Posted on

Just Another Kautsky Fan: Understanding the Early Stalin

Interpreting Stalin’s fledgling revolutionary career through his later status as a brutal labor dictator obscures an early whole-hearted admiration for the works of Kautsky and Lenin. By Lawrence Parker.

Writing in 1946, Max Shachtman made an astute point about Joseph Stalin. In reviewing Leon Trotsky’s biography of Stalin, he said that “we do not recognize the young Stalin in the Stalin of today; there does not even seem to be a strong resemblance”.1 By 1946, Stalin was the ‘generalissimus’ of the Soviet Union, heading up a brutal dictatorship over and against the working class. Little wonder it was so difficult for the left to then understand the mentality of the young Georgian revolutionary who joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) at the turn of the 20th century, particularly after Stalin’s back story had been ‘enlivened’ by a few decades of lying propaganda. 

Shachtman’s own line of reasoning appears to be traceable to contradictions inherent in Trotsky’s (unfinished) biography of Stalin. We partly have the imposition of a schema, a kind of ‘original sin’ that suggests Stalin was always fundamentally bad:

Never a tribune, never the strategist or leader of a rebellion, [Stalin] has ever been only a bureaucrat of revolution. That was why, in order to find full play for his peculiar talents, he was condemned to bide his time in a semi-comatose condition until the revolution’s raging torrents had subsided.2 

However, Trotsky offered other statements that make such overarching judgments problematic from the standpoint of method. He had this to say about Stalin at the beginnings of the anti-Trotsky triumvirate (which included Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev) in circa 1923: 

Who could have thought during those hours that from the midst of the Bolshevik Party itself would emerge a totalitarian dictator who would repeat the calumny of Yarmelenko with reference to the entire staff of Bolshevism? If at that time anyone would have shown Stalin his own future role he would have turned away from himself in disgust.3 

Now, calling someone “only a bureaucrat of revolution” is obviously a different designation to that of “totalitarian dictator”, but Trotsky does establish the important principle that historical circumstances changed Stalin profoundly, which could be taken to imply that history could have produced a number of different versions of Stalin, so to speak.  

With this in mind, it might be better to view pre-1917 Stalin as a Social Democratic praktik, one of its intelligent workers involved in the running of its local and national organizations and intent on furnishing the proletariat with a deep-seated Marxist knowledge of its heroic mission to overthrow Tsarism (i.e. the active, hegemonic notion of a Marxist propagandist). As part of this role, Stalin, as a follower of Lenin, also sought to emulate the revolutionary achievements of German Social Democracy and its leaders and communicated his admiration. Subsequent Soviet notions from Stalin and others of Russian Bolshevism as sui generis, set apart from the international revolutionary movement, are invented narratives, absent from Stalin’s early work. This, I would argue, is one of the messages to be gleaned from Stalin’s pre-1917 writings. 

When looking back at his own works from 1901-07, Stalin classed himself as one of the “Bolshevik practical workers”, characterized by “inadequate theoretical training” and a “neglect, characteristic of practical workers, of theoretical questions”.4 As Tucker has pointed out, this characterization allies itself with the mature image of Stalin as a “pragmatist”, intent on the practical effort in constructing ‘socialism’ inside the borders of the Soviet Union rather than on supposed airy-fairy ideals of ‘world revolution’.5 In fact, a prosaic reading of ‘practical’ (as opposed to praktik) obscures what Stalin was in these years. Tucker asserts that Stalin’s “original function as a Social Democratic ‘practical worker’ was propaganda” and that “knowledge of the fundamentals of Marxism and the ability to explain them to ordinary workers were [Stalin’s] chief stock-in trade as a professional revolutionary”.6 Little wonder, then, that this propagandist graduated to writing unspectacular but worthy articles for Georgian Social-Democratic newspapers such as Brdzola (The Struggle). 

Stalin’s downplaying of his theoretical and literary credentials was not followed through consistently in Soviet literature. Although Stalin reduced his personal role in his edits to the 1938 Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)7, other works, for example by Soviet historian Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, offer a more realistic appreciation of Stalin popularizing the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in early theoretical writings and having the “closest affinity” with Lenin.8 Other assertions of Yaroslavsky, that in 1905 “Stalin worked hand in hand with Lenin in hammering out the Bolshevik line”9 are fraudulent. Stalin was simply a follower of Lenin in this period.

Stalin also offered a 1946 health warning on his early works (including ones up until 1917), stating that they were “the works of a young Marxist not yet molded into a finished Marxist-Leninist” and that they “bear traces of some of the propositions of the old Marxists which afterward became obsolete and were subsequently discarded by our party”.10 Stalin gave two examples: the agrarian question and the conditions for the victory of the socialist revolution. But such a warning was also pertinent to articles praising German Social-Democratic figures such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel. The Stalin of 1946 would not have wanted communist readers thinking these were suitable figures to emulate, given the line that had emerged in his manifold corrections to the 1938 Short course, where it was argued that after Engels’ death in 1895, West European Social-Democratic parties had begun to degenerate from parties of social revolution into reformist parties.11 However, at least in the terms in which he referenced German Social-Democracy, Stalin’s praise was not a facet of his own immaturity or ‘immature’ Bolshevism, given that as late as 1920 Lenin was looking back favorably on the influence of Kautsky in the early years of the 20th century: “There were no Bolsheviks then, but all future Bolsheviks, collaborating with him, valued him highly.”12

‘An Outstanding Theoretician of Social-Democracy’

A flavor of Stalin’s own praise can be gleaned from an article from 1906, in which he discussed German opportunists accusing Kautsky and Bebel of being Blanquists. Stalin said: “What is there surprising in the fact that the Russian opportunists… copy the European opportunists and call us Blanquists? It shows only that the Bolsheviks, like Kautsky and [French socialist Jules] Guesde, are revolutionary Marxists.”13

In February 1907, Stalin wrote a preface to Kautsky’s The Driving Force and Prospects of the Russian Revolution, which began unambiguously: 

Karl Kautsky’s name is not new to us. He has long been known as an outstanding theoretician of Social-Democracy. But Kautsky is known not only from that aspect; he is notable also as a thorough and thoughtful investigator of tactical problems. In this respect he has won great authority not only among the European comrades, but also among us.14

In the face of such unambiguous praise, the Soviet editors of Stalin’s Works were forced to partly retract the general suggestion of the 1938 Short Course that Western Social Democracy had begun to disintegrate into reformism after the death of Engels in 1895. They argued that the likes of Kautsky had retained their revolutionary integrity a decade beyond this and that the revolutionary Russian party was, implicitly, not sui generis:

K Kautsky and J Guesde at that time [1906] had not yet gone over to the camp of the opportunists. The Russian revolution of 1905-07, which greatly influenced the international revolutionary movement and the working class of Germany in particular, caused K Kautsky to take the stand of revolutionary Social Democracy on several questions.15

But Stalin was still praising the revolutionary wing of German Social Democracy beyond 1907. In 1909 he was stating that “our movement now needs Russian Bebels, experienced and mature leaders from the ranks of the workers, more than ever before”.16 This after August Bebel, the leading German Social-Democratic parliamentarian (1840-1913). Stalin returned to the example of Bebel on the latter’s 70th birthday in 1910, discussing “why the German and international socialists revere Bebel so much”.17 He concludes:

Let us, then, comrades, send greetings to our beloved teacher — the turner August Bebel! Let him serve as an example to us Russian workers, who are particularly in need of Bebels in the labor movement. Long live Bebel! Long live international Social Democracy!18

Writing much later in 1920, Stalin was prepared to concede that figures such as Kautsky and the Russian Georgi Plekhanov had been worthy theoretical leaders of the movement. Stalin argued that these were examples of “peacetime leaders, who are strong in theory, but weak in matters of organization and practical work”, although their influence was limited to only “an upper layer of the proletariat, and then only up to a certain time”.19 Stalin added: “When the epoch of revolution sets in, when practical revolutionary slogans are demanded of the leaders, the theoreticians quit the stage and give way to new men. Such, for example, were Plekhanov in Russia and Kautsky in Germany.”20 Stalin thus pictured Lenin as the successor both to theoretical leaders such as Kautsky and to “practical leaders, self-sacrificing and courageous, but… weak in theory” such as Ferdinand Lassalle and Louis Auguste Blanqui.21 This line of 1920 did represent a shift from Stalin’s argument in 1907, quoted above, that Kautsky had not been just a theoretical leader but also “a thorough and thoughtful investigator of tactical problems”. Nevertheless, in line with Lenin, Stalin was not yet prepared to give up his longstanding admiration for Kautsky.

