Anti-Zionists (2026)

Book Review from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here Where We Live is Our Country. The Story of the Jewish Bund. By Molly Crabapple. Bloomsbury Circus. 2026.

The Jewish Bund was a Jewish workers’ organisation founded in 1897 in Vilnius (called Vilna in this book), today the capital of Lithuania but then part of the Russian Empire. Its official name in Yiddish, the Germanic language spoken by most Jews in Russia, was the Algemeyner Yiddisher Arbeter Bund (General Jewish Labour Union). It was the largest constituent organisation represented at the later founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), the equivalent of the German Social Democratic Party,

They were known simply as the Bund, its members were Bundists and its doctrine Bundism. They claimed that only they should organise Jewish workers in Russia. Their immediate aim was the establishment of a democratic republic in Russia with cultural autonomy for Yiddish speakers, with socialism as the longer-term aim after Russia had passed through capitalism. Other Russian Social Democrats, including many of Jewish background such as Trotsky and Martov, argued that all workers in Russia, whatever their background or language, should be organised in a single all-Russia party.

When the issue came up at the RSDLP congress in 1903-4 and the Bundists’ claim was rejected, they walked out. This was a fateful decision as it meant that, in the more famous vote on how the party should be organised, Lenin and his supporters won and so got to be called ‘Bolsheviks’ (the majority) as opposed to those who lost the vote who came to be called ‘Mensheviks’ (the minority). The Bundists were opposed to Lenin’s organisational principles, and had they not walked out Lenin’s supporters might have ended up being called the Mensheviks.

The Bund’s policies and tactics were close to those of the Mensheviks and it would not be entirely unfair to describe them as Yiddish Mensheviks. Their mass basis was Jewish workers living within the ‘Pale of Settlement’, the part of the Russian Empire which covered most of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine as well as the whole of what is now Belarus and Moldova and to which ordinary Jews were confined.

After the First World War, when Poland was reconstituted as an independent state and 3.3 million Jews made up about 10 percent of the population, the Bund was active in Polish politics. Its opponents amongst Jews were the religious parties and, above all, the Zionists. In fact they were bitter enemies, the Zionists proposing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and the Bundists proposing full civil and social rights for Jews within Poland. Hence the Bundists’ slogan — and title of this book — ‘here where we live is our country’. They regarded themselves as Poles who happened to be Jews. Unfortunately for them, as Crabtree recounts, Polish ‘ethno-nationalists’ as they would be called today didn’t agree and by the late 1930s the Polish government was just as officially antisemitic as neighbouring Germany under the Nazis.

As for those who ended up in Russia, the Bolsheviks banned the Bund in 1921. Some Bundists joined the Bolshevik Party but most of them were executed in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.

Crabapple’s book is not a scholarly study of the Bund but an account based on what happened over the years in various places and to various personalities, especially her great-grandfather who had been a Bundist in a small town before emigrating to the United States in 1904. Hence the subtitle of her book, the ‘story’ (rather than the history) of the Bund. It makes for an easy and fascinating read. Disturbing too, in that many Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians joined in the extermination of the Jews in the Second World War.

Crabapple doesn’t disguise her own, left-wing political views and her opposition to what the Israeli state, currently controlled by extremist Zionists, is doing in Gaza. She quotes from Bundist publications predicting what would happen if ever a Zionist state was established in Palestine: the Jews would become the oppressors and the previously established population the oppressed. Which is exactly as it has turned out.

She realises that, with the social basis of the Bund’s support exterminated, after 1945 the Bund had no future and was destined to die out, in fact has aged out with the last surviving militants. Even so, she says it left a legacy. It provides Western Jews with a secular, alternative Jewish tradition to the nasty ethno-nationalism of Zionism. In fact, half the Jews in the world have done what the Bundists advocated: they have regarded where they live as their country. We would justify not being Zionists in a different way: workers should unite with other workers living under the same state to win political control there to dispossess the capitalist class. Where you live is where you should wage the class struggle.

Adam Buick

The Socialist Forum: The Programme of the Russian Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. (1932)

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

A reader at St. John, New Brunswick, asks the following questions :—

What was the programme, or principles, in brief, of the Mensheviks and the Left Social Revolutionaries, now under a ban in Russia? Have these extinct organisations much in common with the S.P.G.B. ?

Yours, etc., M. Wasson.

Reply.

