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The Problem of Unity: A Comparative Analysis

In a comparative study of Austro-Marxism, the French Socialist movement, and Bolshevism, Medway Baker argues for the left to seek unity around a programme of constitutional disloyalty.

“May Day demonstration in Putilov” by Boris Kustodiev (1906)

What does party-building look like? This has been a topic of great contention in the past months and years, especially as conflicts within and about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) come to the fore, and as a “base-building” tendency has begun to develop on the left, most notably around the Marxist Center organization (MC). That this question is once again on the left’s radar is a sign of organizational and intellectual resurgence in our ranks, and this must be celebrated. But in the process of these debates, misconceptions have been propagating, in large part because of the linguistic baggage inherited from various traditions: “dual power”, “base-building”, “cadre formation”, “mass work”, and much more. 

These terminological debates, although sometimes useful, often obscure the core issues at hand. In an article published by Regeneration (MC’s publication), Comrade JC counterposes “mass work” to “base-building”, proposes the “creation of autonomous mass organizations capable of collective action to further class power”, and claims that programmatic unity “amounts to a return to… blind-alley sectarianism”. JC, mischaracterizing the concept of programmatic unity, asserts that “for a socialist intelligentsia largely cut off from the wider working class and lacking meaningful structures of counter-power, programmatic unity puts the cart before the horse.” JC’s solution is “cadre formation through mass work”—a nice-sounding phrase, but hardly a new idea. This is simply base-building elevated to a strategy, retheorized with a more Marxist-sounding phraseology.1

As I have argued previously, we must be clear about revolutionary strategy if we are to build a communist party.2 This means that a party in formation, even before attaining a mass base, must be built on the basis of a programme. “Cadre formation through mass work” is itself the process of party-building, and unity within and between cadres can only be forged on the basis of a shared programme. A party without a programme is no party at all, and a cadre without a party can never hope to win the proletariat’s confidence and take power. 

So the question remains unanswered: What does party-building look like? What does “unity” mean, and how can we transcend the theoretical unity model of the microsects? We will explore these questions by comparing the “fanaticism for unity”3 exemplified by the Austrian Social-Democrats, the debates within French Socialism surrounding prospects for unification with the Communists, and the Bolsheviks’ conduct towards other socialist parties during the October Revolution. We will find that programmatic unity can and must be found through comradely debate and shared struggles, and that unity must be constructed on a shared basis of disloyalty toward the bourgeois constitutional order and democratic centralism: freedom of debate combined with unity in action. 

According to Otto Bauer, a leading member of Austrian Social-Democracy’s left-wing, Austro-Marxism “is the product of unity… [and] an intellectual force which maintains unity…. [It] is nothing but the ideology of unity of the workers’ movement!”4 Drawing on the course of the Second International’s split, he explains: 

“Where the working class is divided, one workers’ party embodies sober, day-to-day Realpolitik, while the other embodies the revolutionary will to attain the ultimate goal. Only where a split is avoided are sober Realpolitik and revolutionary enthusiasm united in one spirit…. The synthesis of the realistic sense of the workers’ movement with the idealistic ardour for socialism… protects us from division…. It is more than a matter of tactics that we always formulate policies which bring together all sections of the working class; that we can only get unity, the highest good, by combining sober realism with revolutionary enthusiasm. This is not a tactical question, it is the principle of class struggle…”5

Bauer clearly bends the stick too far towards unity at any cost. Unity with the sorts of reformist social-traitors who urged workers to war and drowned popular revolts in blood (such as the Ebert government in revolutionary Germany) is neither desirable nor possible. But this must be understood in the context of Austrian Social-Democracy, which—while it failed to offer any opposition to the imperialist war of 1914-18, and should be critiqued for this—was not nearly as bankrupt as German Social-Democracy. The Party initially did support the war effort on defencist grounds—defense of the Austrian proletariat from Russian autocracy—but upon coming to power in the aftermath of the war, the Social-Democrats did not turn the repressive apparatus of the state against the proletariat, but rather sought to neutralize the state’s repressive capacity.6 Bauer analyzed the early Austrian Republic as a state “in which neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat could [rule], both had to divide the power between them.”7 Further, the Austrian Republic’s Social-Democratic government was one of the few to recognize and trade with the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.8 We should critique the Austrian Social-Democrats for their timidity and avoidance of using force when given the opportunity (Bauer himself would later do just this)9, but we cannot say that they took an openly counterrevolutionary position when revolution came to Austria and actively sided with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. 

Photo of Otto Bauer

Bauer himself made just such an argument in late 1917 when the left-wing of the Party (to which he then belonged) was agitating for a split. He impressed upon his cothinkers that “such a division would be justified only if the majority of the party were in a position to make compromises with the bourgeois elements of the state. Given such a condition, an independent socialist body might exist to prevent reformism.”10 Bauer argued that such conditions were present in Germany—thus justifying the split of the Independent Social-Democrats (USPD)—but not present in Austria. This raises the question of what actions constitute such collaboration with the bourgeoisie, and why support for the imperialist war does not fulfil this condition; perhaps Bauer was more narrowly concerned with ministerialism and direct attacks on the proletariat, or perhaps it can be explained simply by the fact that he himself failed to oppose the war at the decisive moment and did not want to indict himself.11 However, the extent to which this stance constituted cynical opportunism can and has been argued elsewhere, and is not relevant for our purposes. 

Friedrich Adler, who—unlike Bauer—opposed the war from the very beginning, nevertheless took a parallel stance. He wrote, only several months before his assassination of the Austrian Minister-President: 

“All party activity consists in common action toward the realization of the party program. Every individual act rests on the majority decision of a solidary community. Two dangers threaten the party, one from the side of the majority and one from the side of the minority. The majority is always in danger that its decision does not correspond to the party program, that it contradicts the basic principles of the whole movement which it represents, the principles that give the party meaning. The minority is in danger of destroying the community of action, of not complementing the majority, of going its own way and thereby disturbs the majority decision.”12

In essence, Friedrich Adler believed that even when the majority violated the party’s programmatic unity, it was the duty of the minority to correct the movement’s faulty course by way of both inner-party struggle and independent agitation among the working class13; to be, in essence, an opposition within the party that fought against the sins of the majority while remaining loyal to the party itself. This is a shakier justification than Bauer’s, as Adler fails to define a circumstance under which a split might be acceptable. It is, however, consistent with Adler’s personal relationship to the Party, and should be understood in that context.14 It should also be noted that Adler was a political thinker of less depth and breadth than Bauer, and was not as enmeshed in the practicalities of Party and state politics during this period as Bauer and other Austro-Marxists were. 

In summation, these leftist Austrian Social-Democrats believed that unity of the workers’ movement was essential, even if it meant remaining in a party that violated its own revolutionary (or at least anti-reformist) programme. They are unable to define which conditions would justify a split, outside of vague platitudes. Bauer provides a well-reasoned argument as to why this unity is so important, but he has no answer to the challenge of overcoming reformism. We will see later his failed attempts to rectify this problem following the triumph of fascist counter-revolution in Austria. 

If Austro-Marxism was the “ideology of unity” in practice, then French Socialism saw unity as an essential aspiration which was to be actively pursued. Similarly to Austrian and German Social-Democracy, the French Socialist movement coalesced into a single party throughout the end of the 19th and the dawn of the 20th century, emerging in the form of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) in 1905. It would be sundered in two only 15 years later, with the foundation of the French Communist Party (PCF). More than the Austrian Social-Democrats, the French left-Socialists not only strove to maintain unity within the Party, but also actively sought unity in action and even reunification with the Communist Party. Before moving on to a discussion of reunification efforts between the two workers’ parties, however, it is useful to discuss what unity meant to the SFIO in the first place: on what basis did the French Socialist movement first unify, and what were the outcomes? 

There were several currents which merged into the Party in 1905, but the two most prominent were Guesdism15(named for the political leader Jules Guesde, who was credited with introducing Marxism to France) and Jauressianism (named for the leader Jean Jaurès, a reformist who supported alliances with the bourgeoisie16). The dynamics of these currents and others are not interesting for our purposes, but the manner in which they unified is. 

Jaurès speaks to a crowd

 The Guesdists had the majority at the unification congress, but according to Claude Willard, the foremost historian of Guesdism, it was a “deceptive victory”.17 The programme around which the Party united rejected reformism (although not reforms) and declared its irreconcilable opposition to the bourgeoisie and its state, and proclaimed a “party of class struggle and revolution.” But this was a false programmatic unity: the party apparatus was too decentralised to enforce party discipline, and in practice the programme was violated both by local party organisations and by Socialist parliamentarians. In addition, the “tendencies” inside the Party were essentially “parties within the Party”; Willard notes that “the SFIO, more than a merger, [was] the affixation of assorted ideological and political currents.”18

The existence of factions within a party is, of course, a sign of healthy discourse, which is necessary for a workers’ party to adapt to changing circumstances and remain in constant contact with the workers’ movement in all its diversity. However, for a workers’ party to present a consistent opposition to bourgeois rule and ultimately take power, it must be united in action. That is to say, all sections of the workers’ party, from local cadres to parliamentarians, must conduct their activity on the basis of the party programme, which lays out the path to workers’ rule and communism. When party activists and parliamentarians flout the programme, both democracy and centralism within the party break down, and unity in any meaningful sense is impossible. 

Nevertheless, even this half-unity “constitute[d] a pole of attraction for those who had been repelled by the internecine wars between socialists”: by 1914, the Party’s membership had nearly tripled.19 However, much of this new membership, for one reason or another, was not committed to proletarian revolution, facilitating the Party’s reformist turn.20 When the imperialist war arrived, the Party was torn: many believed it was the duty of all classes to defend the Republic from Prussian militarism; a minority pled for peace, and a few declared the death of the International. The Russian Revolution in 1917 and the formation of the Communist International in 1919 intensified the tensions in the SFIO, and so, in 1920, the majority of delegates at the Tours Congress voted for affiliation to the Comintern and left the SFIO behind. 

This was the beginning of a new era for the French workers’ movement. Not only did the entry of the Communist Party into the political arena have massive implications for France at large, but the inner dynamics of the Socialist Party itself underwent a shift. New personalities emerged into the heights of Socialist politics. Factions which had emerged in response to the war and the Russian Revolution morphed and new factions arose.  

This split must not be understood as a simple split between reformists and revolutionaries. It is perhaps more accurate to understand the Tours Congress as a split within the left-wing camp.21 So what were the dynamics of this split, and of the Socialist Party left behind? 

As the war dragged on and workers revolted in France and across the world, the pro-war majority began to adopt the pacifist rhetoric of the minority, although failing to take an active stance against the war.22 The advent of the Comintern, within this context, divided the Party into three general currents: the right-wing “Resisters”, who supported a continuation of the Second International and rejected the application of Bolshevik methods to Western Europe; the centrist “Reconstructors”, who also rejected the application of Bolshevism to France but defended the October Revolution, and wished to “reconstruct” a united International “with the still-useable materials of the Second and the new framework of the Third”; and the left-wing, which supported joining the Comintern without reservations (or, at least, any stated reservations).23 

Léon Blum, for the Resisters, defended the SFIO’s unity on the basis of the socialist pluralism which had characterized French Socialism from 1905. He argued that the Comintern, after the Second Congress which had laid out the famous “21 Conditions” to which all member parties had to submit, was ideologically rigid and wouldn’t allow for internal factions and debate. In his famous speech to the Congress, in which he pleaded for broad proletarian unity, he proclaimed: 

“Unity in the Party… has, up to today, been a synthetic unity, a harmonic unity; it was a result of all [of the Party’s] forces, and all the tendencies acted together to determine the common axis for action. It is no longer unity in this sense that you seek, it is absolute uniformity and homogeneity. You only want men in your party who are disposed, not only to act together, but to commit to thinking together: your doctrine is fixed, once and for all! Ne variatur! He who does not accept will not enter into your party; he who accepts no longer must leave.”24 

Considering what Bolshevisation would entail for the PCF, Blum’s concerns may not be entirely without basis.25 The Comintern and PCF ultimately did clamp down on internal debate, driving many Communists out into a myriad of sects or back into the arms of the Socialist Party. What Blum fails to acknowledge, however, is that the SFIO’s pluralism was of a type that was unable to enforce unity in action. In practice, due to the Party’s decentralized nature, one militant might agitate for total hostility to the bourgeois state and the seizure of power by the workers, at the same time that a Socialist parliamentarian participated in a bourgeois coalition. Blum nevertheless insisted that the Party had enough bottom-up disciplinary mechanisms to guard against abuses by the leadership.26 At the same time, he defended this loose unity, on the basis that the duty of the Party was to assemble “the working class in its totality” in one party—no matter the cost: 

“Begin by bringing together [the proletariat], this is your work, there is no other limit on a socialist party, in scope and in number, than the number of labourers and waged workers. Our Party has thus been a party of the broadest recruitment possible. As such, it has been a party of freedom of thought, as these two ideas are linked and one derives necessarily from the other. If you wish to group, in one party, all the labourers, all the waged workers, all the exploited people, you cannot bring them together except by simple and general formulas…. Within this [socialist] credo, this essential affirmation [of replacing capitalism with socialism], all varieties, all nuances of opinion are tolerated.”27

This view, much as Bauer’s and Adler’s, clearly bends the stick too far towards unity at any cost. It allows for the violation of the party programme by activists and parliamentarians in the name of pluralism, and attempts to reconcile revolutionaries and avowed class-collaborationists in a single party. It is clearly impossible to proceed towards the socialist aim when such fundamental strategic differences remain unresolved. However, Blum raises an important issue: How should socialists maintain an internally democratic spirit, without on the other hand allowing for the encroachment of reformism and opportunism? 

This worry would later be echoed by Marceau Pivert, even as he called for unity between the Socialist and Communist Parties. Pivert was a leader of the SFIO’s “new left”, which arose in the years following the Tours Congress, as Blum reconciled with the Reconstructors and the space of a “left opposition” was left open.28 The new left was firmly opposed to compromise with the bourgeois state or the middle classes, and sought reunification with the Communists.29 It was also fundamentally committed to the principle of democracy. Pivert specified that, while he saw the formation of a “parti unique” (united party) as one of the highest priorities for the workers’ movement, the condition of such a merger was internal democracy, which “means that the sections designate their secretaries, that the federations choose their officials and their delegates, that only the national congresses will be sovereign.” Most importantly, internal democracy for Pivert meant “that all the nuances of opinion, socialist and communist, will be associated to the collective work, in conformity with majority rule; for this, currents of opinion (‘tendencies’) will have a legal existence, will participate in free investigation, in free internal critique, to the distribution of their theses among militants, and their representation will be assured at all levels of the organization, proportionally to their forces, and evaluated in the assemblies by regular polling.” 

This conception of unity is still tinged by French Socialism’s traditional haphazard “affixation” of factions noted by Willard. Pivert defends this, however, on the basis that the Party majority may itself betray revolutionary politics, and in such a situation it would be necessary for the minority to act on what it believes to be right. “There are cases,” he says, “where formal discipline is not possible: when the Party refuses to rectify certain problems.”30 For example, he claims that Party members should be able to engage in direct actions against fascism or join mass organizations, against the instructions of the leadership. The question is, then: what kind of unity can there be in a party where even unity in action cannot be guaranteed? 

In fact, Pivert was very concerned with unity of action; but he believed that it was the spontaneous direct action of the proletarian masses which would forge unity within the workers’ movement, rather than any precepts from above. I have dealt with the issue of spontaneism elsewhere; suffice to say, history has proven this “strategy” (or more properly, non-strategy) to be a dead end. It is true, however, that a united party of the working class cannot be forged simply through conferences of party or sect bureaucrats. Pivert believed that the starting point for unity should be open meetings between local Socialist and Communist party organizations, at which the membership could find common ground and coordinate further united action.31 A key aspect of this strategy was the formation of antifascist paramilitaries consisting of revolutionary workers.32 

Poster from the French Popular Front election

Indeed, spontaneous mass action by workers exploded across France with the election of Blum’s Popular Front government in 1936, celebrating the working class’s newfound unity (of a type).33 However, these mass actions failed to achieve “organic unity”, that is, the formation of the parti unique through the merger of the two workers’ parties. In fact, the Socialist Party bureaucracy worried that “the party was being by-passed by events”, and worked to distinguish the Socialist Party in popular imagination from the greater Popular Front movement, while combatting Communist influence in the workers’ movement. 34

Pivert fought against this tendency in the SFIO leadership and demanded that the Party encourage the creation of a cross-party antifascist paramilitary and allow members to join “popular committees”. In this way, the working class would transcend the limitations of not only each of the workers’ parties, but also of the Popular Front itself, and thus overcome their political leaderships to form a new, bottom-up proletarian unity.35 The fact that the Socialist and Communist leaders were opposed to the masses’ revolutionary impulse was irrelevant, he claimed, because “what counts is not really the supposed intention of a particular leader, but the manner in which the proletarian masses interpret their own destiny.”36The movement would be reborn with a new vitality, all types of socialist views would be tolerated, and mass action would inevitably lead the proletariat to seize power. Presumably, reformist illusions would be discarded by the masses under the pressure of events, and so undemocratic purges and discipline would not be necessary to secure the revolutionary orientation of the party. 

Jean Zyromski was another leader of the new left in the French Socialist Party who was a longtime ally of Pivert’s although they diverging with the advent of the Popular Front. Zyromski admitted to being influenced by both Lenin and Bauer, among other diverse thinkers37, and was even more committed to the formation of the parti unique than Pivert. He only gave up on the endeavor in November 1937, when Georgi Dimitrov, then-head of the Comintern, demanded that the interests of the Soviet state be treated as paramount. Zyromski treated the USSR as a proletarian beachhead in the class war, which was to be defended from capitalism and fascism so that it could continue to exert pressure on the international bourgeoisie but rejected “idolatry” of the Soviet Union or the Comintern.38 

Zyromski’s conception of proletarian unity was more sophisticated than Pivert’s and relied less on the spontaneity of the masses. He hoped that the synthesis of Socialism and Communism would allow the workers’ movement to transcend the limitations of each. He called for “real Unity, solid Unity, that which results from a merger of the existing Workers’ Parties, based in a Marxist synthesis of the general conceptions of the two movements of the working class…. To achieve this result,” he elaborated, “it is evidently necessary to find the points [where our programmes] intersect.”39 Against those who called for a “return to la vieille maison” (the old house—a common term for the Socialist Party, whereas the Communists belonged to the “new” house), Zyromski contested that “the destruction or liquidation of any given branch of the workers’ movement does not seem, to us, to be the path to unity. Once again, we must bring about a merger of the forces of the organized working class. This task, this merger, will be possible if the points of divergence, upon which the split was justifiably made, are reconciled in view of the facts.”40 

Without denying the validity of the split at Tours, Zyromski argued that with the rise of fascism, and the USSR’s resultant shift in foreign policy, the Socialist and Communist parties had lost any real grounds for maintaining the split: both recognized the need for prioritizing antifascism, and both advocated the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Strategically, both parties favored the combination of legal and illegal means in the class struggle. The Popular Front was the ultimate result of this shared orientation, and although he insisted that it had no revolutionary possibilities, Zyromski believed that it could serve to combat the forces of fascism, and that a Soviet-allied France could allow the proletariat to improve its position, not through insurrectionary means, but rather through supporting a Soviet war effort against German fascism, and through combatting fascism on other fronts as well. Through pursuing these shared aims, the Popular Front might encourage the two parties to merge, as their common programmatic points and actions would trump whatever other differences remained.41 

It was therefore neither “bottom-up” nor “top-down” unity that Zyromski sought, but rather organic unity brought about by unity in action, which was precipitated in turn by programmatic unity. We can thus see that programme and action are inextricable from one another, and unity on the basis of shared programmatic points is not synonymous with unity on the basis of a shared ideology.42 Rather, it constitutes unity on the basis of a shared strategy for the conquest of power, a strategy that necessarily informs present-day tactics. Programme is the immediate basis for both splits and unifications in the workers’ movement. However, Zyromski fails to propose any practical mechanism for maintaining this programmatic unity. 

So we return to Otto Bauer. By this time, he had developed an idea he called “integral socialism”: a synthesis between Socialism and Communism, which would unite the positive characteristics of each while discarding their negative characteristics. 

“On the one hand, we have the great mass workers’ movements: the English Labour Party, the social-democratic parties and unions of the Scandinavian countries, of Belgium, of the Netherlands, with their success, the unions of the United States, the workers’ parties of Australia—all these great mass movements are democratic and reformist. On the other hand, we have the conscious struggle for a socialist society which is realised in the USSR, the influence of which dominates the revolutionary socialist cadres of the fascist countries, makes itself felt in the mass socialist movements in France and Spain, and also in the revolutionary movement of the Far East. The link between the reformist class movement and conscious socialism, this is the problem which we must grapple with in order to devise an integral socialism. 

Marx and Engels surmounted the opposition that existed between the workers’ movement and socialism in the age of bourgeois revolution. They taught the workers’ movement that its aim must be the socialist society. They taught the socialists that the socialist society could be nothing other than the result of the struggles of the working class. But the opposition between the workers’ movement and socialism could not be definitively surmounted. The unification of the movement of the working class and the struggle for a socialist society, the work of Marxism, must be redone in each phase of the development of class struggle…. Surmounting this tension which reappears ceaselessly, uniting the workers’ movement and socialism; this is the historic task of Marxism.”43

What Bauer is describing has elsewhere been termed the “merger formula”. This was no groundbreaking idea in the socialist circles which Bauer frequented. However, what he stresses is that this merger must take place on an ongoing basis, as the objective tendency of the workers’ movement is to obtain the best deal for the working class within capitalism; that is, the tendency is towards reformism, especially under bourgeois-democratic regimes. 

Understanding this fact, for Bauer, is the first step towards reuniting the workers’ movement, a necessary precondition (in his view) for the defeat of fascism. He claims that the polar opposition between reform and revolution, manifested with the formation of the Comintern, was a mistake; in fact, the struggle for reforms (which is inevitable in the workers’ movement) is what will inevitably raise the class struggle to the point where only two outcomes are possible: fascist dictatorship or proletarian dictatorship. The duty of revolutionaries in the meantime, he counsels, is to support the workers’ struggles, propagate the tenets of revolutionary socialism, and organize revolutionary cadres within the workers’ movement to accomplish these goals. In addition, Marxism “must transmit to revolutionary socialism the great heritage of the struggles for democracy, the heritage of democratic socialism… [and] transmit to reformist socialism the great heritage of the proletarian revolutions…”.44

That is to say, the struggle for democracy and the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship must be united in a single party-movement in a single programme. The great split in the workers’ movement had separated these struggles into two internationals, and it was the task of true revolutionaries to reunite them. However, Bauer—much like Pivert—relies too much on the spontaneous will of the masses, which he claims will naturally progress towards revolution under the pressure of events and the influence of the revolutionaries. 

Therefore neither Bauer nor Zyromski can say how it is that the workers’ party can avoid domination by reformist politics, or rebellion of reformist elements against a revolutionary programme. Zyromski comes the closest, in his advocacy of unification around shared programmatic points, while allowing for multiple factions with different theoretical bases to coexist in the same party. But he refuses to draw a definitive line which party members would not be permitted to cross. It is clear that there must be both a minimum political condition for membership in the workers’ party, and a structure which is able to ensure the application of the party’s revolutionary programme in action. 

Ideological conditions—requiring that members agree with a set of theoretical tenets, such as socialism in one country, permanent revolution, protracted people’s war, or what have you—are obviously not the answer. These only serve to perpetuate the preponderance of leftist sects, which have proven themselves incapable of transforming into a mass workers’ party. 

Perhaps the answer lies neither in a broad party, nor in the “party of a new type” advocated by the Comintern and inherited by the sects, but in another part of Bolshevik history: the October Revolution itself. 

Contrary to popular belief, the October Revolution was not an insurrection by one party against all the rest; rather, it was a battle between the soviets and the Provisional Government for absolute authority (vlast, normally translated as “power”), in which the soviets won—thanks to the efforts of not only the Bolsheviks, but also the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Even those socialists who opposed the transfer of “all power to the soviets” often continued to work within the soviet state institutions, playing an active part in legislative work and frequently debating government policy in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, or VTsIK. The government itself—the Council of People’s Commissars, or Sovnarkom—was, from December to March, a multi-party coalition, consisting of both Bolsheviks and Left SRs. But why did the Bolsheviks include the Left SRs and not the other socialist parties? What distinguished these socialists from the rest? 

Banners: “Power to the Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Soviets”; “Down with the Minister Capitalists”.

Lars Lih explains this in terms of “agreementism” versus “anti-agreementism”; the “agreementists” (that is, the “moderate socialists”) favored an alliance between “revolutionary democracy” (that is, the workers and peasants) and the bourgeoisie, whereas the “anti-agreementists” believed that the programme of the democratic revolution could be carried out only by revolutionary democracy, untethered from the burden of the bourgeoisie.45 This was very clearly explained before the revolution by Stalin: 

“The Party declares that the only possible way of securing these [democratic] demands is to break with the capitalists, completely liquidate the bourgeois counter-revolution, and transfer power in the country to the revolutionary workers, peasants, and soldiers.”46

The fundamental message here is that in order to complete the revolution, the workers and peasants had to overthrow the Provisional Government and the constitutional order it had constructed and then replace it with their own organs of governance. The moderate socialists had betrayed the revolution, even as they claimed to defend it, because they refused to break with the bourgeois parties and declare a soviet government. The priority was not a Bolshevik government, but a soviet one, which would refuse all compromise with the bourgeoisie. 

The Left SRs formulated this idea as the “dictatorship of the democracy”47, a more succinct appellation for the old Bolshevik formula of the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”. The workers and peasants alone—revolutionary democracy—would exercise power, against the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The Left SRs actively sought to bring all socialist parties into the coalition on the basis of soviet power, and the Bolsheviks were not necessarily opposed to this goal, either (although they were not overly concerned with courting the moderate socialist parties). The debates in the VTsIK are illustrative of this: 

“Kamkov, for the Left SRs: From the start the Left SRs have taken the view that the best way out of our predicament would be to form a homogenous revolutionary democratic government…. We hold to our view that the soviets are the pivot around which revolutionary democracy can unite…. If no agreement [with the moderate socialists] is reached, or if the government consists exclusively of internationalists, it will be unable to surmount the enormous difficulties facing the revolution. 

