50 Years Ago: Dictatorship in Russia (1969)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bolsheviki have often defended their dictatorship by quoting Marx’s Criticism of the Gotha Programme (1875) where he refers to the transition from Capitalism to Socialism as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat pending the abolition of classes altogether. Marx, however, refers to a dictatorship asserted by a working class majority over the capitalist few, and not the dictatorship of a minority attacked by Engels in his Criticism of the Blanquist Program.

Lenin has admitted the Blanquist character of the 1917 seizure of power:

  Just as 150,000 lordly landowners under Czarism dominated the 130,000,000 Russian peasants, so 200,000 members of the Bolshevik party are imposing their proletarian will in the interest of the latter.

(The New International, New York, April 1918)

Lenin's defence of this as due to the lack of knowledge among the masses is in these words:—

  If Socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least 500 years. The Socialist political party, this is the vanguard of the working class, must not allow itself to be halted by the lack of education of the masses, using the Soviets as organs of revolutionary initiative (Lenin at Peasants Congress. Ten Days that Shook the World. P. 303).

(From an article 'Democracy and Dictatorship in Russia' by E. S. Socialist Standard, December 1919).

"The Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (1976)

From the April 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Communist parties of France and Italy are the biggest in Europe. The Italian party has 1.7 million members, and the French party half a million members. The Italian party holds 29 per cent. of the seats in Parliament and has 33 per cent. of the total vote (Guardian 16th February 1976). The present minority government, the Christian Democrats, depend on the Communists in order to rule, and it seems likely that the Communists will succeed to power. The position in France is said to be that the “Socialists and Communists will combine to form the next government”. Both Italian and French parties, we are told, have renounced the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat and are now relying on democratic methods to obtain and hold political power.

It is not the first time that the Communist parties have turned a complete somersault with embarrassing changes of policy. In the Sunday Times 29th February 1976, Mr. Napolitono, the Italian leader, had this to say about NATO when asked how a Communist party could remain a partner in an anti-communist alliance: “Everything changes. The NATO alliance is not the same as in 1950. In those days we took the view that the NATO alliance was potentially aggressive. But now the danger of an aggressive initiative by NATO against the Warsaw pact has disappeared”. This type of blatant dishonesty characterizes the Communist parties everywhere. A lie becomes the truth when circumstances demand it. What however have not disappeared are the nuclear missiles, the Polaris submarines, and the hordes of armed men ready to disembowel each other over the ownership and control of the earth’s resources at the behest of these unprincipled opportunists and their Moscow parents.

At the moment, the Italian and French capitalist classes are finding increasing difficulty in administering the system. Social problems are mounting, together with the effects of the present world slump. Both countries have unemployment well over the million mark: Italy has 1.3 million unemployed. In these circumstances, the capitalists are prepared to allow the cause of the Communists to advance, having heard them give assurances that they will uphold the national interest at the expense of cutting the ideological ties with the Soviet Union. It is significant that both French and Italian leaders were absent from the Moscow International Congress of World Communist Parties. Perhaps they decided not to risk it.

Communisls & Democracy
Should the Communist parties in both countries take over the running of the governments they will declare themselves for what they really are — the servants of capital. As such they will be forced to come into conflict with the workers and oppose demands where those demands do not harmonize with the interests of the ruling class. This is inevitable, for no political party can serve two masters. They will also show their impotence in solving problems which a class society produces, where events are in control, and where their forked tongues cannot help them.

The new-found democracy they now assume has been produced as evidence of their enlightenment, when in fact it was thrust upon them. Never at a loss to display their talents for turning night into day, they now seem to be claiming credit for discovering democracy. Mr. George Marchais, secretary of the French party, claims to have “defined, clarified and enriched the strategy of the political party line. This line lays down the democratic way we propose to Frenchmen to lead them to socialism . . . we have also taken into account national characteristics and traditions to build socialism with the colours of France”. (Times, 28th February, 1976).

The history of the Communist parties throughout the world is an unrelieved story of dictatorial organizations, having at their head the absolute dictatorship of the Communist party in Russia. The dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the Communist party are two fundamentally different conditions. The former, which basically means conscious majority rule, has never existed in Russia. With the present exception of the Chinese party, whose international ideology has had to give way to the building-up of state capitalism and the defence of national interests, all Communist parties have to be regarded as Trojan horses of Soviet capitalism. The fear of the more ignorant politicians is that if the Communists ever get power in the West they will emulate Lenin and never let it go. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin shut down the Constituent Assembly and abolished free elections, set up censorship, and abolished other democratic rights enjoyed by workers. Had free elections been allowed shortly after the hollow victory of the revolution there was a real danger that the Bolsheviks might have been voted out of power, and Lenin was not prepared to risk it.

The conditions in a modern capitalist country are very different from those obtaining in Russia are 1917. The parliamentary system of government based on a democratic franchise means that property questions can be settled by a democratic vote. Generally, the democratic system of election and an uncensored press, free trade unions, and the freedom of political parties to have their say, grows naturally out of the conditions of free trade. As Engels said, the bourgeois democratic republic is the natural state for capitalism.

Marx's Phrase
In May 1875 the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, led by Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, and the General Association of German Workers, founded by Lassalle, decided to unite under the name of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany. The unity congress was held at Gotha. Prior to the conference, a programme outlining the aims of the new organization was sent to Marx for his criticism. In a letter to Bracke, a founder member of the Social Democratic Party, Marx criticized the Programme. It consisted of a number of vague, and in many cases ethical, propositions which could mean anything. The first proposal, “Labour is the source of all wealth and all cultures”, Marx showed was incorrect, as it ignored the part played by nature.

In criticizing the democratic section II “The Free basis of the State (government machine)” he said : “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one with the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”. (The letter was published by Engels in 1891, 15 years later). This is the historic statement which Lenin seized upon as justifying the dictatorship in Russia and the failure of the Bolsheviks to solve the problems of production without which Socialism is impossible. The transformation between capitalist and communist society became twisted to mean a transition between Socialism and Communism. Socialism being a “lower stage” and Communism a “higher stage”.

The elaborate falsification of Marx’s theory was connived because the Russian revolution was represented to the world as a Socialist revolution, but the Socialism was absent because the conditions for its establishment were absent. The historic revolutionary rôle of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was to build up a capitalist society in Russia, and they knew it, despite the fact that the Bolshevik party contained a number of Marxist thinkers. There was no other course open to them.

"The Transition Period"

Marx’s phrase about the transformation between capitalism and communism could not apply, because capitalism had not developed in Russia. Moreover, Marx was discussing the kind of action the workers ought to take after they had gained political power and Socialism had been established, and the State had become the agent of working-class emancipation instead of an instrument of oppression, and also what changes the form of the State would undergo in communist society. In Marx’s view there could only be a scientific answer to that, and it was what the conference ought to be discussing: not the “freeing of the State” but its transformation within the new conditions of production which communism would bring forth. Earlier in his criticism, dealing with the section on the “fair distribution of the proceeds of labour”, he said: “What we have to deal with here is a Communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmark of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.

(Critique of the Gotha Programme, p.16, Progress Publishers, Moscow.)

Marx cannot be cited as an advocate of dictatorship. A few years earlier, in his book The Civil War in France, dealing with the Paris Commune, he wrote: “The Commune was essentially a government of the working class: the result of the struggles of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form under which the freedom of labour could be attained being at length revealed”. Engels, in his introduction to the work, said: “Of late, the German philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the workers’ Dictatorship of the Proletariat: well and good gentlemen, do you want to know what this Dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune, that was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. (Civil War in France, p.19, Martin Lawrence, 1933.)