In order to make our comments on these Russian organisations understandable we must first give some facts about them. The “Russian Social Democratic Party,” which later split into two separate bodies, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, was formed in 1898. Its aim was declared to be Socialism. Its energies were largely taken up with problems of organisation, with the struggle for immediate demands (such as the right to organise in trade unions, the shorter working day) and with resisting the efforts of the Czarist Government to suppress its propaganda. From the first there were two wings in the Party, and in 1903 at the Party Congress at Geneva a split developed. The following statement concerning the split is taken from “The Labour International Handbook,” published in May, 1921, by the Labour Publishing Co., Ltd., London. The Editor, R. Palme Dutt, is a well-known Communist.

“It is important to note that there was no disagreement on the programme, which was adopted unanimously. The difference was one of tactics, and concerned (1) the importance to be attached to illegal work; and as the difference developed (2) the question of co-operating with bourgeois parties of the left.” (P. 286.)

A Unity Congress was held in 1906, but the two sections continued to keep their separate organisations and journals. In 1912 they ran candidates against one another in the elections for the Fourth Duma (“Handbook,” p. 287).

Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks claim (and still claim) to be Marxists.

The “Socialist Revolutionary Party, ” formed in 1901 did not claim to accept Marxist principles. They advocated and practised political association, which both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks condemned.

“In their social theory they looked above all to the peasants and the development of agricultural communes with a large local autonomy” (“Handbook,” p. 288.)

The “Socialist Revolutionary Party,” with a predominantly peasant membership, was much larger than the other parties, whose members were chiefly in the towns. The Mensheviks were less numerous than the Bolsheviks.

The “Left Socialist Revolutionaries” were a wing led by Spiridonova and Kamkov, who gave general support to the Bolsheviks in their seizure of power in 1917. They had seven seats on the Council of Commissaries until early in 1918, when they resigned as a protest against the Bolshevik policy of making peace with Germany.

The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries still have organisations and journals, with headquarters in Berlin.

In 1920 when a British Labour Delegation visited Russia the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries each issued a full statement of their position. These were included in the Report of the Delegation (Published by the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress, London).

If the Mensheviks could be judged solely on this declaration of Socialist principles there would be little to find fault with.

The S.R. declaration, on the other hand, contains little about principles, and is not in any real sense a Socialist declaration at all. It is merely a propaganda effort to justify the tactics of the S.R. Party and to blacken the Bolsheviks.

The important thing is that the Menshevik document referred to above, although issued by the Central Committee of the Party, does not give anything like a full and true picture. Rather it represents the views of certain individuals on Socialist principles, completely divorced from the actions of the Party. This characteristic of the Mensheviks is one often found in the Labour Parties of Western Europe and elsewhere.

Let us look at certain of their actions.

The Mensheviks permitted their members  to support the war—-in flat contradiction of’ the Socialist principles they were supposed to understand and accept.

The Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (and the Bolsheviks) belonged to the Second International before the war. They accepted the absurd claim that that body and its affiliated parties were Socialist.

The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries are still affiliated to the “Labour and Socialist International ” and still push the reforms which make up the only stock-in-trade of that non-Socialist body.

It will be seen, therefore, that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries have no more in common with the S.P.G.B. than any of the other reformist parties which find it convenient to cover over their reformist programmes with a gloss of Marxian phrases and ideas.  

Ed. Comm.

1905: the first Russian Revolution (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

One hundred years ago this year there happened a series of events in Russia, culminating in a general uprising in December, that Trotsky called ‘the dress rehearsal for the revolution of 1917′ and which in terms of bloodshed were far more violent than the actual events in St. Petersburg twelve years later.

Russia at the time was a predominantly agrarian country. 80 per cent of its inhabitants were peasants, eking out a very meagre existence from the soil. They had been emancipated from being serfs in 1861 by a decree of Tsar Alexander III but peasant understanding of personal ownership in land remained very rudimentary. After the 1861 emancipation act there arose a widespread and deeply held belief among the peasants that at some time in the future a redistribution of land was going to happen. This belief made them a very volatile and potentially revolutionary class, although they had no political aims and could see no further than land.

Whereas in Britain and most of Europe at the time, a strong nobility had limited the power of the monarch, allowing a rising capitalist class to develop. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas had absolute power. He ruled under a system called patrimonialism, in which everything belonged to the Tsar. He was absolute monarch and nothing could change without his consent. There was no parliament or constitution. Government officials were directly responsible to him, and he believed firmly in upholding this system, much as Charles I of England believed firmly in the divine right of Kings. This meant in practice that the growth of capitalist industry in Russia was limited and largely reliant on foreign capital. Consequently the indigenous capitalist class was very weak.