“Volodarsky, for the Bolsheviks: There is scarcely anyone present here who does not want an agreement. But we cannot conclude one at any price. We cannot forget that we are obliged to defend the interests of the working class, the army, and the peasantry…. I move the following resolution: 

“Considering an agreement among the socialist parties desirable, the [VTsIK] declares that such an agreement can be achieved only on the following terms: 

“… 3. Recognition of the Second All-Russian Congress [of Soviets] as the sole source of authority.”48

The points of contention between the Left SR and Bolshevik positions are relatively minor; their unifying point is the primacy of the soviets, as anti-agreementist organs, which represent the workers and peasants while excluding the bourgeoisie. Their unifying point is a common revolutionary strategy of overthrowing bourgeois constitutionalism in favor of a new constitutional order, one resting on the authority of the armed masses. 

Their unifying point is, in short, constitutional disloyalty. The moderate socialists’ insistence on compromise with the bourgeoisie represents a commitment, on the other hand, to playing by the rules of the bourgeois constitutional order. It is not sufficient to declare oneself a partisan of the revolution (as did many of the moderate socialists); what is necessary, for the most basic kind of unity, is a refusal to abide by the constitution. 

This essential point is what drove all the coalition talks. One Left SR even proclaimed that “the government should base [its policy] on the Second Congress of Soviets. All parties that do not agree to this we consider as belonging to the counter-revolutionary camp.”49 Any party which advocated collaboration with the bourgeois parties, regardless of its stated commitment to socialism and revolution, was a liability. Lenin hinted at this in 1915, in a more raw form: 

“The proletariat’s unity is its greatest weapon in the struggle for the socialist revolution. From this indisputable truth it follows just as indisputably that, when a proletarian party is joined by a considerable number of petty-bourgeois elements capable of hampering the struggle for the socialist revolution, unity with such elements is harmful and perilous to the cause of the proletariat.”50

So we must return to the issue of party unity. Although the Bolsheviks were not looking to unify with the Left SRs, the fundamental principle which drove the coalition talks remains relevant. Programmatic unity, for communists, does not mean a shared commitment to certain theoretical tenets, but rather a shared commitment to constitutional disloyalty. Only on this basis can a common programme be constructed. 

The other condition, then, is structural: multiple factions (each committed to constitutional disloyalty) must be able to coexist in the same party while remaining united in action. This requires both democracy (so that each faction can be represented in proportion to its support among the membership, and each will accept the legitimacy of the central party organs’ decisions), and centralism (so that the central party organs’ decisions will be binding in fact on the actions pursued by local party organizations and by the party’s representatives in parliament). Without democracy, the party will inevitably fracture, as factions chafe under a leadership they may view as illegitimate; without centralism, the party will inevitably crumble, as unity in action breaks down. This does not mean the type of “democratic centralism” (perhaps more properly termed bureaucratic centralism) imposed by the Comintern’s “party of a new type”, which developed under the pressures of civil war and general societal breakdown in Russia. This type of centralism was hardly democratic at all, and while it may be defensible in the circumstances that the Bolshevik party found itself in, it can hardly serve as the basis for a mass workers’ party which has yet to take power—never mind a pre-party formation, which has yet to win a mass base for itself. 

Programmatic unity is not an appeal for unity around theoretical tenets, nor is it an appeal for a broad left party. Both of these extremes have proven to be dead ends and it is time that we leave them behind. Communist programmatic unity means unity around a shared strategy for taking power and initiating the socialist transition, which means a shared commitment to constitutional disloyalty and pursuing multiple tactics simultaneously, all directed towards the common aim. This requires both intellectual and political pluralism and democratic centralism, which means allowing multiple factions to coexist within a single party, but acting only on the democratic decisions of the majority. In a healthy mass workers’ party, it is improbable that any one faction could hold a majority on its own, and all factions would presumably be represented in permanent party organs in proportion to their support among the membership. 

In today’s context, where no such parties exist, the existing left should seek common programmatic points with each other, and unite their efforts on that basis. Adherence to a theoretical framework or opinions on the class character of various countries are not programmatic points, although they may inform certain tactics or slogans. These things, however, are things that can and should be debated, and actionable slogans should be decided through democratic deliberation, without fracturing the movement. 

The starting point is not bureaucratic wrangling between sect leaderships or spontaneous mass revolts that will bypass the existing left, but rather unity in action among the left and comradely debate between communists. This is what the Communist International termed the “united front”. This does not mean glossing over theoretical, strategic, or tactical differences but rather, 

“Communists should accept the discipline required for action, they must not under any conditions relinquish the right and the capacity to express… their opinion regarding the policies of all working class organisations without exception. This capacity must not be surrendered under any circumstances. While supporting the slogan of the greatest possible unity of all workers’ organisations in every practical action against the united capitalists, the Communists must not abstain from putting forward their views…”51

Through such united fronts for action—through common fights for shared aims—similar currents will be drawn together, and the memberships of various socialist and workers’ organizations will begin to move towards organizational unity. They will come to understand which issues are really important in the concrete, ongoing struggle against the capitalist onslaught, and which issues can be put to the side in day-to-day organizing. They will begin to develop a common programme, not only through theoretical debates (although these certainly hold an important place in party formation), but through mass, democratic deliberation and the practical work of organizing the working class side by side. 

In short, common action around common demands will inevitably lead to a common programme. This consolidation is necessary if we wish to form a mass workers’ party. This does not mean that everyone we work with in day-to-day struggles must be a constitutional disloyalist, or that all constitutional disloyalists will choose to work alongside us; but with a true communist consolidation, both the right-opportunists and the ultraleft sectarians will be swept aside, into the dustbin of history. So let’s seek our common programme, a programme of constitutional disloyalty. The revolutionary party of proletarian unity will march forth, and its programme will bring the proletariat to power and towards communism. 

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Freedom in Death: Liberalism and the Apocalypse

Medway Baker calls for uncompromising faith in the cause of communism in the face of a capitalist civilization that is destroying humanity. 

Hurricanes ravage shores and flatten communities. Floods sweep away people and submerge houses. Plagues decimate families and destroy solidarity. Famines devour the young and the old. The sun scorches the earth, the creatures of the land and the sea are driven into extinction, children waste away, the elderly are cooped up like livestock to wait for the end. This is the world that the liberal order has wrought. 

Liberalism will lead us all to death. But at least we’ll be free. 

We are living in the end times. The opportunity for compromise and reform is long over. All that’s left to us is to struggle for a new world, for the kingdom of heaven on earth. Without the struggle for the final aim, we may as well consign ourselves to hell. So let us struggle.

The ruling class will be judged for their sins

Life versus Liberalism

The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood;

And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed.

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;

And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.1

The COVID-19 crisis is a tragic, but highly visible example of the crisis of liberalism. While “illiberal” countries such as China, Vietnam, and Egypt have managed to contain the virus and take care of their infected in a humane manner, the so-called “free” liberal democracies were shamefully slow to react. The United States epitomises the liberal approach to the crisis: downplaying the virus, failing to contain the spread until it’s too late, refusing to care for the sick, all in the name of keeping the economy running, until panic seized the population and it became necessary for the state to step in and salvage the situation. This approach was always unsustainable, but the short-sighted liberal bourgeoisie is able to see only one thing: immediate profits. 

When it was already too late, Donald Trump banned travel between the US and Europe, deepening the economic crisis while failing to effectively address the problem of the virus’s spread within the US. The working people of America have been left for too long with no answers, no tests, and no treatment. Hundreds of thousands are sick, many without even knowing it, and the virus is being transmitted to thousands more day by day. Thousands are already dying, and many more will continue to die. And liberal capitalism will do nothing to stop it, except what’s necessary to protect profits. 

The result, paradoxically, is an increasingly authoritarian response, which nevertheless fails to establish limits on individuals’ activities in such a way as to prevent the spread of the virus. Nationalist, militarist rhetoric and the expansion of the police state will continue to rise alongside liberal individualism. All state action is undertaken in the name of defending profit. Protecting the people is not only secondary—it is only a concern insofar as it’s required to keep the economy running. This is the essence of liberalism: freedom for the ruling class, oppression and death for the people. 

Individual freedoms are paramount! But not the freedom of humane care, the freedom to self-quarantine without fear of penury, the freedom of staying alive. We will be free in death—we may not survive, but at least commerce won’t have been restricted. At least we’ll still have the freedom to go out into public, to get infected and infect others; bosses retain the freedom to fire workers for staying home, landlords the freedom to evict tenants who can’t pay their rent. This is the meaning of freedom under liberalism. Liberal freedom is death. 

The types of crazed individualistic responses we’ve seen, with people buying truckloads of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, are symptomatic of the hegemonic liberal consciousness. It’s everyone for themself in this world: hoarding has spiked, leaving the poor and the vulnerable with nothing; people are buying up hand sanitizer in order to resell it for quadruple the price. Young, healthy people seem not to care about getting the virus, because their risk of death is so low; they don’t care that they might infect the old or the sick, that they might bring about another human’s death. Liberalism is alienation. It is the veneration of the self above all, and the destruction of a harmonious society which cares for its members. In the words of the arch-liberal Margaret Thatcher: 

“There is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business…”2

Liberal individualism at work

The essence of liberal freedom is not democracy, not the rule of the people, but the freedom of the slaveholders, the landlords, the financiers.3 Personal liberty, according to the logic of the market, requires dominance over others. The ultimate freedom-through-dominance is, of course, condemning others to death in the name of your personal wellbeing, in the name of your own enjoyment and profits. Whether this is manifested in hoarding and thus preventing others from accessing the goods they need; or in choosing not to self-isolate during a pandemic and thus infecting the vulnerable; or in waging imperialist war in pursuit of profit; or in destroying the biosphere in the name of capitalist accumulation—the result is the same: murder in the name of personal liberty. 

The climate crisis is another, though less obviously pressing, example of liberalism’s death drive. Even as they proclaim a moral commitment to sustainability and protecting the environment, liberal leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, continue to buttress fossil fuel industries, even going so far as to exercise military force to protect these destructive extractive projects. Liberalism’s moral commitments matter for nothing if it continues to drag us all into the hell of climate apocalypse, in the name of freedom and compromise. Down with liberal freedom! Down with compromise! 

Only the people can save the people! The people united and aware will crush the virus!

Death versus Communism

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.

And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.4

The people will judge the wicked. The righteous, the labourers, those who built the world and who will save it from destruction, will destroy our enemies and cast them into the eternal flames. This is the only way to preserve life. We have seen that liberalism—capitalist freedoms and the principle of compromise—will lead us all into the apocalypse. The world will be born anew, but only after a long, hard struggle. We must go to war. War against liberalism, war against compromise, war against death. 

“Revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies,” said Robespierre, that great fighter for the people. “Revolutionary government owes good citizens full national protection; to enemies of the people it owes nothing but death.”5 In order to secure life and liberty for the people, we must bring death to our enemies, who would rather the rule of death than the rule of the people. The time for compromise is long over: as Bukharin said in 1917, on the battle for Moscow in October, 

“Those who call for a compromise are like Metropolitan Platon in Moscow, who came to the soviet and with tears in his eyes implored us to stop the bloodshed. We think firm measures are necessary…. This is the epoch of dictatorship and we shall sweep away with an iron broom everything that deserves to be swept away.”6  

In order to win the war against the apocalypse, we must refuse all half-measures, all compromises, all popular fronts with liberals and “progressives”. These people are not prepared to take the necessary steps to protect life and liberty. At best they are unreliable allies who will desert at the first sign of trouble; at worst, they are our deadly enemies. They will be judged for their betrayal, and they will be destroyed. “Our problem,” as Trotsky elucidated in 1920, “is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the destruction of human life…. The enemy must be made harmless, and in wartime this means that he must be destroyed.”7

Are we not at war for our very survival as a species? Even the bourgeois politicians and press no longer shy away from comparing the COVID-19 crisis to war. But we communists take this principle even further: we are not only at war against the virus, we are at war against the destruction of our planet, against the suicide of our species—against death itself! 

The revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, while in mourning following Lenin’s death, wrote that “‘Lenin’ and ‘Death’—are foes. / ‘Lenin’ and ‘Life’—comrades.”8 This is not mere poetic flourish, but rather distils the essence of the communist mission. Similarly, the architect Konstantin Melnikov, who designed Lenin’s sarcophagus, proclaimed that “the revolutionary Russian people… possess the power of resurrection and will exercise it by endowing their leader with immortality.”9 

Of course we don’t propose that communism will bring about literal, personal immortality. But it will defeat death in a far more profound, truly liberatory fashion: “In communism,” said the Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga, 

“the identity of the individual and his fate with their species is re-won, after destroying within it all the limits of family, race, and nation. This victory puts an end to all fear of personal death and with it every cult of the living and the dead, society being organised for the first time around well-being and joy and the reduction of sorrow, suffering, and sacrifice to a rational minimum”. 

He admired ancient civilizations such as the Inca, who, he claimed, 

“recognised the flow of life in that same energy which the Sun radiates on the planet and which flows through the arteries of a living man, and which becomes unity and love in the whole species, which, until it falls into the superstition of an individual soul with its sanctimonious balance sheet of give and take, the superstructure of monetary venality, does not fear death and knows personal death as nothing other than a hymn of joy and a fecund contribution to the life of humanity.”10

The freedom of communism is the joy of contributing to something greater than oneself, to a greater human cause, to life as a whole. The freedom of liberalism is the murder of humanity in the name of personal gain. Under the guise of upholding individual liberty, capital will sacrifice countless individuals on the altar of profit. Our liberals are all too happy to let millions die if it means keeping the market afloat—indeed, they not only leave the poor to the mercy of the virus and the catastrophic effects of climate change, they actively destroy other nations in order to maintain their position in the global hierarchy! 

Trotsky sums up this predicament succinctly: “To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”11

Placing the needs of the collective over those of the individual, so that each individual can truly be free: this is the meaning of communism. This can only be accomplished with democratic central planning. Even undemocratic planned systems are more capable of mitigating the crisis than the chaos of liberalism. Imagine what could be possible with the full capacities of humanity unleashed, through the power of the Plan, through the harmonious dialectic between the center and the outer nodes, all directed towards the needs of the Social Body. 

Communism means life. Communism means immanentizing the eschaton. Communism means the conquest of chaos, the defeat of entropy, the victory of order and freedom. 

Hope and Revolution

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.

For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope,

Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?12

Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary and first People’s Commissar for Education, wrote that “scientific socialism is the most religious of all religions, and the true Social Democrat is the most deeply religious of all human beings.”13 Although this seems to resemble a common liberal accusation against Marxism—that it is a dogmatic, scriptural, inflexible ideology of dangerous zealots—Lunacharsky, to borrow a turn of phrase, turned this notion on its head. Yes, he says, Marxism is a religion; but what is the essence of religion? Is it dogmatism, adherence to scripture, inflexibility? No! he says. Then, is it belief in the supernatural, blind adherence to an unprovable notion? No! By religion, Lunacharsky means “rather the emotive, collective, utopian, and very human elements of religion.”14 

For Lunacharsky, then, religion is the fundamental belief in something greater than oneself, which drives one to participate in a greater cause. This was a feeling shared by virtually all revolutionaries, although Lenin was highly critical of Lunacharsky’s analysis. For instance, Trotsky proclaimed in 1901: 

“Dum spiro spero! [As long as I breathe, I hope!] … As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy, and happiness!”15 

Nearly four decades later, even while proclaiming his staunch atheism, he would reiterate, “I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion.”16 

What is this if not that same enthusiasm identified by Lunacharsky, when he said that “religion is enthusiasm and ‘without enthusiasm it is not given to man to create anything great’”17? Marxism is the religion of the oppressed, the only truly revolutionary religion remaining. It is the religion of collective action for the construction of a new, truly liberated society. “The personal understanding of the value of life only in connection with a grand sweep of collective life—that is the religious feeling of Marx.”18 

By contrast, Lunacharsky attributed scripturalism and doctrinal inflexibility to Plekhanov, and by extension to Menshevism. He saw many of the problems of the Bolsheviks, too, as deriving from Plekhanovism.19 This mechanistic attitude was a distortion of Marxism which ignored the true spirit of the communist mission. 

For Lunacharsky, it is not cold, hard science which motivates communists to pursue the cause. Yes, a scientific understanding of the world, of class, of political economy, of revolution and all the rest is essential to fulfilling the mission which we have assigned ourselves. But it is not the facts which drive us to devote our lives to the cause; it is a spiritual commitment, to humanity and to life as a whole. Communists are motivated by a “deeply emotional impulse of the soul.”20 As Roland Boer summarises, “the key to Marxism [for Lunacharsky] was… a synthesis of science and irrepressible enthusiasm.”21

Much like a religious zealot (and in the same spirit as Trotsky), Lunacharsky impresses upon us the inevitability of struggle, of sacrifice, of suffering on the road to liberation; but he refuses to let this stop him, because he knows that at the end of the road awaits the kingdom of God. “Things are hard for us now,” he admits, “we have to go up to the neck in blood and filth, but after our Revolution, as after every great revolution, a wave of creative power will come a new, beautiful, fragrant art will blossom.”22 

It is this promise that drives us, even though we know that we may not live to see it ourselves. Communists’ devotion is to humanity, not our own persons; our god is the humanity which may yet exist, but which cannot exist under the oppressive condition of class society. This is the essence of his theory of “God-building”. Humanity is not yet divine; it is the future, liberated humanity which we worship, and our worship consists precisely in bringing about this dream of a future society, in taking hold of our own destiny as a species. In Lunacharsky’s own words: 

“Our ideal is the image of man, of man like a god, in relation to whom we are all raw material only, merely ingots waiting to be given shape, living ingots that bear their own ideal within themselves.”23

Communists are defined by our faith in a dream. Our dream is life, liberated from the shackles imposed on it by nature. Our mission is to materialize this dream, and this can only be accomplished through the struggle against the conditions which shackle us. Our mission is war, war waged in the name of peace, freedom, harmony, life—“holy war”, as Trotsky described it.24 It is our faith which allows us to get up every morning, despite the hardships we face, and to struggle for our dream. Without our dream, we have nothing to accomplish except cold, dry analysis. Without our faith, we have no means by which to make our dream come true.

Conclusion

The liberals have proven themselves incapable of solving the crises that face us today, from climate change to COVID-19. On the contrary, they more often than not exacerbate the crises, due to the anarchic nature of the market and the antisocial profit drive to which they are enslaved. The only way out is to mobilize for war, and the only way to accomplish this is by breaking with the liberals, those suicidal maniacs who would sooner drive us into extinction than cut into their profits. Only the workers, impelled by their faith in the communist future, can deliver humanity from the death spiral to which the liberals have condemned us. 

Neither can the illiberal right deliver us from our impending extinction. While they may succeed in subordinating the profit drive to the needs of “the nation” or “the family”, they cannot resolve the fundamental crisis which is leading us to the slaughter. That would require overcoming capital entirely, and this is not something that they are willing to do. In our fight against liberalism, we must steadfastly refuse to cede ground to the right. Given the chance, they would destroy us without a second thought. We must show them the same treatment.25  

What is necessary to deal with the crisis is a fully international response. The peoples of the world must unite in action, and this is not a step that the bourgeoisie is able to take. They are impelled by the logic of capital to pursue national, imperial interests. We must break with the bourgeoisie to build international solidarity, and respond as a species to our impending doom. 

Liberalism offers us freedom in death. The right offers us bondage in life. Communism offers us salvation and godhood. 

Let us unite, workers, across the world! Let us mobilize for war! Let us go to battle against the virus, against the climate crisis, against the anarchy of the market! Let us decapitate capital, defeat decay, and destroy death! 

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The End of the End of History: COVID-19 and 21st Century Fascism

Debs Bruno and Medway Baker lay out the conditions of the current crisis, the political potentials it opens up, and the need for a socialist program to pave a path forward. 

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” —Milton Friedman

As COVID-19 rages through the shell of a global civilization systematically ravaged by five decades of catabolic capitalism, the facades of processual stability are crumbling and revealing, in their place, a crossroads for human society. The illusion of stability and robustness projected upon the delicate systems of production, distribution, exchange, and social reproduction has long been predicted to evaporate. Yet the prophets of this revelation have long been marginal– considered doomsday prophesiers and malingering malcontents besotted by their own unpopular utopian aspirations. Now, in the wake of a challenge to those processes’ perpetuation – a challenge unprecedented in the annals of fully-developed, advanced global capitalism – such grim prognostications are being rewoven, this time into the weft of history. 

The tasks of socialists, spectating from within the structure as it has been stripped down to the girding beams and beyond, are to clear-headedly analyze the conjuncture at which we find ourselves, identify the opportunities and dangers that conjuncture creates, and to organize at the weak points which yield the greatest leverage for reusing the rubble that results. The first part of this charge promises us a head-spinning voyage. Almost nobody alive has experienced a societal crisis of this scale, and absolutely nobody alive has experienced a menace of this nature. Furthermore, the suite of contingencies within which this havoc has arisen and within which it is doing its work have never before existed. 

The imperial core has, in the course of realizing its ineluctable tendencies, hollowed itself of the substance of its self-perpetuation. The production networks have exogenized themselves, expanding for their continued competitiveness beyond the outer membrane of the core itself and relocating in territories still fertile for exploitation. On the foundation of world destruction following the Second World War, capital has created a global network of energy and resource flows, sending the production of value and the extraction of resources to postcolonial and economically colonized nations in the Global South and the periphery broadly. In the core Western nations, coronated by the whorls of history as the center of this global web, the increasingly costly machinery of capital production has been either left to rot or cannibalized in favor of an ethereal finance economy. The tools of leverage and speculation are used to direct the operation of the global system as a whole while little of substance is produced in the formerly unrivaled center of commodity production. This, however, creates a contradiction. Absent the productive and social apparatus which put the core in this privileged position, the nerve center of global capital has stripped its muscle and hollowed the bone. The aberrant wealth and power resulting from the annihilation of the two imperialist wars of the 20th century have evaporated, and a crisis of reproduction– ecological, political, cultural, and economic– has matured. 

The foundering of profitability, meanwhile, has required the abortion of such regulatory mechanisms as had previously placed a limit on self-destruction, leaving the interior composition of the capitalist core bound, sedated, and ripe for predation. The exportation of ecocide, genocide, and the iron-heeled boot have become impossible; there are no boundaries in interpenetrated systems, and the segmentation once feasible has given way to self-reinforcing, malign cycles of crisis in infrastructure, geopolitics, social degradation, and ecological death.

The political systems of the core’s constituent nation-states have responded accordingly, as the coalition of interested groups inherited from the Fordist Bretton-Woods system has steadily seen its legitimacy and ability to navigate exigencies eroded. In place of the ironclad sovereignty this coalition once enjoyed, chasms have yawned– and nature abhors a vacuum. Into this void have rushed various strains of reaction, most retrograde, whether from the right or the left. In a way, the current presidential contest in the United States represents a popularity contest between various past eras to which to return: Trump wants a return to the post-historical jouissance (or doldrum-plagued interregnum, depending on whom you ask) of a mythical 1990s; Sanders to the New Deal-inflected, postwar imperial sugar-high that reigned during the 1950s and 60s class compromise; Biden to the last-ditch resuscitation of the Third Way characteristic of the late 2000s; and Marianne Williamson to the Zoroastrian golden age of 1500BCE. None of these alternatives are viable, as the preconditions for their existence no longer exist. But some of them represent the extremely powerful but heretofore latent rejection of the absurdly non-functional status quo, while the rest do not.

Many of us had hoped to have at least the ten remaining years promised us to avert certain climate catastrophe as a political deadline, and some had projected relative stability further into the future. Socialists within or adjacent to the Sanders campaign and its attendant parapolitical formations had hoped that a demonstration of its inability to implement its program would further the radicalization and cohesion of a left mass politics. This was a form of impossibilism, it has been argued, but one which could conceivably have worked along the lines it promised. The handlers of the neoliberal consensus had hoped that an exposition of the (clutch pearls now) utter incivility of the perfunctory right-populism of the Trump orbit would enable them to slowly reorient the official political sphere back into carefully-managed, popularly unaccountable, and technocratic halcyon typified by the Obama years.  Neither of these alternatives are any longer possible, and the mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic points to the deeper systemic reason why, illuminating with it our overdetermined spiral into the event horizon of total catastrophe.

The structural impossibility of an effective response to the economic crash of 2007-8 made it inevitable that a more deeply impactful repetition of that crisis would manifest within the normal course of the capitalist business cycle. The overextension and simultaneous neutralization of fiscal and monetary measures introduced to reinflate doomed financial mechanisms and speculation has additionally made certain that the next capital-elimination event would be largely intractable to the top-down treatments required to sustain neoliberal suspension of profit-rate decline. In sum, we knew that another, more system-shattering crisis was coming and that it was coming soon. We could not know what event would precipitate it nor even foggily apprehend what the result would be. It is very possible that we now know the first. What we must do now is to address the second.

Intimations as to the sorts of social and political reactions to this crisis are beginning to coalesce. In recent days, the social-democratic proposal for the maintenance of the slowly disintegrating capitalist system having been roundly rejected, two main strains of response have surfaced. The first of these is a cataclysmic abdication of the concept of governance and even of society as an organ. This is best embodied in the United Kingdom’s policy of pursuing what is misnamed “herd immunity”. Actual herd immunity is not the purpose or result of this strategy. Instead, what it proposes is inaction. While the United States has de facto gone the same route due to incompetence and the total absence of social infrastructure, Boris Johnson has affirmatively asserted that the UK’s response will be to not respond. This will, as everybody knows, result in the expiration of approximately 3% of British people and the utter disintegration of the British economy, but, in Johnson’s theory, will then produce returned stability after everyone who could die from this virus has done so. Perhaps he views the lives lost along the way as more extirpation than expiration.