Stalin Advocates the ‘Merger Theory’

Stalin gave an even more robust defense of Kautsky in May 1905 when he “recycled” the latter’s arguments in order to defend Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? against Menshevik interlocutors in Georgia.22 Stalin quoted a passage from Kautsky writing in the theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit (in 1901-02) that Lenin had used and that subsequently became infamous for apparently illustrating Lenin’s disdain for proletarian leadership abilities: “… the vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia (K Kautsky’s italics). It was in the minds of individual members of that stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians…”23 The often tedious arguments that center on this passage essentially mix up an empirical debate about the origins of proletarian class consciousness with a dialectical one about its future development. Stalin correctly understood this point as working out the difference between initial “elaboration” and the future “assimilation” of socialist theory.24 Neither Kautsky nor Lenin was guilty of disdain for the proletariat because such a dynamic was always presaged on the merger of socialism and the worker movement. In other words, the future of socialism was not beholden to its debatable origins.25

But what of Stalin? Surely, we might expect that someone who had, in Trotsky’s words, only ever been a “bureaucrat of revolution” to have not been in favor of any such democratic merger with the proletariat. In fact, Stalin made his positive appreciation of the merger on the very first page of his defense of Lenin, presaging his article with an (unattributed) Kautsky quote: “Social-Democracy is a combination of the working-class movement with socialism.”26 This is no isolated motif from the article and Stalin elaborated on this point at some length:

What is scientific socialism without the working-class movement? A compass which, if left unused, will only grow rusty and then will have to be thrown overboard. What is the working-class movement without socialism? A ship without a compass [that] will reach the other shore in any case but would reach it much sooner and with less danger if it had a compass. Combine the two and you will get a splendid vessel, which will speed straight towards the other shore and reach its haven unharmed. Combine the working-class movement with socialism and you will get a Social-Democratic movement [that] will speed straight towards the ‘promised land’.27

Stalin was convinced that the Russian proletariat would have no problem in assimilating and adopting Social-Democratic revolutionary politics. Directly opposing the line of Georgian Menshevik critics on the issue of the intelligentsia originating socialist theory, he said: 

“But that means belittling the workers and extolling the intelligentsia!” –  howl our ‘critic’ and his Social-Democrat [Menshevik Tiflis newspaper] … They take the proletariat for a capricious young lady who must not be told the truth, who must always be paid compliments so that she will not run away! No, most highly esteemed gentlemen! We believe that the proletariat will display more staunchness than you think. We believe that it will not fear the truth!

There is not a trace in this of any predestination towards some anti-proletarian bureaucratic hell and Stalin merely comes across as an energetic, if entirely unoriginal, supporter of Kautsky and Lenin, adept at employing their arguments against local Mensheviks in Georgia.

Stalin remembered the ‘merger theory’ when he was editing the 1938 Short Course. Among his very substantial reworking of chapter two, which dealt with the period of What Is To Be Done?, Stalin wrote that Lenin’s work: “Brilliantly substantiated the fundamental Marxist thesis that a Marxist party is a union of the working-class movement with socialism.”28 He also repeated his line of 1905 in suggesting that belittling socialist consciousness meant “to insult the workers, who were drawn to consciousness as to light”. 29It is a bitter irony of historiography that this quack Stalinized history, on this particular issue at least, offers more light on the topic than the vast majority of academic or Trotskyist treatments of What Is To Be Done?.

Deutscher and ‘Foreshadowing’

Stalin’s early writings have been tied up with a problem of ‘foreshadowing’, where they become a roadmap to his future career as a labor dictator. A good example of this occurs in Isaac Deutscher’s famous biography, when he discussed Stalin’s first comment on the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, made in an article entitled ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ from January 1905. This piece dwelt upon the dispute over party membership that had arisen at the RSDLP’s second congress in 1903. Stalin presented Lenin’s formula as: “… a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party is one who accepts the program of this party, renders the party financial support, and works in one of the party organizations”. The Menshevik Julius Martov’s was presented as: “A member of the RSDLP is one who accepts its program, supports the party financially and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations.”3031

Deutscher argued correctly that the Stalin piece is mostly a re-rendering of Lenin’s arguments on the subject but suggested that Stalin added his own sinister confection with an emphasis on the “need for absolute uniformity of views inside the party”.32 This “smacked of that monolithic ‘orthodoxy’ into which Bolshevism was to change after its victory, largely under Koba’s own guidance”.33 Deutscher used the following passage from ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ to illustrate the point: 

Martov’s formula, as we know, refers only to the acceptance of the program; about tactics and organization it contains not a word; and yet, unity of organizational and tactical views is no less essential for party unity than unity of programmatic views. We may be told that nothing is said about this even in Comrade Lenin’s formula. True, but there is no need to say anything about it in Comrade Lenin’s formula. Is it not self-evident that one who works in a Party organization and, consequently, fights in unison with the party and submits to party discipline, cannot pursue tactics and organizational principles other than the party’s tactics and the party’s organizational principles?34

‘Unity’, such as that unity gained, for example, around a democratic vote at a congress between contending factions that have argued out their differences, should not be immediately transposed into ‘monolithic unity’, particularly if one bears in mind that this is the Stalin of 1905 and not 1935 talking. Deutscher half-conceded this point almost immediately by arguing “that ‘monolithism’ was still a matter of the future”.35 

However, Stalin had no issue with Lenin’s formulation around acceptance, not agreement, in relation to the party program:

To the question – who can be called a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party? –  this party can have only one answer: one who accepts the party program, supports the party financially and works in one of the party organizations. It is this obvious truth that comrade Lenin has expressed in his splendid formula.36

Acceptance implies diversity, in that one can clearly accept something without agreeing with everything about it. 

Stalin’s real problem with Martov was over the issue of party organization and discipline. What clearly lay behind Stalin’s emphasis was the dispute at the RSDLP second congress over the appointment of the Iskra editorial board. Martov refused to serve on the three-man board that had been newly elected at the congress and joined the three former members of the board (Axelrod, Zasulich and Potresov) in declaring a boycott on their own participation in party institutions.37 After a succession of maneuvers, the old editorial board rejected by the congress reconstituted itself, a move that lacked political legitimacy. Stalin remarked bitterly on this in 1905 that “these obstinate editors did not submit to the will of the party, to party discipline”. He added: “It would appear that party discipline was invented only for simple party workers like us!”38 This then led to a Bolshevik emphasis on partiinost: acting like a modern political party with a sovereign congress and a disciplined membership. This was opposed to a kruzhok, or ‘little circle’, mentality that did not recognize the larger bonds of partiinost.39 The apparently unmovable Iskra editorial board was clearly an example of the latter. 

It therefore becomes obvious that Stalin’s ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ article shared this partiinost standpoint in terms of its emphasis on working in a disciplined manner in party organizations. Stalin had previously polemicized against the restrictions involved in limiting the movement to small circles as opposed to a party, arguing that it was “the direct duty of Russian Social Democracy to muster the separate advanced detachments of the proletariat, to unite them in one party, and thereby to put an end to disunity in the Party once and for all”.40 Stalin was thus extremely disappointed that this hadn’t been the outcome of the second congress: “We party workers placed great hopes in that congress. At last! – we exclaimed joyfully – we, too, shall be united in one party, we, too, shall be able to work according to a single plan!”41

The above offers important contextualization for the arguments offered in ‘The proletarian party and the proletarian class’. Stalin said:

What are we to do with the ideological and practical centralism that was handed down to us by the second party congress and which is radically contradicted by Martov’s formula [on party membership]? Throw it overboard?42

This should not be read as some kind of paean to future dictatorship but rather a reflection of a partiinost attitude in terms of what he sees as vital to the future success of the RSDLP and annoyance with the likes of Martov that this had not been achieved. Similar conclusions should be gleaned from Stalin’s statement that: “It looks as though Martov is sorry for certain professors and high-school students who are loath to subordinate their wishes to the wishes of the party.”43 This is not a universal plea for unpleasantness towards professors and students but a reflection of a practical situation in which Martov and the other Iskra editors had refused to subordinate themselves to what Stalin saw as a sovereign RSDLP congress and to submit to the same sort of party discipline that he himself was prepared to. Stalin clearly thought that had serious implications for Martov’s definition of party membership. 