Those who know something of the brief history of the Commune will know that instead of the suspension of democracy, it was founded on its most thoroughgoing use. Dictatorship, in the final analysis, must come to mean a form of government by a single individual or of an organization over a great mass. Both these forms are impossible in a Socialist society. The Socialist movement is not a minority movement, it is a movement consciously pushing the interests of the majority. This marks it off from all previous movements which were movements of minorities in the interests of minorities. This mass movement can only be organized on a democratic basis. Everyone will and must know what fundamental issues are involved, and what is expected of them. Participation requires understanding.

It should be borne in mind that Marx’s criticism of the Gotha Programme was not meant for publication, and it was contained in letter form. Furthermore, it was addressed to Wilhelm Bracke and other founders of the Social Democratic Party to be sent to Bebel and Liebknecht, all of whom were men of long experience in the Socialist movement, and who were all familiar with Marx's ideas and writings. Their interpretation of what Marx meant would have been different from that of the ordinary layman. One thing is indisputable, and that is that the Communist party have no claim whatever to represent the work of Marx. They cannot abandon the Dictatorship of the Proletariat because they have never known the meaning of it, let alone accepted it.

Establishment of Socialism

We in the Socialist movement do not accept the idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a transitional period. We have no need to because class society will be abolished simultaneously with the establishment of common ownership. The State machine will be under the direct control of Society, and its repressive organs will be the first to be abolished. Other social and administrative functions, will be developed in accordance with prevailing social requirements. All forms of social re-organization will be under the democratic control of the community. No political transition will be required because political society ends with the abolition of social classes. The political transition takes place before the eventual victory of the proletariat. Capitalist ideology has given way to Socialist ideology — the revolution is complete.

One of the difficulties facing Marx was that the Gotha Programme was not a Socialist programme, nor were the parties to it Socialist parties. However, these were all Marx had to work on, and he had to do the best he could, in all the circumstances. Experience has shown that a well-intentioned leadership with Socialist ideas is not sufficient to change society. The SPGB has learnt this lesson from history.

Jim D'Arcy

Letter: Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. (1946)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

In our January issue we replied to a letter from W. D. B. (Cardiff). We have received a further letter.

Cardiff, Glamorgan.

Sirs,

Your remarks in the January issue on the "dictatorship of the proletariat" smack somewhat of the bourgeois, legalistic idea of "freedom." Compare Engels' letter to Bebel (Marx-Engels Correspondence, page 337): "As, therefore, the state is only the transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one's adversaries by force. . . .  So long as the proletariat still uses the State, it does not use it in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the State as such ceases to exist." (My italics.)

Even though a majority may declare for Socialism, it by no means follows that Socialism will be established without the use of force, or that freedom for a powerful minority will not have to be drastically curtailed.

Yours faithfully,

W. B. D.

Reply.

In our correspondents first letter he complained that “the S.P.G.B. does not attempt to deal with Marx’s and Engels’s repeated reference to the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' . . . nor does it attempt to reconcile this conception with its own conception of 'democracy.' ’’

On the first point we showed that this question has often been dealt with in our columns.

On the second point we quoted Engels’s statement that you could see what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" looks like by looking at the Paris Commune, and we stated that the Paris Commune was an instance of majority control based upon democratic elections and that there was no suppression of newspapers or of the propaganda of the minority or  of their right to vote.

Our correspondent in his further letter does not dispute these statements, but makes the assertion that to him our remarks "smack somewhat of the bourgeois legalistic idea of 'freedom,' " and proceeds to quote from a letter written by Engels to show that Engels held that the working class so long as it uses the State would use it to hold down its adversaries.

We are quite unable to see the point of this quotation from Engels since that matter is not disputed by us. Of course, if a minority should seek to use force to overthrow Socialism against the wishes of the majority, the majority through the control of the machinery of government will prevent the minority from so doing.

We repeat, therefore, that we accept Engels’s statement that when he talked of "dictatorship of the proletariat" he meant majority rule based on democratic elections as in the Commune.

The particular passage from Engels’s letter to Bebel should be read in conjunction with what preceded it, and with the passage omitted by our correspondent. Engels was attacking a German organisation’s programme, which contained reference to a "free people’s state," and the passage omitted from the middle of the statement quoted by our correspondent reads: "it is pure nonsense to talk of a 'free people’s state.' "

As we have not talked the nonsense of a "free people’s state" Engels’s criticism does not apply to us.

Editorial Committee

Lenin v. Marx on the State (1970)

From the April 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lenin's The State and Revolution
Many people assume that Marx believed the working class would only be able to come to power by smashing the State in a violent uprising. They do not realise that this was Lenin’s view and one which tried to pass off as Marx’s in his dishonest pamphlet The State and Revolution. [1]

Marx’s theory of the State is quite clear. When the early communist communities under which mankind originally lived broke up into class societies, a new social institution to protect the interests of the dominant class was needed. This institution was the State, which is essentially an armed centre of social control. The class that controls the Slate is thereby able to control also society, in the end by force of arms; it is the ruling class. In the course of history the State has been controlled by various classes — Ancient slaveowners, feudal barons and. now, modern capitalists. Today’s subject class, the workers, can only achieve its freedom by itself winning control of the State and using it to abolish class society by establishing the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. With the end of classes the need for a State, as the special social organ of coercion, also disappears. The classless society of Socialism has no State, but simply a democratic administrative centre for settling social affairs.

Throughout his political life Marx insisted that the working class must capture the State before trying to establish Socialism and that Socialism would be a society without a State.

In the early days Marx expected that the workers would only be able to win power in a violent insurrection. In the 1840’s this was not an unreasonable proposition. Universal suffrage existed hardly anywhere and the insurrection — barricades, street-fighting, the seizure of public buildings — was a method used even by capitalist politicians. Marx later realised that universal suffrage was an alternative method the workers might be able to use in their struggle to win State power. In 1872 in a speech at the Hague, where the congress of the First International was being held, Marx commented that he thought the workers might be able to achieve power peacefully in America, Britain and perhaps Holland [2] —countries where they made up a majority of the voters. In 1880 a French Workers’ Party was founded. Its manifesto had been drafted in Marx’s study and spoke of turning universal suffrage from a fraud into “an agent of emancipation’’ [3]. Engels in his Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France [4] (an account of French politics from 1848 to 1850) explains how he and Marx came to regard the insurrection behind barricades as an obsolete weapon for the working class and goes on to show how universal suffrage could be much more effective.

Marx, then, left open the question of how the working class would win State power and did not rule out the possibility of their winning control of the State by peaceful means.

As to what the working class should do with the State once they had won control of it, Marx always insisted that they should immediately establish a democratic republic. After the Paris Commune of 1871 he declared that the workers would have to make other, more radical changes in the structure of the State before they could use it to establish Socialism.

The Paris Commune was an ultra-democratic regime set up by patriotic elements after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. After the French Revolution Napoleon had built up a vast bureaucratic and administratively centralised State machine in France. This had remained intact throughout the 19th century despite the insurrections of 1830 and 1848. Only one regime — the Paris Commune — had tried to replace it. This attempt greatly impressed Marx and led him to argue that the workers, once they had won State power, should immediately go on to break up this kind of bureaucratic State apparatus that had grown up too in many other European countries.

