenged those of financiers and the banks, and to the
predominance of the peasantry in the nation as a whole. Each distinct
class needed the support of significant sections of others if a way
forward was to be found. So after 1793, when Louis XVI was executed
and universal suffrage introduced for the first time, consolidation of
the bourgeois revolution quickly became impossible except by way of
the grim work of Robespierre and the Jacobin rule of terror. Following
Robespierre’s own execution, the retreat known as Thermidor – the name
of the month in the new revolutionary calendar when retreat began –
proceeded by way of the Directory, the Consulate and finally the
imperial rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. When – 22 years on – the
restoration of the Bourbons came, it was cemented by the diktat of
English guns at Waterloo.
The victory of February 1848 had clearly gone to the Paris workers;
and subsequent risings broke out all across Europe. But in the new
French ‘Provisional’ Government, which lasted only until May, they
gained just two representatives – the worker Alexandre Martin, known
as Albert, and the exclusively petty-bourgeois socialist Louis Blanc;
a measure not of their contribution at all, but of how the ranks of
the French bourgeoisie estimated the working class. The February
revolution had briefly united workers, the petty-bourgeoisie and the
bulk of the industrial bourgeoisie in overthrowing the Orleanist
monarchy of Louis Phillipe, which had itself come to power via the
July Revolution of 1830 declaring – as Marx memorably recalled: ‘From
now on the bankers will rule!’
And so they had, by means of a royalist-cum-financiers’ regime as an
alternative to the ‘legitimist’ Bourbons, and three ruthless
suppressions of their former ‘allies’ the Parisian workers in later
uprisings throughout the 1830s. February’s success had turned on the
ability of the workers to mobilise a force of some 200,000 of their
forces more powerfully and quickly than the would-be bourgeoisie were
able to do. And it was chiefly by this means, in spite of the
constitutional termination of feudalism a full fifty-five years
earlier, that not only the debt-laden royal regime of the bankers, but
with it monarchy as a direct form of rule in France, was at last
overthrown.
Some of the subsequent developments are echoed even in today’s crisis,
in the role and function in it of the Labour government of Gordon
Brown. ‘Whereas the Revolution of 1789 began by shaking the feudal
burdens off the peasants,’ Marx continued, ‘the Revolution of 1848
announced itself to the rural population by the imposition of a new
tax, in order not to endanger capital and to keep its state machine
going.
‘There was only one means by which the Provisional Government could
set aside all these inconveniences and jerk the state out of its old
rut – a declaration of state bankruptcy . . . By honouring the bills
drawn on the state by the old bourgeois society, the Provisional
Government succumbed to the latter. It had become the hard-pressed
debtor of bourgeois society instead of confronting it as the pressing
creditor that had to collect the revolutionary debts of many
years . . . Credit became a condition of life for it, and the
concessions to the proletariat, the promises made, became so many
fetters which had to be struck off. The emancipation of the workers –
even as a phrase – became an unbearable danger to the new republic,
for it was a standing protest against the restoration of credit, which
rests on undisturbed and untroubled recognition of the existing
economic class relations. . .’
One success of the February revolution had been to force the National
Guard out of Paris. So in its place the new government formed twenty-
four 1,000-strong battalions of Mobile Guards, all consisting of youth
under 20 judged suitable to follow whatever orders they were asked to
for one and a half francs a day. This they represented to the workers
as a proletarian guard. In addition they organised the equivalent of
English workhouses – the ateliers – whose purpose was essentially to
set worker against worker, and which Louis Blanc agreed to run. By
these means a large section of the petty-bourgeoisie, always on or
over the edge of bankruptcy, was wherever possible goaded into anti-
working class hysteria. Then in March and April, when big street
demonstrations of workers began again, these two most desperate of the
classes could be pitted against one another. By that time the
Provisional Government had demonstrated itself capable of mobilising
100,000 armed men to confront what the workers in February had merely
threatened; and its promised general elections to the new National
Assembly duly followed in early May.
Marx wrote: ‘On May 4 the National Assembly, the result of the direct
general elections, convened. Universal suffrage did not possess the
magical power which republicans of the old school had ascribed to it.
They saw in the whole of France, at least in the majority of
Frenchmen, citoyens with the same interests, the same
understanding . . . Instead of their imaginary people, the elections
brought the real people to the light of day, that is, representatives
of the different classes into which it falls . . . But if universal
suffrage was not the miracle-working magic wand for which the
republican worthies had taken it, it possessed the incomparably higher
merit of unchaining the class struggle . . .
‘In the National Assembly all France sat in judgment upon the Paris
proletariat. The Assembly broke immediately with the social illusions
of the February Revolution; it roundly proclaimed the bourgeois
republic, nothing but the bourgeois republic. It at once excluded the
representatives, Louis Blanc and Albert, from the Executive Commission
appointed to it; it threw out the proposal for a special Labour
Ministry, and received with acclamation the statement of the Minister
Trélat: “Now it is only a matter of leading labour back to its old
conditions.”
‘. . . The workers were left with no choice; they had to starve or
take action. They answered on June 22 with the tremendous insurrection
in which the first great battle was fought between the two classes
that split modern society. It was a fight for the preservation or
annihilation of the bourgeois order . . .
‘It is well-known how the workers, with unexampled bravery and
ingenuity, without leaders, without a common plan, without means and,
for the most part, lacking weapons, held in check for five days the
army, the Mobile Guard, the Paris National Guard, and the National
Guard that streamed in from the provinces. It is well-known how the
bourgeoisie compensated itself for the mortal anguish it suffered by
unheard-of brutality, massacring over 3,000 prisoners.’
When Marx had spoken of the freeing of the revolutionary party, and of
its ripening into a ‘really revolutionary party’, he had had something
else in mind too. Along with Engels, and on behalf of the Communist
League on whose behalf both of them had agreed jointly to prepare it a
few months earlier, he had just completed the writing of the Manifesto
of the Communist Party. That was in early 1848.
Later they recalled: ‘The Communist League, an international
association of workers, which could of course be only a secret one at
the time, commissioned the undersigned [i.e., Marx and Engels – MD],
at the Congress held in London in November 1847, to draw up for
publication a detailed, theoretical and practical programme of the
Party. Such was the origin of the Manifesto, the manuscript of which
travelled to London, to be printed, a few weeks before the February
revolution . . . A French version first appeared in Paris shortly
before the June insurrection of 1848 . . .’
From this it’s plain that Marx and Engels are, amongst other things,
making clear that the Communists were now ready for the possibility of
such a defeat, had an analysis which had in general foreseen such a
contest and had something important to say to those looking to find
the way forward through the course of it.
And for that to be so, that analysis must carry within it the idea
that consciousness is determined by life; that historical
circumstances in the last analysis are governed by class laws, and
that in recognition of this events can be intervened in; that
revolutionary theory can guide practice. All these ideas are
inseparable from the philosophical advance completed in 1845-6 in The
German Ideology and the better-known Theses on Feuerbach, where Marx
famously insisted that ‘the question whether objective truth can be
attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but a
practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the
reality and power, the this-sidedness, of his thinking.’
The significance of The German Ideology in the development of Marxism
cannot be overestimated. For only in the light of its recognition of
the primacy of objective, material conditions of life as determinants
of man’s consciousness, an understanding which has at the same time to
be based on recognition of the dialectic not only in the class
struggle but also in nature and in all self-moving matter, can the
theoretically-guided practice necessary for the revolutionary party to
successfully organise the replacement of capitalism permanently be
made possible.
By as early as the beginning of 1845, according to Engels’ later
testimony, Marx had fully worked out both his communist views and the
basics of his dialectical materialist philosophy and method. Prior to
that, i.e. even before the two met, both Marx and Engels were
regularly urging these views to members of the League of the Just, a
Europe-wide organisation banned in France after the workers’ uprising
of 1839. One of its main leaders visited Engels in 1847 to ask them to
join and win over the majority of its members to these communist
views; and later that year the League of the Just became the Communist
League.
The text of Class Struggles in France, written two years after 1848,
also reproduces a part of what Marx, who during June was in Cologne
writing for and editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung newspaper, said
about the events in their immediate aftermath.
‘The last official remnant of the February Revolution, the Executive
Commission, has melted away, like an apparition, before the
seriousness of events . . . Fraternité, the brotherhood of
antagonistic classes, one of which exploits the other, this fraternité
which in February was proclaimed and inscribed in large letters on the
facades of Paris, on every prison and every barracks – this fraternity
found its true, unadulterated and prosaic expression in civil war,
civil war in its most terrible aspect, the war of labour against
capital. This fraternity blazed in front of all the windows of Paris
on the evening of June 25, when the Paris of the bourgeoisie held
illuminations while the Paris of the proletariat was burning,
bleeding, groaning in the throes of death. Brotherhood lasted only as
long as there was a fraternity of interests between the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat.’
It was under the unprecedented conditions of those two years, and in
that state of mind, that Marx first began to speak and write about the
concept of permanent revolution. And by March 1850 he was telling the
Central Committee of the Communist League:
‘If the German workers are not able to attain power and achieve their
own class interests without completely going through a lengthy
revolutionary development, they at least know for a certainty this
time that the first act of this approaching revolutionary drama will
coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will
be very much accelerated by it.
‘But they themselves must do the utmost for their final victory by
clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are, by taking
up their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by
not allowing themselves to be seduced for a single moment by the
hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty-bourgoisie into
refraining from the independent organisation of the party of the
proletariat.
‘Their battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence.’
And just a month later the Central Committee had proceeded to organise
the secret formation – incorporating left-wing Chartists from England
and leading Blanquists from France in spite of Marx’s serious
disagreements with both – of a World Society of Revolutionary
Communists whose constitution began: ‘The aim of the association is
the overthrow of all privileged classes and their subjugation to the
dictatorship of the proletariat, which will carry through the
permanent revolution until the realisation of communism, the ultimate
form of organisation of the human family.’
rab
MARX AND THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION PART TWO: ‘Wage labour and capital –
and the right to revolution’
Defending the street barricades in 1848 (From a contemporary print)
http://www.wrp.org.uk/images/photos/10-12-27-5917.jpg
FREDERICK Engels was also thinking and writing at that time about the
permanent revolution. This showed itself even as early as January
1849, when he wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung about the
revolutionary battle that had erupted in Hungary against Austrian
rule. Highly commending the national uprising ‘armed, organised and
galvanised’ by Louis Kossuth, a Magyar nationalist and revolutionary,
he noted its ‘mass movement, national manufacture of weapons,
assignats, short shrift for anyone obstructing the revolutionary
movement, the revolution in permanence – in brief all the chief
characteristics of the glorious year 1793.’
It cannot be doubted, therefore, that permanent revolution was a
regular subject of discussion at the time between Marx and Engels. No
wonder. The two years 1848-50 were the period of their most directly
revolutionary activity, as they gave themselves over to the cause of
revolution in Germany
Engels fought at Elberfeld, Baden and Pfalz, while Marx was put on
trial for his participation in Cologne. The German revolution had
first to be a bourgeois revolution, as the Manifesto of the Communist
Party had recently said, and not merely because Germany was still
extremely undeveloped; for in fact at that time it was no nation at
all, consisting of 39 separate states mostly headed by princes and
under feudal or absolutist rule. After the French revolution of
1789-93 many of these states had been invaded and conquered by the
troops of Napoleon, only to find themselves – in spite of their active
resistance – almost as quickly back in the political thrall of Russia
following his retreat. For the most part democratic as well as
socialist ideas had their strongest following in the area to the west
of the river Rhine that had been annexed to France since 1798 – and in
which Marx had been born in 1818 at Trier, just three years after that
French annexation ended.