The Johnson approach is consonant with that of the United States and, oddly, Sweden. The key difference is that, while the central political figures in the US are surely indifferent to the eventuality spelled out above, they are at least feigning interest in taking tepid steps toward mitigating the catastrophic effects of that approach. Proposals from such figures include the following: from Trump, lying about having already accomplished the initial stages of a pandemic response; from Joe Biden, providing limited financial assistance to healthcare providers and public health organizations for the duration of the first wave of infections, thereby allowing otherwise helpless populations to access treatment; from Bernie Sanders, the same universal healthcare proposal he has advocated for decades; and from Nancy Pelosi, et al., provision of two weeks’ paid sick leave for about 20% of American workers. This constitutes a less-than-total abdication of governmental responsibility– with just enough prevarication to ensure that levels of hatred for the US stay steady but do not increase. 

More interestingly, however, is the second strain of political response to the many-sided crisis precipitating around COVID-19. This strain is one that has been developing potentiality for many years, but which has, until very recently, remained embryonic and subterranean. Slavoj Zizek recently assessed the political situation in the United States as increasingly four-faceted. His categories fell roughly along the lines of neoliberal-establishment, neo-conservative establishment, right-populist, and left-populist. There are valid objections to this framing, but in the interest of this analysis, we can retain the idea that, despite appearances, the political polarity is between neoliberal-neoconservatism, straining mightily to maintain its stranglehold on the formal-political, and rupture-seeking populisms on the left and the right. Zizek’s analysis suffers from diffraction: there are not four faces, but two. There exists a backward-looking political contingent, comprising the cores of both major parties. And there is a rapidly-condensing sentiment which is formulating from the far right a politics which, in the United States, at least, is entirely new. If we accept the notion that politics is only politics in the millions, there is no forward-looking left. 

The left-ruptural cohort has yet to promulgate a political vision which supersedes what it has already tried: a politics it has never stopped fighting to implement in the course of US labor history. The right-ruptural faction, on the other hand, appears to have formulated something novel and unspeakably dangerous. The mere appearance of an articulation seeking an alternative rather than a facially-improved continuation of the present arrangements is revolutionary in the post-neoliberal moment. And, as in all revolutionary epochs, the possibility for seizing the vlast – for challenging the sovereignty of the present regime and seizing it for one’s own political project – flows to the right as well as to the left. It is evident that the political center has almost fully fallen away and that a new center of gravity which will frame a new political polarity is inevitably on its way. The neoliberal hell-halcyon is as good as dead. The question that remains to us is what new social conjuncture will follow it. 

The gravest threat, therefore, is neither (as most readers will agree) Donald Trump or “Trumpism”, as the liberals bray, nor the Democratic Party inertia-machines. Nor is it mass catatonia, although that threat and its ecological implications rank higher than either of the two former monstrosities. Instead, the true nightmare scenario against which we must be vigilant and organized is presented by what we have called the “Carlson Effect”. Sensing, as anyone with cortical function probably has, that the winds are shifting, elements of the American right (parallel to various European right parties and populations) have at least rhetorically embraced a vigorous right-populism tending, even, to social-fascism. At the time of writing, there have been at least three calls from prominent figures in or adjacent to the Republican Party for social provision to those deemed to be “real Americans”. Mitt Romney, the billionaire Mormon, ex-presidential candidate, and longtime denizen of the lounges of Republican Party officialdom, last week called for a $1,000 payment to offset the financial ruin in store for half of US workers in wake of the indefinite suspension of their employment. Crypto-fascist Senator Tom Cotton today decried the ersatz and indirect system of tax credits used for social provision, calling instead for a similar UBI-esque policy. 

While, at first glance, these programs appear to be much-needed and overdue relief for millions of Americans barely clinging to the economic margins, they are very likely the opening shots in a coming salvo of right-populist political sentiment. A salvo which will certainly vouchsafe the irrelevancy of any left movement – and maybe even violently suppress such a movement – for generations. Of course, we would never take a position counter to the material alleviation of the suffering of the working class over insignificant political quibbles regarding who is providing that relief. The objection, however, that we should raise to this politics is not insignificant quibbling. 

Any program of social provision implemented by the virulently nativist, white supremacist US ruling class or their political lickspittles will contain within it exclusionary mechanisms that will demarcate the populations they wish to recruit to their politics. Communities most affected by the grindstone of capitalist destruction will inevitably fall shy of program requirements. They may lack sufficient citizenship status or be in debt to the Internal Revenue Service. They may have criminal records or (god forbid!) low credit scores. As the Democratic Party – never a champion of the working class despite over a century of too-clever-by-half attempts to subvert it from within – has withdrawn its constituency to the extent that it now solely serves the whims and aesthetics of a shrinking, cosseted coastal elite, the space for any collectivism has gone unfilled. This will not persist as the existing pressures intensify and new ones arise. Reform movements led or won by social-democrats do not carry us further from revolution and the emancipatory project. Reform movements helmed by fascists certainly do.

The goals of any politics which falls under the scattershot term “fascist” are bounded by the class nature of their constituent population segments. Fascism, in its minimum identifying features, is a socio-political movement that hijacks an existing mass-political framework or creates an ersatz mass-political appeal in service of the perpetuation of the current class relations. Fascism arises in times of capitalist crisis; they are socio-political responses to the possibility of revolutionary upheaval. They seek to curtail this possibility by forging unitary social institutions, crushing any deviant or dissenting factors, and accommodating the reintensified cannibalization of the social fabric and its extrinsic environment, both ecological and geopolitical. 

The insufficiency and brutality of the US sociopolitical system was enough to spark in its populace anger, despair, non-participation, and social disease. Its collapse will generate a deconstruction of the former system’s constituent parts and their reassemblage into something new, which, as in all ruptural processes, will come into existence as a chimera of those parts and will gradually metamorphose into something entirely new. In a society based fundamentally on settler genocide, racialized caste relations up to and including race-based slavery, aggressively-pursued imperialism, and thoroughly insinuated anti-collectivism, that recombination is very likely to yield an atrociously destructive lusus nature.1

A peculiar manifestation of this kind of settler right-wing populism took shape in Western Canada during the Great Depression. This movement called itself “Social Credit”, after the economic theories of British engineer CH Douglas, although it rapidly took on a life of its own, separate from Douglas’s original formulations. Informally led by the deeply religious educator and radio show host William Aberhart, the movement rapidly acquired a grassroots base among the impoverished farmers of Alberta during the early 1930s, and swept Aberhart to electoral victory in 1935, heralding a virtual one-party rule in the province for the following 36 years. 

Although Douglas’s economic theories are not particularly relevant for our purposes, it is useful to elucidate his philosophy, particularly his conception of “cultural heritage”, which, he said, entitled citizens to dividends based on their participation in society—essentially, an early form of universal basic income. In his own words: 

“In place of the relation of the individual to the nation being that of a taxpayer it is easily seen to be that of a shareholder. Instead of paying for the doubtful privilege of being entitled to a particular brand of passport, its possession entitles him to draw a dividend, certain, and probably increasing, from the past and present efforts of the community [i.e., nation] of which he is a member…. Not being dependent upon a wage or salary for subsistence, he is under no necessity to suppress his individuality”.2

Douglas himself never intended to inspire a populist movement; he rather wished simply to influence economic policy through dialogue with the powers that be.3 It was Aberhart who brought social credit to the masses. Aberhart was quite literally a rabble-rousing preacher, spreading the word of God and social credit, denouncing the establishment politicians and finance capitalists, and promising his constituents a miraculous cure to the Depression. His radio audience ballooned as the economic crisis deepened, and his conviction inspired thousands to believe in him and his cause. 

The specific financial measures he proposed were not so important as the message he propounded: There is no reason for our poverty! The bankers are robbing us! We, the people who work this land, must take what is rightfully ours! Douglas himself noted that 

“it would not be possible to claim that at any time the technical basis of Social Credit propaganda was understood by [Aberhart], and, in fact, his own writings upon the subject are defective both in theory and in practicability…. [However,] it was at no time Mr. Aberhart’s economics which brought him to power, but rather his vivid presentation of the general lunacy responsible for the grinding poverty so common in a Province of abounding riches, superimposed upon his peculiar theological reputation.”4

Aberhart, in line with Douglas’s own theories, proposed that the state apparatus was in the hands of bankers who cared only about their own profits, not the common people. Although he attempted to convince the political establishment in Alberta of social credit policies, he was rebuffed, so he went to the people. Through his radio show, he tapped into the alienation of the impoverished workers and farmers of Alberta, their anger at the banks which drove them into eternal debt, their despair at the neverending Depression. He denounced, too, the mainstream media, the newspapers, for their failure to publish “the truth about the financial racketeers.”5 He framed himself as a man of the people, bringing the truth to the masses which the elites concealed from them. This scenario will be familiar to many of us today, in the age of television talk show hosts who seem to be displacing serious journalism in the popular consciousness. 

Aberhart insisted that social credit would never involve confiscations of property, and that “production for use does not necessitate the public ownership of the instruments of production.”6 The explicit aim of social credit was an agreement between social classes, in which all citizens (i.e. members of the national community) would be taken care of. Aberhart explicitly counterposed class struggle to the “brotherhood of man”.7 “If we do not change the basis of the present system,” he exclaimed, “we may see revolution and bloodshed.”8 It was through “the common people stick[ing] together” that class warfare and violent revolution would be averted. 9

Indeed, while the labor movement was on the rise in other parts of the country, and the social-democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, now the NDP) was making gains in the neighboring province of Saskatchewan, the left was utterly crushed in Alberta, which remains a right-wing stronghold to this day despite the death of the Social Credit Party. The victory of right-wing populism in Alberta destroyed the capacity of labor activists and socialists to have any success for generations. In uniting the workers and petty bourgeoisie against the banks and the political establishment, social credit simultaneously staved off the threat of a genuine workers’ movement which could pursue its own, independent interests. 

A comprehensive history of Social Credit rule in Alberta is well beyond our scope, but it is useful to highlight one incident which occurred under Aberhart’s Premiership, which involved government officials calling for the “extermination” of political opponents, termed “Bankers’ Toadies”. The leaflet they distributed read: 

“My child, you should NEVER say hard or unkind things about Bankers’ Toadies. God made Bankers’ Toadies, just as He made snakes, slugs, snails and other creepy-crawly, treacherous and poisonous things. NEVER therefore, abuse them—just exterminate them!”10

This incident epitomises the type of threat presented by right-wing populism. While liberalism openly detests the masses and pretends at enlightened nonviolence while enacting the violence of the state, right-wing populists are unafraid to whip up popular sentiment against political opposition. This is the language of pogromists. 

Although Aberhart was committed to realizing his program through constitutional means, the social credit movement did not remain committed to democratic principles. The right-wing thinks nothing of using force to crush dissent. If they are willing to take coercive and even violent measures against the capitalists to enact their program, the measures they are willing to use against workers are a thousand times worse. We must give the populist right the same treatment they would visit on us: we must exterminate them. 

Regardless of what exigencies arise in the coming years’ political landscape, most of which are entirely obscured to us now, we can be certain of the crux of every political question: ecological collapse. Beyond the most obvious horror of this central question, the high-visibility catastrophes which will increase in magnitude and frequency, the tendrils of crisis will reach outward into every level of our social systems. Drought will spark agricultural collapse, which will cause multiple deluges of human migration, often all at once. Severe storms, flooding, weather-pattern changes, and sea-level rise will render major metropolitan areas functionally uninhabitable. The desertification of regions now devoted to large-scale monoculture or husbandry will disrupt critical commodity chains. This will doubtless cause armed conflict within and between nations. 

We have likely all read these and many other dire projections and do not need to systematically enumerate them in order to demonstrate that whatever new mode of social organization coheres from the ashes of the old, it will be structured first and foremost by ecological catastrophe. This means, however, that during the collapse or slow disintegration of this social formation, a revolutionary program of clarity, urgency, and mass appeal never before attainable is possible to pursue. 

Climate change is the skeleton key that unlocks the barred gate between us and the better world we struggle for. Every demand we now pursue in the interest of social justice, proletarian self-activation, and relief of sheer human misery will become a critical factor of our social system which has to be radically transformed in order to mitigate climate collapse. This means that any progressive, affirmative program of socio-ecological collapse constitutes, by the very nature of the adaptations required, a minimum program– a suite of demands which, when implemented, create the dictatorship of the proletariat and bring into the world real democracy for the first time. All other potential courses of action responsive to the general crisis coming down the pike are not only reactive and politically reactionary but will be insufficient to the scale of the calamity they respond to. The disastrous, sublime, terrifying situation we are now faced with lays down the gauntlet: we must either overcome our inhumanity and for the first time realize our collective potential, or consign the project of humanity to ignominy and extinction.

The retooling of society has already begun But we are in the premonitory tremors, so we cannot see around the curve. The present mode of economic relations, production methods, distribution mechanisms, political engagement, and energy production; our understanding of humanity’s position relative to “external nature”; the system of politically adversarial nation-states; those same nation-states’ positions in a rigid world-economic system; the presence of military conflict; social atomization – all of these elements of social existence and countless more will be altered by the metamorphic pressures of the coming total crisis. This inevitability creates two types of potential outcomes: the construction of an emancipatory, livable, fully-realized society; or the fall into a society increasingly composed along the barbaric trend-lines evident today. This epochal moment either breaks left, or it breaks right. 

COVID-19 is not the harbinger of doom many subconsciously await with the sense of one waiting for the hammer blow to fall. It is, however, a signal and a model of the type of crisis we must anticipate and prepare for. The failure of the present could not be better illuminated than it is in the present disintegration. The present is intolerable and the future unthinkable. But to explore and demand the impossible is the task of revolutionaries, and our failure to take on this mantle will ensure our inability to seize the moment when future calamities emerge. To that end, we must formulate a program responsive to the needs of the masses of people, integrate ourselves into those groups most profoundly impacted by the implosion we are living through, and patch them together into a coalition capable of carrying our struggle forward into this brave new reality.  

Responsive to this mandate, the formation of a new minimum program is the first and most urgent task of socialists today– particularly those in the West. We must begin to build a structured movement capable of responding, and even of assuming power the next time a civilizational collapse-level event emerges. And the first step in the way toward doing that is to build a program that addresses the critical needs of the masses of working people. The role of money, debt, stratospheric financial wizardry, foreign policy and international trade, and the structure of employment as a means of social control has never been more material than it is now. The purpose of those systems as a means of the restriction of access to resources has never been illustrated as clearly and starkly as it is right now. It is crystal clear which forms of labor are productive of value and which merely distribute, realize, and circulate value. It is also becoming clear how little of the value produced goes to the producers or to the general social good. 

Banner on display in Baltimore

Critically, at a moment in which the US left is more nationalist than ever, this crisis is the first in an escalating series of crises that can only be remedied by internationalist socialism. The opportunity to promulgate a thoroughly internationalist politics and weave it into the existing left is the crux of this historical moment. Whether we do that will structure the outcome of the general collapse on its heels. Which fork in the path we choose may determine the survival of the species. The crossroads at which we stand must be understood as a unique opportunity to a) expand the class composition of the western socialist left; b) direct its politics in the necessary directions; c) incorporate swathes of working people toward a socialist politics of mutual self-interest; and, d) collectively take over the process of rebuilding (or not) the capital that will be destroyed by this many-sided crisis.

Moreover, this is a social rather than merely economic crisis, meaning it can only be effectively combatted through social solidarity, mutual aid, and democratically-run governmental initiatives. Economic crises often breed individualism, while more general, social crises breed mass politics and social cohesion. This is the first opportunity of this scale in many of our lives thus far, and we cannot let it pass. 

In order to accomplish this essential task, the precondition for a socialist politics in the advanced capitalist core is being increasingly illuminated. This cornerstone is the precipitation of a mass, organized social movement with material social power which forms itself independent of and prior to participation in “official” politics. It cannot be wished into existence by way of electoral campaigns– especially not within the existing bourgeois unipolar political structure– or by trading in liberal-NGO cultural appeals. It must be built through the arduous, lumbering work of on-the-ground organizing. Fortunately for socialists, crises often catalyze the formation of such networks. We must attend to the material needs of our communities, build a package of demands responsive to those needs, and, in a coordinated campaign, target the crumbling mechanisms of maldistribution and social repression, and withhold our participation in them. There is no greater opportunity in recent memory to do so: people will be unable to comply with coercive maldistribution mechanisms such as rents and debt obligations, they will lack income but require the necessities of life, they will require medical care but be systematically denied access to it, and they will be exposed to hazards in the course of their work (should they have any) by indifferent or malicious capitalist corporations. 

The contradictions are sharpening and they are incandescently clear for all who care to see. The socialist left often bandies this jargon about, often to the end of promulgating bad strategy and inadequate theory but in this case the process is actively accelerating and presents a crucial window of opportunity for real organizing toward social rupture. 

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Invasion: A Story of Anti-Colonial Resistance

Medway Baker reviews and contextualizes a short documentary on struggles of the Wet’suwet’en against the modern Canadian state. 

On February 6, the Canadian state’s police force, the RCMP, invaded Wet’suwet’en territories. On February 10, it arrested their Unist’ot’en matriarchs. It is a brutal reminder of the ongoing invasion by settler-colonial forces of the nation’s lands. This comes shortly after the Wet’suwet’en nation invoked their own laws alongside Canadian law to mandate that Coastal GasLink, which is building a pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory against the wishes of the Wet’suwet’en people, leave their lands. Coastal GasLink has refused to comply and has called on the capitalist state to uphold its interests. 

The RCMP was founded under the name North-West Mounted Police in 1873, as an explicitly colonising force, shortly after the Métis Red River Rebellion led by Louis Riel. Its duty was to protect British-Canadian interests in the vast uncolonised expanses, and extend the colonial boot as settlers flocked to occupy indigenous lands. It subjected indigenous nations to colonial law, a task that it continues to fulfill to this day. Later, the RCMP would be used to crush labour revolts and repress communists. It is fundamentally an instrument of the capitalist, settler-colonial Canadian state. The present use of the RCMP to dispossess and repress the Wet’suwet’en people is one incident among countless assaults carried out by this force. 

To learn more about this struggle, I watched a short documentary produced by the Wet’suwet’en to spread the message of their fight for peace and survival. I was deeply moved by the plight of this oppressed people, and it hardened my resolve to fight against capitalism and settler-colonialism. 

Invasion begins, aptly, with police harassing a Wet’suwet’en woman. It’s a stark image, this meeting at the bridge marking the entrance to the Unist’ot’en territory. Agents of the settler-colonial Canadian state stand threateningly at the border. Behind the woman there are signs declaring “No to colonial violence” and “Defend the yintah!” There is an undeclared war here. On one side, a people who have lived in this area for countless generations, trying to go about their lives in peace. On the other side, an occupying force which seeks to dispossess the Unist’ot’en in the name of capitalist accumulation. Because the Unist’ot’en find themselves in the way of the capitalists’ exploitative ventures, they are no longer citizens with equal rights; they are the enemy of capital, and they must be destroyed. 

The woman in question is Freda Huson, a spokesperson of the Unist’ot’en. She and others have been fighting against a proposed pipeline through their unceded lands for years. At a protest in front of a colonial courthouse, she declares, “Everyone needs to stand up, not just indigenous people. Everyone needs to stand up to the political powers that be.” This is fundamentally an internationalist message, a message that all people, all of the dispossessed, must stand up to defend their rights and their lives from the capitalists and their state. 

It’s reminiscent of another indigenous freedom fighter’s message, all the way back in 1885. Louis Riel, at the trial where he was sentenced to death for rebelling against British-Canadian colonialism, said, 

“When I came into the North West in July, the first of July 1884, I found the Indians suffering. I found the half-breeds [Métis] eating the rotten pork of the Hudson Bay Company and getting sick and weak every day. Although a half-breed, and having no pretension to help the whites, I also paid attention to them. I saw they were deprived of responsible government, I saw that they were deprived of their public liberties. I remembered that half-breed meant white and Indian, and while I paid attention to the suffering Indians and the half-breeds I remembered that the greatest part of my heart and blood was white and I have directed my attention to help the Indians, to help the half-breeds and to help the whites to the best of my ability…. No one can say that the North-West was not suffering last year, particularly the Saskatchewan, for the other parts of the North-West I cannot say so much; but what I have done, and risked, and to which I have exposed myself, rested certainly on the conviction, I had to do, was called upon to do something for my country.

“It is true, gentlemen, I believed for years I had a mission, and when I speak of a mission you will understand me not as trying to play the role of insane before the grand jury so as to have a verdict of acquittal upon that ground. I believe that I have a mission, I believe I had a mission at this very time.”1

Echoing Louis Riel, Huson announces, “I know I’m doing the right thing.”

And just as the Canadian state invaded the territories controlled by Louis Riel and his comrades, we see armed agents of the state wrestling with Wet’suwet’en freedom fighters. The freedom fighters’ songs of resistance move the heart, as we watch their lands being invaded and their people being attacked. A freedom fighter tells the settler-colonial agents that their courts have no jurisdiction on Wet’suwet’en territory. To no avail. A St’at’imc woman asks the chief agent of the Canadian colonial bourgeoisie, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “When are you going to give us our rights back?” To no avail. A white woman tells Trudeau that the state’s behaviour is “appalling.” 

Huson says that it’s “inspiring” to know that people all over the world of all backgrounds are standing up for the rights of the Wet’suwet’en people. Although the national oppression of the Wet’suwet’en and other indigenous nations is at the core of this conflict, it has taken on an internationalist character: people of all nations against capitalist accumulation by dispossession of the Wet’suwet’en nation, people of all nations against the rapacious destruction of the planet which we rely on to survive. This is not a narrow conflict. It is a battle in the greatest conflict humanity has ever faced: the dispossessed peoples of the world against the ruling classes, creation against destruction, life against death. 

The mission of the Wet’suwet’en is in line with the communist mission: building a new world, without oppression or exploitation. It is the duty of communists to fight alongside the Wet’suwet’en and other nations oppressed by settler-colonialism against our shared oppressors, the capitalist class. It is the duty of communists to defend the right of national self-determination of these oppressed nations, and that is all they ask. “They are trying to erase us from our own land,” says Huson. She demands only that Wet’suwet’en laws be respected, that her people be allowed to live independently of the settler-colonial society and rebuild their communities on their traditional lands. It would be a crime for us not to defend these rights. 

The documentary ends with Huson pronouncing, “I don’t fear anything.” Her message should inspire us all to take action to defend the dispossessed of all backgrounds, and to fight against settler-colonialism and exploitation. Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en freedom fighters! Solidarity with the people of all nations who are fighting for their liberation! 

The assault on the Wet’suwet’en peoples and territories is ongoing. Presently, protests and railway blockades are taking place across the Canadian state. To learn more about the Wet’suwet’en struggle and how we can support them, visit https://unistoten.camp/. A full-length documentary is planned to be released later this year. 

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Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition

For this episode, Parker and Donald welcome Cosmonaut editor and writer Medway Baker on to Canadasplain the Westminster system. Join us as we put on our inner socdem wonk to discover what went wrong for the Labour Party in the recent UK election.

 

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For the Unity of Marxists with the Dispossessed: The Bolsheviks and the State, 1912-1917

 A reply by Medway Baker to Sophia Burns’  article For the Unity of Marxists, or the Unity of the Dispossessed?.    

In a previous article, Comrade Sophia Burns argued for the “unity of the dispossessed,” in opposition to the “unity of Marxists” proposed by Comrades Rosa Janis and Parker McQueeney. She correctly exposes the largely petit-bourgeois makeup of the contemporary left, critiques its culture of protest (which, as she notes, often does little to build up an organised revolutionary force, but rather “attract[s] dissident anger and channel[s] it harmlessly into the ground”), and identifies that Marxists must “gain experience with class struggle, gradually cultivate a base among the dispossessed, and eventually begin to develop the necessary forces to establish revolutionary sovereignty.” However, she goes too far in her identification of what constitutes collaboration with the bourgeois state. 

Burns is correct that the goal of any Marxist minimum programme must be “not [to] join[] the official political realm but [to] creat[e] an entirely new one, an insurrectionary proletarian state”. But even as she advocates for the overthrow of the state and the establishment of “‘dual power’ the way Lenin meant it”, she rejects key lessons of the Bolshevik experience, both before the establishment of “dual power” and after. When she insists on “not lobbying [the government], participating in its elections… or… protesting it”, Burns leaves to us only a single tactic: the formation of “struggle committees” for the fulfillment of the workers’ demands in their struggles against the bosses and the landlords. Presumably these “struggle committees” are to form the nucleus of the future workers’ state. 

This tactical orientation leaves something to be desired, even by Burns’ own admission. “Something more is needed,” she says. “I don’t know what it is. It’ll take a lot of experimentation and, likely, plenty of failures to figure it out.” This is a respectable position to hold, and she is on the right track. She correctly identifies the need for “mass organizations with communist leadership actively destabilizing the liberal order” and “developing the organizational capacity to govern.” As I have argued in the past, it is necessary to form a workers’ party with a revolutionary programme, which will train the proletariat in self-governance through the formation of counter-hegemonic, democratic proletarian civic institutions. These institutions, administered and staffed by the proletariat, must substitute the functions of the bourgeois state following the seizure of power. Burns is not hostile to party-building—indeed, she admits that it “will likely be necessary”—but her conception of this is not comprehensive. 

In How Do You Do Politics? Burns shows the beginnings of the path forward. Although I have some misgivings about her overall thesis, her tactical orientation of directly engaging with workers in the class struggle is correct. But what comes after? Where do we go once we’ve begun to build up this organic base among the workers? 

In accordance with Burns’ own advocacy of “‘dual power’ the way Lenin meant it”, we will explore the ways in which the Bolsheviks built up their mass base among the proletariat. Contrary to Burns’ insistence that the revolutionary movement must boycott all engagement with the bourgeois state, I will argue that such engagement was crucial to the Bolshevik victory in October 1917. The Bolsheviks did not only engage in elections to the soviets—the “insurrectionary proletarian state”, as Burns puts it—but they also made demands of the Provisional Government, called for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and participated in bourgeois elections to the Constituent Assembly and the municipal Dumas. Even before the February Revolution, they participated in elections to the tsarist Duma, which was hardly representative and had no real legislative power. We will also examine the notion of “dual power” in the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary strategy in 1917, in order to provide context for these discussions. 