In his private letters and notes Marx sometimes referred to the period during which the workers would be using State power to establish Socialism as “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This has often been misunderstood to mean that he advocated dictatorship in the sense this word is generally understood today. In fact, in Marx's day, the word meant little more than “government” and, as we saw.,Marx advocated that while under the control of the working class (or “proletariat”) the State should be made democratic. [5]

Marx views can be summarised:

1. The working class must first, either peacefully or violently, win control of the State.
2. Then they must make it completely democratic, and,
3. Use it to dispossess the capitalists and establish the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.
4. This done, there would no longer be any need for the State, which consequently would cease to exist in Socialism.

Marx’s views were distorted in two opposing ways. First, by some Social Democrats who made him stand for a gradual, peaceful transition to Socialism by means of social reform measures passed by parliament. Secondly, by Lenin.

When Lenin returned to Russia in April 1917 after the overthrow of the Tsar he began to advocate that his party, the Bolsheviks, should aim to seize power in the near future. He knew that they could only do this in a violent uprising. Forced into hiding in August and September he wrote this pamphlet The State and Revolution in which he distorted Marx’s views so as to justify in Marxist terms the Bolsheviks’ planned insurrection.

Lenin's basic distortion is to take Marx’s statements about the need to break up Napoleon’s bureaucratic State machine after the workers had won power and to argue that he was referring to the State generally. This made Marx appear to say that the State should be smashed by the working class before they could win, or while they were winning power.

Lenin quotes Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and emphasises a passage which reads “All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it” (our emphasis), clearly a reference to a particular State apparatus; in this case the centralised French State. But see what Lenin makes Marx say:

  . . . all the revolutions which have occurred up to now perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed, (p. 45, our emphasis).

Another example occurs in Chapter III where Lenin quotes from one of Marx’s letters (to Kugelmann, 12 April 1871). In it Marx is saying that the passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire just discussed means that it was essential for “every real people’s revolution on the Continent” not “to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it".

Lenin inserts the word “state” into Marx’s “the bureaucratic-military machine” and uses the phrase "bureaucratic-military state machine” in the rest of the Chapter as if this is what Marx had written.

Again, Lenin quotes Marx’s statement that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made machinery and wield it for its own purposes” and says:

  Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made state machinery’, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it (p. 59).

Taken quite literally, this is true. Marx did advocate that parts of the old State should be broken up. The real question, however, is when he advocated this should be done: Was it before or after the working class had won State power?

Lenin argues that Marx meant “before”. Engels, on the other hand, made it quite clear that Marx meant “after”. Engels was specifically asked about this passage from Marx and replied:

  It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes (Letter to Bernstein, 1 Jan. 1884 our emphasis). [6]

In fact, Lenin later (Chapter IV) himself quotes passages from Engels’ Introduction to Marx Civil War in France which show that Marx was talking about what the workers should do after, rather than before, they had won power:

  From the very outset the Commune was compelled to recognise that the working class, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state machine; that . . . this working class must . . . do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself . . . (p. 123, our emphasis).

and.

  . . . the state is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another . . . and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible . . . (p. 127. our emphasis).

Oddly enough, in Chapter VI Lenin, on three occasions, formulates Marx’s views so as to mean that the bureaucratic-military parts of the State must be smashed after the workers have won power. [7] This is all the more confusing in that only a few pages away Lenin had accused Kautsky of admitting “the possibility of power being seized without destroying the state machine" (p. 171, our emphasis). Lenin confused the two separate issues of breaking up the old bureaucratic state machine and how the working class could come to win control of that machine. It suggests that Lenin, when he makes statements like:

  Marx meant that the working class must smash, break, shatter . . . the whole state machine (p. 169).

and.

From 1852 to 1891, for forty years, Marx and Engels taught the proletariat that it must smash the state machine (p. 170).

he means his readers to think Marx’s view to be that the State must be smashed by the working class while seizing power. This would mean that Marx thought a peaceful capture of State power impossible. Quite apart from Engels’ clear explanation, the fact that Marx did not rule out this possibility is in itself sufficient to disprove Lenin’s distortion. Marx would have seen no contradiction between the working class winning power peacefully and then later smashing the bureaucratic- military machine.

There are a number of other distortions in Lenin’s pamphlet which we will briefly record.

In that part of Anti-Duhring later published as Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels in the course of describing the establishment of Socialism wrote:

  The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But in doing this, it . . . abolishes . . . the state as state.

Despite the fact that Engels goes on to explain this (that the State, as a means of class oppression, becomes unnecessary when it has become the representative of the whole community as it would after thus ending class property), Lenin makes the absurd claim that "Engels speaks here of the proletarian revolution ‘abolishing' the bourgeois state . . ." (p. 28)

Lenin describes as "this panegyric on violent revolution” (p. 33) another passage from Anti-Duhring where Engels writes about the role of “force” in history. Here Lenin disguises the fact that Marx and Engels understood by "force” not necessarily and exclusively “violent insurrection” but also the mere exercise of State power, whether accompanied by violence or not.

Lenin quotes (p. 96) from an article in an Italian journal without making it clear that the passage he reproduces is not really Marx’s own words, but Marx’s summary in heavily sarcastic terms of the arguments that might be used to refute a pacifist anarchist. [8]

Again, Lenin quotes (p. 113) a passage from Engels’ criticism of the German Social Democrats’ 1891 programme where he says that "the democratic republic . . . is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”, (our emphasis). This did not fit in with Lenin’s views so he argues that Engels only meant that the democratic republic was “the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat” (our emphasis).

Finally, in Chapter V Lenin makes a false distinction between Socialism and Communism in a bid to prove that, according to Marx, the State would not finally disappear till "Communism” and so would still exist under “Socialism”. Marx and Engels in fact made no distinction between Socialism and Communism ; they were terms they used interchangeably to refer to future classless, Stateless society based on social or common ownership. [9]

Lenin’s The State and Revolution is not, as it claims, a re-statement of Marx’s theory of the State but a gross distortion of it.

Adam Buick

[1] All references in this article are to the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, edition. Where Lenin quotes Marx or Engels these too are given as in this edition.

[2] Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, by Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky (1965). p.265.

[3] Karl Marx Textes, ed. Jean Kanapa, Edirias Socialis (Paris), pp. 486-7.

[4] Marx Engels Selected Works Vol. I, FLPM. pp. 118-139.

[5] Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, by Hal Draper, New Politics Vol. I, No. 4. 1962.

[6] Marx Engels Selected Correspondence, FLPM. p. 440.

[7] For instance (our emphasis): "The workers, having conquered political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus." (p. 175) and Marxists ‘‘recognise that after the proletariat has conquered political power it must utterly destroy the old state machine . . .” (p. 180) The third instance is on p. 181.

[8] Draper, p. 101.

[9] Lenin twists Marxism, Socialist Standard, September 1969.

Letter: Marx and Dictatorship (1932)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter From A Correspondent.
Under the above heading, the Socialist Standard for June chose to answer a perfectly fair question by twisting and misconstruing a clear statement of Engels into an anti-class struggle position by adding to it a typical S.P.G.B. “explanatory interpretation.” The statement quoted ran, “ . . . Then look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This statement was “clarified,” save the mark! You went on to show how the Paris Commune was an instance of majority democratic control with, of course, no suppression of minorities. Minorities had their newspapers and were allowed to carry on their propaganda. In point of fact, they were, according to you, generally and generously “protected” by the “good” working-class dictatorship.