It was not Germany, therefore, but the march of industry in the whole
of Europe and the economically developed world that Marx and Engels
had in mind in 1848, when writing so famously in the Manifesto: ‘The
bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part . . .
wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal,
patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has
left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-
interest, than callous “cash payment”. . .
‘It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of
the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has
substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.’
For Marx and Engels, the very nakedness and directness of this
exploitation had now placed a historical turning-point for mankind in
the hands of the working-class as a class. In the final passages of
the Manifesto, in which the political standpoints of Communism towards
opposition parties in the main countries of Europe are outlined, they
state: ‘In Germany [the Communists] fight with the bourgeoisie
whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute
monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.
‘But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the
working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile
antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the
German workers may straightaway use, as so many weapons against the
bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie
must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order
that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight
against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.’
The Manifesto concludes: ‘The Communists turn their attention chiefly
to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois
revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced
conditions of European civilisation, and with a much more developed
proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of
France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution
in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following
proletarian revolution.’
But since we have the benefit, over 150 years later, of hindsight, we
should use it. When the first article of this series referred to the
retreat of ‘Thermidor’ in France, we saw how in the context of 1793-4
it signified that the bourgeois character of the 1789 revolution
eventually predominated over the revolutionary interests of the less
privileged layers of society who had joined with it and also seen it
as the way forward. In the case of the proletarian revolution, Marx is
envisaging here how the working class imposes its interests on the
less revolutionary classes in society.
That is how we have to understand the predominant development of the
interests of the working class, relative to and in consideration of
those of other classes, in the context of what Marx had called
‘permanent revolution’ – both as he himself insisted on it in March
1850, and as it was noted by Engels as present in France in 1793.
Before 1848, up to and including the time of his writing of the
Manifesto, Marx’s political and philosophical analyses had been
dominated by his scathing attention to Germany’s failure to develop
itself as a nation in accordance with the revolutionary examples of
England and France. As a student at Bonn and then Berlin university,
he had found himself drawn most strongly to philosophy, and the work
of the Kantians and above all of Hegel. This had been had been one key
area in which Germans had surpassed the comparable achievements of the
already established bourgeois states.
Marx had no illusions about the limits of this success. The Germans
had had to ‘think what others had done’, was his summary of it as a
national accomplishment, and his early allegiance to Feuerbach was an
index of his determination to supersede the idealism of Hegel in
particular by – in his own words – standing him on his head; or
rather, on his feet. In 1843 he moved to Paris where, until he was
thrown out of the country again by the government of Louis Phillipe,
he studied at first hand what he recognised as the social sources of
all philosophical developments, in the practices which had made
theoretical advances possible. And when Engels first met Marx in Paris
in 1844, following a period of correspondence in connection with
Marx’s editorship of the Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbuch, they had
found themselves in full agreement on this along with almost
everything else.
As the Manifesto explained: ‘The Socialist and Communist literature of
France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a
bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle
against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the
bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal
absolutism.
‘German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits,
eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that, when these
writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions
had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social
conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical
significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect.
‘Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the
demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the
demands of “Practical Reason” in general, and the utterance of the
will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes
the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of human Will
generally. . .
‘It is well-known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints
over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient
heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process
with the profane French literature. For instance, beneath the French
criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation
of Humanity,” and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state
they wrote “Dethronement of the Category of the General,” and so
forth.
‘The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely
emasculated.’
At much the same time as this passage was written, furthermore, Marx
had undertaken a significant development of his work begun in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; in the form of a
delivery of lectures to the German Workers’ Society in Brussels under
the title Wage Labour and Capital.
They were obviously significantly updated when Marx published them in
the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of April 1849, because he alludes in the
very first paragraph to ‘the present class struggles and national
struggles’ – a clear reference to the uprisings of 1848, which are
then specifically mentioned in the second paragraph. So whatever was
said in the earlier lectures had clearly been developed by later
events; unprecedented events which in their turn had deepened Marx’s
understanding of the conflict of labour against capital as he’d noted
it at the time of the Paris massacres.
Marx began: ‘From various quarters we have been reproached with not
having presented the economic relations which constitute the material
foundation of the present class struggles and national struggles . . .
Now, after our readers have seen the class struggle develop in
colossal political forms in 1848, the time has come to deal more
closely with the economic relations themselves on which the existence
of the bourgeoisie and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the
workers, are founded.
‘We shall present in three large sections: 1) the relation of wage
labour to capital, the slavery of the worker, the domination of the
capitalist; 2) the inevitable destruction of the middle bourgeois
classes and the so-called peasant estate under the present system; 3)
the commercial subjugation and exploitation of the bourgeois classes
of the various European nations by the despot of the world market –
England.’
Wage Labour and Capital was however never finished, and the part that
was finished only begins to cover the issues of the proposed first
section; nevertheless, two significant advances are immediately
noticeable. First of all, Marx has detailed more clearly the
distinction between wage labour and other forms of labour in exposing
the capitalist conception of ‘free’ labour. The slave, he says, ‘is a
commodity which can pass from the hand of one owner to another. The
serf ‘does not receive a wage from the owner of the land; rather the
owner of the land receives a tribute from him. . . The free labourer,
on the other hand, sells himself and, indeed, sells himself
piecemeal . . . The worker belongs neither to an owner nor to the
land, but eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his daily life belong
to him who buys them. The worker leaves the capitalist to whom he
hires himself whenever he likes, and the capitalist discharges him
whenever he thinks fit . . . But the worker . . . cannot leave the
whole class of purchasers, that is the capitalist class, without
renouncing his existence.’
What does that signify if not the end of those ‘results of social
relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class
antagonisms’, i.e., the defeat only of the illusions of the Paris
workers in June 1848, above all the illusion of ‘fraternity’ that
characterised even the permanent overthrow, in February 1848, of the
French monarchy? And Wage Labour and Capital is correspondingly much
clearer too in its analysis of what capital is.
When, for example, Marx says in part 3 that ‘a cotton spinning jenny
is a machine for spinning cotton/It becomes capital only in certain
relations/Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than
gold in itself is money, or sugar the price of sugar’, it’s clear that
such an analysis really does foreshadow what he was able to reveal
more completely in Volume 3 of Capital itself; i.e., that ‘capital is
not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation,
belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is
manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social
character.’
Finally, it is necessary to understand how Marx and Engels viewed the
efforts of the German bourgeoisie in the revolution of 1848. It is put
most succinctly in the passage translated by Vladimir Lenin in his
July 1905 pamphlet Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic
Revolution, where he quotes Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung analysis of
July 29 1848 – i.e. four months after the uprising in Germany had
begun. A later article in our series will comment further on Vladimir
Lenin’s assessment of this.
Marx said: ‘The German Revolution of 1848 is only a parody of the
French Revolution of 1789. On August 4 1789, three weeks after the
storming of the Bastille, the French people triumphed in a single day
over all feudal burdens . . . The French bourgeoisie of 1789 did not
for a moment leave its allies, the peasants, in the lurch. It knew
that its rule was grounded in the destruction of feudalism in the
countryside, the creation of a free landowning peasant class.
‘The German bourgeoisie of 1848 is, without the least compunction,
betraying the peasants, who are its most natural allies, the flesh of
its flesh, and without whom it is powerless against the aristocracy.’
When, in November 1848, the resolution of the Prussian Berlin Assembly
established by the revolution to refuse to pay taxes was annulled by
the more timid all-German National Assembly in Frankfurt (at that time
still just a small town), Marx called in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
for the non-payment of taxes, declaring ‘the payment of taxes is high
treason.’ For this he was among those brought to trial following the
victory of the counter-revolution; and his trial began in February
1849.
Marx took the same principled position. At the height of his speech in
his defence, he told the jury: ‘The (National Assembly) deputy,
Schneider, is in fact one of the accused in this trial. The question
of the right of the National Assembly to resolve to refuse to pay
taxes has therefore already been confirmed in practice by the
people . . .
‘You will all concede, gentlemen, that you are not confronted here
with a crime in the ordinary sense . . . in normal circumstances, the
public power executes the existing laws; the criminal is he who breaks
those laws or violently opposes the public power in its execution of
those laws. In our case, one public power has broken the law, and the
other public power, it is unimportant which one, has upheld it. A
conflict between two state powers does not fall within the
jurisdiction of either private law or criminal law.
‘The question as to who is in the right, the Crown or the National
Assembly, is a historical question. All the juries, all the courts of
Prussia, cannot decide this question. There is only one power which
can decide it: history…
‘This was not a case of a conflict between two parties standing on the
ground of one society, it was a conflict between two societies, a
social conflict which had taken on a political form, it was the
struggle of modern bourgeois society with the old feudal –
bureaucratic society, the struggle between the society of free
competition and the society of guild organisation, between the society
of industry and the society of landownership, between the society of
knowledge and the society of belief. . .
‘The Berlin National Assembly clearly abandoned itself to a gigantic
illusion, it showed its failure to understand its own position and its
own condition of existence, when it held an amicable understanding, a
compromise with the Crown, to be possible, and endeavoured to put this
into effect, both before and during the conflict . . .
‘If the Crown makes a counter-revolution, the people have the right to
reply with a revolution.’
The jury acquitted Marx and all the accused, though in other trials
many were jailed.
rab
MARX AND THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION – PART 3: The Class Dictatorship of
the Proletariat
Hungarian revolutionary troops capture the bastion in Buda on May 21,
1849
http://www.wrp.org.uk/images/photos/10-12-28-5921.jpg
‘FEBRUARY 25, 1848, had granted the republic to France, June 25 thrust
the revolution upon her. And revolution, after June, meant: overthrow
of bourgeois society, whereas before February it had meant: overthrow
of the form of government.’ So began the second part of Marx’s
analysis of the crucial class struggles of 1848-50, which was first
published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in early 1850.
A page before he had recalled: ‘The Paris proletariat was forced into
the June insurrection by the bourgeoisie . . . and only its defeat
convinced it of the truth that the slightest improvement in its
position remains a utopia within the bourgeois republic . . .’
And afterwards: ‘In place of its demands, exuberant in form, but petty
and even bourgeois still in content, the concession of which it wanted
to wring from the February republic, there appeared the bold slogan of
revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of
the working class! ’
But if any improvement for workers at all was utopian, what could
there be in the objective situation that could possibly realise the
dictatorship of the working class? What could make such a thing even
thinkable?
Marx explained it as follows: ‘If the June insurrection raised the
self-assurance of the bourgeoisie all over the Continent, and caused
it to league itself openly with the feudal monarchy against the
people, who was the first victim of the alliance? The Continental
bourgeoisie itself. The June defeat prevented it from consolidating
its rule and from bringing the people, half satisfied and half out of
humour, to a standstill at the lowest stage of the bourgeois
revolution.
‘. . . Thus the peoples who had begun the fight for their national
independence were abandoned to the superior power of Russia, Austria
and Prussia, but, at the same time, the fate of these national
revolutions was made subject to the fate of the proletarian
revolution, and they were robbed of their apparent autonomy, their
independence of the great social revolution. The Hungarian shall not
be free, nor the Pole, nor the Italian, as long as the worker remains
a slave!