Deutscher’s argument that ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ was the herald of future totalitarianism is a particularly lurid fantasy on his part. If anyone other than Stalin had written such an article in 1905, it is almost certain that it would be an entirely plausible and non-controversial statement of Bolshevik views in response to the situation after the RSDLP’s second congress.

Form and Content in Stalin

Given that questions of style and form cannot be mechanically separated from political ones, and considering that Stalin’s prose in the articles that have been discussed above can at best be classed as somewhat plodding, often repetitive and generally unremarkable in the canon of Marxism, does this not prove something? Does it not show that a bureaucratic soul lurked deep within what were ostensibly run-of-the-mill Bolshevik writings? I think not, but to explore this question we need to go back to Trotsky. 

Trotsky was not flattering about Stalin’s early journalism, arguing it sought to “attain a systematic exposition of the theme” but such an “effort usually expressed itself in schematic arrangement of material, the enumeration of arguments, artificial rhetorical questions, and in unwieldy repetitions heavily on the didactic side”.44 Trotsky made the harsh judgement: “Not a single one of the articles [Stalin] then wrote would have been accepted by an editorial board in the slightest degree thoughtful or exacting.”45 Of course, this was not true of 1913’s Marxism and the national question (another work heavily influenced by Kautsky46), which was highly esteemed by Lenin. However, Trotsky attributed any positives almost solely to Lenin’s inspiration and editing.47 However, Trotsky did qualify his thoughts on Stalin’s early writings, stating that underground publications were not notable for their “literary excellence, since they were, for the most part, written by people who took to the pen of necessity and not because it was their calling”.48 This sense of necessity spills over into the way Trotsky sees that these works were received by their audience: 

It would, of course, be erroneous to assume that such articles did not lead to action. There was great need for them. They answered a pressing demand. They drew their strength from that need, for they expressed the ideas and slogans of the revolution. To the mass reader, who could not find anything of the kind in the bourgeois press, they were new and fresh. But their passing influence was limited to the circle for which they were written.49

So, Trotsky seemed to conclude that Stalin’s work was mediocre, unexceptional but necessary. Similarly, if Stalin suffered an “absence of his own thought, of original form, of vivid imagery – these mark every line of his with the brand of banality”50 then one would wonder whether this is just a paler reflection of what Lih has called Lenin’s “aggressive unoriginality”.51 

Trotsky also alluded to Lenin’s unoriginality in his comments on the development of ‘Leninism’. In its Soviet bureaucratic form, ‘Leninism’ was a unique development of Marxism, or Russian Marxism sui generis; in Trotsky’s words, “trying to work up to the idea that Leninism is ‘more revolutionary’ than Marxism”.52 This is coded in notorious formulas such as this one from Stalin’s ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ (1924): 

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular.53

Trotsky steadfastly denied that Lenin developed anything new, stating that his former leader “was a million miles away from any thought of inventing a new dialectic for the epoch of imperialism” (which is interesting, because this tenet of ‘Leninism’ is repeated by many of Trotsky’s current epigones).54 To underline the point, Trotsky argued that Lenin “paid his debts to Marx with the same thoroughness that characterized the power of his own thought”55, “failed to notice his break with ‘pre-imperialistic Marxism’”56; and that “Lenin’s work contains no new system nor is there a new method. It contains fully and completely the system and the method of Marxism”.57 But once this idea of the absolute uniqueness of ‘Leninism’ is knocked off its pedestal and we begin to understand the power of Lenin lay in his unoriginality, we do then begin to lessen the difference between other unoriginal writings such as the early works of Stalin. This is not to equate Lenin and Stalin – the latter was simply a follower of his leader – but it is not a sin in the annals of Bolshevism to be repetitive and unoriginal, even though figures such as Lenin had more obvious theoretical power. 

Conclusion

This is not an exercise in rehabilitating the early career of Stalin in order to shine a light forward onto the so-called progressive aspects of the Soviet Union. After around 1928, Stalin’s bureaucratized regime was not a ‘workers’ state’ in any sense. Projecting positivity forwards would only repeat the methodological errors of ‘foreshadowing’, as Stalinists do, rather than projecting negativity backwards, as many Trotskyists do. What this article is attempting to establish is that the contours of Stalin’s early ideological development were shaped by the contours of being a Bolshevik praktik, with a consequent heavy reliance on the revolutionary ideas of the Second International’s leading thinkers. The later, ‘other’ Stalin was the product of an isolated and poverty-stricken revolution that had run out of steam by the early 1920s. There was no ideological ‘original sin’ or ‘smoking gun’ before that time. 

Posted on

Revolution or the Democratic Road to Socialism? A Reply to Eric Blanc

Donald Parkinson responds to Eric Blanc’s latest take in the Kautsky debate, critiquing his strategy of a democratic road to socialism. 

The recent debate hosted on John Riddell’s blog (and reprinted in Cosmonaut) between Eric Blanc and Mike Taber is not only an argument about the details of Marxist intellectual history but one about the correct revolutionary strategy for Marxists today. To summarize the argument, Blanc argues that from the work of the early Kautsky, one can find a strategy for taking power through parliament that is an alternative to the ‘insurrectionism’ of Bolshevism, and that while Kautsky’s method is no less revolutionary, it offers a “democratic road to socialism” that avoids insurrection. Taber, in his response, argues that Blanc is raising a specter when he cites a specific Bolshevik strategy of insurrection, and points of out his own example of the Finnish Revolution saw armed conflict between classes. Furthermore, there are issues with Kautsky’s own politics even in his early pre-revisionist years, such as his wavering on the question of coalition governments and his lack of clarity on the need to smash the bourgeois state. Taber also points out how the Bolshevik Revolution was democratically legitimated and that the Bolsheviks utilized parliamentary elections. The response from Blanc to Taber goes on to make a more detailed argument against a “dual power/insurrection strategy” that is implicit in Taber’s positive view of the Bolsheviks, claiming that one either supports Blanc’s “democratic road” or has an unrealistic belief in “dual power” which is represented by the Marxist Center organization.

The debate is now framed by Blanc as one of dual power/insurrection vs. a democratic road to socialism where a socialist party is elected to parliament. This dichotomy is one established by Nicos Poulantzas in his work State, Power, Socialism. While Blanc does not explicitly mention Poulantzas, his affiliates in The Call promote his work. In State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas argues that the authoritarianism of Stalinism was incipient in the very idea of dual power as creating a new state, and that the Bolshevik Revolution went wrong with the attempt to take the soviets from a form of dual power to the form of the state itself so as to establish a “class dictatorship” of the proletariat by replacing parliament with the soviets. For Poulantzas, power from below, like the soviets, must be balanced by power from above exercised in a parliament. He argues that instead of trying to build a counter-sovereignty that will take the mantle of state power, socialists must struggle within the state by democratizing its own institutions. On this view, the state is not controlled or ruled by the dominant class, but is a sort of political expression of all classes in their interactions. In the eyes of Poulantzas, socialist politics is a struggle within the bourgeois state for the working class to become the dominant power bloc, or at least a significant faction within it. Power from below has an important role in keeping the parliamentary government from being corrupt and in pushing it to more radical ends.

This general strategy has come to be known as “the democratic road to socialism.” Kautsky’s own work is a reference point for this project, but it was exactly on the issue of the bourgeois state that Kautsky was weakest. It was therefore necessary for his disciple Lenin to reconstruct the Marxist view of the state. For Lenin in State and Revolution, Kautsky was overly vague about the need to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a workers’ state. Kautsky, in his early works, certainly saw a socialist revolution as something initiated by the election of a revolutionary party, but was ambiguous on the need to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a workers state, which on its own would transform the nature of the state. Whether there was a real rupture between the bourgeois state and a state based on the organized power of the workers, as Marx argued in “The Civil War in France,” was not spelled out by Kautsky.