Then you contrast this beautiful fancy against Russia, with its ruthless suppression of all minorities, and draw the vicious anti-working class conclusion that you are right and the Bolshevist wrong.

You, as individuals, editors, contributors and members of the S.P.G.B., have every “right” to express opinions like the foregoing, but neither you nor anyone else has the slightest right to make, or try to make, Marx or Engels responsible for such cowardly opinions.

I am going to quote from Engels, but before doing so I want to say that the quotations which I will use need no "interpretations” from the S.P.G.B., or anybody else. They are clarity itself! Engels, writing on the Anti-authoritarians of his day, says;:

  “These gentlemen, have they ever seen a revolution? A revolution is the most authoritative thing possible. Revolution is an act in which part of the population forces its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, cannon, i.e., by the most authoritative means. And the conquering party is inevitably forced to maintain its supremacy by means of that fear which its arms inspires in the reactionaries.
  “Had the Paris Commune not relied on the armed people against the bourgeoisie, would it have lasted longer than a single day ?
   “May we not rather censure the Commune for not having made sufficient use of its authority?”

Again Engels, in a letter to Bebel, after pointing out the ahsurdity of a Free People’s State in a revolutionary period, says:—

  “As the State is only a transitional institution which we are obliged to use in the revolutionary struggle in order to forcibly crush our opponents, it is a pure absurdity to talk of a 'Free People's State.’ During the period that the proletariat still needs the State, it does not require it in the interest of ‘Freedom,’ but in the interest of crushing its antagonists . . ."  

And so any Marxist could go on quoting. But it is when you make the stupid blunder of contrasting the Russian “departure” from “equality” in wages and their “resorting” to inequality that you really relinquish all right to be considered seriously as Socialists, and take your true place as “just another one of those opposed to the growing power of the Working Class all over the world and particularly in Soviet Russia.!’

Try, if you can, to get the idea contained in the common Marxism : Equal “right” is a bourgeois “right” and will wither away as the State withers away, until real justice for Humanity shall establish itself in what would appear to-day as inequality, and we shall realise to the full that pregnant sentence—“ From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

W. D., 

London.

Reply.
If W.D. would use his intelligence, instead of his temper, he would try to meet arguments based on facts instead of foolish remarks.

It is a fact that Engels wrote: —

  The German Philistine has lately been thrown once again into wholesome paroxisms by the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Well, gentle sirs. would you like to know how this dictatorship looks? Then look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Paris Commune, p. 20, New York Labor News Co.)

It is a fact that Marx described the Commune in the following words: —

  The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman's wages. (Page 74.)
  While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority-usurping preeminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling Class was to represent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture. (P. 76.)

Of Russia it was and is a fact that universal suffrage is superseded by hierarchic investiture.

It is a fact that Russia is one of the most bureaucracy-ridden countries in the world, and that the police and all the officials of the administration are the agents of the Central Government—the Central Committee of the Communist Party—and are not revocable at the behest of the majority of the Russian people.

It is a fact that the officials of the Russian Government do not perform their duties at workmen’s wages in the sense Marx used the term.

The above are a few of the host of fundamental differences between the Paris Commune and the Russian Soviet Republic.

We will quote the evidence of Lenin. Speaking at the 4th Congress of the Communist International in 1922, and enumerating the reasons the Bolsheviks made mistakes, he said : —

  A fourth reason is the nature of our State apparatus. One of our misfortunes was that we had to take over the old state apparatus. The State apparatus often works against us. It is a matter of history that in the year 1917, when we had seized power, the State apparatus practised sabotage against us. We were greatly alarmed, and said: “Please come back to us”—and they all came back. That was our misfortune; We have now an enormous mass of officials, but we still lack a sufficient quantity of trained energies to keep them under proper control.
  In actual practice we often find that here at the top, where we exercise the powers of State, the apparatus works all right, whereas lower down the officials do as they please, and what they please to do is to work against our measures.
  At the top we have a few—I do not know the exact number—I am sure it is only a few thousand, or at a maximum, a few ten thousands—of our people; in the lower grades we have hundreds of thousands of officials bequeathed to us from Czarist clays or taken over by us from capitalist society. To some extent deliberately and to some extent unconsciously, they work against us. (The Communist, 16th December, 1922.)

From the above it will be seen that the Bolsheviks took over the old state apparatus, whereas the Commune did not. Since Lenin’s speech, Stalin and company have developed this state apparatus into a huge overshadowing power that crushes out all who disagree on particular points of policy with the small clique at the top. Heresy hunts and the activities of the secret police remind one of the extent the ideas of the Middle Ages affect Bolshevik activity. Trotsky and others have already found this out to their cost.

In further illustration of the undemocratic nature of the Russian Dictatorship as compared with the Paris Commune, let us quote once again the statement of Zinovieff at the 1st Congress of the 3rd International in March, 1919: —

   Our Central Committee has decided to deprive certain categories of party members the right to vote at the Congress of the Party. Certainly it is unheard of to limit the right of voting within the party, but the entire party has approved this measure, which is to insure the homogeneous unity of the Communists.
  So that, in fact, we have 500,000 members who manage the entire State machine from top to bottom. (The Socialist, 29th April 1920.)

Now, W.D., would you mind informing us what kind of a “working class dictatorship" this is from which not only the working class but even members of the ruling party are excluded ? Is this the form under which “real justice for humanity" (whatever this empty bourgeois phrase means!) will "establish itself"?

Let us now take the two extracts from pages 64 and 67 of Lenin’s “State and Revolution," that have been quoted by our opponent. W.D. says they need no "interpretation" from us or anybody else. Having doctored the quotations by tearing them from their context, he naturally objects to analysis.

The first is a quotation from an article written in 1873, by Engels, in an Italian paper against the Anarchists who "denied every form of authority, of subordination, of power." The whole of the quotation given by Lenin on page 64 is as follows: — .

  If the Autonomists merely meant to say that the social organisation of the future would admit authority only within those limits which the conditions of industry inevitably dictate, then it would be possible to come to an understanding with them. But they are blind in respect of all the facts which make authority necessary, and they fight passionately against a mere word.
  Why do not the Anti-Authoritarians limit themselves to shouting against the political authority, against the State? All Socialists agree that the State, and together with it, also political authority, will vanish as the result of the future Socialist Revolution, i.e., that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into simple administrative functions, concerned with social interests. But the Anti-Authoritarians demand that the political State should be abolished at one
blow, even before those social relations which gave birth to the State are themselves abolished. They demand that the first act of the Social Revolution shall be the abolition of all authority..
 These gentlemen, have they ever seen a Revolution? Revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritative thing possible. Revolution is an act in which part of the population forces its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, cannons, i.e., by the most authoritative means. And the conquering party is inevitably forced to maintain its supremacy by means of that fear which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Had the Paris Commune not relied on the authority of the armed people, against the bourgeoisie, would it have lasted longer than a single day? May we not. rather censure the Commune for not having made sufficient use of this authority? And so either the Anti-Authoritarians themselves do not know what they are talking about, in which case they merely sow confusion, or they do know what they are talking about, in which case they are betraying the proletariat. In either case they serve only the interests of reaction. 