‘Finally, with the victories of the Holy Alliance, Europe has taken on
a form in which every fresh proletarian upheaval in France directly
involves a world war. The new French revolution is forced to leave its
national soil . . . and conquer the European terrain . . .’
The reference to the ‘dictatorship of the working class’ doubtless
recalls a real slogan of the Paris workers of June 1848. But clearly
it also recapitulates the Manifesto’s insistence that ‘The proletariat
will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital
from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in
the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the
ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as
rapidly as possible.’
These ideas had first taken coherent philosophical form in Marx’s and
Engels’ writings as long ago as 1845, i.e., in The German Ideology.
And we have already stressed that the significance of The German
Ideology in the development of Marxism cannot be overestimated in its
connection with the permanence of revolution. Even a cursory glance at
the manner in which it made this point also makes clear that this had
been bound up from the start with the recognition of the international
interests of the working class.
As Marx and Engels put it: ‘In order to become an “unendurable” power,
i.e., a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily
have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless”, and moreover
in contradiction to an existing world of wealth and culture; both
these premises presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high
degree of its development.
‘And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which
at the same time implies the actual empirical existence of men in
their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely
necessary practical premise, because without it privation, want is
merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would
begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be
restored; and furthermore, because only with this universal
development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between
men established, which on the one side produces in all nations
simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal
competition), making each nation dependent on the revolutions of the
others, and finally puts world-historical, empirically universal
individuals in place of local ones.
‘Without this, 1) communism could only exist as a local phenomenon; 2)
the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as
universal, hence unendurable powers: they would have remained home-
bred “conditions”, surrounded by superstition; and 3) each extension
of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism
is only possible as the act of dominant peoples “all at once” and
simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of
productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them.
‘Moreover the mass of workers who are nothing but workers . . .
presupposes the world market. The proletariat can thus only exist
world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a
“world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of
individuals, i.e., existence of individuals which is directly linked
up with world history.
‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be
established, an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state
of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now
existing premise.’ (The German Ideology was unpublished in Marx’s
lifetime, and remains in note form; on this page Marx seems to have
considered placing the last quoted paragraph either at the start or as
the last paragraph but one – MD)
So while the Paris workers were consolidating their slogan
‘Dictatorship of the working class!’ in the aftermath of June 1848,
while the demands of the rising national bourgeois across Europe were
opposed by the alliance of the ‘despot of Europe’, England, with
Russia and other reactionary powers, and while the rival rump royalist
factions of France dreamt of an unrealisable new monarchy sustained by
a ‘party of Order’, Marx was noticing that the rule of the French
bourgeoisie – the state of siege, as he called it, later describing
this as an ‘invention which has found periodic application in every
successive crisis of the French Revolution’ – was also coming under
‘unexpected danger’ from elsewhere.
‘No one,’ he wrote, ‘had fought more fanatically in the June days for
the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the
Parisian petty-bourgeois . . . But behind the barricade stood the
customers and the debtors; before it the shop’s creditors. And when
the barricades were thrown down and the workers were crushed and the
shopkeepers, drunk with victory, rushed back to their shops, they
found the entrance barred by a saviour of property, an official agent
of credit, who presented them with threatening notices: Overdue rent!
Overdue bond! . . Doomed shop! Doomed shopkeeper!
‘Salvation of property! But the house in which they lived was not
their property; the shop which they kept was not their property . . .
Neither their business, nor the plate from which they ate, nor the bed
on which they slept belonged to them any longer. It was precisely from
them that this property had to be saved . . .’
By August and September, each class had begun to realign itself in
response to the relative conditions of the others; and when an
election for two new Paris National Assembly members took place,
Prince Louis Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon) was elected by the
infuriated peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, while the leading
Communist Raspail, in prison after the June events, was elected by
workers in defiance of the state of siege. ‘From all sides at once,
therefore, open declaration of war against the Constituent National
Assembly, against bourgeois republicanism,’ commented Marx. And it was
just at that time that the Assembly made the inflammatory declaration
that the ‘state of siege’ was to stay even after the constitution had
been decided on and pronounced.
Of that constitution (of October 23) Marx said that its ‘fundamental
contradiction . . . consists in the following: The classes whose
social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat,
peasantry, petty-bourgeoisie, it puts in possession of political power
through universal suffrage. And from the class whose . . . social
power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political
guarantees of this power. It forces the political rule of the
bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the
hostile classes to victory and jeopardise the very foundations of
bourgeois society. . .’ It isn’t hard to see, behind such a state of
affairs, the semblance of restorationism.
Still unsure of its stability, therefore, the Assembly decreed that
France must have a President, in the hope that its leader Cavaignac
would be elected and cement its rule – but instead the post was won by
Louis Bonaparte – representing peasant nostalgia for the era of
Napoleon – by six million votes to just one million for Cavaignac.
‘December 10, 1848, was the day of the peasant insurrection . . ,’
Marx said of the result. ‘No more taxes, down with the rich, down with
the republic, long live the Emperor! . . . December 10 was the coup
d’etat of the peasants, which overthrew the existing government.’
Petty bourgeoisie and proletariat had voted as a bloc for Bonaparte,
Marx explained, while the more advanced proletariat had put forward
two candidates – Ledru-Rollin and Raspail, ‘the former of the
democratic petty-bourgeoisie, the latter of the revolutionary
proletariat. The votes for Raspail – the proletarians and their
socialist spokesmen declared it loudly – were to be . . . the first
act by which the proletariat, as an independent political party,
declared its separation from the democratic party . . . Not only the
republican bourgeois party, but also the democratic petty bourgeoisie
and its Montagne [the party of Robespierre in 1793 – MD] were beaten
on December 10.’
He added a few pages later: ‘The party of Order was formed just after
the June days: only after December 10 had allowed it to cast off the
coterie . . . of the bourgeois republicans, was the secret of its
existence – the coalition of Orleanists and Legitimists into one party
– disclosed.
‘The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions, which had
alternately maintained a monopoly of power [i.e., from 1815 to 1848 –
MD] – the big landed proprietors under the restored monarchy, and the
finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July
monarchy . . . the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in
which both factions could maintain with equal power the common class
interest without giving up their mutual rivalry . . . Thus we find
these royalists in the beginning believing in an immediate
restoration, . . and finally confessing that they can endure each
other only in the republic and postponing the restoration
indefinitely.’
Cavaignac left office on December 20 1848, just a day after the
National Assembly leaders had sought to rally themselves by voting
down any amnesty for the 15,000 June insurgents marked for
deportation. Shortly afterwards Louis Bonaparte removed these leaders
from their posts. The Mobile Guard was then reorganised on monarchist
lines, with half its personnel judged unfit and dismissed. The new
regime also revitalised calls for the banning of the institutions
where the revolutionary workers met, i.e., the workers’ clubs: no
matter that ‘freedom of association’ had been guaranteed in the
constitution. And by January, as Marx put it: ‘What place was there
for a Constituent Assembly in a constituted republic? . . .
‘The scrambled eggs were unscrambled, the crystallisations of the
revolutionary movement had again become fluid, the republic that was
being fought for was once again the indefinite republic of the
February days, the defining of which each party reserved to itself.
For a moment the parties again took up their old February positions,
without sharing the illusions of February.’
At this point a key drama moved from the background to the foreground
– at issue were French relations with European revolution and counter-
revolution, still raging across the Continent: in France by this time,
however, the issue was a counter-revolutionary French intervention
against a national uprising and its consequences in Civitavecchia in
Italy.
In mid-November Cavaignac had sent a small battle fleet there ‘to
protect the Pope’ from the nascent Roman republic and to ship him to
France. Louis Bonaparte, coming into office just a few weeks
afterwards, had quickly seized on Cavaignac’s initiative for his own
ends, and was followed by the royalist factions whose motive was the
same.
For the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin voiced opposition only when invading
Austrian and Neapolitan forces jointly crushed the Italian republicans
and threatened the invasion of France, allowing the intervention to
clothe itself in a different justification – and a huge force of
14,000 was dispatched ‘in order to give support to peaceful
negotiations with Austria concerning the integrity of Sardinian
territory and the question of Rome.’ It was then that Rome was placed
under bombardment by troops of French General Oudinot.
The stand in the name of the Montagne did boost Ledru-Rollin’s vote in
the Legislative National Assembly elections in May, especially as he
had by then also been able to establish an electoral alliance with the
Socialists to create the social democratic party. But it was short-
lived. The winners of the election were the party of Order, which saw
off all opponents by a large majority. After that Ledru-Rollin
attempted to stage what Marx dubbed a ‘purely parliamentary
insurrection’, putting a motion to the new Assembly that the President
be impeached for having countermanded the constitution and ordered the
bombardment of Rome. No matter that that military action had in fact
‘attacked the liberty of foreign peoples’ and therefore countermanded
the constitution; the motion was rejected by 377 votes to 8, so ending
Ledru-Rollin’s career in any Assembly.
The same motion had been rejected earlier by the Constituent Assembly,
on May 11, and was laid to rest by the Legislative National Assembly
on June 12; at which point Ledru-Rollin ‘brought the Montagne onto the
streets,’ as Marx said of it, ‘not to a street battle, however, but
only to a street procession. It is enough to say,’ he went on, ‘that
the Montagne was at the head of this movement to know the movement was
defeated, and that June 1849 was a caricature, as ridiculous as it was
repulsive, of June 1848 . . .
‘It was not the workers that were vanquished; it was the petty-
bourgeoisie. . . June 1849 was not a bloody tragedy between wage
labour and capital, but a prison-filling, lamentable play of debtors
and creditors. The party of Order had won... The 13th of June breaks
its [the petty-bourgeoisie’s] resistance, and makes the legislative
dictatorship of the united royalists a fait accompli. The National
Assembly is only a Committee of Public Safety of the party of Order.’
And the Constituent Assembly, which February had brought into being to
rule in place of the last French monarch, was itself history.
As we know, these events led on to Bonaparte’s emergence in 1851 as
the Emperor of France – through a series of disasters for the
Montagne, for the republican bourgeoisie, and for universal suffrage,
as depicted in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. (Brumaire was
another revolutionary calendar month of historic significance, MD)
But The Class Struggles in France 1848-50 offers us something else,
more essential to our theme: for it is the first real definition Marx
gave of what he called the permanent revolution. Having rejected
‘utopia, doctrinaire socialism’, he tells us, the French working class
‘increasingly organises itself around revolutionary Socialism, around
Communism . . . This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of
the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the
necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions
generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on
which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that
correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionising of
all the ideas that result from these social relations.’
rab
MARX AND THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION – Part 4: The emergence of Soviets
in Russia
The masses march to the Winter Palace in what was then Petrograd in
1905. Troops opened fire on them beginning the 1905 revolution
http://www.wrp.org.uk/images/photos/11-01-11-6013.jpg
BY MIKE DRIVER
LEON Trotsky’s analysis 1789-1848-1905 is contained in his 1906 book
Results and Prospects.
This was written while he was in prison awaiting trial after playing
the leading role in the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies
during the defeated 1905 Revolution. Having spent fifteen months there
he was among those sentenced to life imprisonment; but he promptly
escaped, with the aid of supporters, while in transit to northern
Siberia. Later, in My Life – though this was some twelve years after
the victorious Russian Revolution of 1917 – he described Results and
Prospects as ‘for that period, the most finished statement in proof of
the theory of permanent revolution.’