This is not to say that Karl Kautsky was not a great Marxist with much to teach us, and I do believe that Kautsky’s classic works are essential reading. Kautsky in his prime was certainly a revolutionary, but, unlike Lenin, he never led a successful revolution nor gained, or apparently really attempted to gain, crucial experience as a revolutionary statesman. On the topic of revolutionary strategy, Kautsky issues a good set of basic principles for a party-building strategy (adhering to democratic republican principles and defending Marxism), but the actual nature of revolution and the process of building a revolutionary government are better understood by Lenin. It is absolutely true that Lenin made mistakes, but Blanc would have us dismiss Lenin’s career as a statesman because “really working-class democracy only lasted 6 months.” It is easy to criticize the Soviet Republic as not meeting the ideal of a workers state as outlined in State and Revolution, but this avoids the question in the first place of why bureaucracy, militarization, and restrictions on democratic rights occurred—the country was thrown into Civil War while already in a period of economic collapse.

Any workers’ movement taking power, even through fully legal means as in Chile and elsewhere, will have to deal with the problem of civil war, as the Bolsheviks did, and of building a new state. This makes clear the appeal of the “democratic road to socialism”: it avoids having to deal with the fact that any revolutionary rupture—be it the US Civil War, Bolshevik Revolution, Finnish Civil War—will have to deal with an element of catastrophe that may require extreme measures. This is perhaps not a great selling point if we want the undecided masses on board, but it would be cripplingly dishonest to conceal this reality. The history of the 20th century has shown to what barbaric depths the ruling class’s fear of socialism will throw society if needed. The strength of reaction, the widespread irrational propaganda of conservatism, and a nascent number of active right-wing paramilitaries in the United States are among many indicators of this historical continuity. Kautsky, although terribly timid in his predictions about the nature of any future revolutionary civil war, recognized in his 1902 book Social Revolution that:

We have also, as we have already said, no right to apply conclusions drawn from nature directly to social processes. We can go no further upon the ground of such analogies than to conclude: that as each animal creature must at one time go through a catastrophe in order to reach a higher stage of development (the act of birth or of the breaking of a shell), so society can only be raised to a higher stage of development through a catastrophe.

Blanc, of course, realizes that a revolutionary government elected to power will face resistance from capitalism and reactionaries. He vaguely calls for whatever is necessary to defend this government, to be achieved in alliance with a mass popular movement, yet he also clearly rejects insurrection. This indecisive vagueness is what is so disturbing. It is exactly armed conflict and insurrection that would be necessary to defend a government genuinely dedicated to undermining capitalism, and we must be conscious and clear about what this implies for and will demand from a socialist party. In a revolutionary situation, the military and police must be splintered and disbanded, the old, corrupt state bureaucracy put under the oversight of the armed and prepared proletariat. The old constitutional order is to be torn down, and representative institutions must be made to embody the mass democracy of the working class. This is what smashing the state entails. This must be clearly articulated and communicated.

If Blanc is merely rejecting putschism or the strategy pursued by the KPD in the March Action, I have no disagreements. Saying that insurrection is off the table while saying you will do whatever is possible to defend a revolutionary government is contradictory if not dishonest, or at least a confusion of legitimate insurrection with putschism. The Finnish Red Guards could have simply given power back to the capitalist class for example, but instead they armed themselves and fought back. They heroically attempted a revolt against the illegitimate authority of the capitalist state, i.e. they attempted insurrection. Any real attempt to make inroads on private property will most definitely find itself coming into armed conflict with the capitalist class, especially in the United States. The working class has to be prepared for this before taking power, which means that a mass party has to have its own defensive wing. As Alexander Gallus shows in his article on Red Vienna, defensive and paramilitary organizations such as the Schutzbund of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party must be successfully organized before the appearance of revolutionary situations, at which point a mass party becomes a major social influence and thus subject to police and fascist violence. While the Austrian Social-Democrats were committed to a strategy that is very similar to Blanc’s conception of a “democratic road to socialism,” they had failed to prepare their party and paramilitary organization for a successful civil war against fascism precisely because they refused to utilize insurrection and hone a militant proletarian defense of democracy.

The Austrian paramilitary Schutzbund in the province of Ottnang.

The assumption that bourgeois democracy makes insurrection outmoded and thus allows for a democratic road to socialism also greatly exaggerates the extent that bourgeois democracy is tolerant of subversion by the working class. Just recently a Turkish Communist was elected to office and is being blocked from entering his post. This is just one example of such dirty tricks, and it is easy to imagine that with the ascendance of a mass workers’ movement, the capitalist state will shed much of its democratic facade as a workers party grows and threatens the smooth functioning of capitalism. The hope in a “democratic road to socialism” has too much faith in the permanence of bourgeois democracy, not seeing that this is just one method of bourgeois rule. It almost assumes that the democratic parliamentary state is a telos that states head toward, a sort of ideal form that can be assumed. We must not fall for the trap that socialists respecting democracy will necessarily lead to bourgeois rule respecting a socialist movement.

This is of course not a call to abandon participation in elections. Blanc is certainly right that we need to run in elections, and Kautsky tells us much about the correct way to do this. Kautsky, unlike Blanc, did not believe the workers’ party should campaign for bourgeois parties like the Democrats. The important lesson from Kautsky and Marxist Social-Democracy is their focus on party-building around a minimum-maximum program. This type of party must run its own independent candidates under the central discipline of a workers’ party that has a clear revolutionary agenda. Elections are a means of gathering power and mass support, spreading the Marxist message of the party and consolidating its influence in society. While Mike Taber shows that Kautsky did waver on the issue of coalition governments, Kautsky did, in fact, maintain as a rule that the party shouldn’t enter into coalitions with capitalist candidates, nor enter government. The legislative rather than the executive branch was the target of electoral campaigns so the workers could send representatives to parliament without entering government itself. This is however not the strategy of the DSA or The Call, who believe that the current aim of socialists should be to push debate vaguely “leftwards,” fall behind any candidate who is generally of the left, and campaign for left-Democrats.

Running in elections should not be seen as a way to build workers’ power “within” the state. The tendency to see class struggle as an intra-state conflict is a major problem because a socialist movement needs to actually build a counter-sovereignty to the capitalist state, not become integrated into it. It is important to be explicitly clear and honest about this necessary component of socialist revolution and of “building a state within a state,” as Kautsky states, one that maintains the working class’s independence. Some, of course, let their fear of integration into the state lead to a complete rejection of electoral politics, which is a mistake. Kautsky’s own original electoral strategy was meant to avoid a situation where the party was elected to merely be a manager of capitalism. The point of elections was to build the party, not maintain parliamentarism, the party serving as a state-within-the-state that had its own working class alternative culture. In other words, it was what those who advocate for base-building call dual power, something Blanc rejects as a strategy. While Blanc does follow Poulantzas in calling for a struggle “from below” to complement the struggle internal to the state, how is such a struggle supposed to be developed without patient base-building, some kind of dual power? Here we fall into the assumption of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike that the workers’ movement will spontaneously throw up such a struggle which will provide solutions to the problems of the workers’ movement. In this sense, there is a strange mix of ultra-left spontaneism in these arguments within the framework of an electoral approach which aims to gradually build workers’ power within the state itself without “smashing” the bourgeois state.

Eric Blanc essentially counterposes a strategy of dual power and insurrection to strategy of electoralism. Yet it is necessary to struggle in electoral politics as well as to build a counter-sovereignty to the bourgeois state in the form of a party movement that is willing to defend working class gains, by all means, naturally not limited to, but including, insurrection. The idea of base-building is simply that we need to organize institutions in working-class communities that serve the needs of workers. There are many ideas on how it fits into a broader strategy, yet base-building has been part of what all successful workers parties have done in order to build up strength. As Blanc would likely agree, it is through organization that the working class becomes strong and capable of leading society; but it must be accompanied by the development and eventual leadership of an explicitly Marxist party, one which defends and openly declares our fundamental principles and lessons from history.

Promising a road to socialism without insurrection is a form of wishful thinking, a dangerous hope that we can avoid anything like the catastrophes and difficult situations of revolutionaries in the 20th century. In speaking of a democratic road to socialism, we are only speaking in terms of ideal situations, not actual situations. If a party seeking a “democratic road to socialism” was elected, what would it do if it attempted to nationalize key industries only to be faced by a right-wing coup? One could hope they have sufficient friends in the bourgeois military to avert the coup, which Chavez was able to do with the help of popular mobilization. Yet then one has to deal with the issues of the military becoming a dominant force in the government, bringing with it all the corruption of bourgeois society that has led to massive corruption overtaking the Venezuelan government, something no power from below in the communal movement has been able to check.