If Engels' statement is analysed, and not blindly bolted, it is obvious that he was arguing against those who were opposed to the capture and use of political power. Engels and the S.P.G.B. maintain that political power must be captured by the workers and used as an agent of emancipation. Engels also means that it shall be the work of the majority, hence his reference to the Paris Commune. Engels nowhere says that a minority of the population shall force its will on the majority, nor does he say that the minority shall not be.allowed to express their views. He is not dealing with that point. He is only concerned that the will of the conquering party shall prevail, that it shall remain supreme. In other words, that when the majority are in favour of Socialism, and obtain control of political power, they will not allow the minority to prevent them from setting about the establishment of Socialism. He suggests that the Commune might be censured for not having made sufficient use of their authority, and we have also put forward the same view in different articles on the Commune. But this has nothing to do with the question of democracy.

The second quotation from page 66 of Lenin's book is taken from a private letter to Bebel by Engels, criticising the “Gotha programme" of 1875. Again Engels was concerned with the Anarchist's criticism of the State, and he objected to the use of the term "Free State" in the programme.

  The Free People's State has been transformed into a Free State. According to the grammatical meaning of the words, the Free State is one in which the State is free in relation to its citizens, that is. a State with a despotic government. It would be well to throw overboard all this nonsense about the State, especially after the Commune, which was already no longer a State in the proper sense of the word.
  The Anarchists have too long been able to throw in our teeth this “People’s State,” although already, in Marx’s works against Proudhon, and then in the “Communist Manifesto,” it was stated quite plainly that with the introduction of the Socialist order of society, the State will dissolve of itself, and will disappear, as the State is only a transitional institution which we are obliged to use in the revolutionary struggle in order forcibly to crush our opponents, it is a pure absurdity to speak of a Free People’s State. During the period when the proletariat needs the State, it does not require it in the interests of freedom, but in the interests of crushing its antagonists; and when it becomes possible really to speak of freedom, then the State, as such, ceases to exist. We should, therefore, suggest that everywhere the word State be replaced by Gemeinwesen (Commonwealth), a fine old German word, which corresponds to the French word "Commune."

Take the expression, “crushing its antagonists” in the above, and, putting it along with all Engels’ other writings on the subject, what meaning can be taken from it except the crushing of those who try to frustrate the carrying out of the will of the majority? Engels certainly did not mean that one portion of the working class party should use state power to prevent another part from having a voice in policy.

In Engels' criticism of the German Social Democratic draft programme of 1891, he said: —

   If anything is certain, it is this, that our party and the working class can only achieve power under the form of the democratic Republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(The Labour Revolution, Kautsky, p.67).

Finally, let us hear the voice of one who should know something of Russia: —

 We know from older books that workers' bureaucracy and workers' aristocracy is the social foundation for opportunism. In Russia this phenomenon has taken on new forms. On the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat—in a backward country—surrounded by capitalism—for the first time a powerful bureaucratic apparatus has been created from among the upper layers of the workers, that is, raised above the masses, that lays down the law to them, that has at its disposal colossal resources, that is bound together by an inner mutual responsibility and that intrudes into the policies of a workers* government in its own interests, methods and regulations.
   . . . The entire leading stratum of the party that was at the helm during the revolution and the civil war has been replaced, removed and crushed. Their place has been taken by an anonymous functionary. At the same time the struggle against bureaucratism which was so acute in character during Lenin's lifetime, when the bureaucracy was not yet out of its diapers, has ceased entirely now when the apparatus has grown sky high.
  And, indeed, who is there capable of carrying on this struggle? The party, as a self-controlling vanguard of the proletariat, no longer exists now. The party apparatus has been fused with the administrative. The most important instrument of the general line within the party is the G.P.U. The bureaucracy not only prohibits the criticism of the top from below but it prohibits its theoreticians from even talking about it and from noticing it. (Trotzky, quoted from the Militant by the One Big Union Bulletin, 16/6/1932.)

Perhaps the above is an illustration of the "growing power of the workers"!

Finally, W. D., if you would analyse what you write, you might think more clearly. For instance, when you say "contrasting the Russian 'departure' from 'equality' in wages and their 'resorting' to 'inequality,' " what do you mean? What is contrasted? Again, how "Equal 'Right' " "wither away"? Again, when we quote Marx's statements as to the nature of the Commune, how are we contrasting "this beautiful fancy against Russia"? If, as it appears, you are in favour of the "ruthless suppression of all minorities," why do you say: "You, as individuals, editors, contributors, and members of the S.P.G.B., have every 'right' to express opinions like the foregoing"? At least be logical! '

Gilmac.

Lenin vs. Marx (1976)

From the Spring 1976 issue of the Western Socialist

 This is one of a series of articles that appeared in the Lance, published by the Student Media, University of Windsor in Windsor, Ont., Canada.

It seems that for the past while I have been criticized for not backing up some of my claims with references to the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. This week, however, I plan to show how Lenin directly distorted Marxian scientific socialism.

Marx and Engels made it quite clear that “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room within it have developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.” (Preface to Critque of Political Economy).

Compare this to the Leninist theory that socialism can be built in backward countries such as the Russia of 1917. Engels himself wrote in 1893 that France (already an industrialized country) had not “reached the point which would have made the transition to socialism possible.” (Preface to Italian edition of the Communist Manifesto). So how could backward Russia which was just developing capitalism proceed to socialism?

Lenin, later, had to admit that “The development of the productive forces of Russia has not attained the level that makes socialism possible.  . . . They keep harping on this incontrovertible proposition” . . . (Our Revolution). Thus he was to look to countries such as India and China to assure the victory of socialism. Quite a contradiction. If Russia was too backward for socialism, then how were India and China, which were even more backward, to remedy the situation?

In order for Lenin’s followers to claim that socialism could be built in one country, and a backward country at that, then they would have to reject the total concept of historical materialism, one of the cornerstones of Marxian thought.

To Marx, the socialist revolution could only be “the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.” — (Communist Manifesto). And what did Lenin say? He stated that the workers can only be led by a group of skilled professional revolutionaries. Why? Because “the working class exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop only trade-union consciousness . . . ” — (What is to be Done?) Marx knew that only a politically conscious majority of workers can build socialism — “So that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required.” — (Class Struggles in France). Whereas Lenin followed a different view — “If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see socialism for at least five hundred years.” — (reported by John Reed).

On question of the role of the State to Marx: the “destruction of the State machine” (Eighteenth Brumaire) meant the “destruction of the bureaucratic and military machine" (letter to Kugelmann). The State is “an evil inherited by the proletariat” and “whose worse sides the proletariat . . .  will have at the earliest possible moment to lop off . . .” (Civil War in France).

This is a far cry from Lenin’s distortion when he wrote that “Marx’s idea is that the working class must breakup, smash, the ‘ready-made state machinery’ and not confine itself to laying hold of it.” — (State and Revolution). Now which shall it be — lop off the military and bureaucracy or smash the state altogether?

And what of the much talked about “dictatorship of the proletariat”?

This was elaborated on by Engels who did not see the dictatorship as a form of government, but rather as the social structure of state power. Obviously Lenin did not share this view.

In fact, Engels saw the democratic republic as “the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Critique of the draft of the Erfurt program) . Whereas to Lenin the “Democratic Republic comes nearest the dictatorship of the proletariat” — (State and Revolution).