What is the comparative relationship between Marx’s 1850 ‘battle-cry’
of permanent revolution, and Trotsky’s theory of it? Trotsky did not
specifically cite Marx as his source, though he did refer to both The
Class Struggles in France 1848-50 and The 18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte in his book 1905, completed a year after Results and
Prospects. Much more important, however, are the historical and
logical connections between the two, whose foundation is the emergence
of the revolutionary role of the working class as capitalism developed
as a world system and the grasping of this through the development of
historical and dialectical materialist philosophy as its basic method.
What is certain, then, is that Marxism’s foresight was firmly grounded
on a scientific understanding of what Engels called ‘the law of motion
of history’ – without which it would certainly have been impossible to
conceive of a theory of permanent revolution. And Marx’s call for ‘the
Revolution in Permanence’, in the concluding words of the Address to
the Central Committee of the Communist League, is very definitely an
anticipation – i.e., the expression of what he sometimes called a
semblance – of the conditions of worldwide permanent revolution which
erupted onto the scene in 1905 and 1917 and are now dominating the
political situation today.
It was in early summer of that same year 1850, as is very well-known,
that Marx had been able to uncover for the first time previously
unavailable economic statistics which showed, again in Engels’ words,
that ‘the world trade crisis of 1847 had been the true mother of the
February and March Revolutions, and that the industrial prosperity,
which had been returning gradually since the middle of 1848 and
attained full bloom in 1849 and 1850, was the revitalising force of
the newly strengthened European reaction.’
This marked a decisive change, and a different course of action was
necessary as a result. Revolution, Marx emphasised afterwards, was
‘only possible in the periods when . . . the modern productive forces
and the bourgeois forms of production, come in collision with each
other’. In our era of imperialism, of course, this general condition
is itself permanent. But Marx’s understanding of the qualitative
change in 1850 began the period of necessary research we noted
earlier, culminating in his publication of the first volume of Capital
in 1867, and the leading role he played in founding the First
International.
On June 11 1849, however, shortly before France’s Legislative National
Assembly threw out Montagne leader Ledru-Rollin’s motion to impeach
Louis Bonaparte for the decision to bombard Rome, Marx had been
unaware of this changed situation. The Assembly had voted by 361 to
203 to ignore the motion that day and move to next business. Marx –
who had just been allowed temporarily into France as a political
refugee, only to be expelled again in August – recalled that
afterwards ‘a conference took place between members of the Montagne
and delegates of the secret workers’ societies.’
The societies proposed to organise an attack on the government that
same night, even claiming to have supporters within the National
Guard. But the Montagne, as June 13 soon made clear, had very
different plans in mind and rejected the proposal. ‘On no account did
it want to let the leadership slip out of its hands,’ Marx commented,
‘its allies were as suspect to it as its antagonists . . . The memory
of June 1848 surged through the ranks of the Paris proletariat more
vigorously than ever . . .’
On seeing these limitations of their leaders, the societies’ delegates
decided that ‘to begin the insurrection at this moment against the
will of the Montagne would have meant for the proletariat, decimated
moreover by cholera and driven out of Paris in considerable numbers by
unemployment, to repeat uselessly the June days of 1848 . . .
‘The proletarian delegates did the only rational thing,’ Marx
continued. ‘They obliged the Montagne to compromise itself, that is,
to come out beyond the confines of the parliamentary struggle in the
event of its bill of impeachment being rejected. During the whole of
June 13, the proletariat maintained this same skeptically watchful
attitude, and awaited a seriously engaged irrevocable melee between
the democratic National Guard and the army, in order then to plunge
into the fight and push the revolution forward beyond the petty-
bourgeois aim set for it. In the event of victory a proletarian
commune was already formed which would take its place beside the
official government. The Parisian workers had learned in the bloody
school of June 1848.’
And by this time, with the right of association about to be curtailed,
the restraint of the Montagne was certainly not shared by the troops
of the Paris Artillery, which advanced on protesters with fixed
bayonets and took prisoner all those who couldn’t escape.
Marx concluded after recounting the event: ‘If June 23 1848 was the
insurrection of the revolutionary proletariat, June 13 1849 was the
insurrection of the democratic petty bourgeois, each of these two
insurrections being the classically pure expression of the class which
had been its vehicle.’ It was only in Lyons, to the south, that an
‘obstinate, bloody conflict’ arose – in an area of France ‘where the
industrial bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat stand directly
opposed to one another . . .’
And in summary of the wider situation he added: ‘While the French
republic thus became the property of the coalition of the royalist
parties, the European coalition of the counter-revolutionary powers
embarked, simultaneously, upon a general crusade against the last
places of refuge of the March revolutions. Russia invaded Hungary;
Prussia marched against the army defending the Reich constitution, and
Oudinot bombarded Rome. The European crisis was evidently approaching
a decisive turning-point . . .’
Marx’s concluding articles in The Class Struggles in France 1848-50
appeared in the very last issues of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung – by
which time the events he was writing about were significantly more
recent; so recent in fact that, as in 1848, they were immediately
determining the course of his thinking. It was March of 1850, and he
was at that very time preparing that same Address to the Central
Committee of the Communist League. What he had learnt from the German
uprisings, and his recognition that the Communist workers in France
were now breaking from petty bourgeois utopian and doctrinaire
socialism to look towards permanent revolution (see article 3), had
featured in this same March issue. This was how he developed it in
relation to Germany:
‘Far from desiring to revolutionise all society for the revolutionary
proletarians, the democratic petty bourgeois strive for a change in
social conditions by means of which existing society will be made as
tolerable and comfortable as possible for them . . . As far as wage-
workers are concerned, it remains certain above all that they are to
remain wage-workers as before; the democratic petty-bourgeois only
desire better wages and a more secure existence for the workers . . .
in short, they hope to bribe the workers . . . and to break their
revolutionary potency by making their position tolerable for the
moment . . . those few who see their own programme in what has been
outlined above might believe that thereby they have put forward the
utmost that can be demanded from the revolution.
‘But these demands can in nowise suffice for the party of the
proletariat. While the democratic petty-bourgeois wish to bring the
revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the
achievement, at most, of the above demands, it is our interest and our
task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less
possessing classes have been forced out of their position of
dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and the
association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the
dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition
among the proletarians has ceased and that at least the decisive
productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians.
For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only
its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the
abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the
foundation of a new one . . .’
Marx continued: ‘Instead of once again stooping to serve as the
applauding chorus of the bourgeois democrats, the workers, and above
all the League, must exert themselves to establish an independent,
secret and public organisation of the workers’ party alongside of the
official democrats and make each section the central point and nucleus
of workers’ societies in which the attitude and interests of the
proletariat will be discussed independently of bourgeois
influences . . . During the struggle and after the struggle, the
workers must, at every opportunity, put forward their own demands
alongside of the demands of the bourgeois governments. They must
demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeois
start taking over the government . . .’
For such a situation, Marx went on to stress, the workers would need
to be armed and organised, with this organisation centred in workers’
own clubs; when such situations arose, he insisted, the Central
Committee should send an emissary to ‘convene a congress and put
before the latter the necessary proposals for the centralisation of
the workers’ clubs under a leadership established in the chief seat of
the movement.’ The organisation of ‘at least a provincial interlinking
of the workers’ clubs is one of the most important points for
strengthening and development of the workers’ party…’
And on the key issue of relations of the working class to the
peasantry, he insisted: ‘The first point on which the bourgeois
democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the
abolition of feudalism. As in the first French Revolution, the petty
bourgeois will give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property,
that is to say, try to leave the rural proletariat in existence and
form a petty-bourgeois peasant class which will go through the same
cycle of impoverishment and indebtedness which the French peasant is
still now going through. The workers must oppose this plan in the
interest of the rural proletariat and in their own interest.
‘They must demand that the confiscated feudal property remain state
property and be converted into workers’ colonies cultivated by the
associated rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale
agriculture, through which the principle of common property
immediately obtains a firm basis in the midst of the tottering
bourgeois property relations.
‘Just as the democrats combine with the peasants, so must the workers
combine with the rural proletariat. Further, the democrats will work
either for a federative republic or, if they cannot avoid a single and
indivisible republic, they will at least attempt to cripple the
central government by the utmost possible autonomy and independence
for the communities and provinces. The workers, in opposition to this
plan, must not only strive for a single and indivisible German
republic, but also within this republic for the most determined
centralisation of power in the hands of the state authority.’
And now we will see how Trotsky, fifty-five years later, analysed the
1848-9 events in relation to those of 1789 and 1905, looked
particularly at the example of Vienna where the 1848 German uprisings
had begun, and then detailed the Russian conditions which gave rise in
his lifetime to the birth of the Soviets: ‘However much one may
compare the Russian Revolution with the Great French Revolution,’ he
insisted, ‘the former can never be transformed into a repetition of
the latter. The 19th century has not passed in vain. . .’
Trotsky continued: ‘In the heroic period of French history we saw a
bourgeoisie, enlightened, active, as yet not aware of the
contradictions of its own position, upon whom history had imposed the
task of leadership in the struggle for a new order, not only against
the outworn institutions of France but also against the reactionary
forces of the whole of Europe. The bourgeoisie, consistently, in all
its factions, regarded itself as the leader of the nation, rallied the
masses to the struggle, gave them slogans and dictated their fighting
tactics . . . During the revolution itself, though class antagonisms
were revealed, yet the powerful inertia of the revolutionary struggle
consistently threw the more conservative elements of the bourgeoisie
off the political path. No stratum was thrown off before it had
transferred its energy to the stratum behind it . . . At what other
period did bourgeois democracy rise to such a height and kindle such a
flame as during the period of the Jacobin, sansculotte, terrorist,
Robespierrean democracy of 1793? . . .
‘In 1848 the bourgeoisie was already unable to play a comparable role.
It did not want and was not able to undertake the revolutionary
liquidation of the social system that stood in its path to power. We
know now why that was so. Its aim was – and of this it was perfectly
conscious – to introduce into the old system the necessary guarantees,
not for its political domination, but merely for a sharing of power
with the forces of the past. . .
‘The German bourgeoisie, however, from the very start, did not “make”
the revolution, but dissociated itself from it. Its consciousness rose
against the objective conditions for its own domination. The
revolution could only be carried out not by it but against it . . . In
1848 a class was needed that would be able to take charge of events
without and in spite of the bourgeoisie, a class which would not only
be prepared to push the bourgeois forward by its pressure but also at
the decisive moment to throw its political corpse out of the way.
Neither the urban petty-bourgeoisie nor the peasants were able to do
this. . .
‘The proletariat was too weak, lacked organisation, experience and
knowledge.
‘Capitalism had developed sufficiently to render necessary the
abolition of the old feudal relations, but not sufficiently to bring
forward the working class, the product of the new industrial
relations, as a decisive political force… Austria provided a
particularly clear and tragic example of this unfinished and
incomplete character of political relations in the period of
revolution. Altogether a position was created concerning which a
contemporary accurately said: “A Republic had actually been set up in
Vienna, but unfortunately no one saw this.” The Republic that nobody
noticed departed for a long time from the stage, giving place to the
Habsburgs . . . An opportunity, once missed, never returns.’
By contrast, he stressed: ‘The Russian working class of 1906 in no way
resembles the workers of Vienna of 1848. The best evidence of this is
the springing up all over Russia of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.