As a result of this weakness the path to a political and legal set-up in which capitalist development could flourish was undertaken by the ‘intelligentsia’, a concept peculiar to Russia. Comprised largely of university students, lawyers, and artists (i.e. writers) it was more or less open to anyone who was against the patrimonial set-up. And because Tsar Nicholas was extremely rigid in his outlook and frightened of any change that could limit his power, democratic protest from the 1870s onwards was not an option. Protest became channelled into the form of violence, with assassinations of government officials taking a prominent part.  A movement, openly committed to assassination, called the People’s Will came into being, attracting the support of much of the intelligentsia, including, for a time, Lenin. Some thousands of government officials were killed; assassination became a way of life.

The response from the government, backed by the Tsar, was repression, to clamp down ever more tightly. The use of whips by the police to quell student strikes did not endear the government to those who wanted change. At the close of the 19th century with the setting-up of the Okhrana, Russia became the first police state in history. It was riddled with secret police infiltrating agents into most of the anti-Tsar organisations. Various political parties had developed by this time, with varying aims, ranging from the establishment of a parliament and a constitution to establishing socialism.

The exact nature of what they meant by socialism was never really stated, but probably boiled down to some kind of nationalisation, with tight government control. Around this time many of Marx’s early writings had arrived in Russia and Marx was very popular, but not much understood. Funnily enough Capital was allowed by the censor who thought it was so dreary no one would read it, but mostly Marx’s writings were smuggled in.

By 1905 there were three major political parties loosely representing different class interests. They were the Democratic Constitutional Party (Kadets) (bourgeois), Social Democratic Labour Party (working class or proletariat in the language of the day), and Socialist Revolutionaries (roughly, peasants and workers).

Tactics varied from assassination,advocating strike action, to ‘leading the workers to the dictatorship of the proletariat’ but all were agreed on the necessity to remove the Tsar. From the 1890s onwards things were growing tense. Conditions of work in the factories and railways were abysmal, with very low wages, working hours of twelve to fourteen hours a day and appalling living conditions, much like they had been a few years earlier in Britain’s industrial revolution. There were many very large factories in Russia employing up to six thousand workers, attracting thousands of unskilled peasants. They were mainly housed in rapidly built barracks crammed in four or five to one room, quite a few of those employing a night shift saving on bed linen by having the night and day shifts use the same bed.

As usual, as a result of hasty building to accommodate large numbers of workers sanitary conditions were practically non-existent with open sewers in St Petersburg and Moscow and the consequent health risk, the usual concomitants of capitalism in its early stages.

In 1903 the Social Democratic Labour Party held a conference in London to draw up fresh rules (largely to contain the split in their ranks between those following Lenin and those supporting Martov). Lenin was insistent on the need for a tightly integrated, disciplined party of  professional revolutionaries. Martov was infavour of a more open, less disciplined party with much easier access to membership. The conference lead to a decisive split, roughly down the middle but with a slight edge to Lenin. From that time on these two sections were known by the name of Bolsheviks (majority) and Mensheviks (minority), leading to open conflict between these groups, played out fifteen years later at the time of the deposition of the Tsar and the Bolshevik rise to power.

So, at the turn of the century there existed a highly critical situation. An all powerful and inflexible, but nevertheless weak, Tsar, a poorly organised and ill-developed native capitalist class, a peasantry in rebellious mood but non-politicised, and a small as yet unorganised working class, not political, whose aims were confined to improving working conditions. On the fringe a party of professional revolutionaries whose aim was to lead the proletariat as their ‘vanguard’, but as yet had minimal influence. Something had to give! In 1905 it did.

In 1904 Russia went to war against Japan, in a war that was partly territorial, and partly, as most Western historians seem agreed, a bid by the Russian government to distract attention from current difficulties and unite the population in a patriotic fervour with a resounding victory. Unfortunately for the Tsar it didn’t work, as there was an even more resounding defeat. The general public lack of support for the Tsar fell even lower. More large-scale strikes ensued, and then, in 1905, there happened an event only too common in the struggles of the working class to gain justice.