Bombs fall on Chile’s National Palace on September 11, 1973, killing Democratic Socialist and President Allende

More likely is that the military would not side with the socialists, and we would end up with a Pinochet or a technocratic military regime. Do the workers simply stand by? Or do they take up arms to defend their party and legitimate government? One could argue that simply acting in self-defense against a right-wing coup is not insurrection, yet at some point, there must be a decision to engage in military confrontation with the bourgeoisie or not. Not engaging with the concrete reality that a revolutionary state in its infancy will likely see conditions of civil war and that this will necessitate a level of insurrection and militarization that will conflict with some ideals of democracy can only create confusion. The flawed “democratic road to socialism” endorsed by Blanc also expresses a certain kind of faith in the institutions which make up modern democracy, that violent revolutions can be avoided and are simply a product of revolutions against absolutist states. It is an assumption that politics has been civilized, but the rise of right-populism and violence shows this is anything but the case. In fact, the extent to which we actually have functioning democratic processes to work within is severely questionable. As the Harvard Electoral Integrity Project states, the United States has the most corrupt elections in the entire industrialized world, with the majority of primary and general elections being completely rigged. 

On the question of workers’ government and this slogan, taken up at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Blanc sees a move towards a proper recognition of the need for a democratic road to socialism. Yet the Workers’ Government slogan that was taken up was a confusing addition to the strategy of the united front that generally discredited a legitimate strategic turn. The Workers’ Government called for more than joining the SPD in joint struggle: it also called for the KPD to form an electoral alliance with the SPD and even enter government with them. This was to be a sort of halfway-house toward the dictatorship of the proletariat, but in fact only served to create confusion. The KPD and SPD did not have programmatic unity—their politics were inherently at odds at this point, and even if the SPD was part of the labor movement, their politics were the politics of managing capitalism.

To enter government, a workers’ party can only go into coalition with those it shares programmatic unity with to enough of a degree that they can stand in unity to fight for the dismantling of the capitalist state and the formation of an actual workers’ republic. This basic level of unity was not shared with the SPD, so a ‘Workers’ Government’ between the KPD and the SPD could only be a confused coalition paralyzingly standing in contradiction with itself, with this contradiction either resulting in a breakdown of the coalition or the KPD making shifts to the right in order to accommodate their coalition partners. When the KPD attempted this strategy with the SPD in Saxony in 1923, forming a municipal government in partnership with them, the result was the discrediting of the KPD as they attempted to use the situation as a launching point for taking power. Blanc’s attempt to use the makeshift Workers’ Government slogan as an example of something good in the Comintern doesn’t match up with history, and rather than a “return to form” towards orthodox Marxism, the Workers’ Government was a predecessor to future failures like the Popular Front.

Using elections to advance socialism requires that such efforts are led by a party with an intransigent adherence to the principles of class independence. It also means being aware of the limitation of elections. The party winning an election to the point of being able to take government doesn’t in itself transfer power to the working class: it is merely means of provoking a crisis of the bourgeois state and its legitimacy. Transferring power to the working class requires the successful application of a minimum program that actually leads to a rupture with the existing state institutions. Winning an election can mean the party simply enters into government and manages capitalism, if the party is allowed to enter government at all. Yet winning elections is in fact a tool of great importance, and offers us an unparalleled method of spreading propaganda while breaking up the smooth running of capitalism. The ability of elections to create a crisis of legitimacy that allows for a revolution is not to be ignored or undervalued. However, the point is that a socialist party can only enter into government if it is willing and able to carry out its full minimum program which lays the basis for a workers’ republic. We must not fall into the trap of modern left parties that see getting into government as the only means of accomplishing anything.

The bourgeois state is not broken up overnight either, and a simple parliamentary victory leaves the entire state bureaucracy and military intact. Attempts to engage in even radical democratic reforms will meet resistance from the bourgeoisie and necessitate the decapitation of their armed forces and power. This brings us to the question of the Bolsheviks. While Lenin and the Bolsheviks may not have replaced the bourgeois state with ideal forms (something Lenin would admit), they nonetheless understood that the old state institutions had to go and that relying on experts from the old regime was a setback. They actually dealt with the concrete issue of trying to oversee a rupture from one form of the state to the other, and how this process itself would at times be one of violent class struggle and well as of concessions and retreats. While for Blanc the Bolshevik regime was only a “true workers democracy” for six months and after that was essentially defeated, the Bolsheviks did not even consolidate power and develop some kind of stable regime until 1921. It is assumed that after the Civil War there was no movement within the USSR to extend the gains of the early revolution, or these there were no gains of the revolution left in the first place. It is a view of a workers’ state as an ideal that is born as a true democracy, and not an achievement of a protracted process of smashing and replacing the bourgeois state with new institutions governed by working class. In the USSR, this process indeed saw a bureaucracy that would drive the system into capitalism developing and taking hold, but this process was not one that simply began and ended after the Bolsheviks made one certain mistake.

The best of Karl Kautsky is his general strategy of patiently building a revolutionary oppositional counter-sovereignty in the form of a mass party. It is not in his ambiguity on the transition to socialism or his faith in capitalist democratic institutions. On these questions, Lenin was far more clear than Kautsky. Lenin does not theorize a strategy of insurrection but revolution in general, where insurrection is simply a means to an end. His strategy is aggressively unoriginal in its faithfulness to Marx and Engels, but visionary in its ability to organize the working class for revolution in difficult circumstances. On the question of insurrection, Lenin was not a putschist, but simply recognized that the class struggle could and in some cases would necessarily take a military form. The more we deny this, the more we set ourselves up for failure. 

Posted on

The Democratic Road to Socialism: Reply to Mike Taber

Eric Blanc replies to Mike Taber’s article Lenin, Kautsky and the Transition to Socialism and argues that the work of Karl Kautsky provides a strategy for a democratic road to socialism. Read Donald Parkinson’s response here.

Stuttgart Congress of the Second International, 1907

I wrote my piece on Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky’s pre-1910 strategy on the democratic road to socialism in the hopes of helping socialists today sharpen our political strategy. Moving beyond various unfounded assumptions about working-class politics and history — particularly regarding the generalizability of the October 1917 model for capitalist democracies — is a good starting point for critically thinking about the specific challenges facing us today and in the coming years.

I was excited to read Mike Taber’s response to my article, since I am a big fan of his historical work. Though his contribution distorts some of my arguments and misrepresents key historical facts, I appreciate his contribution and I hope that responding to it will help clarify the political and historical stakes of this debate. Here are my responses to what I see as the main problems with his piece.

An evolutionary road to socialism?

Taber implies that I’m trying to “prove” the case for “the perspective of evolutionary change through the capitalist political set-up.” As such, he seeks to rebut my piece by noting that because capitalists inevitably resist being overthrown, “there is no example in history where a transition to socialism was successfully achieved entirely through peaceful and electoral means.”

I don’t know what to make of this critique, since so much of my article advocated revolutionary rupture on precisely these grounds — and in demonstrating that early Kautsky positively articulated this position as well. One of the reasons why Kautsky’s radical strategy remains compelling is that it posits that to overthrow capitalism a) socialists should fight to win a socialist universal suffrage electoral majority in government/parliament and b) socialists must expect that serious anti-capitalist change will necessarily require extra-parliamentary mass action like a general strike and a revolution to defeat the inevitable sabotage and resistance of the ruling class.

Propaganda poster for Independent Social Democrats (USPD), political home of Kautksy and Bernstein during the German Revolution.

Dual power and insurrection

Taber claims that “Lenin and the early Communist movement never put forward an ‘insurrectionary strategy.’” This is factually incorrect. The early Comintern was explicitly committed to insurrection as the path to institute soviet power. The Second Congress’ “Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism” insists that “the mass struggle is a whole system of developing actions sharpening in their form and logically leading to the insurrection against the capitalist state.” What differentiated Communists from Blanquists was not over whether an insurrection was needed, but whether or not it could be the product of a relatively small group of conspirators (a position Communists rejected).

Indeed, even when the term insurrection wasn’t explicitly used, the early Comintern’s commitment to fighting for soviet power necessarily meant advocating insurrection — that is, an “instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government” — since nobody believed that the existing capitalist state would peacefully cede power to workers’ councils.