These were not previously-prepared conspirative organisations for the
purpose of seizure of power by the workers at the moment of revolt.
No, these were organs created in a planned way by the masses
themselves for the purpose of co-ordinating their revolutionary
struggle. And these Soviets, elected by the masses and responsible to
the masses, are unquestionably democratic institutions, conducting a
most determined class policy in the spirit of revolutionary socialism.
‘The social peculiarities of the Russian revolution are particularly
evident in the question of the arming of the nation. A militia, the
National Guard, was the first demand and the first gain of every
revolution, in 1789 and 1848, in Paris, in all the states of Italy, in
Vienna and in Berlin. In 1848 the National Guard, i.e. the arming of
propertied and “educated” classes, was the demand of the whole
bourgeois opposition . . .
‘In Russia the demand for a militia found no support in the bourgeois
parties. The liberals cannot help understanding the serious
significance of arms; absolutism has given them some object-lessons in
this respect. But they also understand the impossibility of creating a
militia in Russia apart from or against the proletariat . . . Arming
the revolution, in Russia, means first and foremost arming the
workers. Knowing and fearing this, the liberals altogether eschew a
militia. They even surrender their positions without a fight just as
the bourgeois Thiers surrendered Paris and France to Bismarck simply
to avoid arming the workers. . . (in 1871, prior to the Paris Commune
uprising – MD)
‘For that reason the task of arming the revolution falls with all its
weight upon the proletariat. The civil militia, the class demand of
the bourgeoisie in 1848 is, in Russia, from the very first a demand
for the arming of the people and above all for the arming of the
proletariat. The fate of the Russian Revolution is bound up with this
question.’
At the end of Results and Prospects Trotsky spelled out the most
essential component part of what was to become the theory of permanent
revolution: its internationalism: ‘Without the direct State support of
the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot remain in
power and convert its temporary domination into a lasting socialistic
dictatorship. Of this there cannot for one moment be any doubt.’ So
permanent revolution is synonymous with the necessity of the world
socialist revolution.
rab
KARL MARX AND THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION Part Five: the law of motion of
history
Napoleon III’s defeat at the hands of Prussia led to the first seizure
of power by the working class in its history, when the workers of
Paris established the Commune in 1871
http://www.wrp.org.uk/images/photos/11-01-11-5958.jpg
‘THE concept of law,’ wrote Lenin in 1914 in his Philosophical
Notebooks, ‘is one of the stages of the cognition by man of unity and
connection, of the reciprocal dependence and totality of the world
process . . .
‘Law and essence are concepts of the same kind (of the same order), or
rather, of the same degree, expressing the deepening of man’s
knowledge, of phenomena, the world . . .’ He added later: ‘Hegel
actually proved that logical forms and laws are not an empty shell,
but the reflection of the objective world. More correctly, he did not
prove, but made a brilliant guess.’
In these and other passages of the Notebooks Lenin was intently
studying – with the aid of Hegel – what Marx and Engels understood by
a law; i.e., what a law is, in what way it is objective, in what way
therefore the law of value is more truly objective than, for example,
the law of supply and demand. It was the history of crucial advances
such as these that he chose to focus on, when exiled from Russia
during the 1914-18 war, as he thoroughly studied Hegel’s Science of
Logic in the library of the Swiss capital, Berne.
And the relevant first and second passages above, like so many in
Hegel, concerned the limitations of Kant’s subjective idealist
philosophy; with its view that the world outside of thought was a
‘thing-in-itself’ which could never be certainly known by human
consciousness. It is easy for us to see that, in its variously revived
‘Neo-Kantian’ forms, that is exactly the ‘philosophy’ that capitalists
and their governments like to propagate today – alongside the idea, of
course, that we can never be sure whether any other system of society
could really be better than capitalism.
Kant’s concept of the Thing-in-itself, Hegel wrote, ‘is not supposed
to contain in itself any determinate multiplicity . . . ( – The Thing-
in-itself has colour only in relation to the eye, smell in relation to
the nose, and so forth.) . . .’ But this meant, he went on to say,
that Kant’s idealism ‘clings to the abstract Thing-in-itself as to an
ultimate determination; it opposes Reflection, or the determinateness
and multiplicity of the Properties, to the Thing-in-itself; while in
fact the Thing-in-itself essentially has this External Reflection in
itself . . . whence it is seen that the abstraction of the Thing,
which makes it pure Thing-in-itself, is an untrue determination . . .
‘Many different Things are in essential Reciprocal Action by virtue of
their Properties; Property is this very reciprocal relation, and apart
from it the Thing is nothing . . .’
As is evident, Hegel’s meaning of ‘reflection’ is entirely different
from Marxism’s materialist meaning; and his passage seems at first to
be a wordy way of saying what has by now long been known to science –
that the colour or smell of a thing is an objective part and property
of it in its relation to other existing things, and not at all
something imposed on it by differing perceptions of different
individual subjects. But there is more to it than that; and in any
case, as an idealist early19th-century philosopher who leant
necessarily on Kant as the greatest of his German predecessors since
Leibniz a century earlier, Hegel had to counter to Kant’s
philosophical language a suitable one of his own.
So to say that alone is to omit two much more important factors. The
first is that Hegel’s actual purpose in the Science of Logic was, as
Lenin put it, to establish a logic ‘the forms of which would be forms
with content, forms of living, real content, inseparably connected
with the content’. He explained this as follows: ‘In Kant, the Thing-
in-itself is an empty abstraction, but Hegel demands abstractions
which correspond to the essence: “the objective concept of things
constitutes their very essence”, which correspond – speaking
materialistically – to the real deepening of our knowledge of the
world.’
The second factor it omits is the full meaning of the second paragraph
– in which Hegel pointed out that, considered apart from its
properties and its ‘external reflections’, the ‘Thing-in-itself’ is
reduced not just to abstraction, but to ‘nothing’. That is exactly
why, when Hegel’s dialectical method and outlook is turned on its feet
and understood materialistically, his recognition of such a reduction
is so important. He may have ‘guessed’ rather than proved it; but
nevertheless Hegel did decisively reject the idealist logic with which
Kant implied that the objective world amounted in fact to nothing at
all.
Engels, for his part, explained it this way: ‘The Neo-Kantian
agnostics . . . say: “We may correctly perceive the qualities of a
thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-
in-itself.” To this Hegel, long since, has replied: “If you know all
the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains
but that the said thing exists without us, and when your senses have
taught you that fact you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-
itself”. . . To which it may be added that in Kant’s time our
knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might
well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a
mysterious thing-in-itself. But one after another these ungraspable
things have been grasped, analysed, and, what is more, reproduced by
the great progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly
cannot consider as unknowable.’
It was Lenin who finally added: ‘Consequently, Hegel is much more
profound than Kant, and others, in tracing the reflection of the
movement of the objective world in the movement of notions. Just as
the simple form of value, the individual act of exchange of one given
commodity for another, already includes in an undeveloped form all the
main contradictions of capitalism, – so the simplest generalisation,
the first and simplest formation of notions (judgments, syllogisms,
etc.) already denotes man’s ever-deeper cognition of the objective
connection of the world. Here is where one should look for the true
meaning, significance and role of Hegel’s Logic. This NB.’
It is there also that one must look in order to understand what Engels
meant in 1885, when he wrote of Marx’s discovery of ‘the great law of
motion of history’. For although every law is partial, and is, in
Lenin’s words, ‘narrow’ and ‘approximate’ in relation to the objective
conditions from which it is inseparable – e.g. the law of value will
cease to be a law at all after capitalism is fully overthrown and
value ceases to exist in its present form – nevertheless the full
understanding of these two laws can definitely be of great assistance
to workers and youth wanting to overthrow capitalism and greatly
improve, as far as the vast majority of people worldwide are
concerned, the course of human history.
It was sometime in the early summer of 1850, according to Engels’ 1895
introduction to the Class Struggles in France 1848-50, that Marx found
the time to carry out more detailed economic studies of events during
the previous ten years; and it was that work, of course, that
eventually resulted in his decision to give some two decades of his
life to the uncovering and proof in detail the correctness of the law
of value ; that is to say, to the writing of Capital and the texts and
research that led up to it.
But Engels was also making another point here. As a result of that
work of 1850, he went on to explain, ‘what he had hitherto deduced, a
priori, from gappy material, became absolutely clear to him from the
facts themselves, namely, that the world trade crisis of 1847 had been
the true mother of the February and March Revolutions, and that the
industrial prosperity, which had been returning gradually since the
middle of 1848 and attained full bloom in 1849 and 1850, was the
revitalising force of the newly strengthened European reaction.
‘That was decisive. Whereas in the first three articles (the first
three chapters of The Class Struggles in France 1848-50 as reviewed in
these articles, MD) . . . there was still the expectation of an early
new upsurge of revolutionary energy, the historical review written by
myself and Marx for the last . . . which was published in the autumn
of 1850, breaks once and for all with these illusions: “A new
revolution is possible only in the wake of a new crisis. It is,
however, just as certain as this crisis.”
‘But,’ continued Engels, ‘that was the only essential change which had
to be made. There was absolutely nothing to alter in the
interpretation of events given in the earlier chapters, or in the
causal connections established therein . . .’
In that is revealed the great strength of Marx’s dialectical
materialist method: that even though there had been no possibility of
access to certain kinds of information about the economic background
to the 1848 events, the Marxist analysis had proved essentially true
and had withstood the test of time. As Engels put it in 1895, (he was
then living in Manchester): ‘Even today, when the specialised press
concerned provides such rich material, it still remains impossible
even in England to follow day by day the movement of industry and
trade in the world market and the changes which take place in the
methods of production in such a way as to be able to draw a general
conclusion, for any point of time, from these manifold, complicated
and ever-changing factors, the most important of which, into the
bargain, operate a long time in secret before they suddenly make
themselves violently felt on the surface . . .
‘It is self-evident that this unavoidable neglect of contemporaneous
changes in the economic situation, the very basis of all the processes
to be examined, must be a source of error. But all the conditions of a
comprehensive presentation of contemporary history unavoidably include
sources of error – which, however, keeps nobody from writing current
history.’
Marx had subjected his 1848 analysis to a ‘double test’, Engels went
on to say; he’d been able to leave the earlier sections of his book
unaltered even though he’d changed his mind as to where events were
headed, and he’d re-examined the whole period over again following
Bonaparte’s December 1851 coup d’etat and had still altered ‘very
little’.
But nevertheless, the Communists of 1848 had been mistaken in the
following respect: ‘History has proved us, and all who thought like
us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development
on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the
elimination of capitalist production; it has proved this by the
economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the
Continent, and has caused big industry to take real root in France,
Austria, Hungary, Poland, and, recently, in Russia, while it has made
Germany positively an industrial country of the first rank, – all on a
capitalist basis, which in the year 1848, therefore, still had great
capacity for expansion.
‘But it is just this industrial revolution which has everywhere
produced clarity in class relations, has removed a number of
intermediate forms handed down from the period of manufacture and in
Eastern Europe even from guild handicraft, has created a genuine
bourgeoisie and a genuine large-scale industrial proletariat and has
pushed them into the foreground of social development. However, owing
to this, the struggle between these two great classes, a struggle
which, apart from England, existed in 1848 only in Paris and, at the
most, a few big industrial centres, has spread over the whole of
Europe and reached an intensity still inconceivable in 1848 . . .’