Marx and Engels saw the dictatorship as being based on universal suffrage, democratic from top to bottom. Quite different from Lenin’s view “that Soviet Socialist Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person" — (Economic Construction).

Lenin, to enforce his theories, claimed that Marx made a distinction between socialism and communism when in fact neither Marx nor Engels ever made such a distinction. Marx and Engels made it clear that the state was only necessary in a class society of inequality. What happened to Russia? The state is not withering away. In fact, it is stronger than ever.

This article is not long enough to go into all the areas of Leninist distortion. We must realise that the distortions made by Lenin inevitably resulted in Stalinist terror. Terror and violence are not recognized by socialists.

Len Wallace

Leninism v Democratic Socialism (1984)

From the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of the nineteenth century the peasantry accounted for eighty-five per cent of the total Russian population of one hundred and fifty million. The “revolutionary" activities of the most recent past had been confined to a group of intellectuals who believed in “going to the people", that is to say mingling with the peasantry at large so as to spread their ideas. These Narodniks. as they were known, held that the revolutionary potential to overthrow the tyranny of Tsardom lay with the mass of peasants. This was understandable since at the time Russia, in terms of industrial development, was backward in comparison with the more highly developed Western economies, with their correspondingly large urban working class.

The Narodniks, as typified by the "People’s Will” group, believed in terrorism and teaching of anarchy as the means to revolution. They were responsible for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. and the subsequent treatment of their members when caught did little to deter others from following the futile policy of violent minority action. In fact, six years later, Lenin’s brother Alexander was executed for complicity in a plot to assassinate Alexander III. under the auspices of the same organisation.

The "People’s Will" had been formed after a split in the Narodnik organisation "Land and Freedom”, which was set up in 1876 under the influence of the prominent anarchist Bakunin, who advocated such measures as the razing of capital cities and, when drinking, toasted "the destruction of public order and the unleashing of evil passions".

Concurrent with the establishment, at the turn of the century, of large-scale Russian industry, there arose a movement known as the League of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, whose number came to include one Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. This Ulyanov, who became better known as Lenin, was a keen follower of Plekhanov, who had previously split from the "People’s Will" on the issue of individual terrorism. Plekhanov had founded the “Liberation of Labour" group, dedicated to rejection of the old Narodnik ideas in favour of using the incipient industrial working class as the agent of revolution. Through his association with Plekhanov, Lenin began to formulate an idea for a new party organisation using new tactics based on this growing proletariat. Arrested in 1895 for distributing agitational pamphlets, the subsequent period of exile gave him time to consolidate these ideas.

Professional revolutionaries 
Lenin made no secret of his desire to build an organisation of revolutionary leaders who would devote their abilities to imposing their will on the ignorant mass of porkers. The arrogance of this policy is clearly shown in the 1902 pamphlet ‘What is to he Done?': “As I have stated repeatedly, by ‘wise men’ in connection with organisation, I mean professional revolutionaries". [1]

On the question of “vanguardist” professionals. Marx and Engels had unequivocally stated some twenty years previously:

  When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry: the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic persons from the upper and lower middle classes. [2]

This compares interestingly with Lenin’s blatant leadership policy:

  The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness . . . The theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophical, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, the founders of modern Scientific Socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. [3]

Nobody who claims to take a scientific view of history could deny that What is to be Done? was a reflection of the conditions of the day — conspiracy and violent minority action being a logical product of a non-democratic feudal system of society. But in fact Lenin did not abandon the policy of elitism even when the justification for it had disappeared. Fifteen years later he announced that if it were necessary for everybody to have developed intellectually to the level of desiring socialism, then we would have to wait five hundred years. [4] There is a wealth of evidence scattered throughout Lenin’s political career to show his contempt for the ability of the workers to understand socialism, and his conviction that they would have to be led to it by an elite of professionals. In 1917 a former colleague of Lenin’s described him as “a candidate for a European throne vacant for thirty years, the throne of Bakunin". [5]

Lenin had never really departed from the policy advocated by Peter Tkachev, who some twenty-seven years earlier stated:

  A real revolution can only be brought about in one way: through the seizure of power by revolutionists . . .
  The revolutionary minority, having freed the people from the yoke of fear and terror, provides an opportunity for the people to manifest their revolutionary destructive power. [6]

Views on the coming revolution
After the Second Party Congress of 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party split into two on the issue of whether the party should be constituted as a democratic mass party or as a small, centralised, disciplined elite. Tactical differences also developed between the “Bolsheviks” and “Mensheviks” (from the Russian words for majority and minority respectively). Both groups saw the necessity for Russia to undergo a preliminary capitalist revolution before socialism could even be considered—a view quite in accordance with the Marxian Materialist Conception of History. No one expressed this formulation more forcefully than Lenin, who wrote quite unambiguously that "Marxism has irrevocably broken with the Narodnik and anarchist gibberish that Russia for instance can bypass capitalist development, [7] and that . . . the democratic revolution will not immediately overstep the bounds of bourgeois social economic relationships.” [8]

The Mensheviks maintained that the proletariat, the working class, had no hope of gaining political power for their own ends without the prior establishment of this “bourgeois-democratic” regime. Only under these circumstances, with workers meanwhile negotiating some interim reforms, could conditions develop under which the working class would be able to lake power for themselves in order to establish socialism.

The Mensheviks therefore postponed any direct revolutionary action to some remote unforeseeable future, and openly advocated support for the up-and-coming Russian capitalist class in its struggle for supremacy over the reigning autocracy. The Mensheviks were therefore the faction most closely to be associated with the “revisionist” tendency in the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, as propounded by Eduard Bernstein. These members rejected conspiratorial organisation in favour of what was considered by the Bolsheviks to be a too-deterministic approach.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks took the attitude that, due to the weakness of the developing capitalist class in Russia at that time, their coming superiority as a class could only be effected if helped by an alliance between the proletariat and the numerically superior peasantry. Under this dictatorship of workers and peasants, the richer section of the peasantry could then be dispensed with, leaving the working class and the “semi-proletarian” element of the peasantry in control:

  The proletariat must carry through to completion the democratic revolution, by uniting itself to the mass of the peasantry, in order to crush by force the opposition of the autocracy and to paralyse the instability of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must complete the Socialist revolution by uniting to itself the mass of semi-proletarian elements in the population, in order to break by force the opposition of the bourgeoisie and to paralyse the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. [9]

Dictatorship of the proletariat
It is significant that this peasant/worker alliance was not originally intended to constitute the "dictatorship of the proletariat” — a phrase used by Marx when he was optimistic about the establishment of socialism in the near future. He envisaged a situation where the workers would have taken democratic control but the forces of wealth production had not yet been sufficiently developed to allow free access. Hence the need for a democratic society with the proletariat in political control but not yet fully at the level where it would be possible to have access based on the principle “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”. [10]

This idea of “dictatorship” was later used by Lenin to justify a “two-stage” theory of socialist development, made necessary by his (at first) unique interpretation of the events at the end of 1917. The Bolshevik idea was that there would follow, in the wake of their seizure of power, a series of revolutions in Western Europe, thereby consolidating the world revolution.

The third opinion on the debate over the nature of the coming revolution was provided by Leon Trotsky, who argued that the proletariat, having carried out the initial revolution, could scarcely be expected to relinquish state power afterwards. He held that the revolution would become "permanent” through the institution by the workers of nationalisation measures, while waiting for the rest of the European workers to take the lead from Russia's good example. Originally, Lenin maintained that the peasants and European workers would have to support the revolution from the outset. Trotsky arguing on the other hand that their support would constitute the final phase of the revolution.

