SPGB Meetings (1982)

Party News from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

A number of the meetings listed are actually available as audio files on the SPGB website. Click on the links:

Debate: Did Lenin distort?

‘Yes’ – Steve Coleman, SPGB

‘No’ – Monty Johnstone, CPGB & ‘Marxism Today’

Venue: Islington Central Library, London

Date: 11th November 1982

Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

A series of talks by Steve Coleman and held by Islington Branch between 3rd October 1982 and 26th December 1982.

The venue was the Prince Albert pub in Islington.

Plekhanov and the Materialist Conception of History 

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 3rd October 1982

Dietzgen and Dialectical Thought

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 17th October 1982

Kautsky and the Critique of Religion

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 31st October 1982

Bronterre O'Brien and Working-Class Radicalism

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 21st November 1982

Belfort Bax and the Ethics of Socialism

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 28th November 1982

William Morris' Vision of Socialism

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 12th December 1982 (Part 2)

Martov and the Anti-Bolshevik Approach to Revolution

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 26th December 1982

Socialism on tape (1989)

 From the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

From the list above the following recordings are available on the SPGB website:

• Is Britain Worth Dying For? DEBATE between The Socialist Party and Lady Olga Maitland (Women and Families for Defence) (1984).
• After The Miners Strike — Which Way Forward For Socialists? DEBATE between The Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party (speaker Colin Tipton) (1985).
• Is Inequality Natural? Speaker Clifford Slapper (1985).
• Did Lenin Distort Marx? DEBATE between The Socialist Party and Monty Johnstone (Communist Party. Marxism Today) (1982).
• Why Tony Benn Should Be A Socialist. Speaker Dick Donnelly (1980).
• The Crisis In Capitalism — What Is The Next Step? DEBATE between The Socialist Party (speaker Clifford Slapper) and Bill Etherington (General Secretary. Durham Mechanics NUM) (1986)
• Historical Materialism: Theory And Action. Speakers Janie Percy-Smith. Steve Coleman (1987)
• Marxian Economics And Capitalist Textbooks. Speaker Adam Buick. (1987)
• Marx's Conception Of Socialism. Speaker E. Hardy (1987)

Education Series: Socialist Thinkers — People Who History 
Made. Speaker Steve Coleman (1982).

• Plekhanov And Historical Materialism.
• Dietzgen And Dialectical Thought.
• Kautsky's Critique Of Religion.
• Bronterre O'Brien And Working Class Radicalism.
• Belfort Bax And The "Ethics’ Of Socialism.
• William Morris' Vision Of Socialism.
• Martov And The Anti-Bolshevik Approach To Revolution.

Marxist Anti-Bolshevik (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

World Bolshevism. By Iulii Martov. Translated by Paul Kellogg and Mariya Melentyeva. AU Press, Edmonton, Canada, 2022.

When in 1938 International Review published, under the title The State and the Socialist Revolution, a number of essays written by Martov in the years 1918-1921 (he died in 1923) the translator omitted the first section. The whole collection had been published in Russian, in Berlin in 1923, under the title “Mirovoi bol’shevizm” (World Bolshevism). This explains why Martov has come to be called Julius, the German equivalent of Iulii (or Yuliy), his first name in Russian.

The whole collection has now been published in a new translation with an introduction by Kellogg. In the missing chapters Martov advanced the view that Bolshevism was popular amongst large sections of the working class outside Russia because they had been brutalised by serving as soldiers during the war, hence their belief in violent direct action and contempt for traditional working class institutions and activities (reformist parliamentary action and trade unionism). The newly-translated chapters don’t add much, in terms of Marxist analysis, to the points made in the parts that have been available in English since 1938. In any event, by 1921 the Bolsheviks had abandoned advocating an immediate armed insurrection in favour of electing left-wing governments, which brought them a different following.

As a further dissemination of Martov’s Marxist criticism of Lenin and Bolshevik ideology the new translation can only be welcome.

Adam Buick

Martov: a Russian Social-Democrat (1967)

From the November 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain Martov is mainly remembered for his pamphlet The State and the Socialist Revolution, in which he does a brilliant demolition job on Lenin’s State and Revolution. Israel Getzler’s study* is the first biography of this leader of the Russian Mensheviks to be published. Although it has a number of defects — not least the author’s irritating Jewish nationalism — it is nonetheless better than nothing.

When measuring up Martov’s contribution to the working class movement it is convenient to compare him with Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The Menshevik-Bolshevik split of 1903 was largely centred on different conceptions of how a social-democratic party should be organised. Lenin, with his Jacobin turn of mind, wanted (as Rosa Luxemburg put it) “the blind subordination of all party organisations and their activity, down to the least detail, to a central authority which alone thinks, acts and decides for all”. Martov, on the other hand, favoured an organisation roughly modelled on the German SPD. This then was not a controversy between Socialists — since both sides accepted the need for leaders and both were opportunists, prepared to ally themselves with, and support, anti-socialists if it seemed politically expedient.

Although Lenin and Martov opposed the first world war, their position on militarism was not a consistent Socialist one. Thus Lenin, in a letter to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, September 26-27, 1917: "Only our party, having won a victory in an uprising, can save Petrograd, for if our offer of peace is rejected, and we obtain not even a truce, then we shall become ‘defensists’, then we shall place ourselves at the head of the war parties, we shall be the most ‘warring’ party, and we shall carry on a war in a truly revolutionary manner.” (Lenin’s emphasis). In a similar style Martov denounced the Brest-Litovsk peace, calling for “a nation-wide call-up”, and in a speech to the combined session of the Executive Committee of Soviets, the Moscow Soviet and trade unions on May 5, 1920 he pledged his party’s support to the war effort against Poland — although he wanted a ‘defensive war'.

Martov, however, came into his own after the Bolsheviks seized control of the state. Since the Mensheviks were then excluded from any share in political power he no longer had much opportunity to squander his talents on reformist issues. Instead he was able to use his Marxist knowledge to hammer away at the efforts of the Bolsheviks to convince the working class that they were constructing a Socialist system in the Russian empire. When Lenin suggested ‘Socialism in one country’:

  If for the construction of socialism a certain level of culture is required . . . why should it not be permissible for us to begin by seizing by revolutionary means the preconditions for that certain level, and then afterwards, on the basis of the workers’ and peasants’ state-power and the Soviet order, advance further and catch up on the other (Western) nations.

Martov was able to answer by flinging back at Lenin his own words, written in 1905:

  We declare he is an agent provocateur who strives to use state power for the realisation of socialism in backward Russia.