Trade unions had been disallowed up till then in Russia but the government had been experimenting with police-led unions in an attempt to take the heat out of workers discontent. One of these was a union led by a priest, Father Gapon. Father Gapon thought it a worthy idea to lead a march in St. Petersburg to appeal to the Tsar, following the commonly-held belief in countries with a very powerful head that their father figure is unaware of the sufferings of the population and will intervene to put them right if only they can bring their problems to his attention. On Sunday 22 January some 150,000 people gathered in St Petersburg and marched on the Winter Palace where it was believed the Tsar was in residence. It was a peaceful protest, many were carrying icons, none were carrying weapons; they believed the Tsar would listen. They were met by troops who opened fire. The death toll was estimated at 200 killed and 800 wounded, reminiscent of many other panic reactions by governing bodies to peaceful working class demonstrations, Peterloo, Tiananmen Square among them. Support for the Tsar fell even further from then on.

Bloody Sunday, as it was thereafter called, opened the floodgates and the country was in turmoil. Strikes, demonstrations, outbreaks of violence were the order of the day. Eventually it was reluctantly agreed to inaugurate a constituent assembly called the ‘Duma’. This was set up and delegates were voted in, many of them peasants, but it never had any real power. In the mind of the Tsar it was only a sop which he intended to revoke as soon as the opportunity presented itself. 

The conservative reaction to this concession was extreme. A party was set up, the Octoberist party, which encouraged mob violence against supporters of the Duma. Government-inspired pogroms against Jews resulted in thousands of deaths and much homelessness. A wave of strikes broke out, peasant violence against their landlords escalated, similar to the French peasant violence and destruction of chateaux in another bourgeois revolution. The country was approaching a civil war.The appointment of a new minister of the interior, Stolypin, brought some ease to the country. His reign of repression consisted of setting special courts, which would have no compunction about passing the death sentence. So many were hanged that the nickname ‘Stolypin’s neckties’ became popular. He was eventually assassinated – at the opera, in front of the Tsar.

On the positive side, Stolypin initiated land reforms that were meant to be progressive but are generally agreed as having no great effect. The country gradually settled down, though never completely, and from around 1908 to 1914 there was a mild boom, with an increase in capital development.

Was 1905 a revolution? Not really. It was more a revolt, by large sections of the population against savagely repressive conditions, and by the nascent capitalist class to establish the freedom to operate. But there was no proposal to change the basis of society and each element, the peasants, the bourgeoisie, the nobles were paddling their own canoe. There was only one way they could go: capitalism. At best it was a rebellion, but one that had a profound influence on a similar uprising twelve years later which did change the basis of Russian society by completely uprooting Tsarism.

There are many lessons to be learned from this one episode in a period of violent change. One is that any worthwhile progress in human society must come, and can only come, from the working class. Relying on our rulers to initiate worthwhile change is as useless as the Russian peasants’ reliance on the Tsar. But above  all is the fact that no force can cut short the natural development of society until it is ready for change.

Cyril Evans

Light on Soviet Russia. (1930)

Book Review from the December 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Economic Trends in Soviet Russia.” By A. Yugoff. (George Allen & Unwin.)

The above volume is intended as a broad general outline of affairs in Russia. It affords considerable support to the position maintained by the Socialist Party since the Bolshevik upheaval.

“Soviet Russia,” says the author, in his introduction 

“is a land of economic contrasts and oppositions. In the towns there are huge factories and workshops; in the countryside, a natural economy is still almost exclusively dominant. Huge trusts and syndicates, embracing whole branches of industry and commerce, confront independent home workers and itinerant traders. Theoretically, and as a matter of principle, all the economic life of the country is under State control; whilst in practice currency crises, crises of production, gluts, crises of demand, press hard on one another’s heels, and are renewed ever and again by the spontaneous play of economic forces and by the lack of due proportion between the various branches of economic life.

Furthermore, in latter-day Russia we can see a peculiarly vivid picture of the results of artificially cultivated Socialist economic forms in a country where neither the economic nor the social conditions are ripe for anything of the kind; we can note what a caricature of true Socialism such an enforced ‘Socialism’ must be.

Two conflicting tendencies arc at work in Soviet Russia to-day. One of them has originated out of the new economic and social situation created by the revolution, the overthrow of Tsarism, and the freshly-created possibilities for a rapid unfolding of productive forces alike in industry and agriculture. The other, which Communist policy has artificially introduced into the realm of economic reality acts as a brake upon economic progress, rivets Utopian fetters upon these same productive forces, and gives rise to a pendulum swing from ‘right’ to ‘left,’ and then back to ‘right’ again.”