It is true that many attempts by modern-day Marxists to engage in elections are frankly opportunistic, and fail to advance the revolutionary cause. However, as this foray into Russian revolutionary history will reveal, boycotting elections (and other forms of engagement with the state) on principle would be a grave mistake. Although Cosmonaut has published examinations of communist electoral tactics in the past, this remains a very muddled issue for the left, and Burns’ needed intervention provides an opportunity to clarify how communists should orient ourselves vis-à-vis the state. For the moment, the Marxist left in most of the Global North remains too weak to engage in successful electoral tactics on any significant scale, but if we are to engage in party-building, we must be clear about what we plan to do with the party once it has been formed. It is impossible to formulate short-term tactics without a long-term strategy; hopefully, this examination of the Bolshevik strategy can help to inform Marxist revolutionary strategy today. 

Last session of the third Duma, October 15, 1911.

Before the Revolution: The Duma

The trial has unfolded a picture of revolutionary Social-Democracy taking advantage of parliamentarism, the like of which has not been witnessed in international Socialism. This example will, more than all speeches, appeal to the minds and hearts of the proletarian masses; it will, more than any arguments, repudiate the legalist-opportunists and anarchist phrase-mongers…. There was a Workers’ Party in Russia whose deputies neither shone with fine rhetoric, nor had “access” to the bourgeois intellectual drawing rooms, nor possessed the business-like efficiency of a ‘European’ lawyer and parliamentarian, but excelled in maintaining connections with the working masses, in ardent work among those masses, in carrying out the small, unpretentious, difficult, thankless and unusually dangerous functions of illegal propagandists and organisers…. The ‘Pravdist’ papers and the ‘Muranov type’ of work have brought about the unity of four-fifths of the class-conscious workers of Russia…. It is with this section that we must work. It is its unity that must be defended against social-chauvinism. It is along this road that the labour movement of Russia can develop towards social revolution.

— V. I. Lenin, 19151

The State Duma was hardly a democratic body. It had no true legislative power and absolutely no power over the executive. The Russian workers had little faith in it. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks chose to participate in the elections, even though they knew they would be totally unable to effect any kind of legislative change towards socialism in doing so. Today, in an age of polarisation between electoral opportunism and abstentionism, this may seem strange. If the Bolsheviks had no illusions in the State Duma, and they were committed to effecting revolutionary change, why would they waste their time with sham elections? 

Before answering this question, we should note that the Bolsheviks were not opposed a priori to a boycott of the Duma. In fact, Lenin proposed just this in 1905, when, in response to the great revolutionary upheaval that had taken hold of Russia, the Tsar’s government proposed the convocation of a Duma which would take on a merely advisory role. Nevertheless, Lenin was opposed to “mere passive abstention from voting,” insisting that a boycott of the elections must be an “active boycott”, which “should imply increasing agitation tenfold, organising meetings everywhere, taking advantage of election meetings, even if we have to force our way into them, holding demonstrations, political strikes, and so on and so forth.”2 It is clear from this formulation that the active boycott tactic can only be applied under the conditions of a mass revolutionary upsurge, and requires the existence of a mass workers’ party. 

Lenin would elaborate on this theme two years later, reflecting on the experience of the 1905 revolution. This time, however, he argued against a boycott of the Duma—not on the basis that the Duma had become any more democratic than before, but on the basis that the situation was no longer conducive to an insurrection: 

The Social-Democrat who takes a Marxist stand draws his conclusions about the boycott not from the degree of reactionariness of one or another institution, but from the existence of those special conditions of struggle that, as the experience of the Russian revolution has now shown, make it possible to apply the specific method known as boycott.3

Further, 

All boycott is a struggle, not within the framework of a given institution, but against its emergence, or, to put it more broadly, against it becoming operative. Therefore, those who… opposed the boycott on the general grounds that it was necessary for a Marxist to make use of representative institutions, thereby only revealed absurd doctrinairism… Unquestionably, a Marxist should make use of representative institutions. Does that imply that a Marxist cannot, under certain conditions, stand for a struggle not within the framework of a given institution but against that institution being brought into existence? No, it does not, because this general argument applies only to those cases where there is no room for a struggle to prevent such an institution from coming into being. The boycott is a controversial question precisely because it is a question of whether there is room for a struggle to prevent the emergence of such institutions…. 

… [T]he boycott is a means of struggle aimed directly at overthrowing the old regime, or, at the worst, i.e., when the assault is not strong enough for overthrow, at weakening it to such an extent that it would be unable to set up that institution, unable to make it operate. Consequently, to be successful the boycott requires a direct struggle against the old regime, an uprising against it and mass disobedience to it in a large number of cases (such mass disobedience is one of the conditions for preparing an uprising). Boycott is a refusal to recognise the old regime, a refusal, of course, not in words, but in deeds, i.e., it is something that finds expression not only in cries or the slogans of organisations, but in a definite movement of the mass of the people, who systematically defy the laws of the old regime, systematically set up new institutions, which, though unlawful, actually exist, and so on and so forth. The connection between boycott and the broad revolutionary upswing is thus obvious: boycott is the most decisive means of struggle, which rejects not the form of organisation of the given institution, but its very existence. Boycott is a declaration of open war against the old regime, a direct attack upon it. Unless there is a broad revolutionary upswing, unless there is mass unrest which overflows, as it were, the bounds of the old legality, there can be no question of the boycott succeeding.4

In Lenin’s formulation, it is thus necessary to use the state institutions to the benefit of the revolutionary movement when opposing the state outright is impossible; to boycott these institutions, without having the ability to truly contest their legitimacy, is to spurn a potentially useful avenue of propaganda and revolutionary work. While it could be argued that this formulation is incorrect or no longer applicable, we must understand this context if we are to understand the Bolsheviks’ use of election campaigns and the Duma rostrum. 

With this in mind, we can return to the question of how participation in the Duma could benefit the revolutionary movement. The writings of Alexei Badayev, a factory worker and a Bolshevik deputy to the Duma from 1912 to 1914, offer a great deal of insight into this matter: 

The Fourth Duma was to follow in the footsteps of the Third. The electoral law remained the same, and therefore the majority in the new Duma was bound to be as Black Hundred as before. There was no doubt that the activities of the Fourth Duma would also be directed against the workers and that its legislation would be of no use either to the workers or the peasantry. 

In spite of these considerations the Social-Democratic Party decided to take an active part in the elections as it had done in those for the Second and Third Dumas. The experience of the preceding years had shown the great importance of an election campaign from the standpoint of agitation, and the important role played by Social-Democratic fractions in the Duma. Our fractions, while refusing to take part in the so-called ‘positive’ work of legislation, used the Duma rostrum for revolutionary agitation. The work of the Social-Democratic fractions outside the Duma was still more important; they were becoming the organising centres of Party work in Russia. Therefore our Party decided that active participation in the campaign was necessary.5

Indeed, the election campaign was a great opportunity for the elaboration of the party’s tactics and the development of the workers’ class-consciousness. Although the tsarist police did their utmost to prevent public meetings during the campaigns, debates in Pravda and Luch (the Mensheviks’ newspaper) were widely read by workers and served to clarify the programme of revolutionary social democracy. This helped set the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary platform (centred around the slogans of a democratic republic, an eight-hour workday, and the confiscation of the landlords’ estates, to which the rest of the minimum programme for workers’ power was to be linked) apart from the opportunistic and legalistic slogans of the Mensheviks (which failed to challenge the tsarist, feudal order in a revolutionary manner).6 The election campaign spurred the Bolsheviks to forge true programmatic unity and then helped them to win the proletariat to this programme. Throughout the campaign, the Bolsheviks and their supporters among the working class were subjected to considerable police repression, and while this disrupted a great deal of potentially valuable propaganda work, it also strengthened the solidarity of the workers. 

The most egregious example of such repression is perhaps the invalidation of the election results from 29 factories and mills throughout St. Petersburg, disqualifying their delegates from participating in the electoral college that would choose electors who would go on, along with the electors of the other classes of St. Petersburg, to select a deputy from among themselves.7 

The disqualification of the delegates triggered a militant reaction by the workers of St. Petersburg: more than 70,000 workers would go out on strike, including many of those whose delegates had not been disqualified. No economic demands were presented; the core of the strike was centered around the right to vote. The workers made a great show of unity and discipline and were able to win their demands: not only were new elections to be held, but many factories and mills which had previously been unable to participate in the elections were to be included.8 It was a great victory for the working class, which exemplifies the value of engaging in political struggles against the state, both through elections and in the streets. The electoral and street actions reinforced each other and pushed the class struggle beyond simple economistic demands to a question of state power. The crucial factor is the presentation of concrete demands on a class basis, demands that expose the fundamental opposition between the exploiters and the exploited, the rulers and the ruled. This type of engagement with the state is hardly comparable to the opportunistic election campaigns and liberal activist culture to which so much of the modern left is wedded. 

The election campaign was conducted upon a revolutionary, class basis, which united workers around the struggle for their political rights and the Bolshevik programme. The campaign forced the distinctions between the revolutionary Bolsheviks and the “legalist-opportunist” Mensheviks out into the open, for all the workers to see. It mobilised the forces of labour against the ruling class in a tangible way that clearly raised the workers’ class consciousness. Following the second round of elections, the workers voted to bind their delegates to a set of instructions drafted by the Bolsheviks, which laid out the role of the deputies as specifically revolutionary:

The Duma tribune is, under the present conditions, one of the best means for enlightening and organising the broad masses of the proletariat. 

It is for this very purpose that we are sending our deputy into the Duma, and we charge him and the whole Social-Democratic fraction of the Fourth Duma to make widely known our demands from the Duma tribune, and not to play at legislation in the State Duma…. 

We want to hear the voices of the members of the Social-Democratic fraction ring out loudly from the Duma tribune proclaiming the final goal of the proletariat…. We call upon the Social-Democratic- fraction of the Fourth Duma, in its work on the basis of the above slogans, to act in unity and with its ranks closed.

Let it gather its strength from constant contact with the broad masses. 

Let it march shoulder to shoulder with the political organisation of the working class of Russia.9

The Bolshevik deputies elected to the Duma held to this promise. “During my daily visits to the Pravda offices,” Badayev recalls, “I met the representatives of labour organisations and became acquainted with the moods of the workers. Workers came there from all the city districts and related what had taken place at factories and works, and how the legal and illegal organisations were functioning. Conversations and meetings with the representatives of the revolutionary workers supplied me with a vast amount of material for my future activity in the Duma.”10 

Once within the halls of Tauride Palace, where the Duma sat, the Social-Democratic fraction declared its irreconcilable opposition to the legislative work of the body from day one. They refused to participate in electing the chairman of the Duma, as “the chairman of such a Duma would systematically attack members of the Social-Democratic fraction, whenever the latter spoke from the Duma rostrum in defence of the interests of the masses…. You are welcome to choose a chairman acceptable to the majority; we shall use the rostrum in the interests of the people.”11 In Badayev’s words: 

… [W]e demonstrated, on the first day of the Fourth Duma, that there could be no question of ‘parliamentary’ work for us, that the working class only used the Duma for the greater consolidation and strengthening of the revolutionary struggle in the country. A similar attitude determined the nature of our relations with the Duma majority. No joint work, but a sustained struggle against the Rights, the Octobrists and the Cadets, and their exposure in the eyes of the workers; this was the task of the workers’ deputies in the Duma of the landlords and nobles.12

Another example of the mutual reinforcement of mass action and activities in the Duma came only a short while later. The metalworkers’ union—one of the most advanced workers’ organisations in Russia, with which the party had conducted a great deal of work—was subjected, like all Russian trade unions, to periodic suppressions, forcing it to refound itself under a new name each time. In late 1912, once again, the police shut down the union and worked to prevent its refoundation. In the process, both the police and the municipal government violated the 1906 law that accorded some meager protections to the unions. 

The Social-Democratic fraction took advantage of these illegal proceedings to register an interpellation. This process was always convoluted, and the government did all it could to limit speeches and debate. Nevertheless, the Social-Democratic fraction took advantage of whatever parts of the bureaucratic procedure they could. In particular, they were allowed to make speeches to argue for the urgency of a matter, which would have to be accepted in order for the interpellation to be made. Although the urgency of those matters raised by the Social-Democrats was consistently denied, the fraction frequently used these speeches to denounce the government and call for revolution. In this particular instance, on December 14, the interpellation was accompanied by a one-day strike of the St. Petersburg workers, who held public meetings to pass resolutions of protest against the suppression of the trade unions, and in support of the Social-Democratic fraction’s interpellation. 

What the Social-Democrats had planned as a one-day strike continued the next day, and expanded to include even more workers than the day before. Some of the “unreliable” workers were fired, and this only triggered a third day of strikes, demanding their reinstatement. The Social-Democratic fraction remained at the centre of workers’ struggles during these days. They remained in constant contact with the strikers, helped to coordinate funds and develop slogans, and served as negotiators with the authorities. The workers of the whole city supported, in words and in deeds, the plight of the dismissed workers, and the strike ultimately lasted over two weeks.13

By 1914, the Bolsheviks were a truly mass workers’ party, despite their conditions of illegality. But with the outbreak of the war, this work all came to an end. Patriotic sentiments were running high: pro-war demonstrators marched through the streets, praising the Tsar and beating passers-by who failed to meet the correct standards of nationalist fervour; workers’ organisations were suppressed, and patriotic onlookers aided the police in clashes with strikers and anti-war demonstrators.14

The Bolsheviks declared “War against War”15, and walked out of the Duma rather than participate in the vote for war credits. The Bolshevik deputies were soon arrested, in violation of their parliamentary immunity. The workers protested but were too weak to secure the freedom of the deputies. The party was crippled by the destruction of this centre of revolutionary work, along with the destruction of so many other organising centres. The proletariat won only a single victory in this regard: the government, fearing a backlash in the case that they were to execute the deputies, turned the case over from the military to the civilian courts. 16

Even this was an opportunity for propaganda among the workers, and the party and the deputies seized upon it. The trial was highly publicised by the Bolshevik press, and the deputies defended their revolutionary work with zeal. They insisted that the Russian workers would remember this repression of their chosen representatives, and foretold that they would “not remain long in exile but [would] soon return in triumph.”17 

And so, in 1917, they did. 

From the First Revolution to the Second: Dual Power

The deputies, alongside the rest of the Bolshevik party, returned from exile following the overthrow of the Tsar in February. The bourgeoisie had formed a Provisional Government; the workers and soldiers had formed the soviets. The former represented the bourgeois republic; the latter, the workers’ and peasants’ republic. Lenin described this situation using the term “dual power.” Let us examine what he meant by this, and what political conclusions he drew from this analysis. 

According to the old way of thinking, the rule of the bourgeoisie could and should be followed by the rule of the proletariat and the peasantry, by their dictatorship. 

In real life, however, things have already turned out differently; there has been an extremely original, novel and unprecedented interlacing of the one with the other. We have side by side, existing together, simultaneously, both the rule of the bourgeoisie (the government of Lvov and Guchkov) and a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie, voluntarily making itself an appendage of the bourgeoisie.

For it must not be forgotten that actually, in Petrograd, the power is in the hands of the workers and soldiers; the new government is not using and cannot use violence against them, because there is no police, no army standing apart from the people, no officialdom standing all-powerful above the people. 

… [F]reely elected soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies are freely joining the second, parallel government, and are freely supplementing, developing and completing it. And, just as freely, they are surrendering power to the bourgeoisie…18

It is important to note that “power” (vlast) refers specifically to the sovereign state authority. This is a key point: the existence of more than one vlast is necessarily a contradiction in terms because by definition there can only be one sovereign authority in a single state. “Dual power”, then, is a situation in which the narod (the workers and peasants, analogous to Burns’ use of “the dispossessed”) and the bourgeoisie each has an embryonic vlast, the former (the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies) being unwilling to establish a “firm vlast”, and the latter (the Provisional Government) being unable to establish one. In effect, then, there is no true vlast under these conditions. The necessary outcome of this situation is, therefore, the end of dual power, and the establishment of a firm vlast around a single class pole: either that of the bourgeoisie (in the form of the Provisional Government) or that of the narod (in the form of the soviets).19  Lenin summarised this situation thus: 

The bourgeoisie stands for the undivided power (vlast) of the bourgeoisie. 

The class-conscious workers stand for the undivided power (vlast) of the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies—for undivided power (vlast) made possible not by adventurist acts, but by clarifying proletarian minds, by emancipating them from the influence of the bourgeoisie20

We must ably, carefully, clear people’s minds and lead the proletariat and poor peasantry forward, away from ‘dual power’ towards the full power of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.21

Soviet power came into existence in February; October was merely the point at which it ceased to tolerate the Provisional Government, ending the period of “dual power.” To speak, then, of dual power as an aim of the revolutionary movement is to fundamentally misunderstand the lessons of October. In the Bolsheviks’ view, dual power was never an aim but an unexpected obstacle—an aberrant result of the peculiar conditions of the Russian Revolution—which was to be overcome. 

Even so, the Bolsheviks were not opposed to the convention of the Constituent Assembly; in fact, they often criticised the Provisional Government for delaying the elections to it. One of the first demands of the Bolsheviks following the February Revolution was “to convene a Constituent Assembly as speedily as possible” (alongside the establishment of the soviet vlast).22 Lenin noted upon his return to Russia, 

I attacked the Provisional Government for not having appointed an early date, or any date at all, for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and for confining itself to promises. I argued that without the Soviets  of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies the convocation of the Constituent Assembly is not guaranteed and its success is impossible.23

Even beyond this, the Bolsheviks participated in the municipal Duma elections in the summer of 1917, much in the same way they used the prewar Duma elections. In particular, they took advantage of the campaign to make a series of demands of the Provisional Government—demands which they knew the government could not meet. “Unless these demands are met,” Pravda proclaimed, “unless a fight is waged for these demands, not a single serious municipal reform and no democratization of municipal affairs is conceivable.”24 These demands were explicitly connected to the transfer of power to the narod. Although the municipal Dumas were not class organs—they did not represent the “insurrectionary state”—the election campaigns were used by the Bolsheviks to agitate for the takeover of the full vlast by the insurrectionary state, as well as to measure the balance of class forces.25 They heartily urged the workers and soldiers to vote, in such forceful terms as: “You, and you alone, comrades, will be to blame if you do not make full use of this right [to vote]…. [B]e capable now of battling for your interests by voting for our Party!”26 

Making demands of the Provisional Government was a key tactic of the Bolshevik party during the revolutionary period. Although in April there was a debate between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks over the issue of “kontrol”, that is, supervision of the Provisional Government by the Soviet, Lars Lih chalks this up to essentially a misunderstanding between Lenin and the Petrograd Bolsheviks, which was resolved by the end of April in a manner that satisfied both camps. The crux of the debate was over the role of kontrol in the revolution: while the moderate socialists proposed kontrol as a means of maintaining the vlast of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks proposed it as a means of exposing the Provisional Government as incapable of carrying out the revolution “to the end.”27 

This tactic of making demands, in order to expose the Provisional Government’s counterrevolutionary nature, was used to great effect throughout 1917. The Bolsheviks maintained in their propaganda that the Provisional Government, to the extent that it carried out revolutionary measures against tsarism, only did so under pressure from the workers and soldiers, and its ultimate counterrevolutionary nature would inevitably lead to a confrontation between revolutionary democracy (i.e. the narod) and the bourgeoisie. Hence, demands for a democratic republic, an end to the war, redistribution of the land, the publication and annulment of the secret treaties, etc. were not made under the pretense that the Provisional Government would or could carry these out. Stalin wrote in August: 

The Party declares that unless these demands are realized it will be impossible to save the revolution, which for half a year now has been stifling in the clutches of war and general disruption. 

The Party declares that the only possible way of securing these demands is to break with the capitalists, completely liquidate the bourgeois counter-revolution, and transfer power in the country to the revolutionary workers, peasants, and soldiers. 

That is the only means of saving the country and the revolution from collapse.28

This method must be clearly delineated from that of making demands in a way that obscures the necessity of taking power. Revolution is not a secondary concern in this type of propaganda, but placed front and centre. Demands are formulated specifically in connection with overthrowing the bourgeoisie: “All propaganda, agitation and the organisation of the millions must immediately be directed towards [transferring power to the soviets].”29

This way of making demands of the bourgeois state is far from the usual, liberal-democratic practice of lobbying. These demands, backed up by organising the proletariat through the Bolshevik type of electoral work and street actions, can be a valuable weapon in the arsenal of the revolution. It is true that none of these methods individually can accomplish revolution, but that goes just as much for organising workers in “struggle committees” as it does for electoral participation, making demands of the government, or participating in street protests. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks used all four of these tools to win the confidence of the dispossessed and take power in October. 

Bolshevik Central Committee on the eve of the revolution.

Conclusion

Burns is correct to call for Marxists to focus on organising the proletariat, and she is equally correct to identify erroneous, opportunistic and petit-bourgeois activist tendencies in the contemporary left. However, her solution falls short: her tactical inflexibility leads her to reject participation in elections or making demands of the bourgeois state out of hand—tactics which, as we have shown above, were crucial to the Bolshevik victory in October. 

Comrades Janis and McQueeney are correct to call for programmatic unity of revolutionary Marxists, and they are correct to identify DSA as one possible avenue through which to fight for this unity. The task of Marxists in DSA is not only to organise the working class, but also to fight for a revolutionary programme, and to elaborate on the tactics that may assist organising efforts. While there is an influential opportunistic tendency in DSA that insists on tailing the Democratic Party (either temporarily or indefinitely), this is not the only possible electoral tactic. This opportunism must be fought against, in favour of a class-independent electoral tactic; one that, like the Bolsheviks’, serves to heighten the consciousness of the proletariat, to rally their numbers to the revolutionary programme, and above all to support DSA’s organising work. The specifics of this tactic must be left up to the revolutionary Marxists in DSA, who will need to deliberate among themselves, examine the objective conditions, and engage in debate with both opportunists and abstentionists in order to formulate a revolutionary orientation to bourgeois elections suitable to 21st-century American conditions. That said, the core of this tactic must consist of: 

    1. An immediate break with the Democratic Party and all other bourgeois parties, 
    2. Using electoral and parliamentary work above all to support the task of organising the proletariat, rather than for its own sake, and 
    3. Irreconcilable opposition to the American state, its military and police, and taking advantage of every opportunity to obstruct its functioning. 

It is possible that the best electoral tactic for the present moment is to temporarily refrain from electoral work in favour of organising the working class. It is also possible that the best electoral tactic will involve participation in elections at various levels of government in different degrees. A discussion of these details is well beyond the scope of this essay, but it is urgent that such discussions take place, that revolutionary Marxists in DSA begin to forge programmatic unity, and that the struggle is taken up against opportunist collaboration with the bourgeois state. 

Comrade Burns asks us: “For the unity of Marxists, or the unity of the dispossessed?” This question, although thought-provoking in a necessary way, sets up a false dichotomy. For the Bolsheviks, there was never a question of one or the other. They saw the programmatic unity of revolutionary Marxists as bringing about the unity of the dispossessed around the programme of revolution; and this unity of the dispossessed, in turn, empowered the party of revolution, transforming it from a circle of intellectuals into a potent weapon of the class struggle. The revolution was made possible, not by one or the other, but by both: the unity of Marxists with the dispossessed, the unity of the revolutionary programme with the workers’ movement. This is the lesson of the October Revolution; this is the lesson that we must remember, as the left vacillates between opportunism and impotency if we are to recreate a revolutionary movement, if we are to win power, if we are to achieve communism. 

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‘Expelled, but Communist’ by Boris Souvarine

Translation and introduction by Medway Baker. 

Boris Souvarine was one of the leading founders of the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1921, after having founded the weekly Bulletin communiste, a publication dedicated to promoting adherence to the Communist International, in 1920. Bulletin communiste became an organ of the PCF, but ceased publication in late 1924, after Souvarine was expelled from the party for his support of Trotsky (with whom he would later break) in the Soviet factional struggles. This was part of a process called “Bolshevisation,” in which the Comintern’s member parties were brought into line with the commands of the centre (sometimes for the better, often as an expression of Soviet factional struggles). In the piece we present today, Souvarine fervently denies that this process has anything to do with the “true Bolshevism” of Lenin; in fact, he asserts that it marks a return to the “degenerated socialism” of the Second International.

The piece below was published in October 1925, in the first issue of the new Bulletin communiste refounded by Souvarine following his expulsion. In this article, he discusses not only Bolshevization, but also the French syndicalists, especially Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte. Both of these revolutionaries became committed militants of the Communist Party (Rosmer in 1921, Monatte in 1923), only to be expelled alongside Souvarine in late 1924. Below, Souvarine both defends the place of these “communist syndicalists” in the PCF (while excoriating the “neo-Leninists of 1924”), and critiques them and their publication, Révolution prolétarienne, for once again taking up the syndicalist name.

At the heart of this piece is ultimately a commitment to organizing communists across theoretical lines. What matters for Souvarine is not theoretical shibboleths, but a commitment to class warfare, to the principle of communists’ active support of workers’ everyday struggles, to the dictatorship of the proletariat—in a word, to revolutionary Marxism. Serving the working class is communists’ highest duty for Souvarine, and this requires not only supporting the struggles of the exploited masses but also uniting the forces of those revolutionaries who have a common aim and method, the aim and method of revolutionary Marxism. This was what Souvarine fought for when he agitated within the Socialist Party (SFIO) for acceptance of the Comintern’s principles; this was what he fought for after his expulsion from the party he helped to build, insisting that the former syndicalists should not abandon the banner of communism, and that “when the Party really works for the proletariat, we should be with it.” It is only when the forces of revolutionary Marxism are united in the class struggle, in the service of the exploited and oppressed, that revolutionaries can truly advance the communist project.

Although Souvarine would ultimately grow farther and farther away from the communist movement, we present this piece on its own merits, as a defense of Marxist unity, and as a critique of both Stalinism and syndicalism.

Portrait of Souvarine and Anatoli Lunatscharsky

Expelled, but Communist

Translated from “Exclus, mais communistes,” Bulletin communiste 6, no. 1 (October 23, 1925).