Turning back to the development of France following Bonaparte’s
electoral coup, he continued: ‘The reversion to empire in 1851 gave
new proof of the unripeness of the proletarian aspirations of that
time. But it was itself to create the conditions under which they were
bound to ripen. Internal tranquillity ensured the full development of
the new industrial boom; the necessity of keeping the army occupied
and of diverting the revolutionary currents outwards produced the wars
in which Bonaparte, under the pretext of asserting “the principle of
nationality”, sought to hook annexations to France. His imitator,
Bismarck, adopted the same policy for Prussia; he made his coup
d’etat, his revolution from above, in 1866, against the German
Confederation and Austria, and no less against the Prussian Chamber
then in conflict with the government.
‘But Europe was too small for two Bonapartes and the irony of history
so willed it that Bismarck overthrew Bonaparte, and King William of
Prussia not only established the little German Empire [i.e., Germany
without Austria – MD], but also the French republic.
‘The general result, however, was that in Europe the independence and
internal unity of the great nations, with the exception of Poland, had
become a fact. Within relatively modest limits, it is true, but, for
all that, on a scale large enough to allow the development of the
working class to proceed without finding national complications any
longer a serious obstacle. The grave-diggers of the Revolution of 1848
had become the executors of its will. And alongside of them already
arose threateningly the heir of 1848, the proletariat, in the shape of
the International.’
rab
MARX AND THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION – part Six The theory of the
Permanent Revolution and the imperialist epoch
TROTSKY (far left) reviews a Red Square march of workers and soldiers.
They were clear that their revolution was the start of the struggle to
smash capitalism and imperialism worldwide
http://www.wrp.org.uk/images/photos/11-01-12-5962.jpg
‘THERE can be no analogy of historical development,’ wrote Trotsky in
his book 1905, ‘between, on the one hand, England, the pioneer of
capitalism which has been creating new social forms for centuries and
has also created a powerful bourgeoisie as the expression of these new
forms and, on the other hand, the colonies of today, to which European
capital delivers ready-made rails, sleepers, nuts and bolts in ready-
made battleships for the use of the colonial administration, and then,
with rifle and bayonet, drives the natives from their primitive
environment straight into capitalist civilisation: there can be no
analogy of historical development, certainly, but there does exist a
profound inner connection between the two.
‘The new Russia acquired its absolutely specific character because it
received its capitalist baptism in the latter half of the nineteenth
century from European capital which by then had reached its most
concentrated and abstract form, that of finance capital.’
In this passage – from the chapter in the book on ‘The Driving Forces
of the Russian Revolution’ – Trotsky adds to the ideas of Results and
Prospects and concludes with the famous quotation from the 18th
Brumaire in which Marx proposed a characterisation and definition of
proletarian revolution. The detailing of the role of European finance
capital in Russia’s development is Trotsky’s most significant
addition. What does it mean?
Exactly this – for we can once again make use, this time for a
different purpose, of the advantage of hindsight. It means that the
tendency of capitalist world economy towards becoming an imperialist
economy now predominated, and had begun to drive forward revolutionary
developments in every part of the world. This later became the context
in which, as the 1914-1918 imperialist war broke out and the social-
democratic parties of Europe abandoned socialism and revolution to
support their own bourgeois governments fighting one another, similar
social chauvinism was also exposed in the positions of many leading
members of Russia’s Bolshevik Party – not least in the position of
Stalin.
Trotsky continued: ‘When English or French capital, the historical
coagulate of many centuries, appears in the steppes of the Donets
basin, it cannot release the same social forces, relations and
passions which once went into its own formation. It does not repeat on
the new territory the development which it has already completed, but
starts from the point at which it has arrived on its own ground.’ Then
he added: ‘Around the machines which it has transported across the
seas and the customs barriers, it immediately, without any
intermediate stages whatsoever, concentrates the masses of a new
proletariat, and into this class it instills the revolutionary energy
of all the past generations of the bourgeoisie – an energy which in
Europe has by now become stagnant.’
The magnitude of the social contradictions that give rise to such
‘revolutionary energy’ explains the lack of an analogy: for the main
characteristic of finance capital is that it requires its new
proletariat to produce at a greater rate of profit than in a
corresponding European context. It’s a fact too that the Russo-
Japanese war helped to precipitate 1905. And already in the same
chapter of 1905 Trotsky had outlined the massive change in Russia’s
social character during the nineteenth century: between 1812 and 1850
the proportion of Russians living and working in towns increased by
3.4 per cent, whereas between 1885 and 1897 it increased by 33.8 per
cent. In almost all cases this process was organised centrally and
guaranteed financially by the Tsarist absolutism. ‘Thus,’ wrote
Trotsky, ‘large-scale capital achieved economic domination without a
struggle.
‘But,’ he went on, ‘the tremendous part played in this process by
foreign capital has had a fatal impact on the Russian bourgeoisie’s
power of political influence. As a result of state indebtedness, a
considerable share of the national product went abroad year by year,
enriching and strengthening the European bourgeoisie. But the
aristocracy of the stock exchange, which holds the hegemony in
European countries and which, without effort, turned the Tsarist
government into its financial vassal, neither wished nor was able to
become part of the bourgeois opposition within Russia, if only because
no other form of national government would have guaranteed it the
usurers’ rate of interest it exacted under Tsarism . . . Neither could
our indigenous capital take up a position at the head of the national
struggle with Tsarism, since, from the first, it was antagonistic to
the popular masses – the proletariat, which it exploits directly, and
the peasantry, which it robs indirectly through the state.’
After Trotsky had escaped from Tsarist custody in early 1907, he
succeeded both in returning to St Petersburg to meet with his wife
Natalya, and in leaving again for Finland together with her, without
being noticed by the police. In Finland he met, and was helped by
Lenin himself, who was in exile again; the help came, of course, in
spite of the split in Russia’s Social Democratic Labour Party at the
London congress of 1903, from which Trotsky had walked out with the
Menshevik minority. Later in 1907 both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were
in attendance at that year’s congress, also held in London; and the
speech Trotsky made there – Lenin was present and responded reservedly
but favourably to Trotsky’s position – was included in the first
edition of 1905, published later that year. It had attacked the
Mensheviks for continuing to believe that a Russian bourgeoisie
existed that was capable of leading the nation in a revolution to
overthrow Tsarism, and defended as follows his conception of permanent
revolution.
‘Just as the petty-bourgeois urban democracy of the French Revolution
placed itself at the head of the revolutionary nation,’ he said, ‘so
the proletariat, that sole revolutionary democracy of our towns, must
seek support among the peasant masses and must take power if the
revolution is to be victorious . . . Perhaps the proletariat is
destined to fall, as the Jacobin democracy fell, to clear a space for
the rule of the bourgeoisie. I want to establish only one thing: if,
as Plekhanov predicted, the revolutionary movement in Russia triumphs
as a workers’ movement, then the victory of the proletariat in Russia
is possible only as a revolutionary victory of the proletariat – or
else it is not possible at all.
‘On this conclusion I insist most adamantly. If we are forced to admit
that the social contradictions between the proletariat and the peasant
masses will not allow the proletariat to become the leader of the
peasantry, and the proletariat itself is not strong enough for
victory, then we must reach the conclusion that our revolution is not
destined to win at all.’
There was another key point too that Trotsky had made for the first
time in 1905, and developed throughout his life, when he wrote about
the October 1905 general strike. ‘In struggle it is extremely
important to weaken the enemy,’ he wrote. ‘That is what a strike does.
At the same time a strike brings the army of the revolution to its
feet. But neither the one nor the other, in itself, creates a state
revolution. The power still has to be snatched from the hands of the
old rulers and handed over to the revolution. That is the fundamental
task. A general strike only creates the necessary preconditions; it is
quite inadequate for achieving the task itself.’
These passages and speeches came a full ten years before the Russian
Revolution of 1917 – but ten years which Lenin and Trotsky both spent
in their separate exiles, and in their separate ways preparing the
ground for the new revolution they were confident would come; while a
number of the other well-known Bolshevik leaders only marked time. And
it was in 1908 that Lenin spent the best part of a year writing his
book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, with its thoroughgoing
philosophical rejection of the ‘new’ forms of subjective idealism
which were disorientating some party leaders during the years of
counter-revolutionary reaction from 1907 to 1912. ‘Without any
immediate intercourse with the masses, and deprived of contacts with
any organisations,’ said Trotsky of Lenin in the History of the
Russian Revolution, ‘he concentrated his thought the more resolutely
upon the fundamental problems of revolution, reducing them – as was
both his rule and the necessity of his nature – to the key problems of
Marxism.’
By the time the 1914-18 war began, it was clear to Lenin and to a
number of Marxists that what determined its character as a world war
was the fact that, as he later put it, ‘the colonial policy of the
capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied
territories on our planet. For the first time the world is completely
divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible.’ By the
end of 1916 Lenin had completed his book Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism, which was published after his return to Russia
from exile in April 1917. For the task of writing it he had studied
methodically, choosing to read or re-read many crucial texts and
sources of Marxism. Not the least of those he studied was Hegel’s
Science of Logic, offering invaluable insights into its dialectics by
tracing over and over again the materialist core of the dialectic
itself.
In 1902 Lenin’s book What is to be Done? had expressed a relentless
determination to build a party capable of organising and leading the
Russian revolution, and he went on at the 1903 London congress to
split that same party rather than accept anything less. Then in his
1905 book Two Tactics . . , as we saw in article 2, he had looked back
to Marx’s 1848 experiences in fighting for a German revolution, and
had commented on, after ‘half a century’, the ‘enormous
difference . . . between the German workers’ party of those days and
the present Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.’
By the time of writing his Imperialism . . . he had been insisting for
two years that ‘the epoch of the so-called Second International’ had
ended in 1914; and that: ‘Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for
domination instead of the striving for liberty, the exploitation of an
increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small group
of the richest or most powerful nations – all these have given birth
to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to
define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism . . . From all that has
been said in this book on the economic nature of imperialism, it
follows that we must define it as capitalism in transition, or
moribund capitalism.’ And after that, in the famous Letters from Afar
in which, before he could even get back to Russia following the
February 1917 overthrow of the Tsar and the coming to power of a
Provisional Government, he was once again looking back to Marx’s
writings on 1848, and their analysis of the February revolution, in
drawing his conclusion on what this transition had to be: ‘Workers,
you have performed miracles of proletarian heroism, the heroism of the
people, in the civil war against Tsarism. You must perform miracles of
organisation, miracles of organisation of the proletariat and of the
whole people, to prepare the way for your victory in the second stage
of the revolution.’
In the History of the Russian Revolution Trotsky describes what Lenin
found in the Bolshevik leadership on his return: ‘Kamenev, a member of
the emigrant editorial staff of the central organ, Stalin, a member of
the Central Committee, and Muranov, a deputy in the Duma who had also
returned from [exile in] Siberia, removed the old editors of Pravda,
who had occupied a too “left” position, and on March 15 . . . took the
paper into their own hands. In the programme announcement of the new
editorship, it was declared that the Bolsheviks would decisively
support the Provisional Government “insofar as it struggles against
reaction or counter-revolution”.
‘The new editors expressed themselves no less categorically on the
question of war: “While the German army obeys its emperor, the Russian
soldier must “stand firmly at his post answering bullet with bullet,
and shell with shell.” “Our slogan is not the meaningless ‘down with
war.’ Our slogan is pressure upon the Provisional Government with the
aim of compelling it . . . to make an attempt to induce all the
warring countries to open immediate negotiations . . . and until then
every man remains at his fighting post!”