Similarly, when they enforced the death penalty, he reminded the Bolsheviks of their former stand — how they had voted for a resolution against execution at the Copenhagen Congress of the International in 1910 and had protested against the reintroduction of the death penalty in Russia in July, 1917. He singled out Lunacharsky:

  You, A. V. Lunacharsky, you who loved to come to the workers and depict them in resounding words the greatness of the socialist teaching; you, who casting your eyes up to heaven, extolled the brotherhood of men in socialist construction; you who denounced the hypocrisy of a Christian religion which sanctioned homicide, you who preached the religion of proletarian socialism — you are three times a liar, three times a Pharisee when, in a pause in your self-intoxication with cheap phrases, you become an accomplice of Lenin and Trotsky in the organisation of murder, with or without trial!

But, unlike the vast majority of the critics of the Soviet Union, Martov went much further than just sniping at the unpleasant features of the Bolshevik regime — at the smashing of democracy and the use of terror. While he acknowledged the Russian revolution as being historically progressive he also recognised its capitalist nature, despite the idealism of Lenin and his associates. He realised that the Bolsheviks’ wild shrieks for world revolution would soon give way to an even more fervent passion for normalising their relations with the rest of the capitalist world as they set about the task which confronts any young capitalist state — the twin process of industrialisation and beating down the peasantry into a mass of propertyless wage- earners. Nor did he fall into the trap of criticising the lack of democracy in Russia simply or ethical on moral grounds. Instead he contrasted the clumsy and arbitrary repression in the Soviet Union with the Bolsheviks’ claim that they were advancing to Socialism. He pointed out that this was a primitive concept which had been popular among many of the utopian Socialists of the nineteenth century. Babeuf, Weitling, Cabet, Blanqui — all had their elitism summed up for them by Charles Naine :

  The minority possessing the knowledge of the truth of scientific socialism has the right to impose it on the mass . . . Later, that is, after the social order will have been totally transformed by the socialist dictators, liberty and democracy will be reconstituted.

Martov put forward the Marxist argument against this. Socialism, he argued, could only be achieved by a politically conscious working class. It is the experience of workers under capitalism which drives them to understand the need for Socialism and this process is enhanced by the degree of democracy which they have won for themselves. Dictatorial power wielded by a vanguard minority, no matter how sincere its intentions, can never act as a substitute. That way the workers remain a subject class and the dictators, having acquired a taste for power, consolidate their own rule.

This then is Martov’s value to Socialist theory. Even however when bitterly criticising the Bolsheviks he still had no real alternative to offer — not, at any rate, in uncompromising, revolutionary terms such as those of the Socialist Party. But like other social democrats — Plekhanov, Kautsky, Luxemburg — despite all his errors, he made a contribution to the general body of Marxist theory. Lenin is a pale shadow at the side of him.

John Crump

* Martov: a political biography of a Russian social democrat by Israel Getzler (Cambridge University Press, 70s.).

How Should Socialists Organise? (2013)

Julius Martov

From the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

We were anti-Leninist from the start.

In recent months the idea or concept of ‘Leninism’ has been placed under the microscope with the revelations of the undemocratic activities of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. In March the Socialist Standard republished its 1995 education document as The SWP: an undemocratic Leninist organisation which identifies the undemocratic nature of the ‘Leninist’ concept of ‘democratic centralism’ in the SWP. The origins of ‘Leninism’ lie at the beginning of the twentieth century when Lenin distorted the original message of Marx and Engels, but even in this period there were criticisms of ‘Leninism’ and ‘Bolshevism’ by such revolutionary thinkers as Rosa Luxemburg and Julius Martov.

Lenin’s pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement was published in 1902 when Lenin, Martov and Plekhanov with the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) were in political exile from Tsarist Russia. The pamphlet detailed the organisational structure Lenin believed necessary for a revolutionary political party in an autocratic state like that of Tsarist Russia. This organisational structure of a disciplined centralised party of committed activists is the seedbed for the later authoritarianism and dictatorship in the Bolshevik regime in Russia. Lenin argued that the working class would not achieve political class consciousness simply by fighting the ‘economic’ battles between capital and labour over wages and working hours, and that Marxists needed to form a political party, a ‘vanguard’ of dedicated revolutionaries to bring socialist consciousness to the working class.

Lenin wrote that:

‘Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships (of all classes and strata) to the state and government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.’

Lenin had little if any belief in the working class as agents of change, believing ‘that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness’, and that socialist ideas came from ‘the educated representatives of the propertied classes’ or ‘revolutionary socialist intellectuals.’

At the second congress of the exiled RSDLP on Charlotte Street in London in 1903, there was a split between Lenin on one side and Martov and Plekhanov on the other. The opposing factions became known as ‘Bolshevik’ and ‘Menshevik’ respectively. The split centred on definitions of party membership. The Martov ‘Menshevik’ faction favoured a loose (in comparison to Lenin’s views) interpretation of party membership as ‘one who accepts the Party’s programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organisations.’ In contrast Lenin and the ‘Bolshevik’ faction wanted a restricted membership of a fully committed cadre; ‘one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party’s organisations.’

The ideas of Lenin in What Is To Be Done? are in contrast to what Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 where they described the proletarian movement as ‘the self conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.’ Marx drafted the general rules of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 which began categorically with the line ‘that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ In 1879 Marx and Engels felt the need to distribute a circular where they stated: ‘when the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry; the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, cooperate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.’

In response to Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Rosa Luxemburg wrote Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (1904) which later became known as Leninism or Marxism? where she criticised his concept of revolutionary organisation and identified Lenin as a ‘Blanquist’ socialist revolutionist.

Luxemburg wrote that:

‘Blanquism did not count on the direct action of the working class. It, therefore, did not need to organise the people for the revolution. The people were expected to play their part only at the moment of revolution. Preparation for the revolution concerned only the little group of revolutionists armed for the coup.’

This is the Bolshevik strategy in its essence, both then and now.

Luxemburg identified ‘the two principles on which Lenin’s centralism rests are precisely these: the blind subordination, in the smallest detail, of all party organs to the party centre which alone thinks, guides, and decides for all. The rigorous separation of the organised nucleus of revolutionaries from its social-revolutionary surroundings.’ This is Blanquist organisation, although Lenin himself ‘defined his ‘revolutionary Social Democrat’ as the ‘Jacobin indissolubly connected with the organisation of the class-conscious proletariat.’

Lenin’s former comrade-in-arms Julius Martov wrote a critique of ‘Leninism’ and ‘Bolshevism’ in his 1919 work 'The Ideology of ‘Sovietism’ identifying the ‘Jacobin and Blanquist idea of a minority dictatorship.’ Martov reiterated the point made by Engels ‘that the epoch of revolutions effected by conscious minorities heading unknowing masses had closed for ever. From then on, he [Engels] said, revolution would be prepared by long years of political propaganda, organisation, education, and would be realised directly and consciously by the interested masses themselves.’

Martov also quoted the Swiss Social Democrat Charles Naine’s observation on ‘Bolshevism’ as ‘the minority possessing the knowledge of the truth of scientific socialism has the right to impose it on the mass.’ Later Martov looks at Blanqui as a major influence (‘a dictatorial power whose mission it will be to direct the revolutionary movement’).