There was but a handful of men in 1914 who stood against the unleashing of bourgeois and proletarian chauvinism, the abdication of the International, the bankruptcy of socialism, syndicalism, and anarchism, the collapse of international solidarity between workers.

There was but a handful of revolutionaries in 1917 who supported the Bolsheviks, reviled and hunted; who expressed an active sympathy with them before their victory, and remained loyal to it in the bleakest of hours.

There are today, amid the crisis of international communism, but a handful of indomitable men who maintain the vital spirit of Marxist critique, who continue the living tradition of communism, who maintain proletarian consciousness in their class pride—against the deviations of the revolutionary organisation, against the abandonment of the proletariat’s general interest to the bureaucratic coteries, against the mortal dangers of adventurism, servility, and corruption.

The task is thankless and grueling. The architects of this curative resistance are drowned in contempt. The working class, misled once again, no longer recognise their own. But the men of the proletariat and the revolution have been through worse. They hold out. The certainty of the duty fulfilled animates them, their faith in immutably serving the same cause and being armed with tested communist truths fortifies them. If they needed, in 1914 and 1917, to “hope to engage,” they have been able to dispense with “succeeding to persevere.” Even more so, in 1924, they made their choice without regret, rich with the enlightening experience of the past ten years, which assured that their initial meager band was destined to become legion.

The outcome of the endeavor called “Bolshevization,” in accordance with the so-called “Leninism” invented after the death of Lenin, is not in the slightest doubt: it will be—it already is—a disaster. Russian Bolshevism, undefeated by the assaults of the capitalist world, diminished only by its recent internecine struggles, in time put aside the most novice exaggerations of the methods instituted after Lenin’s death. As for European neo-Bolshevism, the monstrous caricature of true Bolshevism, this has already gone bankrupt a year after its appearance, and it would disappear from the contemporary schools—if we can even call a set of sad practices a “school”—if it were not artificially supported by the Soviet Revolution, the strength of which is not the least bit revealed by the number of its parasites.

And the outcome of the work undertaken by the menders of the diverted communist movement is not anymore in doubt. But our efforts will be met with success only by a single condition: to remain loyal to the proven approaches that led to the strength of contemporary communism. The assimilation of knowledge and experiences acquired over the course of the last ten years of wars and revolutions is indispensable to the progression of the communist idea. The original traditions of the proletariat of each country are incorporated into this. But a return to old concepts, displaced by the active science of revolution, would be a veritable regression, no matter how revolutionary these concepts may have been in their time. We raise the question of whether the organ of our companions in the struggle for the restitution of the errant revolutionary movement, Révolution prolétarienne, by sporting the label of “communist syndicalist” (syndicaliste communiste), is taking a step forward or a step back.

(Revolutionary) syndicalism borrowed the elements of its school in part from Marxism, in part from Bakuninism, and in part from the mixed heritage of utopianism, reformism, and heroic insurrectionism, transmitted from generation to generation among the proletariat of the Latin countries. Even though the unevenness of its formation damned it to rapid extinction, it was able to represent a stage of communist thought superior to the degenerated socialism of the Second International: not only because the latter, in its decline, conferred an easy prestige on the former, but essentially because its practice was worth far more than its theory. This is why the Bolsheviks, before even having founded the Third International, considered the syndicalists to be allies, as a variety of communists destined to merge sooner or later into the organizations of communism.

Even more: the Bolsheviks knew to treat anarchists, strictly speaking, as combatants of the proletarian revolution, as auxiliaries, as possible reinforcements. Lenin wrote State and Revolution both to re-establish the Marxist conception of the abolition of the state, and to demonstrate that communists were differentiated from anarchists, on this point, by their means, and not by their goals.

In light of the plain failure of international socialism during the imperialist war, the rebirth of the proletarian International was accomplished with the aid of syndicalists and anarchists. Zimmerwald and Kienthal were our common will. Lenin was the one who directed this policy. Those excluded from the Congress of London in 1896 re-entered the International, under the aegis of left social democrats, radical Marxists, and Bolsheviks.

The first French section of the Communist International, called the Committee of the 3rd International (Comité de la IIIe Internationale), was formed from three subsections: left socialists, syndicalists, and anarchists. It was consecrated as the French branch of the new International. If anarchists and syndicalists split with us, it was of their own free will, not of ours. Repeatedly, even Zinoviev felt the need to address greetings to Péricat, which, in his fashion, he overemphasized….

The founding conference of the Communist International, in March 1919, declared in its “Platform”:

“It is vital to form a bloc with elements of the revolutionary workers’ movement who, in spite of the fact that they did not earlier belong to the socialist party, have essentially declared for the proletarian dictatorship through the soviets, that is to say, with syndicalist elements.”

In January 1920, the Communist International addressed a message to the revolutionary syndicalists and anarchists of the Untied States, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW):

“Our goal is the same as yours: a community without a state, without a government, without classes, in which the workers will administer production and distribution in the interest of all.

“We invite you, revolutionaries, to rally to the Communist International, born at the dawn of the global social revolution. We invite you to take the place that is yours by right of your courage and revolutionary experience, at the forefront of the proletarian red army battling under the banner of communism.”

On the French syndicalists in particular, here is how Zinoviev spoke in 1922, at the 3rd World Congress, when Lenin was still there to give him instructions:

“The most important political observation made by the Executive and its representatives, of which several, such as Humbert-Droz, have spent nearly six months in France, is that—and we must speak frankly—we must search for a large number of communist elements in the ranks of the syndicalists, the best syndicalists, that is to say the communist syndicalists. It is strange, but it is thus.”

The same Zinoviev, in the same year, at the 2nd Congress of the Red International of Labour Unions, adopted this language:

“As we all know, the Second International was stricken by ostracism, and excluded from its organization whoever was more or less anarchist. The leaders of the Second International wanted nothing to do with these elements. They held the same attitude with regard to the syndicalists. The Third International has broken with this tradition. Born in the tempest of the world war, it has realized that we must have an entirely different attitude towards the syndicalists and anarchists.”

And Zinoviev referred to the first congress of the new International:

“At the First Congress of the CI, we said, ‘No one is asking the question: Do you call yourself an anarchist or a syndicalist? We ask you: Are you a partisan or an adversary of the imperialist war, for a relentless class struggle or no, for or against the bourgeoisie? If you are for the struggle against our class enemy, you are one of us…’”

This is not all. Zinoviev said further:

“We estimate that all the anarchists and all the syndicalists who are the sincere partisans of class struggle are our brothers.”

And finally, so as to quash any sort of ambiguity:

“The anarchists have organised a whole range of attacks against us. However, we do not intend to revisit our attitude in regard to the anarchists and syndicalists. We maintain our positions. As Marxists, we will be patient until the very process of class struggle brings into our ranks proletarian elements who still remain outside of our organisation.”

It would be superfluous to quote any more to determine the traditional policy of the Communist International towards communist syndicalists.

This policy has borne its fruits. The Communist International has recruited among the syndicalist ranks—perhaps anarchist syndicalists, more likely communist syndicalists—the elements that we have always considered “the best,” and without which certain sections of the Communist International would not exist.

In America, it was among the syndicalists (William Foster, Andreychin, Bill Haywood, Crosby), among the left socialists around The Liberator sympathetic to the IWW (John Reed, Max Eastman), among the anarchists (Robert Minor, Bill Chatov), that it found most of its communists.

In England and Ireland, it was among the syndicalists (Tom Mann, Jim Larkin, Jack Tanner) and in the movement of the Shop Stewards’ Committees, of a syndicalist nature (Murphy, Tom Bell, etc.), that it recruited.

In Spain, it was among the syndicalists and the anarchists that it found Joaquim Maurín, Arlandis, Andrés Nin, Casanellas, and many others.

In France, finally, the Communist International drew from the syndicalist ranks those who, alongside the new militants who emerged from the war, should, according to the CI, exercise decisive influence, and gradually eliminate that of the social democrats inherited from the old party, of obsolete Jaurèsism and null Guesdism. It was by Lenin’s uncontested authority that Rosmer became the primary French representative to the Executive. It was Zinoviev, Lozovsky, and Manuilsky who accorded the highest priority to bringing Monatte into the Party. Certainly, Trotsky was not the last to support this policy, but never did he give up on winning the communist syndicalists to the purely Marxist conception of communism, and his last discussion with Louzon remains memorable.

Even today, when the French Communist Party is diminished, emptied, weakened, after a year of pseudo-Leninist dominion, it is the syndicalists of yesterday, the anarchists of the day before yesterday, like Monmousseau and Dudilleux, that the Executive is forced to go find.

How, then, can we explain the 1924 neo-Leninists’ spontaneous and systematic defamation of this “communist syndicalist” journal, even though all the Communist International’s platforms, resolutions, commentaries, traditions, recruitment practices, command them to treat its founders as friends, as allies, as communists, and even as “brothers,” as Zinoviev has said?

The answer becomes clear with irresistible logic and force, disengaged from the official communist texts quoted above: these false “Leninists” act as the most vulgar social democrats. They have naturally adopted the attitude of the Second International—condemned by the Third, to which they are profoundly foreign, or into which they have intruded. These people know nothing of our movement, of our ideas, of our history. Placed in the presence of an unexpected question, to which the solution was not prepared for them by the bureaucracy allocated to this task, and to which their inaptitude for work prevented them from finding enlightenment in the documents available to all, they improvised an answer, and, as is their habit, pronounced a great deal.

Their specifically social-democratic reaction to “communist syndicalism” characterizes an entire doctrine.

“How can one be Persian?” Montesquieu jested agreeably. “How can one be a communist syndicalist?” ask the creators of 1924’s “Leninism.” The Communist International, in the time of Lenin and Trotsky, responded in advance. It was only after the death of the first and the absence of the second that in this question, as in so many others, true Bolshevism was thrown out, and replaced by the offensive return of degenerated socialism, masked in neo-Leninism.

But if Révolution prolétarienne is far above the commentaries of its detractors, it is within range of the critique of its friends, of those who, in agreement with Zinoviev on this question, consider communist syndicalists to be “brothers.” And we must clearly say that many of us do not approve of the label.

What is our rationale? Ten issues of the journal have appeared and we have found nothing that justifies the abandonment of that which we call simply “communism.” Monatte and Rosmer said after their expulsion: “We return to whence we came.” This is meaningless. Why not remain that which they had become—“communists”? We understand that they still are communists. But this should suffice. Unless the experience has led them to introduce something new into their theories? They have surely not abandoned the old without mature reflection.

Monatte, Rosmer, and Delagarde were expelled from the Party by way of senseless accusations—with the secret aim of pushing them down a hill that they could not reclimb. This wish was immediately dashed, and none of those who knew them expected anything else: only foreigners to the communist workers’ movement could hope to eliminate them. They remained themselves, but they changed their name. As if they wanted only to differentiate themselves from the demagogues who discredit the communist name. But the name of syndicalist is no more pristine than that of communist; the marks are less recent, is all.

They remain loyal to the Marxist conception of class struggle, the proletarian dictatorship, the state. And as for Lenin’s conception of the Party and the International? They said to our comrades, after their own expulsion, “Remain in the Party, you are in your proper place.” And they discussed the day when the party would become truly communist, when the mass of communists outside of the party would retake it, themselves among them. None of this has anything to do with syndicalism.

All that remains is that they are profoundly disappointed with the degeneration of this Party that together we attempted to make communist, and that they do not wish to renew their attempt, preferring instead that others do so. An understandable feeling, but a feeling only, and totally personal. They can even less theorize it than they can say simply, “Comrades, remain in the Party.”

In fact, when it comes to true syndicalism, we found nothing other than an article by Allot. And this syndicalism is nothing new; it is old, and it is not of the best of its kind. Allot’s article, so remarkable on a number of fronts, serious, documented, and instructive, ended on an elementary critique of the intervention of the Party in a strike. But what does Allot demonstrate? Exactly the opposite of his intention. He proved that the Party did well to intervene in the strike in question. Whose fault is it if “the trade union organizations appeared to be erased”? If the facts establish that syndicalism does not suffice at all? It is a critique that well represents the impotence of syndicalist theory, as this justifies the criticized acts. Since when have strikes had for their goal to save the trade unions from their “erasure”? Is the strike conducted for the union, or is the union made for the strike? The strike has as its goal the satisfaction of demands: if the goal is achieved, all that has contributed is good. If the Party plays a part, all the better for the workers first, for the Party after. Nothing is more legitimate than the benefit gained by the party from serving the working class. What is condemnable is an attempt to profit from a situation to the detriment of the working class; but nothing like this took place at Douarnenez. “Communists,” said Marx and Engels, “have no interests distinct from those of the proletariat in general.” This undying principle remains our law: the communist party that lives up to it acts well, that which discards it loses its communist quality.

The Party that has lost its political sense, its consciousness of its role, intervenes by disserving the movement that it pretends to support. The clumsiness, incapacity or indignity of those responsible cannot be placed on the principle of interference. It is possible that at Douarnenez, certain communists said foolish things, but none of them had a monopoly, and this does not prove that the Party should not involve itself in workers’ struggles. Critiquing the mistakes made, without having the special goal of emphasizing the union or the Party, simply in pursuing the interest of the strike, this is serving the working class and, at the same time, without doing so expressly, the union and the Party themselves. Because the union and the Party have no other well-understood interest than that of the proletariat.

That which discredits our Party and our International is a tendency to ignore the interest of the working class to serve the interests of the bureaucrats. But when the Party really works for the proletariat, we should be with it. This is made all the easier for us by the fact that it was us, including Monatte and Rosmer, who worked so hard to substantiate this idea that the Party must occupy itself a little less with vulgar politics and much more with workers’ struggles. If the communist deputies loitered less in the halls of the Chamber and frequented more the meetings of strikers, all the better.

The remnants of old doctrinaire syndicalism, the attempt to revive ideas that have no more historic value, are not progress from the step already traversed by the syndicalists who became communists. And they add to the already large confusion that troubles the consciousness of the working-class vanguard. The less of this we find in Révolution prolétarienne, the more it will strengthen itself in its task of revolutionary restitution.

The question of a return to syndicalism could perhaps have been posed if the communism of 1919-1923, true communism, that of the first four congresses of the Third International, that of Lenin and Trotsky, had failed. Such a catastrophe would have put into question all its theories, all its practices. But happily, nothing of the sort came to pass. That which failed was not communism, but its caricature, the “Leninism of 1924.” That which failed was not Bolshevism, but its parody, so-called “Bolshevization.”

The communism of Marx and Engels, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, is sufficient to guide militants to working-class emancipation. The last word has not been said. More will come who add onto the greatest teachings of the communists. But the spirit of communism will be immutable, and we will inspire ourselves to serve our cause with dignity. 

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‘Evolution of the National Question’ and ‘The East and Revolution’ by Safarov

Translation and Introduction by Medway Baker.

Safarov (upper right) with Ural Regional Soviet, circa 1918.

Georgy Safarov was born in St. Petersburg in 1891. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1908, and from 1910 spent many years exiled in Switzerland, returning to Russia alongside Lenin in 1917. Despite spending most of his political career up until the revolution in Western Europe, he took a keen interest in the national question, especially the plight of the Muslim population of Russian Central Asia. He was sent to Soviet Turkestan in 1919 to aid in the establishment of soviet power and the fight against the counterrevolutionary Basmachi movement. The complexity of carrying out these tasks—establishing soviet power, winning over the oppressed masses, building socialism, and combatting both counterrevolutionary nationalism and Russian chauvinism—led Safarov to engage in a comprehensive study of Central Asian economic and social conditions. The two pieces we present below were written around the time that Safarov was engaged in a struggle with Mikhail Tomsky, who also had come to hold a leadership position in Soviet Turkestan. Tomsky, as Matthieu Renault elaborates in his essay Revolution Decentered: Two Studies on Lenin, wished to transplant the methods used with regard to the peasantry in the Russian core—the tax-in-kind, etc.—directly to Turkestan, without consideration for the national chauvinism and economic dominance of Russian peasants, workers, and administrators, and the resentment of the native population towards these colonisers. To this proposal, Safarov counterposed the establishment of committees of the poor peasants and distribution of the lands of the large landowners to these peasants, in order to encourage class conflict within the Muslim population, against both their own elites and the Russian colonisers. As Renault demonstrates, Lenin—eternally concerned with Great Russian chauvinism and bureaucratism—attempted to mediate between the two, but clearly sided with Safarov. This was a struggle that he and Safarov were to lose.

The first essay, The Evolution of the National Question, published in the French publication Bulletin communiste in early 1921, is a brief sketch of the development of the national question throughout the revolutionary period, and concludes with a list of problems and a set of prescriptions for the Soviet government to act upon. The style, structure, and content suggest that it was rather hastily written as a call to action, a feature that we have attempted to preserve in this translation. The second, The East and Revolution, published in Bulletin communiste a few months after (and having been published in German in late 1920), greatly elaborates on the content of the first article, with references to anthropological, economic, and historical studies, especially of the Central Asian peoples of the Russian Empire. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Safarov examines the nature of imperialism, its effect on the economies and societies of colonised nations, the changes in the global and Russian situations since the beginning of the First World War, and the experiences of the national-democratic and proletarian revolutions occurring worldwide in the wake of the war. He then discusses solutions to the national question, in an earnest attempt to resolve the tensions inherent to the national-democratic and socialist revolutions in Russia, and by extension the world.

A key part of his solution is the soviets, which he identifies as “a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries.”

But the importance of the soviets, for Safarov, is not the particularities of the soviet form as manifested in Russia in 1917 (he in fact refers also to the anjoman, a type of revolutionary council that emerged during the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-09). Rather, it is their status as popular organs of the revolutionary masses, created in the actual process of the class struggle, and as anti-agreementist organs from which the exploiting strata are excluded. For Safarov, the significance of the soviet form is not in their size, nor in their organisational norms; it is in their class composition. Only the class-independence of the labouring masses (the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty producers alike) from their exploiters can fully carry out the project of national liberation from imperialism. The native exploiters, Safarov demonstrates, will inevitably betray the interests of the majority of the nation in favor of their own class interests, and in so doing will side with imperialist dictatorship.

It is crucial to note that Safarov does not at any point confuse national liberation with the transition to communism, nor does he advocate liquidation of the proletarian struggle against exploitation into the pure struggle for national liberation. On the contrary, he stresses that “this entire programme [for national liberation] has not a single communist element,” and insists on the necessity of “conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form.” For Safarov, the struggle for national liberation is a necessary component of the progression towards communism, of the development of the exploited masses’ revolutionary consciousness — but national-democratic revolutionaries are not to be confused with communists, and it is the duty of communists to struggle against these elements in order to win over the exploited masses.

It is notable that for Safarov, the national policy he proposes “coincides with another [task]: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule.” In effect, the alliance of the Russian workers and peasants with the toiling masses of the oppressed nations is mirrored by the alliance between the proletariat and the peasanty (the smychka). Just as the Russian proletariat was incapable of exercising power without the support and active participation of the peasantry (unless they wanted to wage a brutal war against the countryside), it was also unable to exercise power without the participation of the exploited strata of the oppressed nations. Safarov, clearly referencing the Basmachi movement, insists that attempting to exercise proletarian power over the oppressed nations, without taking into consideration their particular conditions and tasks, “can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development” — that is, a struggle against the Soviet Republic. This applies not only to the Soviet Republic internally, but also to the international revolution. Even Soviet economic policy is mirrored in Safarov’s vision for the global socialist economy: the peasant soviet republics of the once-oppressed nations, he says, will trade raw materials to the proletarian soviet socialist republics in exchange for manufactured goods and technical expertise, just as the New Economic Policy was founded upon equal exchange between the workers and the peasants. Safarov claims that this will allow the peasant soviet republics to develop at their own pace, so that they can “prepare for communism.”

The tendencies that Safarov identifies constitute an early version of a thesis later elaborated upon by postcolonial revolutionaries and scholars, such as Frantz Fanon. The thesis rejects both stageism—the idea that the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions are and must be entirely distinct events—and the notion that proletarian revolution must be directly transplanted to the colonies by the advanced proletariat of the imperial core, to the exclusion of a native, national-democratic revolution. These two stages of revolution—national and socialist—are not identical, but neither can they be isolated from each other.

We thus present these works as not only a part of the Bolsheviks’ debate on the national question, but also as a study on the dynamics of national oppression and revolution. We contend that these articles are not only a historical curiosity, but can provide insight into questions of imperialism, uneven economic development, and national oppression even today, along with the larger body of scientific study on the national question.

Bolshevik poster in Russian and Uzbek text, 1920, reads: “life of the eastern masses of the Soviet Union”

The Evolution of the National Question

Translated from “L’Évolution de la question nationale,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 4 (January 27, 1921).

I

The experience of the revolution has not been sufficiently instructive with regard to the national question. At the beginning of the October Revolution this question had not been posed as concretely, nor with such tangible importance and keenness as today. In the first year of soviet power, the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination manifested itself above all as the liquidation of the colonial heritage of the old Russian Empire. Tsarist Russia oppressed and enslaved the “allogenous peoples” (inorodtsy). Soviet power gave them national equality, up to and including the right to create an independent state. The needs of the struggle against internal counterrevolution made this question a problem of prime urgency. Thanks to the concentration of the proletariat in the big cities and the industrial regions of Central Russia, to the favourable strategic position inhabited by this proletariat over the course of Russian history, the seizure of power could not have been easier. But these same circumstances determined in advance the historic path of the Russian counterrevolution, bourgeois and aristocratic, a path travelling from the outer provinces towards the centre. All the preceding history of Russia had been the history of Russian colonisation, and this fact distinguished itself from the moment of the proletariat’s seizure of power: it brought us face to face with the necessity of overcoming the existing antagonism between the Russian proletarian centre and the outer provinces, which are neither Russian nor proletarian; between the Russian city and the non-Russian country. The key to victory was in the resolution of the national question. But obtaining this resolution has not been easy. It has been necessary, firstly, to educate the Russian proletarian masses, infected—at least among their backwards sections—by an unconscious nationalism that makes them see the Russian cities as the focal point of the revolution, and the non-Russian villages as the focal point of the petite bourgeoisie; this leads them to apply the same methods of attack against these villages as are employed against capital. It has been necessary on the other hand to overcome the age-old distrust of the non-Russian villages towards the Russian cities and factories. The cities and the factories were developed and fortified on the immense expanses of the peasant world, as centres of Russian colonisation. The Bashkir knows this all too well, as the factories in the south Urals took away all their wealth and land; the nomadic Kirghiz knows it all too well, and looks askance at the Orenburg, Kazalinsk, Petrovsk, and Tashkent railways, which have always been nests of the scorpions called “police”; the poor Ukrainian peasant, too, knows it all too well. The assault against capital, advancing beyond the outskirts of the city, encounters an environment where the classes were not distinguished. It comes up against an impassable wall of national distrust. The primary attitude of the oppressed, non-Russian countryside was above all the desire for the Russian cities to finally cease commanding them, and to let the oppressed nations freely pursue their proper path towards national development. The poor sections of the oppressed nations considered soviet power to be a force hostile to their national character. The well-off sections and the nationalists of the intellectual stratum, having become the direct object of requisitions and confiscations, as well as of the struggle against counterrevolution, speculation, and sabotage, saw soviet power as a direct menace to their class domination or to their privileges as intellectual workers. This state of mind naturally facilitated, in a large way, the projects of the Russian counterrevolution. Crushed in the first declared encounter, they naturally seized upon the principles of separation, decentralisation, and independence. Kolchak, “Supreme Leader of the Russian Forces,” and Denikin, leader of “Russia One and Indivisible,” are figures of the second period of the Russian counterrevolution. Before selling their beloved “Fatherland” on the global market, where the demand was not yet enough, the counterrevolution first engaged in business among themselves, in the outer provinces of the old Russian Empire.

The experience of the civil war taught the labouring masses of the oppressed nations that the Ukrainian Rada led to Hetman Skoropadskyi and the German general Eichhorn, which wasn’t far from Kolchak’s Alash Orda or the Musavatist government of the English oil barons. The masses of Russian proletarians inhabiting the frontiers understood, too, that without the middle peasant it was impossible to hold firm against the aristocrats and the generals, that without the allogenous peoples it was impossible to create global proletarian power. The immediate collision of Soviet Russia with international imperialism compelled the oppressed nations to stand with the Russian proletariat against imperialist dictatorship, since the latter excluded all possibility of democracy and national liberty. The civil war was terrible, but it made the peoples of Russia pass through entire eras of history. Over the course of the civil war the possessing classes of the oppressed nations demonstrated to even the most backwards their internal, profound impotence in maintaining their positions of national independence in the struggle between capital and the soviets.

The conclusion of this experience has been clear and indubitable: all the bourgeois-national movements, led by the ruling class, have a natural tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the great powers, the buffer states, and the colonies. The natural tendency, unconscious from the first, of all national-revolutionary movements, is, by contrast, to draw on the revolutionary governing organisation of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, in order to obtain, by this course, their freedom to develop their nation in the global socialist economic system presently being constructed. The structure of the Federation of Soviets of Russia, the decisions of the Congress of the Peoples of the East, the existing alliance with the eastern revolutionary movements with the European revolutionary proletariat, are proof of this.

Three years of soviet power have presented the national question on a global scale, as a question of class struggle.