‘. . . This programme of pressure on an imperialist government with
the aim of “inducing” it to adopt a peace-loving form of activity, was
the programme of Kautsky in Germany, Jean Longuet in France, MacDonald
in England. It was anything but the programme of Lenin, who was
calling for the overthrow of imperialist rule . . .’
Quoting Bolshevik Central Committee member Shliapnikov – a former
metal worker – Trotsky continues: ‘When that number of Pravda was
received in the factories it produced a complete bewilderment among
the members of the party and its sympathisers, and a sarcastic
satisfaction amongst its enemies . . . The indignation in the party
ranks was enormous, and when the proletarians found out that Pravda
had been seized by three former editors arriving from Siberia they
demanded their expulsion from the party. Pravda was soon compelled to
print a sharp protest from the Vyborg district: “If the paper does not
want to lose the confidence of the workers, it must and will bring the
light of revolutionary consciousness, no matter how painful it may be,
to the bourgeois owls”.’
That was the true situation in March 1917 when Lenin and then Trotsky
returned from exile; after which Lenin quickly re-established his
leadership of the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks – more slowly –
succeeded in winning the leadership of the workers’ Soviets.
It’s in the light of this history that the following basic postulates
of permanent revolution, set out in these words by Trotsky in 1929,
can be best understood:
‘1) The theory of the permanent revolution now demands the greatest
attention from every Marxist, for the course of the class and
ideological struggle has fully and finally raised this question from
the realm of reminiscences over old differences of opinion among
Russian Marxists, and converted it into a question of the character,
the inner connections and methods of the international revolution in
general.
2) With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development,
especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the
permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solutions
of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is
conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the
leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.
3) Not only the agrarian, but also the national question assigns to
the peasantry – the overwhelming majority of the population in
backward countries – an exceptional place in the democratic
revolution. Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry
the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even
seriously posed. But the alliance of these two classes can be realised
in no other way than through an irreconcilable struggle against the
influence of the national-liberal bourgeoisie.
4) No matter what the first episodic stages of the revolution may be
in the individual countries, the realisation of the revolutionary
alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only
under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organised
in the Communist Party. This in turn means that the victory of the
democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of
the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the
peasantry and solves first all the tasks of the democratic revolution.
8) The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the
leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly
confronted with tasks, the fulfilment of which is bound up with deep
inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic
revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and
thereby becomes a permanent revolution.
9) The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the
revolution, but only opens it. Socialist construction is conceivable
only on the foundation of the class struggle, on a national and
international scale. This struggle, under the conditions of an
overwhelming predominance of capitalist relationships on the world
arena, must inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally to
civil wars, and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the
permanent character of the socialist revolution as such, regardless of
whether it is a backward country that is involved, which only
yesterday accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old capitalist
country which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy and
parliamentarism.
10) The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits
is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois
society is the fact that the productive forces created by it can no
longer be reconciled with the framework of the national state. From
this follow, on the one hand, imperialist wars, on the other, the
utopia of a United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins
on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is
completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a
permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it
attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our
entire planet.’
• Concluded
rab
PERMANENT REVOLUTION – Part 7 Trotsky deepens his analysis
A painting showing the guillotine that was used to behead aristocrats
after the French Revolution
http://www.wrp.org.uk/images/photos/11-02-04-6035.jpg
EXILED once again in 1929, but this time banished from the entire USSR
by the Stalin-led counter-revolution which followed Lenin’s death,
Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution deepened his analysis
of both the English revolution and the years 1789-93 in France in the
light of the establishment of the world’s first workers’ state.
‘In the Great French Revolution,’ he wrote, ‘the Constituent Assembly,
the backbone of which was the upper levels of the Third Estate,
concentrated the power in its hands – without however fully annulling
the prerogatives of the king. The period of the Constituent Assembly
is a clearly-marked period of dual power, which ends with the flight
of the king to Varennes and is formally liquidated with the founding
of the Republic.
‘The first French constitution (1791), based upon the fiction of a
complete independence of the legislative and executive powers, in
reality concealed from the people, or tried to conceal, a double
sovereignty: that of the bourgeoisie, firmly entrenched in the
National Assembly after the capture by the people of the Bastille, and
that of the old monarchy still relying upon the upper circles of the
priesthood, the clergy, the bureaucracy, and the military, to say
nothing of their hopes of foreign intervention.
‘In this self-contradictory regime lay the germs of its inevitable
destruction. A way out could be found, but only in the abolition of
bourgeois representation by the powers of European reaction, or in the
guillotine for the king and the monarchy …
‘But before it comes to war and the guillotine, the Paris Commune
enters the scene – supported by the lowest city layers of the Third
Estate – and with increasing boldness contests the power with the
official representatives of the national bourgeoisie. A new double
sovereignty is thus inaugurated, the first manifestation of which we
observe as early as 1790, when the big and medium bourgeoisie is still
firmly seated in the administration and in the municipalities.
‘How striking is the picture – and how vilely it has been slandered! –
of the efforts of the plebeian levels to raise themselves up out of
the social cellars and catacombs, and stand forth in that forbidden
arena where people in wigs and silk breeches are settling the fate of
the nation. It seems as though the very foundation of society,
trampled underfoot by the cultured bourgeoisie, was stirring and
coming to life. . .
‘The districts of Paris, bastards of the revolution, began to live a
life of their own. They were recognised – it was impossible not to
recognise them! – and transformed into sections. But they kept
continually breaking the boundaries of legality and receiving a
current of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks in spite of the
law to those with no rights, the destitute Sansculottes. At the same
time the rural municipalities were becoming a screen for a peasant
uprising against that bourgeois legality which was defending the
feudal property system. Thus from under the second nation arises a
third.
‘The Parisian sections at first stood opposed to the Commune, which
was still dominated by the respectable bourgeoisie. In the bold
outbreak of August 10, 1792, the sections gained control of the
Commune. From then on the revolutionary Commune opposed the
Legislative Assembly, and subsequently the Convention, which failed to
keep up with the problems and progress of the revolution – registering
its events, but not performing them – because it did not possess the
energy, audacity and unanimity of that new class which had raised
itself up from the depths of the Parisian districts and found support
in the most backward villages.
‘As the sections gained control of the Commune, so the Commune, by way
of a new insurrection, gained control of the Convention. Each of the
stages was characterised by a sharply marked double sovereignty, each
wing of which was trying to establish a single and strong government –
the right by a defensive struggle, the left by an offensive. Thus
characteristically – for both revolutions and counter-revolutions –
the demand for a dictatorship results from the intolerable conditions
of the double sovereignty. The transition from one of its forms to the
other is accomplished by civil war.
‘The great stages of a revolution – that is, the passing of power to
new classes or layers – do not at all coincide in this process with
the succession of representative institutions, which march along after
the dynamic of the revolution like a belated shadow. In the long run,
to be sure, the revolutionary dictatorship of the Sansculottes unites
with the dictatorship of the Convention. But with what Convention? A
Convention purged of the Girondists (big bourgeoisie MD) who yesterday
ruled it with the hand of the Terror – a Convention abridged and
adapted to the dominion of new social forces. Thus by the steps of the
dual power the French revolution rises in the course of four years to
its culmination.
After the 9th Thermidor it begins – again by the steps of the dual
power – to descend. And again civil war precedes every downward step,
just as before it had accompanied every rise. In this way the new
society seeks a new equilibrium of forces.’
For our purpose in this series of articles, the first point of note in
this analysis is this: a key part of the period it describes – i.e.
the period following the execution of the king in January – is exactly
the period of ‘the glorious year 1793’, characterised by Engels (see
article 2) as ‘the revolution in permanence’. We can say with
certainty, therefore, that as far as both Marx and Engels were
concerned permanent revolution was synonymous with every manifestation
of revolution moving beyond democracy towards socialism, as well as
with every political anticipation of the kind of irreversibly
permanent change in human social life which the end of class society
will bring as ‘the ultimate form of organisation of the human
family’ (article 1). It is in both these senses then – and in the one
no less importantly than in the other – that the ‘battle-cry’ of
permanent revolution is a semblance of Trotsky’s theory of the
permanent revolution.
Secondly – and for exactly the reason we’ve just now noted – the bold
history of the Paris Commune to 1871, and of its destruction that year
by the combined bourgeois armies of France and Germany, is not to be
measured by any shortcomings of its leaders but by the great political
maturity the Parisian workers reached by that time. ‘It was
essentially a working-class government,’ Marx said of it, ‘the product
of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating
class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out
the economic emancipation of labour.’ Engels developed this analysis
20 years later; and in 1921 Trotsky called the events of 1871 ‘a
lightning harbinger of world proletarian revolution.’
The period prior to and including the formation of the 1871 Commune –
whose majority were Blanquists – was also the subject of Marx’s most
substantial early addresses to the First International, in July and
September of 1870 and on May 30 1871; and the murder of the Communards
while Bismarck’s armies stood at the gates of Paris, for which the
restored Orleanist prime minister of France’s Third Republic, Adolphe
Thiers, was principally responsible, is still commemorated all over
the world whenever the Internationale is sung. Between 20,000 and
30,000 of its defenders were massacred.
The real history of 1871 was first told in Marx’s Civil War in France;
a text which also marked the end of the political career of Louis
Bonaparte, swindler, adventurer and elected Emperor of France from
1851 to 1870. In fact, when Marx used the term imperialism – that is
to say before the time when it was needed to describe monopoly
capital, finance capital and moribund capital – he was almost
invariably talking about Bonaparte and the French ‘Second Empire’.
‘Imperialism,’ he said, is ‘the most prostitute and the ultimate form
of the state power, which nascent middle-class society has begun to
elaborate as a means of its emancipation from feudalism, and which
full-grown bourgeois society finally transformed into a means for the
enslavement of labour by capital.’
And in the words of Engels: ‘Louis Bonaparte took the political power
from the capitalists under the pretext of protecting them, the
bourgeoisie, from the workers, and on the other hand, the workers from
them; but in return his rule encouraged speculation and industrial
activity – in a word, the upsurgence and enrichment of the whole
bourgeoisie to an extent hitherto unknown.’ To realise this, however,
Bonaparte had to organise foreign wars as a matter of course. And
since ‘no extension of frontiers was so dazzling to the imagination of
the French chauvinist as the extension to the German left bank of the
Rhine’, it was only a matter of time, after Prussian Germany’s
separation from Austria following the war of 1866, before Bonaparte
was at war with Prussia and Bismarck.
That war was declared in July 1870 and lost by September, with the
defeated French troops either stranded in Metz or captured, and as
Paris began to starve under a German siege. In this declared state of
national emergency only the workers were strong enough to defend
revolutionary France. A new workers’ revolution in the capital
restored the Republic, but still allowed the existing Paris deputies
to constitute a ‘government of national defence’ in Versailles; even
though armed workers formed the majority of those patrolling the city
as members of the National Guard. When prime minister Thiers moved
inevitably to disarm these workers and failed, civil war was declared
on March 18 1871 and the Commune was elected and proclaimed by March
28. Two days later the Commune abolished conscription, the standing
army and declared the National Guard, which now included all citizens
capable of bearing arms, the sole armed force in Paris.