Lenin’s own words in a speech on Economic Construction in 1920 were also revealing when he said:

‘the Soviet Socialist Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of a class is at times best realised by a dictator, who sometimes will accomplish more by himself and is frequently more needed. At any rate, the principal relation toward one person rule was not only explained a long time ago but was also decided by the Central Executive Committee.’

Marx in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach had written that ‘The materialist doctrine that men are the products of conditions and education, different men therefore the products of other conditions and changed education, forgets that circumstances may be altered by men and that the educator has himself to be educated. This doctrine leads inevitably to the ideas of a society composed of two distinct portions, one of which is elevated above society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.’

Martov correctly pointed out that if this thesis is applied

  ‘. . . to the class struggle of the propertyless, this means the following. Impelled by the same ‘circumstances’ of capitalist society that determine their character as an enslaved class, the workers enter into a struggle against the society that enslaves them. The process of this struggle modifies the social ‘circumstances.’ It modifies the environment in which the working class moves. This way the working class modifies its own character. From a class reflecting passively the mental servitude to which they are subjected, the propertyless become a class which frees itself actively from all enslavement, including that of the mind.’

In conclusion Martov saw ‘the proletarian class considered as a whole is the only possible builder of the new society.’

A year after the RSDLP congress in London at which the Bolshevik/Menshevik split took place 142 former members of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) met to found the Socialist Party of Great Britain on quite different organisational principles to those proposed by Lenin. The SDF was riddled with ‘reformist’ policies, undemocratic party organisation, authoritarianism and dictatorial methods used by its leadership. The rules of the newly established party gave the party membership complete control of the organisation, all meetings at branch, executive committee and conference were open to the public; there were no leaders, just an annually elected executive committee with power only to run week-to-week affairs and carry out membership decisions. The declaration of principles of the new party stated that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be work of the working class itself.’ We were therefore ‘anti-Leninist’ in principle and practice before ‘Leninism’ and the Bolshevik revolution that was its political outcome.

Steve Clayton

The State and the Socialist Revolution (1940)

Pamphlet Review from the January 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

The State and the Socialist Revolution by J. Martov. (International Review, New York.)

This pamphlet consists of a number of essays written during the years 1919-23 by the Russian Marxist, Martov

Who was Martov?

“Integer”, the translator, gives a detailed account of Martov in his Foreword. He was a Russian Marxist who accepted neither the point of view of the Bolsheviks, nor that of the Mensheviks, but was very well known in Russia for his writings both before and during the revolutionary days. He was “one if the founders and collaborators on the Iskra, the publication around which the Russian Social Democracy developed”. After 1917 he opposed the infliction of capital punishment on workers who thought differently from the Bolsheviks, and he demanded trial by jury for political prisoners. Because he persisted in examining critically the policy of the Bolsheviks, he was driven into exile, where he died, poverty-stricken and a victim of tuberculosis.

Martov’s writings are of particular interest to the working class, for therein he carefully examines the content and lays bear the meaning of the Russian Revolution. In addition, he covers such important questions as “Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and “The Commune of 1871”.

It is worthy of note that Martov, possibly ignorant of the S. P. G. B., arrived at conclusions on a large number of subjects which coincide with the views of the Socialist Party of Great Britain expressed in the Socialist Standard in the early years of Bolshevik rule.

Martov on “Soviets for All Countries”

After 1917, the Bolsheviks and their followers in other countries announced to the world that a new weapon, a new political form, had at long last been discovered which would enable the working class everywhere to win its emancipation. This “perfect” political form was, of course, the Soviet. Time and place were of no importance. All that was necessary was for the different peoples to make use of Soviets and each and every one of them would achieve Socialism. Soviets, the Bolsheviks claimed, would be equally efficacious in backward countries like Russia, Bulgaria and Hungary, and in highly industrialised countries like England and the United States. “Soviets are the perfect form of State. They are the magic wand by which all inequalities, all misery, may be suppressed”  (p. 14).

Martov ridiculed the Bolsheviks for their belief that revolutions were ready to break out everywhere, for their belief that workers and peasants, by embracing Soviets (a world merely meaning Council), could establish Socialism. He held the Marxian view that no political form can enable Socialism to be won, unless the material conditions are ripe for such a change, unless capitalism has reached a high degree of development. Says Martov: “No less than mystic is the concept of a political form that, by virtue of its particular character, can surmount all economic social and national contradictions” (p. 15).

Marx’s view on the impossibility of peasant communities passing directly to Socialism without passing through the intermediary stage of capitalism, can be found in his preface to the first edition of Capital. There Marx says: “And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement . . . it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development.”

It can easily be seen, therefore, how little the Bolsheviks understood the teachings of Marx (whose apostles they claim to be), and how badly they followed the advice he had to give.

Reality has shattered all these illusions

To-day, we hear little of Soviets. The reality of experience has taught that they are not “a magic wand”.

Reality, too, shattered many of the Bolsheviks’ early illusions. In his essay on “Dictatorship of the Minority”, Martov shows how the Bolsheviks were forced by conditions of the time to change their tactics and ideas.

In 1917, Lenin urged that the Russian workers would shatter the old bureaucratic and oppressive features of the State, once they had gained political power. He wrote of “the substitution of a universal popular militia for the police”, of the “electiveness and recall at any moment of all functionaries and commanding ranks”, of “workers’ control in its primitive sense, direct participation of the people at the courts” (p. 17). Indeed, Lenin claimed that the triumph of the Bolsheviks would bring to the Russian workers a more real democracy than that found in capitalist countries with the parliamentary system.

This soon proved to be an idle dream. (And yet, perhaps, it was not so “idle”, since such talk helped Lenin and his clique to gain support and power.) In any case, the programme above outlined was soon abandoned. It was found impossible to put it into effect in face of the backward condition of industry and agriculture, and of the peasant outlook. Alread, by1919, Martov could observe that the machinery of State in Russia was being strengthened, and that the apparatus for repression was being improved and extended. Martov sums up the matter in these words:

  Reality has cruelly shattered all these illusions. The ‘Soviet State’ has not established in any instance electiveness and recall of public officials and the commanding staff. It has not suppressed the professional police . . . It has not done away with social hierarchy in production . . . On the contrary, in proportion to its evolution, the Soviet State shows a tendency in the opposite direction. It shows a tendency toward the utmost possible strengthening of the principles of hierarchy and compulsion. It shows a tendency toward the development of a more specialised apparatus of repression than before . . . It shows a tendency toward the total freedom of the executive organisms from the tutelage of the electors” (p. 18. Our emphasis).

Again, on page 55, Martov tells us how things developed after 1917.