So, Lenin's revolutionary horizon was at first no broader than a “dictatorship" of workers and peasants. This attitude was to change dramatically after the first, February, revolution of 1917. After his return in April. Lenin published his famous April Theses, one of which was that the worldwide socialist revolution had, in fact, begun. Most of Lenin's own comrades were staggered by this interpretation, even to the extent that he was interrupted with cries of, “delerium, the delerium of a madman”, [11] and it was widely believed that he would come to his senses when he had time properly to assess the true situation.

What is to be done?
Leninist and Trotskyist organisations to this day attempt to discredit the use of the. admittedly limited, democratic institutions as a vehicle for social revolution. "Parliamentary Cretinism”, to use Marx's term, is indeed doomed to failure — meaning the use of the capitalist institution to pass legislative reforms which are supposed to lead, ultimately, to a "fairer” society. However, the system of more-or-less democracy which goes with the Parliamentary institution can serve as a useful measure of the prerequisite for a successful revolution — working class consciousness.

Marx and Engels recognised the growing value of using suffrage as an expression of popular will. Marx wrote in 1880:

  . . . collective appropriation must be striven for by all means that are available to the proletariat. including universal suffrage, which will thus be transformed from the instrument of fraud that it has been till now, into an instrument of emancipation. [12]

The out of date vanguardist methods of violent insurrection were finally laid to rest by Friedrich Engels at the end of the nineteenth century, when he wrote in his introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France 1848-1850,

  The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses . . . the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they must act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us. But so that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required . . . even in France the Socialists realise more and more that no durable success is possible unless they win over in advance the great mass of the people. . . . The slow work of propaganda and parliamentary activity are here also recognised as the next task of the party. [13]

Soviets and the state
The soviet, or council, was the institution that flourished in Russia at the beginning of the abortive 1905 revolution, in the absence of any legally-sanctioned representative body of political opinion. Obviously, the form of democratic representation used by the working class depends ultimately on the prevailing political and economic conditions at that time. However, present-day advocates of the soviet as a means to "workers' control” are adamant that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield for its own purposes"; [14] this is the article of faith still propounded in the Trotskyist paper Socialist Worker.

  It was however the view of Marx and Engels, authors of the above passage, that it was necessary for their workers to take control of the state machinery before it could be used against the capitalist class. This , seeming paradox was resolved some years later when Engels clarified the specific point in a letter to Bernstein:

  As to your former enquiry regarding the passage in the preface of the Manifesto. . . . It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes. . . . [15]

The state is after all the executive body of the ruling class, even if run from top to bottom by members of the working class. The army and the police force, by virtue of their particularly unpleasant manifestations of repression and brutality, have come to be regarded by some as a force unto themselves, impermeable to socialist ideas. The fact remains, however, that the police and army are made up of workers who are forced to sell their ability to work in whichever way they can. The members of these repressive state institutions are no less susceptible to socialist ideas than is any other body of people.

A democratically-expressed majority is the only way to ensure that there will be a sufficiently large number of people aware of how society will need to be run and prepared to assert it. As Rosa Luxemburg said, with regard to the Bolshevik closure of an unfavourable Constituent Assembly:
   . . . the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people. [16]

P. G. Robinson

References
[1] What is to he Done?, p121 (Progress, Moscow 1978).
[2] Selected Correspondence — Marx and Engels, p307 (Progress 1975).
[3] Lenin, op.cit, p31.
[4] Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed, p263 (Penguin).
[5] Quoted in The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I. E.H. Carr, p90 (Pelican 1983).
[6] Quoted in D. Shub’s biography, Lenin, p26 (Pelican 1966).
[7] "Two Tactics in Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution". Lenin, p76 Selected Works (Progress Moscow 1977).
[8] ibid, p82.
[9] ibid, p147.
[10] Critique of the Gotha Programme, p247 (Pelican Marx Library 1974).
[11] Carr, op.cit, p90.
[12] "Introduction to the Programme of French Workers’ Party". p247 (Pelican Marx Library 1974).
[13] Introduction to Marx’s "Class Struggles in Trance, 1848-1850". p18 (Progress 1972).
[14] Communist Manifesto, Preface to 1872 edition. p2 (Peking 1970).
[15] Selected Correspondence — Marx and Engels, p345. (Progress Moscow 1975).
[16] The Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg. p38 (Slienger, London 1977).

Trotsky-Stalin Feud: An American View (1938)

From the April 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Professor John Dewey, the well-known American philosopher and educationalist, who presided over the Committee that inquired into the Trotsky affair, gave an interview to an American newspaper on the lessons of Bolshevism as he sees them. As the line he takes is going to be increasingly the line of attack on Socialism, his arguments are worth examination. But before coming to this it is worth while placing on record what he and the Committee concluded are the facts of Trotsky’ supposed complicity in the Russian assassination plots. This is what he said to his interviewer, as reported in the Washington Post (December 19th, 1937):

  “During the nine months of its steady works, our committee held hearings in Mexico, New York City, and Paris. It collected many scores of affidavits and depositions, and examined hundreds of letters and documents, as well as making a complete analysis of the testimony given in the Moscow trials. As a result of its prolonged, thorough, and impartial investigation – for none of its ten members is a Trotskyite or affiliated in any way with his theories and activities – it found Trotsky and his son innocent of the charges brought against them.
  It found that the prosecutor made no effort to ascertain the truth and that his procedure contradicted at every point the rules laid down for legal procedure in Russian law in a book edited by the prosecutor himself. It found that the three alleged interviews with Trotsky, said to have occurred in Copenhagen, Paris, and Oslo, never took place, this finding being supported by a mass of notarised depositions by persons in personal contact with Trotsky at the time the interviews were alleged to have been held, many of them by his political adversaries.
  . . . On the basis of all the evidence, we found that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the U.S.S.R. It was clearly established that the prosecutor at the trials fantastically falsified Trotsky’s role before, during, and after the October revolution. In short, the report proves the Moscow trials to be a frame-up. Later a volume of some two hundred pages will be published, giving in full the evidence on which our findings rest.”

Now for Professor Dewey’s conclusions.

The Breakdown of Marxism?

His first point is that the feud itself, regarded in its personal aspect, is of no importance to anyone but those immediately concerned. As the interviewer, Agnes E. Meyer phrased it, the dispute “has no more meaning to John Dewey than the fight between Schmeling and Joe Louis.” But the ideas for which the men and their supporters stand matter very much to the world at large, for, in Dewey’s eyes, we are witnessing the final breakdown of Marxism:

   “The great lesson to be derived from these amazing revelations is the complete breakdown of revolutionary Marxism. Nor do I think that a confirmed Communist is going to get anywhere by concluding that, because he can no longer believe in Stalin, he must pin his faith on Trotsky. The great lesson for all American radicals and for all sympathisers with the U.S.S.R. is that they must go back and reconsider the whole question of means of bringing about social changes and of truly democratic methods of approach to social progress.”

He believes that Trotsky, as well as Stalin, stands for a method which has proved, and must prove, disastrous; “the dictatorship of the proletariat has led, and, I am convinced, always must lead, to a dictatorship over the proletariat and over the party. I see no reason to believe that something similar would not happen in every country in which an attempt is made to establish a Communist government.”