Even in Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, in which he famously advocates the tactical participation of Communists in capitalist parliaments, he makes clear that in all countries “workers must prepare—ideologically, politically and technically—for the struggle of the Soviets against parliament, for the dispersal of parliament by the Soviets.”

That a commitment to a dual power/workers’ council strategy necessarily meant orienting to insurrection was articulated and upheld by Leon Trotsky in subsequent decades. As he argued in a 1937 balance sheet of Bolshevism, the “Bolshevik party has shown the entire world how to carry out armed insurrection and the seizure of power.”

But history has shown, as I argued in my article, that “[n]ot only has there never been a victorious insurrectionary socialist movement under a capitalist democracy, but only a tiny minority of workers have ever even nominally supported the idea of an insurrection.” Neither Taber, nor other critics of my article, have sufficiently grappled with the strategic implications of this fact.

Whereas there have been dozens of occasions over the past century in which a majority of workers have supported a process of democratic socialist transformation, there’s never been anything even approximating a majoritarian working-class push towards replacing parliamentary rule with workers’ councils. Why exactly should we expect this to change in the future — let alone hinge our strategy on such a possibility? Leninists have yet to provide a compelling response to this crucial question.

Taber misses the main point that I and others have made about why we can’t overgeneralize from the Russian experience. Soviets were only able to become the legitimate democratic expression of the majority of working people in 1917 because (due to Tsarism’s autocratic legacy) they didn’t have to compete with any elected democratic parliament; the Russian Provisional Government was an unelected body with almost zero legitimacy. But in countries where democratic parliamentary bodies already existed, dual power bodies have never gained anywhere near the same amount of popular traction.

Any even-handed balance sheet of the past century must acknowledge that widespread adherence to a dual power/insurrectionary strategy has facilitated the marginalization of revolutionary socialists in democratic polities for generations. This is not primarily because of failed attempts in practice to organize insurrections, though there are some examples of these. The reason is more simple: assumptions about the generalizability of the October 1917 model have led most (though not all) revolutionary socialists for generations to downplay the importance of contesting for power in the electoral arena.

As I’ve written about extensively in my coverage of the educators’ revolt, building disruptive strikes, mass actions, powerful social movements, and militant unions is an essential and central component of any viable socialist strategy. But for socialism to become a majoritarian movement, these forms of action will very likely have to be combined with a serious and consistent intervention in electoral politics — which, whether we like it or not, is the political terrain that the largest numbers of working people engage with.

Poster for Fourth Congress of Comintern

The workers’ government strategy

As I noted in my article, “the most perceptive elements of the early Communist International began briefly moving back towards Kautsky’s approach in 1922–23 by advocating the parliamentary election of ‘workers’ governments’ as a first step towards rupture.” Taber says this is untrue.

Yet the Comintern’s Fourth Congress in 1922 explicitly argued that “a workers’ government that arises from a purely parliamentary combination, that is, one that is purely parliamentary in origin, can provide the occasion for a revival of the revolutionary workers’ movement. Obviously, the birth and continued existence of a genuine workers’ government, one that pursues revolutionary policies, must result in a bitter struggle with the bourgeoisie, and possibly a civil war.”

In terms of pro-actively “advocating” such parliamentary elected workers’ governments, I was referencing the practices and agitation of national Communist parties who in 1922-23 did openly push for the election of joint Communist Party-Socialist Party governments in countries including France, Poland, and Germany.

Unfortunately, the political advance represented by the Comintern’s workers’ government discussion was short lived and it never fully strategically crystallized. Though the demand has been periodically raised by revolutionary socialists since 1923, it’s fair to say that a majority of Trotskyist and Maoist currents have stood fast to a dogmatic commitment to the dual power/insurrection strategy, as have the newer “base-building”. formations grouped in the Marxist Center.

See, for example, Sophia Burns’ case for the goal of “launching a revolutionary uprising” and Sandra Bloodworth’s recent defense of the axiom that “[t]he system of world capitalism that we confront today cannot be overturned by any means short of mass insurrection.”

I’m sympathetic to Taber’s implied argument that Marxists should remain relatively strategically open-ended when it comes to the state and revolution. A more agnostic orientation on this question would be a step forward for many socialists who have uncritically assumed the generalizability of the October 1917 model.

It’s impossible, of course, to predict the precise form through which a future socialist revolution will look like. One of the compelling aspects of Kautsky’s early writings is his stress on precisely this question. As he pointed out in 1902, “I am thoroughly convinced that it is not our task to invent recipes for the kitchens of the future. … In this field [of revolution] many surprises for us may yet appear.” Like Kautsky before1910, I agree that there’s no need to deny the possibility that insurrection could at some point be viably posed in the future.

This acknowledgement, however, doesn’t oblige us to avoid staking out a strategic stance based on a critical balance sheet of the accumulated experience of class struggle over the past hundred and fifty years. Politics is about wagers, not certainties. If unexpected conditions and developments emerge, we can and should always adjust our approaches accordingly.

In my view, building a militant working-class mass movement and fighting to elect workers’ governments remains the most likely path to begin a process of structural transformation and mass action capable of culminating in the overthrow of capitalism. In other words, there’s sufficient historical and contemporary evidence for Marxists to make a strategic wager on a democratic road to socialism.

Kautsky’s democratic road to socialism

But what exactly was Kautsky’s “democratic road to socialism” strategy? Taber asserts that Kautsky only first articulated this conception in 1918, i.e. after his reformist turn. This is not accurate.

As Kautsky’s biographer Salvadori notes, Kautsky from at least 1892 onwards “posed an indissoluble link between the conquest of the state and the conquest of a majority in parliament.” Indeed, I included a 1909 Kautsky quote in my article in which he argues that once workers won a majority in parliament, this would lead to a revolutionary, extra-parliamentary clash because the bourgeoisie would refuse to accept the socialists’ anti-capitalist policies.

This was the hegemonic conception of revolutionary rupture among Second International Marxists. As Kautsky put it in 1905, “the bourgeoisie has long ceased to see parliament as the chosen instrument of its rule – as an instrument that is safe under all circumstances. It feels that … the hour is approaching where the proletariat … in Germany it will conquer parliament with the aid of universal suffrage. The bourgeoisie feels that it is lost if parliamentarism becomes a truth.”

Darren Rosso’s recent article charting and condemning Kautsky’s parliamentarism provides more than enough further textual evidence demonstrating that, notwithstanding his repeated caveats about not being to predict the precise form of a social revolution, Kautsky from the 1890s onwards generally portrayed anti-capitalist rupture as passing through a victorious election of a workers’ party in parliamentary, universal suffrage elections.

Reformist Socialist Alexandre Millerand

Against ‘Ministerialism’

Taber claims that Kautsky’s “unsavory” stances after 1910 were rooted in his supposed “longstanding tendency of adapting to reformist and opportunist currents.” Yet Taber’s evidence of the “best example” of this supposed tendency in fact proves the exact opposite.

In 1899-1900, Kautsky led the fight to denounce the entry of reformist socialist Alexandre Millerand into the French government. Rather than praise Kautsky’s sharp fight against reformism in practice, Taber ungenerously criticizes the fact that Kautsky’s written resolution condemning Millerand and socialist “ministerialism” left open the possibility of socialists joining a capitalist government in exceptional circumstances. Yet, far from being a particularity of Kautsky, this exact same position was also shared at the time by fellow revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Giorgi Plekhanov.

Moreover, Taber fails to acknowledge that it was Kautsky himself who only three years later took the lead in articulating and advocating what soon became the standard “orthodox” Marxist stance on this question: non-participation in capitalist governments as a matter of principle. In 1903, the German SPD Dresden congress adopted the resolution written by Kautsky making a case against any such participation under any circumstances. The 1904 Amsterdam Congress of the Second International reaffirmed the Kautsky/SPD 1903 resolution.

As I’ve written about elsewhere, Kautsky from 1903 onwards was the most prominent opponent in Germany and internationally of “ministeralism,” or what would later become known as Popular Frontism. Only many years later, during the German Revolution of 1918-23, did Kautsky reverse his stance on this crucial question. In short, even Taber’s cited “best example” shows that Kautsky led the international fight against reformism before 1910 — as Lenin rightly argued, Kautsky’s later move to the center was a break from, not a continuation of, his earlier strategy and approach.