  “In Russia the evolution of the ‘Soviet State’ has already created a new and complicated State machine, based on the ‘administration of persons’ as against the ‘administration of things’ based on the opposition of  . . . The functionary (official) to the citizen. THESE ANTAGONISMS ARE IN NO WAY DIFFERENT FROM THE ANTAGONISMS THAT CHARACTERISE THE CAPITALIST STATE” (Our emphasis).

Naturally, Martov, like the S.P.G.B., held the view that the form of State in Russia was not as advanced as the “democratic parliamentarism” found in Western Europe. Whilst ridiculing the democracy of the more highly developed  capitalist countries, the Bolsheviks did not fail to make use of the features of repression existing in those countries (p. 19).

To put the whole matter briefly, after the Russian upheaval of 1917, as before it, the State Power continued to be in the hands of a minority, though it was a different minority (p. 19).

What was the historic role of the Bolsheviks?

In his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels showed that after the proletariat has gained political power for the purpose of introducing Socialism, the State would become unnecessary, and die out. “State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of the processes of production” (Our emphasis).

If the conclusions of Engels given above contain the truth, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks was not followed by the introduction of Socialism. Or why the continued development and strengthening of the Russian State Power?

What DID the capture of political power by the Bolsheviks mean? Briefly stated, it meant this. The Bolsheviks became the instruments for the furthering of a capitalist revolution in Russia.

After a life-time of experience of working-class movements, Engels, in his preface to The Class Struggle in France, wrote:

  The time has passed for revolutions accomplished through the sudden seizure of power by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses . . . As soon as the situation calls for the total transformation of the social order, the masses must participate in it directly, and they must have an understanding of what is at stake and what must be won. This is what the history of the last half-century has taught us” (Quoted by Martov, pp. 57-8).

Both Engels and Marx knew from experience that before there could be a Socialist revolution, capitalism must have reached a high stage of development for “no social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room within it have been 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” (Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy).

The Bolsheviks, however, thought it possible for an active minority, representing the vague aspirations of the workers, to gain political power before the capitalist revolution itself had been completed. (See Martov, pp. 58-60.) What would happen if such a minority gained a political victory over the capitalist classes?

Marx himself answers this question in clear-cut terms in his article, “Moralising Criticism”. Briefly stated, his answer is the following: In those circumstances, the minority become merely the tools of the capitalist class, which has not been virile enough to gain or hold power. Such a minority finds itself in the position of having to develop and run capitalism for a class unable, at the time, to do it successfully itself. Hence, let it be remembered, in running capitalism, the minority will be compelled to use its power to keep the working class in its slave position. Says Marx:

  Its victory will only be a point in the process of the bourgeois (capitalist) revolution itself, and will serve the cause of the latter by aiding its further development. This happened in 1794, and will happen again as long as the march, the movement, of history will not have elaborated the material factors that will create the necessity of putting an end to the bourgeois methods of production and, as a consequence, to the political domination of the bourgeoisie” (p. 59, Martov’s emphasis).

Hence, we see the real content and meaning of the Russian Revolution. It was “only a point in the process of the capitalist revolution itself”.  The Bolsheviks, finding Russia in a very backward condition, were obliged themselves to do what had not been done previously, i.e., develop capitalism. The Bolsheviks performed the task of setting Russian capitalism on its feet and helping it through a very stormy period. “For the proletariat can score a victory over the capitalists—and not for the capitalists—only when the march of history will have elaborated the NECESSITY (not merely the objective POSSIBILITY) of putting an end to the capitalist methods of production” (p. 59).

We had hoped to include in this article reference to two other essays by Martov; first, “Metaphysical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism”, and secondly, “Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, but, owing to lack of space, we must leave them for a future issue.

Enough, however, has been said to show that we consider The State and the Socialist Revolution worthy of careful study. Like the books by Gide and Yvon, reviewed already in the Socialist Standard, Martov’s appears to add further proof of the correctness of the attitude taken up by the S.P.G.B. [about] the Russian Revolution.

We recommend it to all workers. We are confident that, if widely read, it will dispel many of those illusions which have been hindering the growth of a solid Socialist movement during the past twenty years.

Clifford Allen

(The State and the Socialist Revolution is obtainable from the Literature Secretary, 42 Great Dover Street, London, S. E. 1. Post free, 1s. 1d.)

‘Imperialism’: Where Lenin Went Wrong (2017)

From the May 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

A hundred years ago last month Lenin’s pamphlet ‘Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism’ was published. We take another look at its defects.

In his introduction Lenin wrote that the pamphlet was based on the views of the English non-Marxist writer J. A. Hobson in his book Imperialism (1902) and those of the Austrian Social Democrat Rudolf Hilferding in his Finance Capital (1910). Hilferding, basing himself mainly on German experience, described how banks, through what would now be called their investment banking side, had come to merge with industrial capital, raising capital for them and not only charging for this but retaining a share for themselves. Hobson, who was an underconsumptionist, argued that what had led to imperialism, as investment and territorial expansion abroad, was a surplus of capital that could not find a profitable outlet in the home country.

Lenin combined these views to come up with a definition of imperialism as ‘the monopoly stage of capitalism’ where ‘finance capital’ as the ‘bank capital of a very few big monopolist banks’ had ‘merged with the capital of the monopolist combines of industrialists’. Accepting Hobson’s surplus capital theory, Lenin said that ‘monopoly capitalism’ led to the formation of ‘international monopolist capitalist combines which share the world amongst themselves’ and to the ‘territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers’.

This was a passable description of some aspects of capitalism at the time, especially in Germany, and Lenin’s was correct in seeing the First World War as a war over the division of the world amongst the biggest capitalist powers. On the other hand, his acceptance of Hobson’s theory of surplus capital as an explanation for the ‘export of capital’. ie overseas investment, was dubious. A more straightforward explanation for the capital being invested abroad would be that it was more profitable to invest it there rather than at home.

Lenin was also mistaken to see the German-style merger of bank and industrial capital as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’. It was a common view amongst the Social Democratic parties at the time that capitalist competition would lead to monopoly and that what socialists had to do was to take these into common ownership and re-orient production to satisfying people’s needs rather than for profit. Karl Kautsky had speculated that the process of monopolisation could lead to a single world trust and a non-aggression arrangement between the imperialist powers, which he called ‘ultra-imperialism’. Lenin had a point when he said that this was impossible as the powers would never agree on a permanent carve-up of the world but would seek to change this as their respective strengths changed. But he failed to see that this applied to ‘monopolies’ in his ‘imperialist’ countries. The capitalist class there was not a monolithic bloc but different sections had different interests and none wanted to be held to ransom by some monopoly. Hence ‘trust-busting’ legislation in the US and nationalisation and the threat of nationalisation in Britain.