II

We can thus say that soviet power is the algebraic formula of revolution. The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised this, in concluding that the backwards peoples, with the aid of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, and by means of the formation of soviets, can jump over the capitalist stage to immediately prepare for communism. This is not a rationale understood by the “socialist colonisers,” who proclaim all national features to be counterrevolutionary prejudices, and who recognise nothing other than the national prejudices of the dominant nations. Our Russian colonisers in no way differentiate themselves from the bourgeois socialists of the Yellow International. To combat them is to combat bourgeois—however radical it appears—influence on the proletariat. If we transplant the communist revolution, unaltered, to the backwards countries, we can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development. In these countries all the nationalisations and socialisations have about as much a basis as the nationalisation of the small peasant’s minuscule exploitation, or that of the cobblers’ awls. But the soviets are the class organisational form which permits the smooth advancement to communism, starting from the lowest stages of historical development. The semi-proletarian Kirghiz, the poor Bashkir, the Armenian peasant, each has wealthy classes in their country. These wealthy strata take away the former’s right to freely dispose of their labour, they enslave them as agrarian serfs, they divest them of the products of their labour, which they appropriate as a usurer’s profit; they keep them in ignorance; they maintain for themselves a sort of monopoly on the national culture, supported by the Mullahs, the Ishans, and the Ulamas. For the labourers of the backwards countries, bourgeois democracy can represent nothing other than a reinforcement of traditional domination, half-feudal, half-bourgeois. The brief experience of the “Kokand Autonomy”—which had more partisans among the Russian police than among the poor Muslims—, the experience of Alash Orda, the experience of Musavatist rule in Azerbaijan and Dashnak rule in Armenia, the recent experience of the pseudo-nationalist government of the Tehran merchants, taught in the imperialist countries of Europe, can all testify to this in perfect clarity. Six years of turmoil, 1914 to 1920, have brought hardship to the labourers of the backwards countries. The Kirghiz who were mobilised in 1916 to dig trenches have even now not been able to recover their lands, once given by the tsar to the rich peasants of Russia. The name “Kolchak” is well-known to the old allogenous peoples. The economic crisis, the absence of flour and cloth, has significantly exacerbated the subjugation of the poor class among the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan, etc.… The lack of land, far from being resolved, has done nothing but grow, as the shortage grows, and as the nomads are forced to become sedentary. In the countries of the East, placed between life and death by the yoke of English imperialism, the crisis clears the market of European products, but at the same time it augments the appetites of the Western generals, the adventurers and the national usurers. The only remedy to all these afflictions is the labourers’ soviets, which by grouping the exploited together must end class inequality, give the land to the poor, free the artisan from the usurious intermediaries, liberate the toilers from drudgery and taxes, begin the education of the masses and the radical betterment of their conditions of existence, all at the public expense. This entire programme has not a single communist element. It is only after its realisation that the preparation for communism can begin among the backwards peoples. Here, as everywhere, we must terminate that which has not terminated — which has been incapable of terminating — capitalism. The communist revolution, throughout its entire course, must struggle against the exploiters of all historic periods and all types. The soviets are the revolution’s primary weapon, the universal form of this struggle.

III

Soviet power has become the form by which the right of the oppressed peoples to self-determination manifests. The soviet organisation of the oppressed peoples, from the national point of view as from the political point of view, sets itself against a slew of practical barriers, arising from class inequality and from traditional injustices.

There are enormous spaces, populated by the nations formerly oppressed by tsarism, a great distance away from the railroads. A characteristic example: the Semirechye line, impossible to construct, although the remoteness of this region with respect to Turkestan proper permits the large Russian peasants to maintain an autonomous existence. The nomads fear the city, because they see it as an erstwhile nest of police.

There are no Muslim printed letters, because printing was the privilege of the dominant nation.

There is no one literate in the native language; in Turkestan the cantons are forced to lend secretaries between each other for their executive committees.

There are no specialists for intellectual labour, and intellectuals count only in the dozens. There is no one who can teach others to read and write. This summer in Turkestan we trained a thousand Muslim schoolmasters, but even in just the already-existing schools, we are still missing about 1500.

As regards Russian specialists, we can employ them in the colonial provinces only with the utmost precaution, as they were all more or less agents of the colonial yoke—the colonial plunder. Their distinctly Russian sabotage, which they decorate with bureaucratic scruples and references to decrees, carries a criminally systematic character.

Finally, white-Russian “internationalism” has not yet been completely uprooted in the Communist Party.

The application of all these measures comes up against obstacles: the absence of primers, of scholars, of native specialists, etc.

The Communist Party must clearly understand these facts. It must declare that the soviet autonomy of the oppressed nations is an urgent task for the Communist Party and for soviet power. We must concentrate the attention of the labouring masses, of the proletarian vanguard, and of the entire soviet and communist apparatus on this problem, as we have done in the past in regard to the middle peasant. The liberation of the East, where there is more national and class slavery than anywhere else, is today the centrepiece of our international policy — the international policy of the socialist proletariat. It is there that we will practically address the problem of organising the International Republic of Soviets and the global socialist economy. In three years of soviet power, the national question has undergone many changes. Declarative formulas have passed into the practical organisation of nations. From the military struggle with the national counterrevolution, we have passed to soviet autonomy. From the struggle with the internal counterrevolution we have passed to global policy. The conclusions that present themselves must be taken up by the Commissariats of Agriculture and of Procurement, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and all the other relevant organs, so that an excessive zeal to execute our labour mobilisations, our taxes-in-kind, etc., will not generate a so-called “counterrevolution.” Our entire party must be mobilised morally to the service of the national liberation of the oppressed. 

Soviet poster from Baku, 1920, text in Azeri, reads: “Through their strong union, workers and peasants destroy oppressors.”

The East and Revolution

Translated from “L’Orient et la Révolution,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 17 (April 28, 1921). Originally appeared in German in Die kommunistische Internationale, no. 15 (December 1920).

The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised that “the masses of the backwards countries, led by the conscious proletariat of the developed capitalist countries, will arrive at communism without passing through the different stages of capitalist development.” We came to recognise this principle through the experience of the national soviet republics in the territory of the former Russian Empire, and through the revolutionary awakening of the colonial peoples and the oppressed nationalities of the East: India, China, Persia, Turkey, etc.… These peoples were cut off from the course of their historical development by European imperialism. They found themselves excluded from the technical revolution, from the rupture with the old social forms, and from the progress of civilisation. European capitalism did not at all revolutionise the mode of production in these countries. It did nothing but erect its own superstructure—in the form of an imperialist bureaucracy, of a commercial agency of European capital and a European “importation” industry—upon the feudal-patriarchal regime which had constituted itself over the course of centuries. It reinforced the exploitation of the agrarian population, by seizing the best lands, the sources of materials and fuel, but did not eliminate the old, reactionary feudal forms of exploitation. Where it could, for example in the Indies, it destroyed the local industry of petty artisans, by saturating the native markets with items manufactured in Europe, outcompeting the locally-manufactured items. Labour, rendered unoccupied by the elimination of petty production, became employed in agriculture. The establishment of industrial hegemony, and the military and political dictatorship of European capital in the colonies, led the great majority of the native population to become “attached to the land” so to speak, and inevitably also to emigration of the surplus population to the industrial centres (such as the exodus of Persians, reduced to finding work in Baku), and the horrific mortalities that periodically desolate certain countries in times of scarcity (India).

The Role of European Capitalism

Therefore, European capitalism has retarded the economic development of the colonies, just as much as it has the development of culture; it has artificially maintained the old social forms and the old reactionary ideology. Certainly, it could not have manifested otherwise in this part of the world and, all things considered, it has fulfilled its role as unconscious revolutionary agent. Friedrich Engels himself recognised this “civilising mission,” even as it concerns former tsarist Russia. In a letter to Karl Marx on May 23, 1851, he wrote, “Russian rule, despite its wickedness, despite its Slavic dirtiness, has a civilising influence on the Black and Caspian Seas and on Central Asia, on the Bashkirs and Tatars.” But here he misses the point. Capitalism of “importation” has the particularity that, in the colonies, it does not in practice follow the same method as in Europe and America. It does not develop the land for capitalist production. The colonialists burn the land to clear it for agriculture, they grow all sorts of grains until the ground is rendered completely barren, and then they abandon it for new lands. It is intensive cropping in all its rapacious brutality. The ruined artisan is not transformed into the industrial proletarian, but is rather transported by force to the countryside, where he has to work as a half-serf day labourer, and becomes literally the rich landlord’s or director’s workhorse, a slave to European exploitation. The nomad who lost his herd meets the same fate. The autonomous petty producer, who does not go to sell his labour on a capitalist farm, is reduced to misery, and becomes the insolvent debtor to the local usurer and to the European commissioner. At the same time that it destroys the native small industry and ruins the agrarian economy, European capitalism reserves all the offices, all the honours and all the important posts to the bearers of “high culture”, to Europeans.

The European is engineer, overseer, commissioner, administrator; the native, labourer and farmer. Just as in capitalist society, the development of the productive forces is accomplished through the intensification of the dominion of capital over labour, in the colonies this development has augmented the class antagonisms between the dominating nation and the oppressed nation. European capitalism barely disturbed the native elites, nor the exploiters of the peoples it oppresses. The big landlords, the merchants, the native usurers, the clergy, and even the police are left at their posts, legitimised by habit, by religion and by history. Only, above them, new figures appeared; the representatives of the imperialist bureaucracy and European capital, the Christian missionaries and the commercial agents. To the feudal exploitation of the peasant by the big landlord, the usurer, and the despotic state was added the oppression of the whole nation by foreign capital. In addition, the European yoke, far from destroying the backwards civil and familial customs, the traditional ancestral ideology, did nothing but consolidate them, by making them dear to the oppressed masses, who see in them a form of conserving their national culture, as well as a weapon in their struggle for political autonomy and their own culture, against the violent assimilation by European capital. This is what explains the strength of pan-Slavism, pan-Mongolism, pan-Asianism (“Asia for Asians!”), and other analogous movements that tend to consolidate the position of the possessing classes in the oppressed nationalities.

“The desire to safeguard the old, backwards forms of production from the invasion of capitalism: this is the economic base that has realised, without difficulty, the unification of the immense masses dispersed across the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe.”1 Pan-Islamism as well as other, analogous movements are prominent examples.

European capitalism has not yet had the time to dissolve in the industrial furnace the population of the colonies and the half-enslaved peoples of the East, which the communist revolution and the European proletariat will break open. This is the fatal consequence of this imbalance in the development of different parts of the global economy, an imbalance that constitutes the very essence of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism has dug an abyss between developed industry and the backwards rural economy. Capitalism has created a contradiction between the production of articles of consumption and the production of the means of production themselves. It has created a collision between the industrial progress of Europe and the backwards economic state of the colonies. It is exactly the transformation of industrial capitalism into imperialism that has caused the world war.

During the imperialist war, many colonial peoples were forced to provide military contingents and working-class armies for the war in Europe. The imperialist war brought the national question to the forefront, on a world-historic and world economic scale. Relying on Turkey, German imperialism attempted to draw into its camp the peoples of the East. The Entente’s imperialism, by virtue of its international situation, naturally had to speculate instead on its relationship with the Latin and Slavic peoples of Europe.

The Military and Political Dictatorship of Conquest

The imperialist war stripped away from the colonies all the “advantages” of their connection with European capital—commodities, the technical and capital means of the Europeans—and at the same time added cannon-fodder and a multitude of raw materials to the usual colonial tribute. The political yoke was equally strengthened. The result of the war was, on the one hand, the spoils of Versailles, and on the other hand the proletarian revolution in Russia and the revolutionary crisis in Europe. Thus, the march of the revolution in the East was predetermined. The war inhibited the base, the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, not only for the national economy of each country in particular, but for the entire global economy. In Europe, the industrious and enterprising capitalist of peacetime—who, hiring labour everywhere and constantly searching for new available capital, would constantly flood the market with streams of commodities—has been replaced with the speculator, declared enemy of large consumption, conscious protagonist of the continual reduction of social production; likewise, in the East, the European travelling salesman, the “peaceful conqueror” has been replaced with the true conqueror, the peacemaker with gold epaulettes, clad in menacing armour made in the European military style, and equipped with a “mandate” for an indeterminate number of colonial slaves and for limitless territory. In Europe, civil war has created an economic necessity for military dictatorship. The awakening of the oppressed peoples of Asia to the struggle for their national existence has equally created an economic necessity of the strengthening of capital’s doctrine of conquest in the East. The military dictatorship in Europe, and the doctrine of conquest in Asia, have been the only means for capitalism to enlarge its base of production, amidst the global disorganisation and the general revolutionary crisis. Looting one to make gifts for the other, making gifts to this one to loot a third, and so on, without end: this is the real essence of the politics of international imperialism, obligated to zig-zag before the proletarian revolution in Europe and the colonial revolution in Asia.

From this peril emerges the community of interests and solidarity in the struggle. The alliance with the European communist proletariat has emerged as an urgent historical necessity for the peoples of the East. The grand course of world history has seen the collision of capitalism with its direct successors—the revolutionary proletarians—and with its bastards—the oppressed peoples. Capitalism has divided humanity into dominant and oppressed nations. The revolution has brought about the union of the workers of the dominant nations with the majority of labourers in the oppressed nations.

It is through the proletarian revolution in Russia that the global revolutionary crisis has begun. The victory of the proletariat in the empire of the tsars, this “prison house of nations,” has given this alliance a concrete manifestation. The Russian revolutionary A. I. Herzen wrote, “The Europeans consider Russia to be Asia; the Asians, for their part, consider Russia to be Europe.” This was the situation of tsarist Russia. In Europe, it fulfilled the role of the international gendarme; in Asia, it conducted the power politics of European bandits. As strange as it may seem, this ancient formula, if turned on its head, characterises the present situation. To the eyes of Europe, the bankers and the big proprietors, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic appears as the propagator of a terrible infection called “Asiatic bolshevism.” In the East, Russia finds itself as the bearer of the ideas of European communist revolution. It is in this phenomenon that we find the revolutionary importance of our geographic position between the East and the West. The Russian proletariat, the vanguard, had to practically resolve the accession of the masses of petty producers to the communist revolution; it had to resolve the question of the transformation of national movements from national-democratic into socialist-revolutionary…. The past march of historical development will sweep them to victory. Concentrated in the great halls of large industry, able to animate immense spaces, the proletariat, from the first, finds itself in a strategic position more advantageous than that of its enemies; the counterrevolution had to take the offensive from the outer reaches of the country, where it has attempted to draw upon the possessing and exploiting strata, upon the nations once oppressed by tsarism. In effect, all the prior history of Russia has been the “history of colonisation”!2

One of the first acts of the proletarian government was to enact “the declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia” (2 November 1917), in which it recognised the right of self-determination, up to and including the right of separation from Russia—the right to form a distinct national state—for all the peoples of the old tsarist empire. Be that as it may, to manifest the right to national autonomy in the soviet form, it is necessary above all to overcome the historical contradiction between the Russian city and the non-Russian village, deprived of all national rights. It is necessary to win the confidence of the toiling masses of the oppressed nations, by eliminating the unconscious nationalism with which the backward elements of the Russian working masses are imbued; and by clearly demonstrating to the oppressed masses the true nature of soviet power, the power of the toilers. In truth, this task coincides with another: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule; and it is this that will enable the solution. The counterrevolution will help to unmask bourgeois democracy before the eyes of the middle peasant, who sees, hiding behind the grand rhetoric of revolutionary socialism, a new landlord. The counterrevolution will contribute to eliminating the illusions of the labourers of tsarist-oppressed nations in national-bourgeois democracy. In effect, during the civil war, the counterrevolutionary nationalists have swerved to march openly behind the bellicose nationalist intellectuals, who present themselves as the old Russian police, as flag-waving Russian patriots, as European imperialists. Kolchak, Denikin, Mannerheim, Skoropadskyi, and the Allied and German generals have thus unmasked the Kirghiz “Alash Orda,” Petliura’s Ukrainian partisans, and many others.

The Separation of Classes

We can say without exaggeration that the separation between the classes of the oppressed nations has occurred only over the course of the civil war. It is through direct struggle, as class interests collide, that the masses have acquired revolutionary experience; and because of this revolutionary experience, they have moved on to new forms of social organisation. The Kirghiz steppes gave birth to “Alash Orda,” declared partisan of the Constituent Assembly in Samara which brought about the rise of Kolchak; and it was under Kolchak’s boot that the labouring Kirghiz masses consciously rallied to soviet power. Bashkiria underwent the same experience. Ukraine had to pass through an even longer series of successive stages: in the first place, the struggle between the Rada and soviet power put pressure on the new workers; next, the German general Eichhorn, in league with the ataman Pavlo Skoropadskyi; after them, Petliura and the French generals took their turn; then, the brief establishment of soviet power, overthrown by the unrest of the rural magnates and Petliura’s partisans; after that, the representative of a Russia “one and indivisible,” Denikin; and lastly, through the inevitable logic of the events, Ukrainian soviet power. Vynnychenko’s metamorphosis from leader of the bourgeois Rada to the vice-president of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic is the most telling of all these displays.

It is over the course of the civil war between the dictatorship of the proletariat and imperialism that soviet power has become the form of national autonomy and of class differentiation among the toiling masses of the oppressed nations. On the territory of the old Russian Empire, the alliance of the oppressed peoples with the revolutionary proletariat has taken shape in the form of the socialist federation of national soviet republics. The soviet revolution among the peoples of the East, who once formed an integral part of the Russian Empire, has bridged the gulf between the communist West and the revolutionary East.

The Russian proletariat knew to take advantage of their special situation, to simultaneously challenge the imperialism of millions of communists—of the European proletariat—and the threatening wall that is the revolting toilers in the East. Comrade Lenin well noted the international significance of various essential traits of our revolution, when he spoke of “the inevitable historical repetition, on the international scale, of what has occurred here.”3 Soviet power, that is the state form of the labouring masses, has been victoriously tested in practice in the revolutionary industrial city of Petrograd, as well as in the Russian hamlet of the Vyatka Gubernia; among the Tatar peasants dwelling on the Volga, as in the Ukrainian villages; in the East so strongly attached to its national customs, in the East where patriarchy reigns and where blood ties are still so important to everyday life, in the lands of the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan and Azerbaijan. Everywhere, soviet power has demonstrated its strength. Karl Marx already noted this peculiarity of proletarian government in his critique of Paris Commune. “The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”4

The revolution accelerates the progress of events to the highest point. It accentuates class contradictions to the extreme, even in the most backwards areas. The long, historic learning process makes way for a learning process governed by the revolutionary method. Peoples and social classes develop, over the course of a few months, more than over dozens of years of normal development.

Soviet propaganda poster from 1921 targeting Muslim women, reads “Now I too am free.”

Oppressors and Oppressed

The world revolution against imperialism places the oppressors and the oppressed on the same level.

The transformation of bourgeois-national movements into social-revolutionary movements has its origins in the conflict of class interests—conflict that manifests with a particular acuity among nations engaged in the struggle for independence, and which can equally be provoked by an external influence: that of the international situation. The elimination of bourgeois domination in the advanced nations necessarily pulls the more backwards nations along the road of the soviet revolution. The counterrevolution then involves itself as an aggressor.

The dictatorship of imperialism unmasks bourgeois nationalism in the West as well as in the East. The dominant strata of the oppressed nations endeavour immediately to seize control of the state machinery and their class victims. For them, the national revolution is the expansion of the national foundation of exploitation. This expansion consists in the manufacturer, the merchant, and the large landlord expelling the foreign interlopers and creating their own state apparatus of class oppression. On the other hand, at the same time, “a class of intellectuals develops and their own written language transforms into a necessity of the national culture, even if in substance this culture had to be very international. And if a nation feels the need for a national intelligentsia, this class, in turn, feels the need for a great, intellectually developed nation.”5

The national bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectual class want to have their market, their stock exchange, their bureaucracy, their officer corps, their writers and journalists, their ministers, their representatives, their teachers and their musicians. At the start, their national need finds its expression in bourgeois development. But this need, in the global economic disorganisation and revolutionary crisis, inevitably falls into class contradictions in a nation that has won its national independence. Democracy, in the name of the national interest, transforms into a national bourgeois dictatorship. Finland, a country with ancient democratic traditions, is a poignant example. “It seemed to us,” writes Comrade Kuusinen, on the beginning of the revolution in Finland, “that parliamentary democracy opened a wide and straight path for our workers’ movement, leading right to our aim. Our bourgeoisie had neither army nor police; what’s more, it didn’t even have the possibility of organising them legally, as to do so they would need the assent of the socialist majority in parliament.”6 And nevertheless, the bourgeoisie organised its white guard and defeated the Finnish working class with the aid of the German imperialists.

Bourgeois democracy is now unable to ensure national peace in the countries that have become independent and which contain national minorities. This is the practical experience of Ukraine: “Petit-bourgeois democracy cannot maintain its power in Ukraine, as the internecine struggle fractures it into hostile parties.”7 The intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, in a nation that frees itself, profess an aggressive bourgeois nationalism, and this leads them to betray the cause of national liberation, to pass into the camp of the imperialists, from which they buy their bourgeois domination at the price of national freedom. The examples are legion: Latvia, Ukraine, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, the Musavat government in Azerbaijan, Greece, “the Israelite state of Palestine,” the pseudo-national state of Persia which, in fear of its soviet revolution, has thrown itself into the arms of the British, etc. The aggressive nationalism of the oppressed nations’ bourgeoisie and large landlords makes their countries into buffer states of the imperialist powers against the revolution. As a result, social conflict—class antagonism—manifests first of all in the domain of the national interest: the labouring masses reclaim their national independence from the yoke of the imperialists; the exploiting strata cling to their class privileges and, because the foreign yoke was, up until that moment, a powerful means of conserving the most reactionary forms of exploitation—in the east, feudal and patriarchal customs—, the revolutionary awakening of the labouring masses transports the revolution from the national terrain to that of social relations. The national question is raised as one of class inequality. The reason is perfectly clear: if industrial capital and the intelligentsia are, in the early stages, the protagonists of national liberation, the big landlords and the native bureaucracy are the declared partisans of European assimilation. The national revolution, waged against the foreign invaders and the native big landlords, therefore pushes the merchant class into the camp of imperialist puppets. Thus we reach this general conclusion: all the bourgeois-national movements led by the possessing strata—by the exploiting strata—have an objective tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the “great powers,” to transform into “buffer states” and colonies. At the outset, the strictly historic, unconscious tendency of all national-revolutionary movements of the labouring masses, in the colonies and in the half-enslaved countries, is to draw on a revolutionary state organisation, a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries, to ensure the freedom of national development in the forming global socialist economy.

The advent of organs of autonomous revolutionary management—the anjoman of the first Persian Revolution, the experience of the eastern national soviet republics, the beginning of the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, the birth of communist movements in Persia, in Turkey, in China, and in the Indies—all this proves that the labouring masses of the East are marching towards the international federation of national soviet republics.

For the Grouping of Communist Elements

It was in understanding the above that the 2nd Congress of the Communist International decided to support national revolutionary movements in the colonies and in the backwards countries, but under the express condition that the truly communist elements of the future workers’ parties in these countries are grouped together and instructed in their special tasks, in the necessity that they combat the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nations; the Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and the backwards countries, nevertheless without ever fusing with it; and in conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form. In the East, as in the West, the way to soviet power has been paved by the process of capitalist development itself. In the West, it was paved by the transformation of “peaceful” industrial capitalism, of imperialism and bourgeois democracy into military dictatorship; in the East, by the implantation of capitalism as a foreign organisation of class domination, as a superstructure over the native society. In India, as the Indian communist Comrade Roy noted, “we are seeing, for the first time in history, an entire people being economically exploited by a true state power.”8 But it is not thus only in India. Russian Turkestan, up until the revolution, was in the same situation. Still today, we see the same state of affairs in Persia, in China, in all the colonies. As for the governmental organisation of the native exploiters, this is relatively weak in the East, where it adopts a purely feudal character.

On the subject of Persia, Victor Bérard had this to say: “Persia is neither a state nor a nation. It is the strange combination of a feudal anarchy and a centralised taxation system, the unstable mix of nomadic tribes and barely settled farmers, Moluk-us-Sawaif, as the natives say, monarchical federation or, more precisely, royal flock of nations.”9

The oppressive and exploitative character of state power is evident here. The base of all social life is the small farmer, ferociously exploited by the feudal state, by the large landowner, and by commercial capital, the true usurer.

The fact that, in the East, state power—as much the native feudal power as the power of the “invaders,” the European imperialists—manifests above all as the immediate exploiter of the population in the economic domain, has an immense political importance: no political revolution is possible in this situation without an economic revolution. Experience confirms this. “Just like their Western counterparts, the exploiting plutocracies of the Near-Eastern countries make every effort to give their rule the appearance of popular rule. The introduction of parliamentarism in Turkey and in Persia, as well as the transformation of Georgia (under the leadership of the Mensheviks), Armenia (under the leadership of the Dashnaks), and Azerbaijan (under the leadership of the Musavatists) into democratic republics, took place under the slogan of ‘Liberty and Equality.’ Nevertheless, every one of these politicians was incapable of providing even the illusion of democracy. The masses of people drown in unbelievable misery, while the agents of foreign imperialism swim in opulence. The land remains in the hands of its old owners, the old fiscal system remains in place, bringing immeasurable harm to the labourers, and the state not only tolerates, but encourages usury.”10

The Form of the Revolution in the East

The “bourgeois-democratic” revolution, in the East, inevitably takes the form of a dynastic revolution: it expands the privileges of the exploiters, but does not alleviate the burden of exploitation for the oppressed one bit. Native feudalism does nothing but assume the cast-offs of “European democracy.”

The East is living history. In some places, we still find remnants of the primitive communitarian society (clan, patriarchy), where patriarchal and feudal customs are conserved in full force. The religion of the East is simultaneously social and political. It consecrates the existing civil and familial order. It is the direct support for social inequality. It plays about the same role as Catholicism in the Middle Ages. “From the point of view of the orthodox Muslim, the theocratic Muslim state is the community of believers, of which the earthly representative is the ‘sultan’ (sovereign, leader); he is no more than the representative of God on Earth, a representative with a mission to take care—in conformity with the exigencies of ‘sharia’ (religious law)—of the civil and religious affairs of the community entrusted to him by God. To accomplish this, he, the ‘amiliami’ (the collectors of the ‘zakat,’ a ritual tax), and other civil servants receive a modest compensation of forty kopeks per day. The ‘zakat,’ which is meant to be used to help the poor, orphans, and invalids; to wage war against the infidels; in short, to serve the needs of society and the state, has become, in the hands of the latest Muslim sovereigns, a personal revenue that they use as they please, without any control and in an absolutely illegal fashion; the troops and even the popular militia, created to war against the infidels, to propagate Islam by force of arms, and to protect the community from outside enemies, are transformed bit by bit into the sovereign’s bodyguards, used to oppress the people and serving exclusively the personal or dynastic interests of these sovereigns. The Muslim community has been transformed into rayat, into herds of docile, mute slaves.”11

The centuries-long domination of the total surplus-value of labour was necessarily an obstacle to the expansion of social production, and it hindered all technical and economic progress. The primitive hoe (ketmen) and plough (omach) are still practically the only agricultural tools of the Central Asian farmer. There, capital is naturally stalled in its development; it has not gone further than usury and the sale of produce at the bazaar.