Brigade of the first train that delivered bread in 1918 from Soviet Russia to Finland.

The lessons of Finland

I noted that Kautsky’s early radical strategy guided Finnish Marxists to successfully overthrow capitalist rule in 1917-18 — arguably the world’s only successful workers’ revolution in parliamentary conditions. Yet Taber argues that the Finnish Revolution is an example of why “sowing illusions among working people in a purely ‘electoral road to socialism’ is a recipe for disaster and defeat.”

It’s worth pointing out that neither I, the early Kautsky, nor the Finnish Marxists ever advocated a “purely electoral” strategy. As I stressed in my piece, and as the experience of Finland bore out, “avoiding the dead-end of social democratization will above all require a very intense and sustained degree of mass action and independent working-class organization outside of parliament. Without this, even the most well-intentioned government will flounder.”

But the main substantive point I want to address here concerns what lessons we can draw from the crushing of the Finnish workers’ government in 1918.  Taber implies that this outcome somehow invalidates Kautsky’s Marxist strategy. In my view, it’d be a mistake to throw out the strategic lessons learned from a successful workers’ revolution on the grounds of its later military defeat.

By this criteria, we should also dismiss the 1871 Paris Commune as well as Bolshevism, since its 1917-18 governments in Latvia, Estonia, and Baku were similarly taken down by the combined military forces of domestic and international counter-revolution. Furthermore, the Bolshevik project was also fundamentally defeated in Russia’s civil war, though this took the unexpected form of the rise of a Stalinist bureaucracy. Anything resembling workers’ democracy in Russia lasted less than half a year after the October Revolution, not much longer than the Finns.

Adhering to revolutionary politics, unfortunately, does not somehow automatically guarantee victory for one’s political project. Taber’s case would only be valid if the Finnish socialists’ commitment to Kautsky’s strategy was the primary reason for the defeat of their workers’ government. But, in reality, the Finnish socialists were militarily defeated because they were isolated and outgunned by the combined weight of the German and Finnish ruling classes – and because the Bolsheviks were too weak to offer them serious armed support.

 

Democratizing the regime

Since space restrictions prevented a thorough discussion in my Jacobin piece, I’m glad to get the opportunity to expand on my argument that “reclaiming Kautsky’s strategy should prompt socialists to focus more on fighting to democratize the political regime.” My point here was not to deny that Leninists have often fought for democratic rights like political equality for all or self-determination for oppressed peoples.

Rather, I sought to show that Kautsky’s strategic emphasis on fighting for the radical republican transformation of the existing state has been unfortunately marginalized on the far left since the October Revolution. As such, I linked to Chris Maisano’s excellent article on the anti-democratic U.S. political regime, which raised the need for socialists to fight for structural reforms like proportional representation, abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate, democratizing the Supreme Court, lowering the power of the executive branch, and enacting deep labor law reform. In this sense, it’s fair to say, as I wrote, that “Leninists have often been reluctant to proactively fight for major democratic reforms [to the structures of the political regime] because they seek to completely illegitimate the current state.”

Taber acknowledges that “one can unquestionably find some self-styled Leninist groups and parties that undervalue this fight [for democracy].” But I am not convinced of his assertion that “one cannot find such undervaluing in Lenin, Trotsky, [and] the early Comintern.” Even if we leave aside my main intended point regarding the forgotten socialist legacy of fighting for democratic republicanism, the fact remains that many of the post-1917 writings of these figures and the Comintern did diminish the importance of democracy. As Rosa Luxemburg famously argued, Bolshevik leaders as early as 1918 had a tendency to make a virtue of necessity in their suppression of basic political freedoms and democratic structures within Russia.

And on an international level, Lenin and the Comintern’s often one-sided denunciations of bourgeois democracy as a complete sham lent itself to ultra-leftism even in the early days of the Communist International. As John Riddell’s work on this website has demonstrated, for example, Communist leaders before 1923 often failed to distinguish sufficiently between capitalist democracies and authoritarian regimes, including fascism.

The Comintern often failed to differentiate capitalist democracy and fascism.

Conclusion

I hope that this debate, as it develops, will not remain limited to discussing the details of Second International Marxism — the case for and against distinct socialist strategies for contemporary conditions certainly doesn’t hinge on what activists wrote or did over a century ago.

As other comrades consider weighing in, I would again underscore that nobody, to my knowledge, has yet made a compelling positive case for the relevance of a dual power/insurrectionary strategy for advanced capitalist democracies. An article along these lines would do much more to clarify this debate than another volley of quotes from Lenin or Gramsci. Criticizing social democracy and democratic socialism is not politically convincing unless you can provide a viable alternative.

Posted on

Kautsky, Lenin, and the Transition to Socialism: A Reply to Eric Blanc

Mike Taber weighs in on the Kautsky debate happening at Jacobin Magazine, responding to Eric Blanc’s text Why Kautsky Was Right (and why you should care). Taber sets the record straight on Kautsky’s strengths and weaknesses and Blanc’s uncharitable reading of Leninism. 

Eric Blanc is a talented Marxist historian and activist, with a reputation for questioning accepted wisdom. While one may not always agree with all of his conclusions, Eric’s works generally have a refreshing quality that can only be welcomed.

That freshness, however, is not in evidence in his latest article, “Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care)” published in Jacobin. The main point of the article is to defend Karl Kautsky’s perspective of a “democratic road to socialism” as against a supposed Leninist “insurrectionary strategy.” In addition to presenting a false framework for the debate, the article strays from Kautsky’s actual record and legacy. It also presents a caricature of “Leninists.”

Good Kautsky / bad Kautsky – Which is it?

There are many positive aspects of Kautsky’s early record: his defense and popularization of Marxism; his opposition to Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism; his internationalism; his opposition to imperialism and colonialism; his enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution of 1905. But Eric mentions none of these points. Instead, he focuses exclusively on the question of the “democratic road to socialism.”

Blanc draws a distinction between Kautsky’s perspective before and after 1910. Kautsky is presented as caving in that year to the opportunist wing in the German Social Democratic Party, reversing many of his key strategic ideas and moving toward reformism.

It’s certainly true that Kautsky backtracked on a number of issues in the years around 1910, and especially after 1914. But the strict division into what one might call a Good Kautsky (before 1910) and a Bad Kautsky (after 1910) does not stand up to reality and is an obstacle to assessing his legacy. Such a dichotomy ignores how aspects of the early version may be found in the later one. It also conveniently implies that all the unsavory things Kautsky did or said after 1910 – and particularly after 1914 and 1917 – can simply be ignored as irrelevant to Eric’s thesis about “why Kautsky was right.”

The reality is much more complex.

First of all, Blanc’s formulation “Kautsky’s case for a democratic road to socialism” is misleading. One will look in vain for such a concept in the three main books Kautsky wrote prior to 1910 that outline his perspective of revolutionary change: The Class Struggle (1892), The Social Revolution (1902), and The Road to Power (1909).

It’s true that in these books there was unclarity as to how a socialist transformation would occur. But they all nevertheless argue sharply against the perspective of evolutionary change through the capitalist political set-up. The role of democracy, as Kautsky put in The Social Revolution, is “as a means of ripening the proletariat for the social revolution.” The quotations that Eric cites from these books show the exact opposite of what he’s trying to prove.

The first place I’m aware of in which Kautsky outlined the idea of a “democratic road to socialism” was in his 1918 work, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as a counterposition to the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks in Russia.1

So the very aspect of Kautsky that Eric Blanc admires most – his “democratic road to socialism” – comes from the Bad Kautsky of post-1910.

Secondly, even though the early Kautsky ably defended important aspects of Marxism, he had a longstanding tendency of adapting to reformist and opportunist currents. The best example of this was in 1900, around the question of Millerandism.

Alexandre Millerand was a French socialist who entered the ministerial cabinet of the bourgeois government of France in 1899. This act led to debate throughout the world socialist movement, given that socialists had always opposed such ministerial participation. At the Second International’s Congress of 1900, it was Kautsky – the Good Kautsky – who introduced a resolution condemning socialist participation in bourgeois ministries under “normal” circumstances but leaving the door open to it under “exceptional” ones. “If in some special instance the political situation necessitates this dangerous expedient,” the Kautsky resolution stated, “that is a question of tactics and not of principle.”