True to his polemical style, Lenin attributed a motive to Kautsky, accusing him of advocating a peaceful, united world capitalism even though Kautsky had only envisaged ‘ultra-imperialism’ as a theoretical possibility. Lenin posited a link between the ‘opportunism’ of which he accused Kautsky and ‘imperialism’, arguing that the reformism of the Social Democratic and Labour parties of Europe was due to the ‘imperialist’ powers using a part of their ‘high monopoly profits’ to bribe ‘certain sections of the workers’ into supporting both reformism and the state in which they lived. After the Bolshevik coup d'état this was developed into a full-blown theory that the top layer of workers in the countries with colonies had been bribed to support capitalism out of the super-profits of colonial exploitation and that the independence of colonial territories would undermine this, with the result that, deprived of their share of the super-profits, the workers there would abandon reformism and become revolutionary.

This was mistaken on a number of counts. First, it goes against the Marxian theory of wages that wages are the price of what workers sell and that higher wages reflect higher training and skills, not any share of surplus value as Lenin implied. Second, it led to supporting the creation of new capitalist states to the benefit of a local capitalist class. Third, it assumes that workers would become less reformist if their standard of living fell.

Lenin himself mentioned an objection, which he attributed to the anti-war Menshevik Martov, that the situation for socialists would be pretty hopeless ‘if it were precisely the best paid workers who were inclined towards opportunism’, e.g. skilled engineering workers. Lenin’s reply was, typically, to accuse Martov too of defending opportunism and reformism.

If the Bolsheviks had not retained power in Russia this work would have remained an obscure, dated pamphlet. However, due to Lenin’s position and later quasi-deification, it became inflated into a serious work of research and theory. The result was that its mistaken ideas – especially about some workers sharing in colonial exploitation and that socialists should support the ‘anti-imperialism’ of rising capitalist classes – became more widely accepted than they otherwise would have.

Adam Buick

Eastern Europe (1991)

Pamphlet Review from the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

We asked a reader in New Zealand to review our new pamphlet on the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes in Eastern Europe.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. The opening words of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte could appropriately be applied to the abortive Soviet coup and its aftermath in relationship to the first coup d’etat by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

History seems to repeat itself as Hegel and Marx observed but both knew that there’s no going back. The momentous events in the Soviet Union are the final death knell for the myth of "communism" or “socialism" in the eastern bloc—the twentieth century’s greatest lie— and for those who promoted and perpetuated that lie.

The facts are that socialism has never existed in the eastern bloc—what does or did exist is a system of bureaucratic state capitalism. It is this system which is undergoing an economic and social convulsion as it inevitably intermeshes itself with the world market.

There is a school of thought prevalent in the West which maintains that the bureaucratic class which has run the Soviet Union, China and the others has been “authoritarian”, “repressive” even “corrupt" and "dishonest” and yet has believed unreservedly in these bureaucratic claims to have created socialism. Needless to say, such an ideology has been actively encouraged because it has uniquely suited the political interests of the ruling élites in both the private capitalist west and the state capitalist east.

The state ideology of the state capitalist world, so-called “Marxism-Leninism”, is principally based on Lenin's distortion of Marx, springing from the historically backward conditions Lenin and the Bolsheviks found themselves in at the collapse of Tsarist Russia. Ideologically Lenin's break with Marx centres on Lenin's contention that the socialist revolution could take place in a backward country and be led by a conspiratorial vanguard. It is clear from hindsight that this elitism was derived more from the French bourgeois revolution and the indigenous Russian Narodnik tradition than from the ideas of Marx or Engels.

Another less obvious but more insidious Leninist distortion of Marx was Lenin's invention of a distinction between "socialism" and “communism” whereas Marx, Engels and the other 19th century Social Democrats used the terms synonymously along with “social democracy” to describe the classless, moneyless, post-capitalist world society. Lenin used “socialism" to describe the state economic monopoly of the Soviet regime (and the political monopoly of the Bolshevik Party), while “communism" as the ultimate classless moneyless society was relegated to an ever-receding future—as Soviet theoreticians continued to do almost up to the present day.

Inside the Soviet Union until his death in 1923 the doctrine of Leninism was courageously opposed by the Bolsheviks' former Russian Social Democrat comrade Julius Martov from a rigorous classical Marxian position. In continental Europe this classical Marxian tradition was eventually overwhelmed by the new orthodoxy of “Marxism-Leninism” and by the great repression of fascism. But it has never been entirely extinguished and has persisted as an underground stream in Western thought, periodically surfacing in the writings of Martov, Rühle, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Bordiga, Reich and Rubel.

In the vast English-speaking world this classical Marxian tradition has been kept alive by the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its like-thinking companion parties. In Australia and New Zealand classical Marxism was nurtured, not in the ivory towers and studies of the professional philosophers and intellectuals but rather in the ship’s forecastles and in the donkey-rooms of waterside workers.

The Socialist Party's state capitalist critique of the Soviet Union and China has been at times extremely unpopular (even physically dangerous) but it has been consistently held virtually from 1918. Time has proven it to be correct.

The publication of a booklet analysing events in the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Eastern bloc is therefore appropriate and timely. Anyone wanting to work out what is going on in the former USSR, what is behind glasnost and perestroika, and to see the problems of the collapsing Soviet economy analysed from a Marxian standpoint should study this booklet.

The work’s academic value would be increased in my view with a reference section of source material and a list of authors at the back of the book. It would also have been useful to see a chapter devoted to the political differences and forces represented by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. And I would have liked to have seen a chapter on Julius Martov whose insistence that Russia would eventually have to go through a bourgeois-democratic revolution is finally being vindicated.

The last word then to Martov: “More than ever convinced that the genuine state power of the toilers must be founded on the principle of democracy, Martov moved a resolution which called for the reactivation of the Soviet constitution and its further democratisation, which he spelled out in some detail. When Sosnovsky interjected, ‘This, comrades. was last year’s declaration’. as if to suggest that Martov’s demands were already out of date, Martov replied, amidst general uproar: ‘Last year’s and for all time!’ (quoted in Martov by Israel Getzler, Melbourne. 1976)

Michael Lee

Marxist refutation (2017)

Pamphlet Review from the October 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Why the Russian Revolution Wasn't a Socialist Revolution - Julius Martov's The State and the Socialist Revolution'. The Socialist Party. 100 pages. £2.

The Socialist Party has reprinted this classic Marxist refutation of Lenin's distortions of Marx's views on the state.

Lenin, who considered himself a Marxist and did in fact know his Marx, was concerned to justify in Marxist terms the Bolshevik coup and subsequent dictatorial rule in Russia. He claimed that Marx had advocated that the state should be 'smashed' in an armed uprising, that 'dictatorship of the proletariat' meant the dictatorship of a vanguard party acting on behalf of the proletariat, and he justified the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on the grounds that the soviets were a higher form of democracy.