Religious law (sharia) defines property rights thus: “Property (mulk) is all that man possesses, whether it be the thing itself or its fruits.” This definition is the loyal reflection of primitive forms of production: religion recognises the proprietor’s right to sell the things that belong to him, as well as its “fruits”; it recognises his right to dispose of the surplus product of his natural goods.

A multitude of peoples in the East have not completely reached agricultural life in their evolution (the Kirghiz, the Turkomans, the Arabs, the tribal peoples of northern India, the Kurds, etc.). Nevertheless, among these peoples the survival of the primitive communal society has, over time, become a source of exploitation of the poor majority by the rich clan leaders. For example, we will look at the Kirghiz of the steppes. “Possessors of an extensive economy, the rich Kirghiz has already completely renounced physical labour; he is no more than the manager, the administrator; those who do the work are the day-labourers. The number of these labourers varies on average from seven to nine by economy, but there are economies where twenty labourers are exploited, or even more. A curious phenomenon to observe in the economy of the rich Kirghiz is the union of traits characteristic of modern capitalism with those of primitive nomadic society… The clan, despite its evident decomposition, still remains the legitimate proprietor of a given territory in the Kirghiz consciousness. The rich Kirghiz, abiding by this boundlessness of the right to use the land, covets considerable advantages: he puts to pasture his numerous herds without obstacle on all the territory of his relatives. Even up to the present, he has nothing pushing him to close off his land from that of the mass of the Kirghiz people.”12

The Task at Hand

From the above, we can easily understand why the Congress of the Revolutionary Peoples of the East (Baku, September 1920) recognised that “the soviet system is the only one which truly gives the labouring masses the possibility of taking power from their natural enemies, the upper classes (large landowners, speculators, high functionaries, officers), and to determine their own fate. Only soviet power empowers the poor labourers to take and keep the land from the landowners. The amalgamation of the soviets in large federations, and their autonomy within the framework of these federations: this is the only means for the toilers of different countries, who once warred among each other in the East, to pursue a peaceful existence, to destroy the foreign and native oppressors’ power, and to defeat all attempts by these oppressors to restore the old state of things.” To the forceful organisation of petty production and exploitation from above, the revolution substitutes the autonomous revolutionary organisation of the petty producers—the half-workers—in the form of the workers’ soviets. “Eliminate the prime cause of all oppression and exploitation—the power of the invading foreign capitalists and native tyrants (sultans, shahs, khans, beys, with all their bureaucrats and parasites)—seize power and exercise it in all domains (administrative, economic, and financial); refuse to fulfil any obligations to the feudal landlords and overthrow their authority; eliminate all personal and economic dependence on the landlords; abolish the large estates, under whatever legal form they may take; take the land from the large landlords without compensation or indemnities, and share it among the peasants, the farmers and the day-labourers who cultivate it”13: this is the task at hand. The alliance between the peasant soviet republics of the East with the soviet socialist republics of the West: this is the path that communism must pursue, to take hold of the entire global economy.

The proletariat of the West will help the toilers of the East with their knowledge, their technical expertise, and their organisational forces. The peasant soviet republics will provide the socialist industry of the West with the raw materials and fuel that it needs. Such an international division of labour between the city and the village, on the basis of amicable collaboration, is necessitated by the logic of the struggle against global economic disorganisation—the evident manifestation of capitalism’s decomposition. It is solely by this division of labour that we can eliminate the dependence of the Eastern people’s economy on the guardianship of the European and American banks, trusts, and syndicates.

The path to salvation of European industry, which suffers from a lack of raw materials and fuel necessary for its development, is the socialist industrial colonisation of the East. The soviets are not a repressive regime against the national customs and traditions of the peoples of the East; they will not drag these peoples by force into the kingdom of liberty. On the contrary, they will make them find their own path towards communism, by the cooperation of petty producers, by the organisation of public works (irrigation systems), and the formation of state enterprises.

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The Winnipeg General Strike: from Revolt to Revolution?

Medway Baker analyzes the Winnipeg General Strike, possibly the height of class struggle in Canada, for its centennial.

Strike Crowd gathers at Victoria Park, 1919

Today marks the hundred-year anniversary of the beginning of the Winnipeg General Strike. An icon of the Canadian socialist mythology, the Winnipeg General Strike is emblematic of the 1919 Canadian labour revolt and the reformation of the Canadian left between 1917 and 1921. More broadly, it speaks to the spontaneism common to much of the revolutionary left worldwide at the time. It is a lesson in the need for a workers’ party able to command the allegiance of the majority of the working class, with a revolutionary strategy and a clear program leading inexorably to a rupture with bourgeois society.

The Canadian revolutionary left prior to 1917 was small and had relatively little experience in labour struggles, but its message rang loud and clear to the Canadian proletariat. The Socialist Party of Canada (SPC), the first nominally nationwide revolutionary party, was formed in 1904 from a merger of several socialist clubs and sects, mostly concentrated in British Columbia, where it had its largest support.1 The leading current of the SPC was impossiblist: much like its sister party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, it rejected all kinds of reformism, which to many of the party’s leading intellectuals included economic struggles. The political struggle was limited to election campaigns, the purpose of which was to educate the working class so that it could ultimately emancipate itself. The role of the party was purely to propagandise, and until 1912 it remained aloof from the trade union movement. Nonetheless, the party held seats in the British Columbia legislature from 1903 to 1912, and did fight for and win important reforms to improve working conditions—even as E.T. Kingsley, one of the party’s primary theoreticians, derided conflicts between employers and workers as mere “commodity struggles” rather than a part of the class struggle itself.2 This line was essentially a sort of ultra-leftist spontaneism, which in the final case is not much different from reformism: socialists were meant to wait for the final upsurge, which would occur only when the material conditions necessitated it: when the forces of production had developed to the point that capitalism could no longer be sustained, and the socialists, through achieving majority support, could peacefully take power.

Western Clarion, newspaper of the SPC

 

This impossibilist line did not sit comfortably with some party branches, especially in Manitoba and Ontario, outside of the SPC’s western heartland. Beginning in 1907, branches gradually broke off from the SPC, until they formed the Social Democratic Party of Canada (SDP) in 1911. The SDP favoured alliances with non-Marxist groups in the labour movement. At the same time, a handful of SPC locals in southern Ontario split because they viewed the party as too reformist; these formed the Socialist Party of North America (SPNA). The SPNA, while anti-electoralist, concluded that its members should join the trade unions whenever possible in order to propagandize among the organized workers.3 Meanwhile, in 1912, a shift occurred in the SPC leadership, from doctrinaire intellectuals to active trade unionists. The SPC proceeded to win a majority of the executive positions in the BC Federation of Labour,4 which went on to endorse the SPC’s program.5

Thus, on the eve of the First World War, three sects constituted Canada’s Marxist left: the Socialist Party of Canada, the Social Democratic Party, and the Socialist Party of North America. All three were involved in the labour movement in different parts of the country, while the SPC and SDP had some experience with electoral politics. The SDP, despite its rather reformist leadership, had a large number of language federations for immigrants from Eastern Europe, which tended to stand on the left of the party. All three of these sects suffered during the war when their membership depleted and their activities ground to a halt under the weight of war propaganda and state repression.6 It was only in 1917 that the left was revived, and at the same time split over a single issue: Bolshevism.

Majorities in the SPC and SPNA supported the October Revolution, while the left and right of the SDP progressed towards an all-out split, with the language federations supporting the revolution, while the English section largely began favoring their own party’s liquidation into an analog of the British Labour Party. The SPC, the left of the SDP, and the SPNA began to speak of uniting around the program of Bolshevism.7 However, despite these talks of the “party of a new type” and the Bolshevik program, the revolutionary left remained spontaneist, and in these formative years worked to build not a mass party that could develop into a counter-hegemonic force in society, but rather a minoritarian “vanguard” party that would intervene in the class struggle in order to propagandize for socialism. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of ordinary workers attended public meetings, went on strike, and called for the nationalization of the means of production. Trade union militants spoke of revolution, and the labour movement, which had fallen nearly silent during the first years of the war, ballooned beyond its prewar levels.8

Yet despite clear support for socialist principles among the working class, the revolutionary Marxist sects did not grow to encompass a real contingent of the class. They began working, instead, to influence the working class so that they would rise up and battle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marxists in Ontario told striking workers, “we don’t oppose your strike, but you have to take the next step to insurrection!” Many of them seem to have been more familiar with Pannekoek than with Lenin9, even as they proudly proclaimed themselves Bolsheviks. The eastern labour movement thus remained dominated by conservatives, who went on to dominate the 1918 convention of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC). In the West, where the Marxists had a more organic connection to the labour movement,10 the left won the leadership of the major workers’ organizations and began to formulate a singular strategy for the 1919 TLC convention. This led to the Western Labour Conference in March 1919, where the left held a firm majority.

The resolutions at this conference were explicitly revolutionary: calls for the abolition of private property, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and for a general strike. The TLC convention was forgotten, and in fact the conference voted to secede from the TLC and form a new, revolutionary industrial union: the One Big Union (OBU).11 While the OBU has been termed syndicalist by some historians,12 this charge is bizarre: its instigators came largely from the SPC, which had always been critical of the IWW’s syndicalism and was committed to political action through a revolutionary party.13 The OBU was not seen by its founders as the primary organ of revolution, but as one weapon among many to be used by the working class in its formation as a class for itself.14 In fact, it seems that it was not quite clear to the OBU’s founders what its practical function was to be.15 It was for the rank and file workers, not the political leadership, to wield the OBU for their own revolutionary ends.16 The SPC had no revolutionary strategy to guide the working class to power, no clear vision of what the tasks of revolutionaries were; as before the war, they saw their activities as consisting primarily of the education of the working class.

Meanwhile, a strike wave was building across the country. 1919 would go down in Canadian history as the most militant year for labour, as nearly 150,000 strikers across the country fought for their rights and the rights of their fellow workers. The strikes of that year can be divided into three categories: first, local strikes addressing the usual issues of union recognition, pay, and work hours; second, general strikes called in support of such local strikes; and third, sympathy strikes called in support of the Winnipeg General Strike.17 All three of these occurred across the country, despite the East’s more conservative labour bureaucracy.

The most famous of these strikes began in Winnipeg in May. Although the OBU had not yet officially been formed, Peter Campbell insists that “the idea of the One Big Union, which aimed at the linking of socialist theory and trade union protest” was an important factor in the progression of the strike, and further that “it was the interaction between trade unionists and Marxian socialists that made the labour revolt of 1919 as widespread and effective as it was.”18 In this sense, the SPC was moving towards the “merger formula,” that is, the notion that the socialist movement is the result of a meeting between socialist theory and the workers’ movement. However, it was not able to provide the workers’ movement with a clear strategy for taking power and therefore failed to direct the 1919 labour revolt into a real revolutionary movement.

The Winnipeg General Strike was a response to employers’ refusal to bargain with metal and building tradesmen—the metal, mining, and shipbuilding trades were at the forefront of class struggle in 1919.19 The Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council called a general strike on May 15, with only 500 votes against the proposition versus over 11,000 in favor. Within 24 hours, over 22,000 workers had walked off the job, many of whom were not even unionized; the final number was over 30,000, a clear majority of the city’s working population. A Strike Committee was formed to manage the affairs of the striking workers, and it found itself in control of the city’s labour: workers selectively performed only certain essential jobs in accordance with the Strike Committee’s will. In effect, it planned the city’s economy for the duration of the strike, at least in a partial sense. The police union also voted overwhelmingly for the strike, but at the request of the Strike Committee (in agreement with the mayor) they remained on the job—it was hinted that the army would be brought in to substitute the police if they walked off.20 Although the striking workers had no goal beyond union recognition and basic wage demands, they had effectively taken control of the administration of the city. Winnipeg, whether the workers were aware of it or not, was ruled (at least in part) by a workers’ council—the Strike Committee.

It is clear, therefore, that the formation of workers’ councils in itself is not a sign of impending revolution or mass class-consciousness. The vast majority of Winnipeg workers had no desire to install the dictatorship of the proletariat. The strike could not advance beyond the immediate aims of the workers without the leadership of a workers’ party with a revolutionary program. The Strike Committee urged workers not to take to the streets, to avoid confrontation with the government. It was the veterans’ organizations, not the Strike Committee, that organized the street demonstrations that did occur.21 In fact, the SPC-led Vancouver General Strike (one of many across the country called in sympathy with the Winnipeg workers) made more radical demands than those being put forward by the Winnipeg Strike Committee, including the universal recognition of trade unions, the nationalization of cold storage plants, slaughterhouses, and grain elevators (to end the hoarding of foodstuffs), and the enactment of the six-hour workday in industries suffering from large-scale unemployment.22 In spite of this, the Vancouver strike collapsed not long after the workers in Winnipeg were defeated: the SPC was not willing to continue fighting a battle that it knew it could not win.

Strikers take to the streets

The bourgeoisie was not nearly so naïve as Winnipeg’s working class. In opposition to the Strike Committee, Winnipeg’s bourgeoisie formed a “Citizens’ Committee” made up of the city’s businessmen, lawyers, and officials with the purpose of organizing the maintenance of public utilities. The commander of Winnipeg’s military district, Major General Ketchen, was present at the creation of this organization and would collaborate with them throughout the strike. They began circulating their own newspaper, which stated on the front page of the first edition that this was not a strike, but a revolution.23

The bourgeois press across the country repeated this sensationalist lie and compared Winnipeg to Soviet Russia. Xenophobia was central to anti-Bolshevism in this period: Eastern European socialists were repressed far more harshly than anglophone socialists, and the Citizens’ Committee pushed a narrative that the strike was being led by these “foreigners.”24 The strikers and their comrades across the country waged war against the press: shortly after the beginning of the strike, Winnipeg’s six wire-services operators walked off the job, cutting short all transcontinental press communications until direct communication was established between Ontario and Saskatchewan. Telegraphers west of Winnipeg resisted this attempt to circumvent the Winnipeg strike by refusing to handle items originating in Winnipeg or even altering stories directly. The Strike Committee proposed to have the operators return to work if all news items were passed by a special committee for approval, but the bourgeois press rejected the suggestion. The Winnipeg typographers were also pressured to join the strike, shutting down the city’s three newspapers; the Strike Committee began to produce its own daily newspaper in their place.25 The class struggle had spread to the domain of information: workers and the bourgeois press battled to present their respective narratives of the situation.

The Strike Committee soon found that it had not prepared itself sufficiently for the task of administering a city. When, on the morning after the beginning of the strike, the bread and milk delivery wagons failed to do their rounds, there was widespread panic. The Strike Committee formed a special food subcommittee to organize the distribution of staples and approached the city council to work out a solution to the problem. This cooperation with the bourgeois state is emblematic of a working-class lacking the ability to govern society, with no civic institutions of its own. Once again, the SPC and SDP had failed to prepare the working class to take power.

It was decided, in consultation with the city council and industry, that the Strike Committee would authorize a number of wagons to distribute bread and milk, which would be given placards displaying, “Permitted by Authority of Strike Committee.” Subsequently, restaurants, bakeries, gasoline stations, and cinemas were reopened with the Strike Committee’s authorization, and the work necessary to keep hospitals running resumed. But the mayor, Charles Gray, felt that the necessity of Strike Committee authorization for the essential work of keeping the city running undermined the authority of the bourgeois state. The city council soon pressured the Strike Committee to remove the placards from the milk and bread carts, to be replaced with special cards carried by the cart operators. This was a victory for Mayor Gray and the forces of the bourgeoisie in the battle for legitimate control of civil society.26 Gray triumphantly stated that now there could be no further misunderstanding “that the legally constituted authority has been taken out of the hands of the civic authority.”27

The Strike Committee had demonstrated, even in its first week of existence, that it was incapable of serving as a counter-hegemonic force against the bourgeois state, incapable of serving as the basis for a workers’ republic. This, nonetheless, did not assuage the fears of Canadian and American capitalists, who continued to print sensationalist headlines about the strike.

This was when the federal government sent representatives to Winnipeg. Even as the Strike Committee failed to contest the bourgeoisie’s grip on state power, to remain aloof any longer would signal a crisis of legitimacy for the Canadian state. Gideon Robertson, the Minister of Labour, and Arthur Meighen, Minister of the Interior and of Justice, arrived on May 21. Having already been exposed to the Citizens’ Committee’s narrative, they spoke to Manitoba’s Premier, Tobias Norris, to General Ketchen, and to various other officials. They refused to address the Strike Committee, despite the Committee’s invitation to attend their meeting. They insisted that the Strike Committee send a delegation to meet them the next day instead.

The cabinet ministers and the Citizens’ Committee quickly began collaborating to undermine the strike. Their first target was the postal workers, who threatened to disrupt the postal service nationwide. They issued an ultimatum to the postal workers to return to work within three days or be dismissed. Even before waiting for the expiry of the three days, however, they had begun to gather volunteers to continue the work. All but 40 of the postal workers chose not to return to work and were fired. The railway mail clerks struck in solidarity with the postal workers but soon were forced to return to work or meet the same fate. Some of the fired postal workers asked to be allowed to go back to work and offered to give up their union memberships, but they were not rehired.28

In failing to retaliate for the dismissal of the postal workers and letting the bourgeoisie retake control of certain means of production, the Strike Committee demonstrated that it presented no real threat to the “constitutional order.” The working class here was no fighting force struggling to control the means of production. Nevertheless, the government would not be satisfied until the total defeat of the working class. Paranoia over the influence of revolutionaries in the One Big Union surely fuelled this hostility.

Robertson was firmly convinced that the Strike Committee and the OBU were connected, working to bring about revolution in Canada. He was convinced of the need to crush the strike in order to strangle the OBU in its cradle. Although his musings of a conspiracy were fantastical, he was likely correct that the success or defeat of the strike would affect the balance of class power in Canada for years to come. Supporters of the OBU came to the same ultimate conclusions that Robertson did. Meighen, while perhaps not sharing Robertson’s paranoia, was equally convinced of the need to crush the general strike, as its success might encourage the formation of vast industrial unions, capable of calling general strikes at a moment’s notice.29

The bourgeoisie soon turned its gaze to the police service, which was sympathetic to the strikers. They presented the police with an ultimatum: to renounce their connections to the unions and pledge their allegiance to the state, or be dismissed. In the end, only a small minority of the police force elected to take the vow. The city council was placed in a delicate situation at this point because to carry out their threats, they would have to empty the streets of the police force. The Citizens’ Committee and the government forces immediately founded a special police force and failed to follow up on the ultimatum.

In response to the introduction of the special police, the Strike Committee ended the distribution of bread, milk, and ice. However, the Citizens’ Committee organized volunteers to distribute staples to the population, with the protection of the special police. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie continued to build up its special police force. Shortly after this, the 240 members of the official police force who refused to sign the pledge were dismissed. The regular head of police was additionally sent on leave. The armed wing of civil society had been almost fully replaced, in another victory for the bourgeoisie in the contest for legitimate authority.

The special police force had practically no training, and through its brutality broke the tense peace that had hitherto persisted in the city. They attempted to break up crowds listening to public speakers and were quick to resort to the baton or even the firearm. Brawls between strikers and police became relatively common occurrences.

As sympathetic strikes spread, the bourgeoisie scrambled to find a peaceful conclusion in their own favor. They proposed to negotiate with the craft unions, the bureaucrats of which were opposed to the OBU’s radicalism and industrial unionism. This divided the Winnipeg workers’ movement, and the strikers were split over the issue of whether to settle on these terms. The Strike Committee opposed this move against it, but if it could not maintain control of the skilled labour force, then the strike would disintegrate. In this moment of weakness, in the early hours of June 17, the government made its move against Winnipeg’s radicals.

Even without having charged them, state forces swiftly swept up the radical strike leaders and placed them in prison. The Labour Temple and other labour offices were broken into and ruthlessly searched by police for evidence of revolutionary plots. The Strike Committee condemned the arrests and demanded the release of the men, and the pro-strike veterans organized public meetings in protest. The state actors involved disagreed on how to proceed: Meighen, while recognizing the dubious legality of the arrests, wished to deport the prisoners; Robertson felt that deportation of the British-born radicals would be deeply unpopular. Members of the Citizens’ Committee pushed for leniency and a fair trial. Ultimately, six of the radicals were released on bail on the condition that they play no further role in the conduct of the strike. The left wing of the strike movement had won its (at least temporary) freedom, but the damage was done. The strike was left under the sway of the moderates.

In this environment of uncertainty, some strikers began to return to work. The streetcars resumed operation on June 18. This was perceived by many in the city as a sign that the strikers were losing the battle. The pro-strike veterans were incensed, and there was talk of violent retaliation even as the Strike Committee attempted to find a compromise with the bourgeoisie.

The veterans insisted that streetcar service be ended and that the capitalists settle an agreement with the strikers, or they would hold a public march on Saturday, June 21. Mayor Gray was openly opposed to such a march, fearful that it would break the tense peace and lead to all-out conflict. He was unable to prevent it, however, and so he called in the Royal North-West Mounted Police to maintain order.

The demonstrating workers and veterans pulled a streetcar off its wire and set it ablaze. The Mounties rode through the demonstration threateningly and were met by jeers, then by bricks and bottles. One rider fell off his horse, and a demonstrator began beating him. The other Mounties decided to fire into the crowd. The firing continued for several minutes; one man was killed instantly, and many others wounded. The crowd scattered and was met by the special police armed with clubs and revolvers. Mayor Gray asked General Ketchen to activate the militia, which had been significantly built up over the course of the strike, and militiamen armed with machine guns moved into downtown. This day would go down in Canadian labour history as Bloody Saturday.

The streets remained occupied by the special police, Mounties, and militia for several days thereafter. Individual strikers began to return to work, and further public meetings were prohibited. The Strike Committee agreed to end the strike if the provincial government would appoint a royal commission to study labour conditions and the cause of the strike. Premier Norris assented to this condition, over the objections of the Citizens’ Committee. On Thursday morning, the vast majority of Winnipeg’s workforce returned to their jobs. Although a few small sections of labour continued the strike, the working class had been totally defeated.30

Demonstrators attacking a streetcar

It is clear that the revolutionary left failed this test of its power entirely. The working class had no civic institutions of its own which could substitute the functions of the bourgeois state, and thus provide an alternative to it. Although the Strike Committee made decisions about what labour was to be performed, it was thoroughly unprepared for this task, thus its collaboration with the city council. The strikers had not prepared for a takeover of society. A revolutionary program would have provided them with a road map for how to conquer state power and take ownership of the means of production; instead, the bourgeoisie won battle after battle for control of production and distribution.

While it is not the goal of this essay to prove that the Canadian labour revolt was or was not a revolutionary situation passed by, it is necessary to reflect on how socialists in the past have succeeded or failed to advance their revolutionary political project, so that the communists of today can better formulate their own strategy. Even if Canada’s working class could not possibly have been prepared to take state power in 1919, the events of that year were pivotal in the reformation of the revolutionary left, and with the right direction could perhaps have resulted in the formation of a mass, militant revolutionary movement. Instead, the revolutionary left remained minoritarian and ultimately failed to win the leadership of the workers’ movement or present the working class with a strategy for taking power.

General strikes and the formation of workers’ councils are not necessarily signs that the working class is conscious of its historic role and making a bid for state power. When the Russian workers and peasants formed soviets during the February Revolution, they were not yet prepared to govern society. It was the Bolshevik party and its program that put forward the slogan, “All power to the Soviets!”, and that led the workers and peasants to take power through the substitution of bourgeois political institutions with their own. Similarly, the Winnipeg workers did not ever seek to replace bourgeois institutions with their own. There was no party agitating for them to do so; no party pointing out that they were already administering the essential means of production to meet the needs of the people; no party agitating for the formation of workers’ militias so that the working class could defend itself against the bourgeois state and expropriate the capitalists.

It is the purpose of the revolutionary workers’ party to organize the working class for such an eventuality. The workers’ party, through presenting the class with democratic alternatives to bourgeois civil society even before the revolution, can prepare the workers for exercising state power. The party must become a state within and without the bourgeois state, by forming its own civic institutions such as schools and recreational clubs. Workers’ militias must be organized and trained by the party to defend the working class from the bourgeois state, and ultimately go on the offensive and seize control of the means of production when the opportunity arises. The party must train the proletariat to govern itself so that it can conquer and effectively wield state power.

The party’s program provides a road map to socialism. Without training the proletariat in self-governance, without preparing it for the conquest of state power, and without a political program that leads, in no uncertain terms, to a rupture with the bourgeois state and the institution of the workers’ republic, the working class cannot become a real fighting force, capable of contesting bourgeois hegemony. As the example of the Winnipeg General Strike demonstrates, the working class cannot struggle in an organized fashion for socialism without such a party. Relying on spontaneous revolts of the working class will result only in disappointment and defeat. The struggle for socialism is the result of a merger between socialist theory and the workers’ movement. This merger is embodied in the mass communist party, which is uniquely capable of organizing the proletariat to take state power and abolish the capitalist system of exploitation. Revolutionary unions and workers’ councils cannot substitute this essential instrument of class struggle; neither can a minoritarian party, limited to interventions in existing struggles. This lesson is essential if we are to avoid defeat,  conquer power and bring about communism.

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‘Is Marxism Obsolete?’ by Charles Rappoport

Introduction and translation by Medway Baker. 

Since the fall of the USSR and the definitive failure of the Russian Revolution, many among the left have begun to question the validity of Marxism, and Lenin’s elaboration of it. Some turn to anarchism; many others turn to “democratic socialism” or left-wing populism. There are also those who classify themselves as Marxists, but reject the legacy of October 1917 and the politics of the Bolsheviks: I include in this category both left-communists of the German/Dutch and right-opportunists (some of whom claim the legacy of Kautsky or other great Marxist thinkers).