This fence-straddling position was met by a counter-resolution put forward by Enrico Ferri and Jules Guesde, opposing such participation under all circumstances. Even though the Kautsky resolution was eventually adopted, its ambiguities and the dissatisfaction thereby engendered led to its repeal at the next Second International Congress. The resolution adopted at the 1904 Congress, defended most forcefully by August Bebel, condemned all socialist acceptance of ministerial posts in capitalist governments.

August Bebel opposed Socialist participation in Ministerial positions against the more ambiguous stance of Kautsky.

‘Leninists’ vs. Leninists

In many of Eric Blanc’s articles, a constant target is the standard historical narrative. As Eric has frequently shown, such narratives can over time become schematized and fossilized, posing an obstacle to clear thought. However, the latest article’s depiction of “Leninists” is largely based on exactly such a standard narrative. Let us examine a few quotes from the article:

“Leninists for decades have hinged their strategy on the need for an insurrection to overthrow the entire parliamentary state and to place all power into the hands of workers’ councils….

“Leninists have rarely grappled with these facts [i.e., workers’ reluctance to “replace universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy with workers’ councils”], let alone provided a compelling explanation for them….

“Leninists have generally been reluctant to proactively fight for major democratic reforms because they seek to completely illegitimate the current state.”

The standard narrative of a Lenin with a fanatical obsession with revolution and insurrection is one I’m quite familiar with, from my Cold War school textbooks in the 1960s. But it’s entirely false.

First of all, Lenin and the early Communist movement never put forward an “insurrectionary strategy.” Their strategy was aimed at mobilizing the proletariat and its allies around the fight for their class interests, and to direct it toward the conquest of political power and the overthrow of the rule of the bourgeoisie. In this, they utilized all methods. They also recognized the reality that socialism could not be reformed into existence; a revolution was required to overturn capitalism’s political apparatus. This revolution would lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, based around a soviet-type system of workers’ democracy.

There is no distinct “Leninist strategy of insurrection” – any more than there’s a Leninist strategy of strikes, of demonstrations, of picket lines, of protest meetings, of study circles, or of fund appeals.

There indeed was such an “insurrectionary strategy,” but it comes from Blanquism, not Leninism. Louis Auguste Blanqui was a dedicated and admirable French revolutionary from the nineteenth century, whose followers did come up with such a perspective. But Lenin argued strongly against that view.

The idea that the proletariat could not achieve revolutionary change through the existing state structure, but only through its overthrow, comes squarely from Marx and Engels. It was a conclusion they drew from the Paris Commune of 1871.

Even more astounding is Blanc’s contention, quoted above, that “Leninists” have been reluctant to fight for democratic rights. Such a blanket and unsubstantiated assertion run counter to all evidence.

True, one can unquestionably find some self-styled Leninist groups and parties that undervalue this fight. But one cannot find such undervaluing in Lenin, Trotsky, the early Comintern, or many others who look to that tradition.

The entire history of the Bolsheviks’ struggle in Russia shows the opposite of what Eric claims. In the years leading up to 1917, their agitation was centered around the so-called “Three Whales of Bolshevism.” These were the eight-hour day, confiscation of the landed estates, and a democratic republic. During 1917 itself much of their agitation was also based around democratic demands.

Following the revolution’s victory, the early Communist movement followed in this tradition, as demonstrated clearly in the series of books on the Comintern edited by John Riddell.

Likewise, in modern times, those who look to Lenin’s legacy and tradition have been active in the civil rights movement, the fight for women’s rights, freedom for political prisoners, immigrants’ rights, and for many other democratic issues. In fact, the majority of struggles in the imperialist world today are around democratic demands.

The Bolshevik Revolution happened just as much because of agitation for democratic demands as well as economic struggle.

The workers’ government – fact and fiction

Eric’s comment about the early Comintern is also wrong. He writes:

[T]he most perceptive elements of the early Communist International began briefly moving back towards Kautsky’s approach in 1922–23 by advocating the parliamentary election of ‘workers’ governments’ as a first step towards rupture.

That statement is factually inaccurate. The Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 indeed held a discussion on the workers’ government question and adopted a resolution on it. But nowhere did that Congress suggest that a workers’ government could be established by “parliamentary election,” as Eric claims. Quite the contrary.

In this resolution analyzing variants of workers’ government, it begins with two variants that it calls “illusory workers’ governments”:

“(1) a liberal workers’ government, such as existed in Australia and may exist in Britain in the foreseeable future. (2) A Social-Democratic workers’ government (Germany)…The first two types are not revolutionary workers’ governments at all, but in reality hidden coalition governments between the bourgeoisie and anti-revolutionary workers’ leaders.”2

As can be seen, such governments were certainly not “advocated.”

A “genuine workers’ government,” the resolution stated, “is possible only if it is born from the struggles of the masses themselves.” The significance of a “purely parliamentary combination” lies in that it can “provide the occasion for a revival of the revolutionary workers’ movement.”3

Moreover, the workers’ government concept largely came out of the experience of the German Communist movement. Following the right-wing Kapp Putsch of 1920 that aimed to overturn the German bourgeois democratic government, workers engaged in probably the most complete general strike in history and began to form armed workers’ detachments. Out of this upsurge, a call was made for a government of all the workers’ parties.  After some debate, the Communist Party gave its support to that initiative.

So the workers’ government (and later the workers’ and peasants’ government) was directly linked by the Comintern to revolutionary struggle – not merely to the triumph of workers’ parties in bourgeois elections.

Yes, there have been examples where working-class electoral victories – and the reactions to them by the ruling class – have led to the onset of revolutionary struggles. Revolutionaries and Leninists have never discounted this possibility. The example of Finland that Eric cites – in which a working-class electoral victory led to the onset of a revolutionary struggle in which workers had an opportunity to take full power into their hands – is a demonstration of how this can occur. But it takes a stretch of the imagination to squeeze the Finnish revolution and civil war into the framework of a “democratic road to socialism.”

Finnish Red Guards, 1918

The Russian Revolution and the electoral road

Blanc labels the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia as “a revolution that toppled an autocratic, noncapitalist state, not a parliamentary regime.” This is not entirely true.

That statement may be an accurate depiction of the February 1917 Revolution that overthrew the tsarist regime. But it is completely inaccurate when describing the October Revolution that toppled the Provisional Government – a capitalist government, not a “non-capitalist” one. Furthermore, a democratically elected body did exist prior to October, but it wasn’t a bourgeois parliament; it was the Soviets, elected by workers and soldiers, in which the Bolsheviks obtained the majority. During the course of 1917, Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders had repeatedly stressed that they would respect the democratic will of the majority of working people, registered in the Soviets. The October insurrection that overthrew the Provisional Government was a defense of this working-class democratic will against an attempt by the government and counterrevolutionary forces to suppress the Soviets. In this sense, the October Revolution might indeed be seen as an example of the “democratic road to socialism,” although the opposite of Kautsky’s conception of it.

While electoral victories can on occasion open the door to revolutionary struggle, there is no example in history where a transition to socialism was successfully achieved entirely through peaceful and electoral means.

Obviously, such a peaceful transition would be preferable to revolutionary upheaval. But has there ever been a ruling class in history that has calmly and peacefully surrendered its power? Will the bourgeoisie come to shake the proletariat’s hand and say, in chivalrous fashion, “You won fair and square. Here are the keys to our government and to our industries. Good luck.” No, I don’t think so!

Asserting that the electoral and evolutionary path to socialism is not possible does not in the slightest mean discarding all possibilities and openings that elections and election campaigns can provide to the working class and its parties. But as the examples of Finland, Spain, Chile, and other places show, sowing illusions among working people in a purely “electoral road to socialism” is a recipe for disaster and defeat.

In this reply, I have deliberately avoided tying these historical arguments into current debates about Bernie Sanders, work inside the Democratic Party, electoral approaches, and so on. The historical record of the socialist movement must never be distorted in order to serve a particular political agenda. To do so would be a disservice to the many thousands of young people attracted to socialism today.

This was originally published on John Riddell’s blog here. 

Mike Taber is preparing a volume collecting together all the resolutions adopted by congresses of the Second International between 1889 and 1912. He is also editor of “The Communist Movement at a Crossroads: Plenums of the Communist International’s Executive Committee, 1922-23” and co-editor of “The Communist Women’s Movement 1920-1922.”