Julius Martov (1873-1923) was a long-standing member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and had been a member of the editorial board of its publication Iskra alongside Lenin, Plekhanov and others. However, he and Lenin fell out over the issue of how Russian Social Democrats should organise themselves that was debated at their congress in 1903. Lenin had proposed that the party be organised as a disciplined, top-down body of professional revolutionaries. Martov was among those who favoured a more open party along the lines of other European Social Democratic parties. Lenin's view won the vote and the party split into 'Bolsheviks' (the majority) and the 'Mensheviks' (the minority). Martov was, then, a 'Menshevik' though this was not how he described himself as 'Menshevik' was a Bolshevik term of abuse. Basically, he was an orthodox Social Democrat.

This pamphlet is a collection of articles Martov wrote in 1919 and 1921 and was originally published in Germany in 1923 under the title World Bolshevism. Most of it was translated into English and published as a pamphlet in 1939 as The State and the Socialist Revolution.

Martov denied that Marx had argued for the violent smashing of the state, but rather for its take-over, peaceably if possible; what was to be 'smashed' was not the whole state but only its 'bureaucratic-military' aspects which were to be 'lopped off' after its capture, leaving a democratised state as the instrument to use to dispossess the capitalist class and usher in socialism.

On the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', Martov pointed out that 'dictatorship' meant the exercise of full powers and that 'of the proletariat' meant that these powers were to be exercised, necessarily democratically, by the whole proletariat, not merely by a minority of them. In short, the term meant the rule of the working class, using the democratised state to effect the socialist revolution from capitalism to socialism. His article is a clear explanation of what Marx meant, even if the term itself is unfortunate as in some respects as inviting misinterpretation, an aspect Lenin exploited to the full.

The whole Russian revolutionary tradition had called for Tsarism to be replaced in the first instance by an elected Constituent Assembly which would decide Russia's future constitution. An election to one did take place in November 1917, after the Bolshevik seizure of power, but  as the Bolsheviks failed to win a majority of seats they dissolved it. Martov, without denying that the soviets were makeshift democratic bodies, dismissed Lenin's claim that they were more democratic than a central assembly directly elected by direct, secret and universal ballot; they were not elected by secret ballot and the only direct vote its members had was at local level, the higher levels being indirectly elected. In practice, it was even less democratic as they were manipulated by the Bolshevik party.

This edition has a new introduction and contains, as an appendix, the first printed translation of the opening chapter of World Bolshevism  in which Martov sets out to explain the attraction of Bolshevism amongst some sections of the working class in Europe. Also included are two reprints from the Socialist Standard: the review of the original pamphlet in 1940 and a review of Israel Getzler's biography of Martov.

Adam Buick

Marxist (2018)

Book Review from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Comment je suis devenu marxiste', by Julius Martov (Editions Lumpen)

This is virtually a French version of our new pamphlet on Martov, containing the same series of articles in which Martov demonstrates how Lenin and the Bolsheviks were distorting Marxism to justify the dictatorship over the working class that they were establishing. The title – 'How I became a Marxist' – is a bit misleading in that this is not the main article nor the whole of Martov's draft autobiography. It does, however, have the merit of identifying the author as a Marxist. In the extract published here, Martov recounts how he became a Marxist, as someone who relied on the working class to overthrow Tsarism (as opposed to the Narodniks who relied on the peasants), while a student at St. Petersburg University in 1892. Other short articles are included, a couple on the aftermath of the 1905 insurrection in Russia and Martov's denunciation of the Bolshevik government for bringing back the death penalty. One minor criticism: the articles are not dated so it is left to the reader to work this out from their content.

Adam Buick

New Interventions (1998)

Book Review from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Interventions, Vol 8 , No 2, Winter 1997-98, PO Box 485 Coventry, CV5 6ZP. £2.

This issue of a Trotskyoid journal is devoted to a reappraisal of Bolshevism on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. But, instead of the expected praise of the Bolsheviks and a call for the 1917 experience to be repeated in this country, most of the contributors expressed doubts about whether the Bolsheviks did the right thing in 1917 and the years that followed.

Veteran Trotskyist Harry Ratner writes that Russia remained a genuine soviet regime (a workers' democracy) for only "a few weeks" after November 1917 (he says October 1917--Trotskyists still use the old Julian calendar). After that, the Bolsheviks established their own dictatorship. He wonders if it might not have been better if some sort of broad front democratic government had been allowed to emerge from the elections to the Constituent Assembly, and asks:

"So were Kautsky and the Mensheviks right to oppose the October Revolution from the start, as an attempt prematurely to go beyond the 'bourgeois' stage of the Russian revolution? Were they right to declare a socialist working-class revolution in a backward Russia premature and doomed to failure because the conditions for socialism were not ripe-both as regards the economic base and the social and cultural level of the working class? On the face of it, subsequent history would seem to justify them".

His reply is even more surprising:

"All one can say is that the 'workers' state' that was born in October 1917 was premature and infected from infancy. Unfortunately, as it degenerated, it infected the working-class movement internationally, and proved an obstacle on the road to socialism. My old comrade, the late Alex Acheson, who joined the movement in the 1930s and remained a committed Trotskyist till his death last year, once told me: 'It might have been better if the October Revolution had never occurred'".

Another contributor, Hillel Ticktin, editor of Critique, tackles the question "What if the Left Opposition had Taken Power?". After beginning with the preposterous statement that "the Russian Revolution is possibly the most important event so far in human history", his conclusion is that they too would have established a dictatorship that would have "had nothing to do with socialism" but would not have been as bad as Stalin's. He asks himself the same questions as Harry Ratner: "Do we wait until we have a revolution that is totally democratic?", "Are those who argue that in 1917 the means of production were not yet sufficiently developed then correct?". His answer is not very clear, especially not to the first one.

Al Richardson, editor of Revolutionary History, says that even "workers' state" is "a term that does not appear in Marx at all, to my knowledge". Only Ian Birchall of the SWP claims the mantle of true Bolshevism. It is his party that seems to him to "come nearest to being a legitimate successor to the essential spirit of Bolshevism". He's right. That's why they should be opposed.

Two other articles, one by a Socialist Party member on "Why the Russian Revolution Wasn't a Proletarian Revolution", the other by Alastair Mitchell on "1917 and All That", have no time at all for Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks.

The same issue also contains a lengthy reply by another Socialist Party member to an ignorant criticism of the Socialist Party in the previous issue by Ted Crawford who supplies an equally ignorant (in all senses of the word) reply.

Of course it wasn't just Kautsky, Martov and the Mensheviks who warned that conditions in Russia in 1917 weren't ripe for a socialist revolution there. We did too. In fact anyone who had read and understood Marx knew this. We know people don't like being told "we told you so". So we shall resist the temptation.

Adam Buick

The parliamentary road to socialism (1978)

From the September 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1871 at a conference of the First International in London, resolution IX which had the support of Marx and Engels read: “Against the power of the propertied classes the proletariat can only act as a class by turning itself into a political party”. That is the reason for the existence of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and why we advocate the parliamentary road to socialism.