He claims that the dictatorship of a minority is compelled to use terrorism in order to crush opposition, and is compelled to make concessions to the non-Socialist outlook of the population in order to secure their support. In the long run such a dictatorship becomes so entrenched that it can only be overthrown by force. Far from being a passing phase and a step towards Socialism it becomes a terrifying barrier to further progress.

We need spend no further time on Dewey’s case, for it will be recognised at once as substantially the case put forward by the S.P.G.B. from 1918 onwards; in other words, it is the case put forward by Marxists against the Bolshevists. Dewey’s fallacy is that he accepts the minority dictatorship idea as being the doctrine of Marxists. Consequently his unanswerable case against the Bolshevists hits them but leaves Marxism in complete possession of the field.

Honesty in Working Class Politics

The argument Dewey goes on to develop – and here again he is only saying what the S.P.G.B. has always said – is that a minority cannot impose a social advance on an apathetic or hostile majority, for the reason that the minority dictatorship, in order to retain power, has to destroy freedom of speech, writing, and of the Press, which are the necessary conditions of orderly progress. The dictatorship has to preach the doctrine that the end justifies the means – as if ends and means could ever be divorced – and has to proclaim, as did Trotsky and Stalin, that Socialism can be achieved by brutal terrorism. They have to justify every form of opportunism, lying to the workers, compromise with the enemies of Socialism, bribery, treachery, framed-up charges, the methods of the Tsarist secret police – all in the name of Socialism. They have to preach that truth is just a bourgeois weapon against the workers, whereas, as Dewey well says: “Truth, instead of being a bourgeois virtue, is the mainspring of all human progress.” He adds:

  “A people that is kept in systematic ignorance of what is going on in the world and even in their own country and which is fed on lies, has lost the fundamental leverage of progress. To me, as an educator, this is the great tragedy of the Russian situation.“

Edgar Hardcastle

‘Transition period’ (2019)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

One thing Brexit has done is to familiarise people with the term ‘transition period’. Dictionaries typically define it as ‘the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another’. Socialists were already familiar with the term in the context of the change from capitalism to socialism. Of course the transition to Brexit – which Theresa May prefers to call an ‘implementation period’ – is a trivial change compared to the social revolution that the change to socialism will be.

Marx himself used the term in some private notes he wrote in 1875:

  ‘Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one to the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Critique of the Gotha Programme).

This statement has been subject to various interpretations but its basic meaning is clear. The change from capitalism to socialism (or communism, the same thing), or ‘the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production’ as he called it elsewhere in the same notes, is revolutionary in two senses. It is a radical change in the basis of society, from class to common ownership of the means of production, and is brought about rapidly and decisively.

This second point is important in that some have imagined this ‘transition’ as lasting decades. However, once the material conditions for ending class ownership have evolved – once production has become ‘socialised’ in the sense of being the collective, co-operative effort of the whole workforce – then the change can be made rapidly. The contradiction between socialised production and minority ownership can be achieved by ending the monopoly control, whether in law or in fact, of the minority over the means of production. What is required to do this is a political decision to withdraw state protection (via the law, police, armed forces, and courts) for this monopoly. There is no reason why this should take any length of time. It just requires a political decision and its implementation; which of course assumes that the working class has won control of political power and is organised to implement its decision.

In this quote, Marx called this period during which political power would be exercised to abolish class society ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, a term that was current amongst revolutionary socialists of his generation, though perhaps unfortunate in today’s context as ‘dictatorship’ has come to have a different connotation to the exercise of full powers that it then had. In the quote Marx prefaced the term by the word ‘revolutionary’, indicating that its aim was to revolutionise the basis of society. This done – and socialist (or communist) society established – then this period of the revolutionary transformation of one society into another comes to an end together with its corresponding political form.

This was not how Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to see it. Having seized power in a country that was not ripe for socialism, they had to justify staying in power while the conditions for socialism developed. Lenin openly said that this period would be one of state capitalism and that dictatorship meant dictatorship in its modern sense. His follower, the leading Trotskyist Ernst Mandel, went even further and made it a new system of society which he called ‘transitional society’ and which he expected to last an ‘epoch’.

This was to move away from Marx’s conception of the ‘transition period’ as a temporary, short period of rapid change brought about by political means. Perhaps we should follow Theresa May and call it an ‘implementation period’. That way it couldn’t be misinterpreted as lasting an epoch.

Letter: Dictatorship and Parliament (1936)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

Socialist Standard.

Comrades,

Being interested in the official position of your organisation, I would appreciate your answers to the following questions: —

1. Does the S.P. of G.B. recognise the necessity of instituting a dictatorship of the proletariat ?
2. If it does, under what conditions can such a dictatorship be realised, and what would be its chief characteristics?
3. Is it possible for the working class to capture and retain political power without crushing and destroying the democratic, parliamentary form of the state which exists in modern capitalist countries to-day?

Comradely yours,

Harry Mandell.

Reply.

The phrase, “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” is now generally used to cover the political form adopted by the Russian Bolsheviks and urged by the Communists of different countries. We take this, therefore, to be the form implied in the question, whatever may have been the earlier meaning of the phrase, and we will answer it from this point of view. We are opposed to this form of Dictatorship as it is an evidence of lack of understanding of Socialism on the part of the majority of the population—the workers. While the workers lack understanding they will defeat all the efforts of a minority in control of power to introduce a system based upon the common ownership of the means of production and distribution. This fact has been dearly demonstrated in Russia and the earlier, and probably more sincere of the Bolsheviks, had very rapidly to face it, and to curtail their proposals for ushering in a new system on a communal basis. Russia’s recent advance towards a democratic parliamentary form of Government is a further evidence of the failure of "Dictatorship” to deliver the goods it promised. It was because the Bolsheviks were weak and had to depend to a large extent upon trickery that they were compelled to destroy democratic forms. Had they allowed free expression the rule of the Russian Communist Party would have been threatened right at the commencement.

When the majority of the workers in a particular country understand Socialism and, therefore, what it implies, they will proceed to introduce it once they have captured political power. To do so it will be essential to allow to all the means to express their views freely and, owing to the understanding of the majority, there will be nothing to fear from this free expression of opinion. As the majority will have control of power, any minority that is foolish enough to try to thwart the wishes of the majority will lack the means to make effective any destructive intentions.

Once Socialism is in process of being introduced the coercive sides of the present parliamentary form will become obsolete. There will be no need to “crush” as they will just disappear.

Editorial Committee

Letter: The S.L.P. and the Conduct of Meetings. (1934)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following letter from a reader in Vancouver : —

“Vancouver, B.C.,

“Canada.

“ September 21st, 1934.

"Comrades,

“In the September issue of the Socialist Standard, in reference to conduct of public meetings, you publish a statement of the Secretary of the British Section of the Socialist Labour Party, quoting that they allow questions and open discussion at all propaganda meetings.

“In this respect the British Section are ahead of the American Section, as last month (Thursday, August 16th), at the Victory Hall, Vancouver, I attended a meeting of the S.L.P., addressed by Eric Hass. Questions were allowed, but discussion was not allowed, and when the Chairman’s decision was protested from the floor he adjourned the meeting.

“I might add, the speaker was in difficulty over a question of the Communists dealing with the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ but the meeting was orderly, and the attitude of the Chairman could only be construed as evidence of the weakness of the position of the S.L.P.