In short, there are many on the left who have been asking the question: “Is Marxism (or Bolshevism) obsolete?” This is not a foolish question; the USSR, and along with it so many of the assumptions underlying communist politics, is a thing of the past. The official communists are deprived of their guiding light, the Trotskyists’ hope for political revolution in the USSR was crushed, and the organized left has retreated as neoliberal capitalism advances across the world. It is correct and, indeed, necessary to question past dogmas.

But Marxism goes beyond the USSR, and Bolshevism goes beyond its contemporary manifestations. It is easy to forget that Marx and Engels argued as a minority within the socialist organizations of their day for scientific socialism; that the Marxists of the Second International often argued as minorities within their parties for Marxist politics; that the nucleus of the Comintern, the antiwar left faction of the Second International, argued as a minority for revolution in the face of social democracy’s capitulation to imperialism.

Charles Rappoport was a French Marxist who argued as a minority for Marxist politics in the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), a member party of the Second International. The SFIO was dominated by two main tendencies. On the one hand were the Guesdists, followers of Jules Guesde, who claimed the legacy of Marxism while rejecting Marxist political strategy; it was in reference to this tendency that Marx famously pronounced, “[if this is Marxism, then] I am not a Marxist.” On the other hand were the reformists, of whom Jean Jaurès was a prominent leader. Despite the revolutionary sloganeering of the Guesdists, neither tendency was prepared to build a mass, revolutionary workers’ party capable of taking power during a crisis of state; this was proven at the beginning of the First World War, when Jaurès (a prominent pacifist) was assassinated, and Guesde chose to support the war.

Rappoport was a member of neither tendency, although he frequently found himself in alliance with the Guesdists—who rejected taking ministerial positions in the bourgeois state, etc.—in the struggle against reformism. He was fanatically committed to the notion of scientific socialism: of Marxism as a scientific research project, and of communism as “the triumph of science, of art, and of the creative genius of man,” which he opposed to its role as “slave of the wealthy” under capitalism. He declared, “That science become the people’s, and that the people become learned (not simply schooled), this is our ideal.” He was equally committed to Marxism as a revolutionary political project.

He broke with the Guesdists in the leadup to the First World War, accusing them of cretinism and charging them with responsibility for the failure of Marxism to take root in France; after the beginning of the war, he began ending his articles with “The Second International is dead. Long live the Third International!” Although he was suspicious of Lenin and did not identify himself as a Bolshevik—indeed, he at first denounced the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and predicted the failure of the Russian Revolution, accusing Lenin of Blanquism—he wholeheartedly supported the formation of the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1920.

As Rappoport learned more about the situation in Russia, and as he worked within the Comintern, he came to largely accept Lenin’s politics, while remaining critical of the Comintern and later Stalin. He was always kept from the reins of power within the party, and especially after “Bolshevisation”, he was less and less able to engage critically with others in the movement. In effect, he was reduced to a pamphleteer, aside from his own projects.

It was during the Popular Front and the Great Purge that he finally became totally disillusioned with the official communist movement. In 1938, he resigned from the party. He characterized the PCF as the “registry office for Stalin’s orders, or those of his speaker, Comrade [Georgi] Dimitrov.” Even as he denounced Stalin and hoped for the eradication of the Stalinist regime, though, Rappoport defended the legacy of October, and understood that the USSR could serve to terrify the capitalists and inspire the nations of the colonial world—and this could only be positive in his view.

Before the dissident Marxists of France had a chance to begin charting a new course, the Second World War began. Charles Rappoport died in 1941, with France under Nazi occupation, the USSR under siege, and himself thoroughly disillusioned with the socialist movement—yet always a staunch defender of revolutionary Marxism, of scientific socialism. 

Is Marxism Obsolete?

This is translated from a transcription of a speech Charles Rappoport gave at a conference on 1 February, 1933, titled “Le marxisme est-il périmé ?” by Medway Baker.

Marxist Theory

Comrades,

Marxist theory has been known for a long time. In 1918, we celebrated the centenary of Karl Marx’s birth in 1818. I’m telling you this because I wrote the article on Marx’s centenary while in La Santé Prison, where I had as jailmate Mr. Caillaux, the originator of the word of the day: “Marxism is obsolete.” And, as I was in prison and could not author articles under my own name during the war, I signed it “a free man!”

This year, we commemorate the fifty-year anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, on 14 March 1883.

Marxism is not an abstract theory. It is the algebra of revolution. It is the science of the proletariat, the truly revolutionary class, as Marx said and as we see every day in our own lives.

It is not surprising that those who have something to conserve, who are by definition conservatives, who want to maintain the existing society, combat Marxist theory, since Karl Marx said to capitalist society, “Brother, you must die!” And as the present society would sooner vanquish all humanity than consent to disappear itself, not a single year passes without writers, journalists, academics, and others trying to refute Marx. It has even become a specialty in Germany, where there is a whole category of people known by the German name Marxvernichter, which means “assassins of Marx,” and where every year we see the same assassination rehashed. This is why there is an entire literature on Marxism which, by its volume (although not by its value), will soon surpass all that we have written on Shakespeare, Goethe, or Kant, the three men about whom the most has been written.

The attacks against Marx are not surprising. Marx has never been more topical, Marxist ideas have never been so alive as today. I will give this presentation on Marxism without passion; objectively, because that is what Marx deserves, having been an objective thinker.

There are two aspects to Marx: there is his method, and there are his theories.

Let us see first whether the method is “obsolete.”

The Marxian Method

Marx’s method is before all else a materialist method. Marx was the enemy of verbalism, even that verbalism playing at revolutionism. He was against all those who, like the ingenious Alexander Herzen said of his friend Bakunin, incorrectly “took the second month of pregnancy to be the ninth.” The result? Miscarriage! He was against the émigrés who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, wanted to restart it as soon as possible. So that the revolution might triumph, we need to wait for the material conditions that will assure victory. He was the opponent of those who, under the pretext of taking a faster route, jumped from the sixth floor to the ground instead of taking the stairs. Evidently, this is a faster route. You’ll arrive sooner, but in what state!

Marx applied the materialist method. He studied reality before all, the material conditions of social life. He was, at the same time, a dialectician. This means that he understood that it is necessary to find in each society the self-destructive elements of that society, which develop inside it, as well as the constructive elements of the new society. One could say that each society carries in its womb the new society, as the mother carries the child.

And if Marx and his partisans give socialism the qualifier of “scientific,” it is because they found within capitalist society, the existing economic society, the self-destructive elements of that society as well as the constructive elements of the new society.

The Marxist method is based on the concept of evolution towards revolution. Now, the concept of evolution is at the base of all sciences and all modern concepts, with the difference that evolutionists in the vein of Spencer halt the law of evolution at the threshold of the current society: everything evolves except capitalism. The law of evolution must respectfully sidestep the Bank of France and the other banks—it loses its authority, it ceases to be applicable; everything evolves except capitalist property and the capitalist mode of production. Marx, on the contrary, with an implacable logic, said, “No! If everything changes, if everything transforms, there is no reason that capitalism and its mode of production should remain at their present stage; there is no reason that historical evolution should stop at the capitalist stage.”

Must we return to the dogmas of the invariability of species, of the stagnation of all that exists, to old geology, to old astronomy? Modern astronomy and geology demonstrate that the comets and the planets are formed gradually and that the earth has passed through diverse stages.

Marx is in agreement with the modern theory of evolution, which does not exclude the rapid passage from evolution to revolution: today’s theory of evolution admits, along with de Vries, the existence of abrupt passages—jumps—in the regular march of things.

Marx never pits evolution against revolution. Thus, the child, who develops in the mother’s womb, enters the world in a bloody storm. Jaurès tried in vain to persuade the bourgeoisie that we could go to Morocco by way of “peaceful penetration.” Despite his good intentions, his power of persuasion and his honesty, he couldn’t make this idea of “peaceful penetration” victorious. You know that we are still at war in Morocco.

So, according to the Marxian method, according to Marx’s dialectic, we should not pit evolution against revolution.

Are these ideas obsolete? Should we return to idealist verbalism? Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern philosophy, said that there are two sources of truth: there is the method of the bees, tributaries of the surrounding materials, of the plants and the flowers from which they draw their honey; and there is the method of the spiders, who draw everything from their own substance. The idealists “have a spider in their head”, which is to say that they draw everything from their head, which leads them to take words for realities.

In the present era, it is common to abuse strong words. During the war, all the idealist baggage was brought into the light. We were told every day that those who parted for the front were going to fight for “justice”, for “rights”, for “civilization”. This abuse of idealist phrases, empty of sense in our present society, continues today. This abuse has so little diminished that, yesterday even, there was a gathering of the small and middle proprietors at the Salle Wagram, organized by the reactionaries. In the name of which principles did they organize against the demands of the socialists and the democrats? It is in the name of equality before tax, it is in the name of the rights of man that the rich demand to pay as much as the poor, Rothschild as much as Rappoport!

In effect, in the name of the rights of man and the citizen, the poor must pay as much as the rich. It is this equality that they propose. And here we see the living things of all time, of today, of yesterday, of the distant past. So, will you criticize Marx for not trusting in the words that are so abused, for looking reality in the face? Ferdinand Lassalle said, “to say what exists is already a revolutionary feat,” because reality works for us because it contains explosive elements because history contains dynamite, truly revolutionary forces that blow up the old “obsolete” societies.

So, from the perspective of method, Marxism cannot be considered “obsolete.” It proceeds from the most modern ideas: movement, transformation, evolution, revolution.

Marx was horrified by emptiness, by the abstract, by words that could apply to everything and which explain nothing, by strong words exploited in order to hide small things or to hide even abominations.

The Class Struggle

The social base of Marxist theory is class struggle. Marx did not content himself (like the bourgeois sociologists) with this banality that consists of arguing that society is made up of individuals and not potatoes. He said, “No, it is not individuals that we should study in society, nor their needs; what must be studied is classes.” When you look at someone in the street and ask: “Who is he?” If we reply, “He is a man,” you reply, “That’s a bad joke, and you have no clue about the person you met.” But if we reply, “He is a man without work, he’s unemployed,” you are informed; if we reply, “That’s Ford, or Citroën,” immediately you know who you’re dealing with.

People still deny the existence of classes. The Times, in its headlines—its emptyheaded headlines—says, “Don’t speak of classes, that’s obsolete, the French Revolution surpassed that, it eliminated classes; all men are equal; Félix Faure was able to become President of the Republic; nothing can stop you from following your dreams; nothing is written in the Penal Code to prevent you, so classes have been eliminated.”

The Times forgets everything up to passenger classes on trains. It forgets, also, that there are even in Paris quarters for classes, and that, for example, in that in which I live, the one ironically called the Santé [Health] Quarter, mortality rates are multiple times higher than in the quarters of the rich classes. There are even class funerals, and so we promise capitalist society a first-class funeral.

Given the events since the war, it’s a macabre joke to say that class struggle does not exist.

We see in each country an organized working class; we also see the emergence of fascism. To go deeper, what does this mean? It is the class struggle of the highest degree. The dominant classes have learned something from Marx, and above all from the practice of class struggle by the revolutionary working class.

So long as governments have constituted police, the guardians of social peace, the guard dogs of property and society, we have contented ourselves with trusting the bourgeois state to defend class. But now, when through the evolution of temperaments, through permanent crises, we see that the state can be threatened under pressure from the masses, or placed in the impossible position of having to rigorously repress the new forces that arise; the dominant classes attract the unconscious from the middle and working classes, and pacify them with self-proclaimed anticapitalist watchwords, cry out at the capitalists, at the bankers—adding “Jews”—and organize themselves in a bluntly demagogic fashion. This is the defense of class, this is the strategy of class, and today these are new forces of terrorist repression available to the regular forces of the capitalist state. This is class struggle in its most violent form. Now, can we deny class struggle? Can we deny the claims of class?

Marx demonstrated this historic fact. He was not, furthermore, the first to demonstrate it. Guizot, the great historian contemporary to Marx, explained the development of the French monarchy by class struggle. It was the monarch who supported the bourgeoisie to diminish the influence of the nobility.

To try to understand modern history and explain, without the idea of class struggle, what is happening today in England, in Russia, in France, in Italy: it cannot be done. This is the indispensable factor for the comprehension of history.

Even our enemies begin to speak of classes. The terms “class” and “capitalist society” were once dismissed as absurd, as the bourgeois economists and theorists told us. They considered these to be socialist exaggerations. Now, everyone speaks of capitalist society or capitalism, and the fascists are forced to declare themselves anticapitalist.

The Marxist Political Economy

Now let us move on to Marxist political economy.

Marx did not begin his treatise on political economy with banalities like “everyone, to eat, to clothe themselves, etc., is obligated to produce.” No, Marx began by defining commodities, capitalist society, by explaining the law of value of commodities: the wealth of our society is not made up of goods meant to satisfy our needs, but of commodities, that is to say, goods meant to enrich a specific class. Marx examined, therefore, which laws determine the value of commodities. This is labor. In this, he agrees with the great classical economists. But Marx specified that it was not simply labor that determines the value of commodities. If you decided to transport a bag of flour on your back from Marseille to Paris, without traveling by rail, your labor would be useless and would not add anything of value to the flour. Labour only determines the value of a product when this labor is accomplished under normal technical conditions. The theory of value leads to the theory of capital gains, by which Marx demonstrated that capitalist profit is made up by labor unpaid by the capitalist to the laborer, by the exploitation of the commodity known as labor power.

Marx, in his analysis of capitalist society, formulated the theory of capital concentration, of the gradual expropriation and disappearance of the middle classes.

Are these ideas obsolete? Can Caillaux contest the concentration of capital? Are the trusts not modern, capitalist economic forms? And are all these capitalist forces not enough confirmation of the law of capital concentration? Is the most capitalist country in the world, the United States, not dominated by capitalist magnates, as Marx said; by those we call “kings”? Kings of oil, of rail, of automotive. There are even kings of pork and steak in Chicago. These are true monopolies of all the material wealth. These are the grand masters who dominate that immense country.

In France, there is still a mass of petty proprietors. But when we examine things up close, we see, for example, six big banks dominating all the markets—and even dominating the state. We can therefore not deny, in this era of billionaires, of big banks, of large stores, of great commerce, that the law of capital concentration exists.

The reformist Bernstein wanted to demonstrate that middle classes exist. He gathered up all the savings books of all the maids to say that there are still, in them, small capitalists. But Marx never claimed that owning a thousand or ten thousand francs made one a capitalist! To be a capitalist, according to Marx’s definition, one must use the means of production to exploit the labor of others and therefore have the ability to live without performing labor. This is not the case with a maid.

I believe that Caillaux has never read Marx, even while declaring Marxism obsolete. What is obsolete is this method that consists of refuting a great thinker without even reading them. Bernstein knew Marx, and he placed joint-stock companies at the forefront of his argument, by saying: there is no concentration of capital, as there are many millions of shareholders. He forgot nothing except to explain the mechanism of joint-stock companies, where he who has the largest block of shares is the true master of the joint-stock company, while the others are nothing but extras.

Everywhere, it’s the same thing. And when a crisis arises, when all the little “capitalists” are swept away, all that remains is the one with the largest block of shares; and if he’s running low on money, the capitalist state will come to his aid, as we’ve seen recently.

In the present era, especially after the war, can we speak of the disappearance of the middle classes? Let us ascertain this in each country. The radical or democratic parties in England, in France, in Germany are the representatives, the chargés d’affaires of the middle classes. If these classes were flourishing, they would dominate all the others; meanwhile, we see the British Liberal Party, with Lloyd George, reduced to impotence. In Germany, the democrats have vanished. We see but two blocs now: the bourgeois reactionary bloc on the one hand, and the proletarian revolutionary bloc on the other. In France, did the May 1932 elections give the lefts a total majority? They capitulated without a struggle to the bourgeois reaction. It is always the reactionary capitalists, the most powerful capitalists, who have the final say in the ministerial composition.

We have published side by side the portraits of Daladier and Mussolini, to demonstrate their resemblance. But when the Socialists proposed not even the socialist programme, but the most tepid of radical programmes to these democratic Mussolinis, the capitalists rejected them. Daladier complained, he practically cried, and faced with the intransigence of the reactionary capitalists he raised up his own lamentations as a plea.

Marx spoke of the anarchy of capitalist production. Is this not demonstrated by the Brazilian coffee thrown into the sea, or by the wheat we use to heat locomotives? In Brazil they throw millions of pounds of coffee in the ocean. They even spend a lot of money on this. So must we not recognize as true Marx’s analysis, which demonstrates that the capitalists are condemned to anarchy because they produce but for profit, for an undetermined market? Go, determine the extent of the global clientele! It is said that the capitalists are smart enough to determine, with their specialists, their publicists, their experts, the volume of the global market. But can we do it? Was the greatest crisis of the past years not produced in the countries of the trusts? It is precisely in America, land of the colossal trusts, that the crisis is the greatest.

This proves that capitalism cannot liberate itself from anarchy. It produces abundance. But on the other hand, there are 30 million unemployed, according to figures from the League of Nations—which is still not communist, by the way. Along with their families, this represents a population of 120 million at least. Is unemployment not a product of capitalism? This phenomenon was studied in admirable detail by Marx when he plotted out the immense riches created by modern technology, alongside a reserve army of unemployed dying of hunger beside the shops filled with commodities. Is, by chance, this theory of capitalist crisis an obsolete theory? One must argue in bad faith or be as ignorant as an academic to claim this.

A large number of Americans have discovered, in America, technocracy. They have demonstrated, with numerous statistical findings, the marvels of technology. They can make a factory work 24 hours without a single worker and augment 4000 times the productivity of certain jobs. But Marx, precise as ever, often cited the words of Aristotle—the greatest thinker of Antiquity—who, in order to justify slavery, said, “If we were to invent machines that could weave and do other work, we could leave slavery behind.” Marx loved to cite this, to demonstrate how we have realized the brilliant idea of Aristotle. We have achieved truly miraculous productivity; we have machines that can do anything, admirable machines, and this is a product of capitalism that we will not refuse. Marx even gave a eulogy of the historical mission accomplished by the bourgeoisie, which has led to the appearance of giant cities and modern mechanical production. He wrote this in 1847. If he saw the present miracles of production, what would he have said! But we contest that these technical marvels, these admirable machines, instead of creating social and individual wellbeing, serve but a category of privileged people, and are raised up against the workers. Each new machine represents another massacre of workers, thousands of workers thrown to the street, without work.

Capitalist rationale is the rationing of the proletariat. The more capitalist society is rationalized, the less you have of the means of existence. This is confirmation of Marx’s dialectic, which demonstrated that every society perishes from its own contradictions. He consecrated his life to the study of contradictions inherent to capitalist society, the abuses that the society fatally engenders. And it does not suffice to destroy these abuses, as the ignoramuses say, but rather it is the very source of these abuses that it is a question of destroying: capitalist society!

Marx demonstrated that all these social contradictions are inherent to the capitalist mode of production, to the fact that the means of production are monopolized by an oligarchy, concentrated in the hands of a minority who enrich themselves while the majority, the working class, can live only by selling its labor-power to these owners of the means of production.

It is this that Marx asserted. Is it not true? Are there means of combating the crisis other than destroying its very cause? What do the technocrats say? They want to maintain capitalist society, that is, the cause of the crisis, its very base, the source of the contradictions of society; and at the same time they claim to want to eliminate its consequences. But what would happen if the technocrats became the leaders? There would be an organized or coordinated society, but this would be subordinated to capitalist interests. At the head of society, and, in the place of capitalists, it would be great engineers and technicians who dominate, always with an eye towards exploitation; because, as long as you leave the proletariat in its state, as people deprived of the instruments of production, they will inevitably be slaves, whether of Ford or of his engineers. Nothing would change. Instead of plutocracy, there would be technocracy.

Furthermore, Saint-Simon anticipated the technocrats in a famous parable, which even earned him a lawsuit. He said, “The kings, the parents of kings, the generals, the ministers, all of these could disappear, and society would not disappear. But the technicians, that’s another matter.” He understood the value of engineers, of architects, of doctors. This is not new. This is, I repeat, America discovered in America by Americans. But instead of starting from a logical premise, and observing the profound reason for this capitalist anarchy, this contradiction between technical progress and social misery, the “technocrats” plug up their ears and shut their eyes in order to maintain the exploitation of man by man.

Marxist Politics

I will move on now to the last chapter: Marxist politics.

Marx, basing himself in the analysis of capitalist society, didn’t address goodwill or the supposed common interest. As he based his sociology on the existence of classes opposed to one another, with antagonistic interests, he understood that among all these classes, only the proletariat was a revolutionary class. This is logical. Having nothing to conserve, the proletariat does not have any interest in being conservative. They possess only their own labor power. They are therefore a revolutionary class. They have nothing to lose but their chains and everything to win, as Marx said at the end of the Manifesto. How is it that the capitalists could be revolutionary? Have you ever known capitalists who demand shorter workdays and higher wages? Never has the capitalist class declared that it wishes to eliminate property. There may be some rare exceptions who prove the rule but never has a class committed suicide.

Marx understood this, while the utopians like Charles Fourier worked to persuade the bourgeoisie to be intelligent and organize social harmony and cooperation. Others, like Robert Owen, who sacrificed millions for social reform, sent sincere, good-faith letters, supplications, to the conventions where monarchs met to take counterrevolutionary measures. He worked to persuade these monarchs that by adopting his project, they could avoid revolution. He worked to persuade the wolves to not eat the sheep. Naturally, he was mocked, and his supplications were never addressed.

Marx was not against political action. He did not place trade unionism, the economic action of the working class, in opposition to its political action. He understood well the role of the state, which he defined thus: “The state is an administrative council of the dominant classes, united to oppress the exploited classes, the dispossessed classes.” He added, “It is necessary to destroy this force, and let us give power to the proletariat—this is what we call the dictatorship of the proletariat. We must give state power to the proletariat in order to eliminate inequality, or rather to remove the monopoly over the means of production from the capitalist oligarchs.” According to Marx, it is necessary to end the domination of possessing classes, to expropriate the proprietors. And by what means, other than by revolution?

It’s from Marx that we get the term “parliamentary cretinism.” Marx was not against parliamentary action, though. He used “parliamentary cretinism” to describe those who believed that they could realise social transformation through such means. Now, parliamentary cretinism is surpassed by ministerial cretinism.

There are those who believe that, with good ministers, we can transform society. Marx denied this. One of the greatest crimes of German social democracy was having believed that with the aid of “parliamentary cretinism” and participation in the bourgeois state, they could change the social model. Of course, you know what state Hitler’s Germany now finds itself in.

Is this not topical today? Is the conception of the conquest of power by revolutionary force obsolete? Never has a people, never has a class obtained its liberation on its knees. It is time to stand up, to struggle, to spill our own blood if we want to attain our emancipation. We cannot avoid revolution by relying simply on millions of voices. In 1904, in Amsterdam, Bebel stood against the ministerial participation supported by the reformists, and demanded that we declare the working class a “party of revolution.” But defining revolution, that was another matter. He said at the same congress, “We are growing by millions of voices; when we have the majority, the bourgeoisie will be drowned, they will be an islet in an ocean.” We see today the “islet” in the person of Hitler and his hitmen.

Marx never, in all his work, employed revolutionary phraseology. The revolution, for Marx, was like an underground fire, smoldering beneath his theories. He examined the origins of revolution without searching for revolutionary phrases. The latter is the specialty of certain other categories of people. It was not Marx’s specialty, as he was preoccupied with establishing facts, which were able to reveal logical conclusions: organise the working class with the knowledge that it is a revolutionary class, that it is not to negotiate, but to fight, as Jules Guesde said. It follows that we should not become ministers of state, that is to say members of the administrative council of the dominant classes. How! You want to enter in this administrative council to look after the day-to-day business of the bourgeoisie? To provide another example of class collaboration, how can Blum declare in his debates and articles that we have no interest in the bankrupting of bourgeois society? However, Mirabeau himself, that bourgeois revolutionary descended from the nobility, understood that the bankrupting of the nobility was a necessary step in the advent of the bourgeoisie. And here, there are those who do not understand that the collapse of capitalism can serve the proletariat! Our intention, our historical “mission” is not, according to Marx, to save capitalism from its inevitable bankruptcy, but to organize and develop the consciousness of the proletarian class.

Yes, there will be suffering; but will there not be even more in the upcoming war? Are we not threatened with a war of extermination? Will the reformists as well as the revolutionaries not disappear in the storm? Can we have confidence in the dronings of the pacifists in Geneva? Has this not all gone bankrupt?

Marx predicted this, declaring that capitalism is at the root of every modern war, and Lenin, in turn, demonstrated that in the era of imperialism, war is inevitable. We have only to state the facts standing before us. We see the impotence of the League of Nations. Despite the confidence people put in the League of Nations at the beginning, it did not prevent the war in the Orient; and if tomorrow, Germany, faithful to the social developments in that country, wanted to occupy the Polish corridor and begin a war, could the League of Nations stop it?

Marxism is not Obsolete

Marx presented his economics against the classical economics of the bourgeoisie. What was the principal, fundamental director of bourgeois economics? “Leave us be, let us do as we like!” But is there anyone in the world who can accept this principle and admit that it’s really saying, “let us make war, let us inflict misery”? Is individualism not bankrupt?

There is the theory of the elites, adopted by Mr. Caillaux, the originator of the phrase “Marxism is obsolete.” The elites, well, they’re naturally Mr. Caillaux and his friends. Us, we say: “There is another elite, and that is the working class, which begins to think, to organize, to become a global force.” We already have the example of the USSR, and I ask my opponents, who were the sociologist, or statesman, or historian who foresaw the advent of the proletariat in the historic role it is playing today?

Marx and Engels foresaw this historic role of the proletariat, and this was particularly difficult in 1847, as the proletariat existed but as a social fact, not yet as an organized force conscious of its historic goal: the end of capitalism. Marx and Engels saw but the beginnings of the working class, but thanks to their ingenious analysis, to their dialectical materialist method, they foresaw the historic role of the proletariat.

We can critique the difficulties of a country making up one-sixth of the globe and boycotted by all the rest. But there is in this a fact that exists: that the proletariat conquered power, that it holds power and is victoriously building socialism.

Is the historic role of the proletariat obsolete? No, Marxism is not obsolete. It is living, and it will live everywhere!