The further succession of revolutionary measures approved by the
Commune was only halted when Thiers succeeded in persuading Bismarck
to release captured soldiers and return them to Versailles to defeat
the revolution. And only when these troops launched an actual
bombardment of Paris late in May, when the German troops still outside
were persuaded to allow them freedom to move against the Commune from
the areas they occupied, and following eight days of fighting, were
the workers ‘shot down in their hundreds’ (Engels), and subjected to
mass arrests. In this event the Prussian members of the Saxon Army
corps displayed more mercy than Thiers’ French troops.
The third point of note to be deduced from Trotsky’s analysis
requires, first of all, use of a further quotation if it is to be
fully understood: ‘What, then, is the peculiarity of this dual power
as it appeared in the February revolution?’ he asked on the very next
page. ‘In the events of the 17th and 18th centuries, (i.e. the English
and French revolutions MD) the dual power was in each case a natural
stage in a struggle imposed upon its participants by a temporary
correlation of forces, and each side strove to replace the dual power
with its own single power. In the revolution of 1917, we see the
official democracy consciously and intentionally creating a two-power
system, dodging with all its might the transfer of power into its own
hands. . . In so far as the Russian “democracy” sought for an escape
from the two-power regime, it could find one only in its own removal
from power.’ The ‘democracy’ in Russia proved even less capable of
assuming the power than in Germany.
• Continued on Monday
rab
MARX AND THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION – PART 8: Lenin studies the
implications of dual power in 1917
TROTSKY stands by as LENIN addresses a mass meeting in Petrograd
http://www.wrp.org.uk/images/photos/11-02-06-6039.jpg
WHEN Lenin saw, on his return to Russia in April 1917, that the
‘democracy’ in Russia proved even less capable of assuming the power
than in Germany he was able to recognise and actually diagnose in
writing this revolutionary situation of dual power as it unfolded.
The conditions of revolutionary illegality in Tsarist Russia, the
backwardness and true bankruptcy of its absolutism, had drilled the
lessons of 1871 into its Marxists – which was also why he could so
confidently commend, in his Two Tactics of 1905, the ‘enormous
difference’ between the German party of 1848 and the Russian Social-
Democratic Labour Party that he led. How could Lenin not have had in
mind the Paris Commune, when he wrote as follows in What is to be
Done? of conditions where a centralised organisation ‘may too easily
rush into a premature attack, may thoughtlessly intensify the movement
before the growth of political discontent, the intensity of the
ferment and anger of the working class etc. have made such an attack
possible and necessary’?
But he’d answered himself: ‘Our reply to this is: Speaking
abstractedly, it cannot be denied of course that a militant
organisation may thoughtlessly engage in battle, which may end in a
defeat entirely avoidable under other conditions. But we cannot
confine ourselves to abstract reasoning on such a question, because
every battle bears within itself the abstract possibility of defeat,
and there is no way of reducing this possibility except by organised
preparation for battle. If, however, we proceed from the concrete
conditions at present obtaining in Russia, we must come to the
positive conclusion that a strong revolutionary organisation is
absolutely necessary precisely for the purpose of giving stability to
the movement and of safeguarding it against the possibility of making
thoughtless attacks.’ It was such a party that he sought to build from
1902 onwards.
So this is the crux of this point: that Lenin was able to recognise
the dual power as it arose not only as a Marxist, but also as a
representative of a democratic and centralist, revolutionary Marxist
party built and prepared for such a situation; i.e. of the Bolshevik
Party, through whose gains of two decades and more he could best gauge
and ascertain every political situation. That was how he came, then,
to write after completing his April Theses: ‘The basic question of
every revolution is that of state power . . . The highly remarkable
feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power…’
Explaining its characteristics, he continued: ‘What is this dual
power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the
bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient,
but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing – the
Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
‘What is the class composition of this other government? It consists
of the proletariat and the peasants (in soldiers’ uniforms). What is
the political nature of this government? It is a revolutionary
dictatorship, i.e. a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on
the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law
enacted by a centralised state power. It is an entirely different kind
of power from the one that generally exists in the parliamentary
bourgeois-democratic republics of the usual type still prevailing in
the advanced countries of Europe and America. This circumstance is
often overlooked, often not given enough thought, yet it is the crux
of the matter.
‘This power is of the same type as the Paris Commune of 1871…’
He also stressed, concerning the fact of the dual power: ‘This fact
must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot
advance. We must know how to supplement and amend “old formulas”, for
example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be
correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to be
different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual
power.’
Clearly, then, Lenin hadn’t fully anticipated such a dual power before
his return, at the time he was writing his Letters from Afar on the
basis of foreign newspaper reports. But he had already urged the
Russian workers to proceed to a second revolution; and even before
indicting the approved representative of the Soviet of Workers’
Deputies in Russia’s Provisional Government, Kerensky, as ‘the Russian
Louis Blanc’, he’d insisted that only a ‘proletarian republic, backed
by the rural workers and the poorest sections of the peasants and town
dwellers, can secure peace, provide bread, order and freedom’. He also
commended the Soviet’s reported call for a members’ ‘supervising
committee’ to oversee the Provisional Government’s conduct, insisting
this should lead, ‘immediately and despite all obstacles, to the
formation of a workers’ militia, or workers’ home guard, extending to
the whole people…which would …replace the exterminated and dissolved
police force (and) make the latter’s restoration impossible by any
government…’
Then, by the time of his third letter, he had also begun to seek to
ensure certain key developments might take root even before his
arrival: ‘If we want to be Marxists,’ he began, ‘and learn from the
experience of revolution in the whole world, we must strive to
understand in what, precisely, lies the peculiarity of this
transitional moment, and what tactics follow from its objective
specific features. . .
‘Under certain circumstances, the new government can at best postpone
its collapse somewhat by leaning on all the organisational ability of
the entire Russian bourgeoisie and bourgeois intelligentsia. But even
in that case it is unable to avoid collapse, because it is impossible
to escape from the claws of the terrible monster of imperialist war
and famine nurtured by world capitalism, unless one renounces
bourgeois relationships, passes to revolutionary measures, appeals to
the supreme historic heroism of both the Russian and the world
proletariat.
‘Hence the conclusion: we cannot overthrow the new government at one
stroke, or, if we can (in revolutionary times the limits of what is
possible expand a thousandfold) we will not be able to maintain power
unless we counter the magnificent organisation of the entire Russian
bourgeoisie and the entire bourgeois intelligentsia with an equally
magnificent organisation of the proletariat, which must lead the
entire vast mass of urban and rural poor, the semi-proletariat and
small proprietors…
‘Guided by their class instinct, the workers have realised that in
revolutionary times they need not only ordinary, but an entirely
different organisation. They have taken the path indicated by the
experience of our 1905 Revolution and the 1871 Paris Commune; they
have set up a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies; they have begun to develop,
expand and strengthen it by drawing in soldiers’ deputies, and,
undoubtedly, deputies from rural wage-workers, and then (in one form
or another) from the entire peasant poor.
‘The prime and most important task, and one that brooks no delay, is
to set up organisations of this kind in all parts of Russia without
exception, for all trades and strata of the proletarian and semi-
proletarian population without exception, i.e. for all the working and
exploited people, to use a less economically exact but more popular
term. Running ahead somewhat, I shall mention that for the entire mass
of the peasantry our Party . . . should especially recommend Soviets
of wage workers and Soviets of small tillers who do not sell grain, to
be formed separately from the well-to-do peasants. Without this, it
will be impossible either to conduct a truly proletarian policy in
general, or correctly to approach the extremely important practical
question which is a matter of life and death for millions of people:
the proper distribution of grain, increasing its production, etc.
‘It might be asked: What should be the function of the Soviets of
Workers’ Deputies? They “must be regarded as organs of insurrection,
of revolutionary rule”, we wrote in…1915. This theoretical
proposition, deduced from the experience of the Commune of 1871 and of
the Russian Revolution of 1905, must be explained and concretely
developed on the basis of precisely the present stage of the present
revolution in Russia…
‘We need a revolutionary government, we need (for a certain
transitional period) a state. . . We need a state, but not the kind
the bourgeoisie needs, with organs of government in the shape of a
police force, an army and a bureaucracy (officialdom) separate from
and opposed to the people. All bourgeois revolutions merely perfected
this state machine, merely transferred it from the hands of one party
to those of another.
‘The proletariat, on the other hand, if it wants to uphold the gains
of the present revolution and proceed further, to win peace, bread and
freedom, must “smash”, to use Marx’s expression, this “ready-made”
state machine and substitute a new one for it by merging the police
force, the army and the bureaucracy with the entire armed people.
Following the path indicated by the experience of the Paris Commune of
1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the proletariat must organise
and arm all the poor exploited sections of the population in order
that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power…
‘These measures do not yet constitute socialism. They concern the
distribution of consumption, not the reorganisation of production.
They would not yet constitute the “dictatorship of the proletariat”,
only the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and
the poor peasantry”. It is not a matter of finding a theoretical
classification. We would be committing a great mistake if we attempted
to force the complex, urgent, rapidly developing practical tasks of
the revolution into the Procrustean bed of narrowly conceived “theory”
instead of regarding theory primarily and predominantly as a guide to
action…
‘What we do know definitely, and what we, as a party, must explain to
the masses is, on the one hand, the immense power of the locomotive of
history that is engendering an unprecedented crisis, starvation and
incalculable hardship. That locomotive is the war, waged for predatory
aims by the capitalists of both belligerent camps. This “locomotive”
has brought a number of the richest, freest and most enlightened
nations to the brink of doom. It is forcing the peoples to strain to
the utmost all their energies, placing them in unbearable conditions,
putting on the order of the day not the application of certain
“theories” (an illusion against which Marx always warned socialists),
but implementation of the most extreme practical measures; for without
extreme measures, death – immediate and certain death from starvation
– awaits millions of people.’
Among the key demands of the April Theses were:
• ‘In our attitude towards the war . . . not the slightest concession
to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible…The class-conscious
proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war , which would
really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition: a) that the
power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants
allied with the proletariat; b) that all annexations be renounced in
deed and not in word; c) that a complete break be effected in actual
fact with all capitalist interests.
• ‘Not a parliamentary republic – to return to a parliamentary
republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde
step – but a Republic of Soviets of Workers, Agricultural Labourers
and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country…
• ‘Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. The salaries
of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any
time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker…
• ‘Confiscation of all landed estates. Nationalisation of all lands in
the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of
Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants Deputies. The organisation of
separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants…
• ‘The immediate amalgamation of all banks in the country into a
single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the
Soviet of Workers’ Deputies…
• ‘Party tasks: a) Immediate convocation of a Party Congress; b)
Alteration of the Party Programme, mainly: 1) On the question of
imperialism and the imperialist war; 2) On our attitude towards the
state and our demand for a “commune state”; 3) Amendment of our out-of-
date minimum programme. c) Change of the party’s name.
• ‘A new International. We must take the initiative in creating a
revolutionary International, an International against the social-
chauvinists and against the “Centre”.’
It was Lenin’s Marxist analysis of the regime of dual power in Russia,
and his revolutionary conclusions concerning it, that brought his and
Trotsky’s position on the revolution, namely its source, its tasks and
its future development to the point where they were identical.
This enabled them to jointly lead the successful October revolution,
part of whose permanence was that it was the beginning of the world
socialist revolution, which was why they founded the Communist
International. The majority of the Bolshevik leadership did not accept
Lenin’s conclusions without a major fight – they were in fact
considering joining the Provisional Government.