The “power of the propertied classes” exist by virtue of their control of the state machine. It is putting the cart before the horse to claim as some do that the political power of the capitalist class (and its representatives) derives from its economic ownership of the means of living. On the contrary, capitalism and the rule of the Capitalist class exist because the overwhelming majority of the population support this state of affairs.

One can see how this fallacious belief that class rule is based on economic power may lead to, or is consistent with, an idealist, as opposed to materialist, conception of history or elitist modes of action such as anarcho-syndicalism. It tends to play down or ignore the fact that the immense majority support capitalism by voting for capitalist parties, whatever the fraudulent labels these may flaunt, or by acquiescing in dictatorships. But as Herman Gersom, translator of Martov’s The State and the Socialist Revolution points out:

“Even the masterminds superintending the Fascist, Nazi and Soviet Communist political superstructures of modern capitalism realise they do not and cannot rule for any length of time against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population”

What lies behind the objection to the parliamentary road to socialism is that should the socialist movement grow to the point when the chance of its delegates forming a parliamentary majority was imminent, then the capitalists would suspend parliament and install a dictatorship. “Democracy”, rather than something which has been struggled for, can, according to this view, be switched on or off as a few leaders see fit, like some electric current. However, the growth of socialist consciousness could not occur in a vacuum and its repercussions will be far-reaching, profoundly influencing social outlook which in turn would determine the nature of existing government.

The tradition of parliamentary democracy is sustained by a general consensus of support for such a tradition which can only be strengthened to the extent that a growing socialist movement will have need of it. Moreover, just as it is impossible to isolate personnel manning the coercive agencies of “bourgeois democracies” so existing dictatorships cannot be isolated from the influence of socialist ideas. The rise of totalitarian regimes such as in Germany before the war was the result of the abysmal, though unavoidable, failure of the social democratic and reformist government of the Weimar republic to deal with the socio-economic problems capitalism presented.

So why do socialists insist on the need to capture parliament? Parliament is the seat of political power through which control of the state apparatus is exercised. Although external influences are exerted upon parliament from big business, unions’ pressure groups and the like, in order to be effective such influence has to be channelled via parliament and realised in the form of legislation.

The basic function of the state, controlled by parliament, is to protect the interests of the capitalist class. The state arose out of the early divisions of society into classes and developed with the development of class conflicts. In this way, class rule through state power originated from class ownership. But private property is a social concept or relationship, the general acceptance of which cannot be separated from the general support given to those who exercise power in the interest of the owning class. The state, through which class rule is exercised will not 'wither away’ as long as the class basis of society exists and conversely the class basis of society will not disappear as long as the state exists to prop it up.

Some would disagree with this. James Guillaume, a nineteenth-century anarchist, declared: “Instead of having recourse to the state which only possesses such strength as the workers give it, the workers will settle their business direct with the bourgeoisie, will pose their own conditions and force them to accept them.” Perhaps it had not occurred to Guillaume that one reason the bourgeoisie has the upper hand in their business with the workers is precisely because they “have recourse to the state”. Behind this recurrent anti-political sentiment is the belief that the political field is tainted with treachery. So it is — but that is the consequence of reformist, not revolutionary, political action and of placing trust in leaders. Furthermore the industrial field — the hunting ground of the militant — is no less “tainted". The same workers that elect Jones or Murray also vote for Thatcher or Callaghan.

Those who reject political action must explain how a revolutionary transformation can be brought about which would result in a classless moneyless system of free access and common ownership.

Two possible methods have been suggested: 1. The creation of a "completely self sufficient cooperative parallel society” (Peace News 16-30 Dec 1977). 2. The anarcho-syndicalist proposal adopted by the founding conference of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 that workers should “take and hold that which they produce by their labour through an economic organization of the working class”.

The first of these has had a long history of application: from the attempts of utopian socialists like Fourier and Robert Owen and their followers to set up utopian communities, to the hippy and rural communes of today. Besides the impracticability of droves of workers opting for the "good life” the advanced division of labour and the integrated social nature of production on a world scale has made interdependence, as opposed to self sufficiency, the hallmark of modern production. As for “workers co-operatives”, these are essentially no different from any other capitalist enterprise competing for the market and therefore subject to its laws; to compete effectively, workers in co-operatives may have to cut their own living standards or sack their fellow workers. Some large-scale co-operatives have developed out of workers’ struggles against redundancies and as such have not been very successful — a prime example being the short-lived co-op producing the Scottish Daily News — either in attracting loans to finance production or in staving off redundancies.

The second option of direct action is equally futile. To begin with the proposal that workers should “seize and hold” the factories and “lock out” the owners implies the fatuous belief that capitalists participate in production, or need to. It is the workers, including the “salaried” managers, who run the entire economy from top to bottom.

But supposing workers “successfully” took over a factory — what then? If they recommenced production, they would have to submit to the rules of the game, to seek to gain legal status to operate on a proper financial basis, to buy and sell. Workers in a match factory cannot live on a diet of matches.

Martov remarked on ihe Proudhonists and anarchists of the 1871 Paris Commune:

They did not realise that capitalism has created for the concentration of the means of production and distribution, so huge an apparatus, that in order to lay hold of these means the working class would require effective administrative machinery extending over the entire economic domain that was previously ruled by capital. They had no idea of the immenseness and complexity of the revolution. And only because they did not understand all these things was it possible for them to think of the autonomous “commune” — itself based on “autonomous” productive units — as the lever of such a transformation. (The State and the Socialist Revolution.) 

Only by capturing the concentrated political power of the state can the necessary coordinated transformation “over the entire economic domain” take place.

As a result of increased state ownership, notably in key industries like transport and energy, the state is increasingly involved in the economy — the most that can be achieved by these means is a change of rulers. Neither can the state be overthrown by insurrection or undermined by social chaos.

There are those, impatient for change, who repudiate the need for “long and persistent work” as Engels put it, to convince workers by persuasion. Rejecting the parliamentary road on the grounds that it stifles the “self-activity” of the masses they turn to the industrial field in the hope of engineering a “social crisis” whereby the consciousness of the masses may be raised. If industrial militancy did turn workers into socialists we might expect to find these militants clamouring for socialism but this is not so. Underlying the mechanistic views of the theorists is an elitist contempt for the intellectual capacity of the working class to grasp the socialist case yet without this working- class understanding, socialism is unattainable.

The parliamentary road does not imply that people hand over their power to others every few years. Parliament is the institution to which the working class shall send their delegates with the purpose of declaring capitalism abolished and to validate this revolutionary act. There has to be some means to effect the neccessary transfer of power from the capitalist to the working class, a means which clearly and democratically indicates the will of the socialist majority. The parliamentary road is the answer. It will be within our party, not parliament that the “self-activity” and “self organisation” of the working class will be realised. The alternative to this was bluntly described by Plekhanov: "Every class struggle is a political struggle. Whosoever repudiates the political struggle, by this very act gives up all part and lot in the class struggle" (Anarchism and Socialism).

Robin Cox

Trotsky and Stalin: rival leaders (2003)

From the March 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite presenting themselves as mortal enemies, the camp followers of Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin were competing government management teams operating under the same basic philosophy – that the workers could not, as a whole, come to socialist consciousness and bring socialism about for themselves.

Trotsky himself can be seen as being one of the main causes of Stalin's ascendancy. As Trotsky's hagiographer Isaac Deutscher points out in his The Prophet Armed, Stalin began his dominance of the Soviet government as part of “a special faction the sole purpose of which was to prevent Trotsky having a majority which would enable him to take Lenin's place.”

This faction was aided by the fear that Trotsky as commander of the Red Army (with a predilection for being seen in public in dashing military uniforms) could assume the role of a military dictator. Such fears would have been stoked by his support, in 1921, for the militarisation of labour (in effect placing the workers under his personal direct command).

Leadership worship

Trotsky was comprehensively out-manoeuvred by Stalin, and eventually driven out of Russia, whereupon he tried to position himself as head of the loyal opposition to the Bolshevik regime. His writings from 1929 onwards are full of criticisms of the leadership of the Comintern and their policies, especially regarding his own faction. Typically, he wrote: “Under the treacherous blows of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Left Opposition [i.e. him and his followers] maintained its fidelity to the official party to the very end” (Trotsky, 'The Tragedy of the German Proletariat: The German Workers will Rise Again – Stalinism, Never', March 1933). The debates between Trotskyists and Stalinists always revolved around such questions of leadership – if only the leaders had acted in such-and-such a way, things would have turned out better.

Tactics, said Trotsky, should have been framed so as to win workers over from their Social Democratic leaders, under the command of the Communist Party: “We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders”. According to Trotsky, the official Communist leaders would not follow his policies because they were constituted of “not a few cowardly careerists and fakers whose little posts, whose incomes, and more than that, whose hides, are dear to them” (Trotsky, 'For a Workers United Front Against Fascism', December 1931) .

Two years later the Stalinist leadership did adopt Trotsky's tactics – specifically of the “United Front” of labour organisations against fascism – but only by surrendering leadership of the movement to the leaders of Social Democracy. The issue remained one of leadership, backed up by a notion that the workers were incapable of developing broad socialist consciousness in anything like a majority, and so that the “Communists” would have to work with reformists in order to influence them, and draw off the active workers into their own ranks.

“Could the Communist Party succeed, during the preparatory epoch, in pushing all other parties out of the ranks of the workers by uniting under its banner the overwhelming majority of workers, then there would be no need whatever for soviets. But historical experience bears witness to the fact that there is no basis whatever for the expectation that...the Communist Party can succeed in occupying such an undisputed and absolutely commanding position in the workers' ranks, prior to the proletarian overturn” (Trotsky cited by John Rees in 'The broad party, the revolutionary party and the united front', International Socialist Journal, Winter 2002).

It is, John Rees claims in the article this quotation comes from, the “uneven consciousness” among workers that necessitates the need for leaders, and for an organisation that can bring it together with non-socialist workers in the name of immediate given ends, be those organisations trade unions, or – as above – workers' councils. Thus, the Soviets beloved of Leninists, and trade unions too, become locations for 'united front' work. This admirably demonstrates that Julius Martov's accusation in his State and Socialist Revolution that Bolsheviks supported soviets in order to help seize power as a minority was acknowledged by the very leaders of the Russian coup d'état.

Reformists

For almost all of their existence, both Trotskyist and Stalinist organizations – thoroughly convinced that the workers could not come to understand and want socialism – have orientated themselves towards working with official reformist organisations. Instead of standing clearly and forthrightly for socialism, they ape the manoeuvres and sounds of official Labourism, seeking to influence non-socialist workers through tactical manipulation, rather than convince them to change their minds.

While Rees argues that “united front” work provides an opportunity for “revolutionaries” to discuss and convert reformists, he also states that “the immediate aim of the united front is to provide the most effective fighting organisation for both reformists and revolutionaries”. That is, whatever front is going to be built must always give precedence to the struggle at hand, and its immediate success. This position stands in some contrast to the official Trotskyist doctrine of “transitional demands” – i.e. advocating reforms known not to work, in order to draw workers into “Communist” ranks through their inevitable disappointment.

Thus, we have the present example of the Stop the War coalition whereby Trotskyists are working with pacifists, CND and Submissionists (“submission”: the English translation of “islam”) to try and achieve their immediate aims. John Rees himself appears in the media as a “co-ordinator” for the coalition, his membership of the SWP never mentioned (at all other times he is generally introduced as the “editor of the International Socialist Journal”). Quite how he is supposed to bring people round to revolutionary politics by hiding his affiliation remains a mystery.

The reality is that these fronts can only attain any sort of success by hiding the disagreements between their constituent organisations, specifically about means and motives. That is, they succeed by making demands that are supported by significant numbers of workers, meaning that any “revolutionary” content will be buried into the need for immediate victory. As such, it is small-c conservative, taking political consciousness as it is found, and seeking to manipulate it, rather than change it.

Such a tactic, however, affords the Leninists an opportunity to extend their influence. As a tiny minority, they get to work with organisations which can more easily attract members, and can thus be part of campaigns and struggles that reach out well beyond the tiny numbers of political activists in any given situation.

For example, in the 50s and 60s, many trade union bureaucrats were members of the Stalinist Communist Party (just as today, a good number are former Trotskyists). Likewise, the SWP provide much of the material and personnel for organising the Stop the War Coalition. The salient fact remains, though, that despite providing all this assistance, the “revolutionaries” are incapable of taking these campaigns and trade unions further than the bulk of the membership are willing to tolerate.

Socialists have long argued that tiny minorities cannot, without force on their side, simply take control of movements and use them to their own ends. Without agreement between the parties to a project about what it is and where it is going, leaders and led will invariably walk off in different directions. That means, if the Leninists are right, and the majority of workers cannot achieve socialist consciousness, then they must be committed to using force against the recalcitrant majority in order to achieve their aims.

Nonetheless, the Leninists continue to attach themselves to larger movements in the hope of providing alternative leaderships and of being at the heart of the struggle. Hence, this is why Rees continues to argue that the official Labour Party remains “organically” linked to the working class through its individual members and the link to the unions. Only at the Labour Party conference could a revolt over PFI occur, he claims, because of the link between the unions and Labour.

We argue, however, that since we are capable, as workers, of understanding and wanting socialism, and of going beyond mere 'trade union consciousness' as Lenin called it, we cannot see any reason why our fellow workers cannot do likewise. Further, since the majority are capable of actively building socialism, there is no need for a leadership to impose it upon them – and that the job of socialists in the here and now is to openly and honestly state the case, rather than trying to wheedle and manoeuvre within bigger parties to win a supposed “influence” that is more illusory than real.

Pik Smeet