Yugoff holds that not only is Russia unripe for Socialism, but that the elaborate bureaucratic structure of nationalisation which the Communist rulers have built up, is a barrier to the capitalist development, which is an essential preliminary to the establishment of Socialism. Nationalisation, he points out, is not Socialism; it has been adopted by the most reactionary governments on occasions when it has suited their interests, and does not in itself necessarily constitute economic progress. In this, Yugoff merely repeats what Engels says in his little work, “Socialism ; Utopian and Scientific” (see footnote and text on pp. 83-4-5)); but he shows also the practical bearing of this fact on the Russian situation.

Nationalisation was adopted by the Bolsheviks as a result of the chaos ensuing from the economic collapse in 1916-17, their seizure of power and the civil war. It was an emergency measure and was carried a good deal further than Lenin had suggested as being desirable in his writings just prior to the events of October-November, 1917. (See “Preparing for Revolt.”) Having adopted it as an immediate policy, however, the Bolsheviks proceeded to make the most extravagant claims for it. The collapse of the currency was hailed as the prelude to the final disappearance of money ; the system of compulsory rationing became the first step towards a planned economy. Small wonder then that the partial reversion to normal capitalism, represented by the N.E,P., should have been regretted by a considerable section of the ruling party as a retreat. Yugoff, however, maintains that the logical implications of the N.E.P. have never been carried out, and the reason is not far to seek.

“During the process of nationalisation thousands upon thousands of private property owners were replaced by new hosts of ‘red’ bureaucrats, trust managers and commissaries, who gobbled up all the savings which might otherwise have been made by the expropriation of the expropriators” (p. 99).

The Bolsheviks nationalised thousands of small enterprises whose owners were also their managers; but the new rulers lacked the technical resources necessary to the reconstruction of these enterprises upon a larger and more economical scale. Hence the surplus value extracted from the workers’ labour did not even provide fresh capital for the expansion of industry. It was swallowed up in “administrative expenses.” The motive of private gain remained the only one capable of acting as a stimulus to the accumulation of capital.

The Bolsheviks, in introducing the New Economic Policy, of course, recognised this fact; but having entrenched themselves in the realm of State industry, their parasitic, bureaucratic supporters are loath to surrender to outsiders the privileges which they enjoy. So far from having been smashed, the State in Russia has expanded into an excrescence which stands in the way of further economic development.

Hence the struggle between those who claim to be intent upon “building up Socialism” and the new class of private capitalists who are arising partly in spite of the Bolsheviks’ efforts, but partly also as a result of them.

In order to provide the capital for the expansion of State industry, the old Tsarist expedient of taxing the peasantry is adopted; but carried beyond a certain point, this defeats its own object by checking agricultural accumulation and the growth of food supplies and raw materials. The experiment of State farms, as Yugoff shows, involves inroads upon peasant cultivation which reduce numbers of peasants to beggary and increase the drift to the towns. The increase in the unemployed is greater than the industries of the State can absorb, and the way is thus opened up for private exploiters to embark upon industrial enterprise. Thus, sooner or later, Yugoff argues, the heavy hand of the State upon trade and industry will be relaxed. In the interests of an expanding capitalism, the State monopoly of foreign commerce will be broken down ; but in so far as these measures involve the abolition of the economic basis of the dictatorship, a serious political change is the essential preliminary. Yugoff puts the question : What form is this likely to take?

He sees three possible alternatives. 

“A democratic State authority might be set up; or part of the Communist Party might be transformed into a party of the possessing classes (Thermidor); or, finally, there might be a Bonapartist, or reactionary coup-d’etat. No one can foresee which course development will take. This much, however, is certain, that the party which now rules in the U.S.S.R. is no longer a party of the working class; is not a party which can carry out a policy of socialisation; is not even a party competent to promote in any consistent or enduring fashion the interests of the working class” (pp. 335-6).

Not that Yugoff blames the Communists for their failure to work a miracle. Indeed, his work is, in its way, a masterpiece of scientific method. He sees in the “dictators” the creatures rather than the creators of the present transitional period in Russia from feudalism to capitalism. Even the very illusions, which he credits them with sharing with their followers in the early days of the Revolution, have in Yugoff’s eyes an historical function. Intoxicated with the idea of an impending world Socialist revolution, the workers of Russia accomplished a task which the Russian capitalists were incapable of doing for themselves. They swept the last vestiges of feudalism from Russian society. They assisted the peasants to lay hands upon the land and free themselves “from the burden of high rents, land taxes, and interest on mortgages,” which Yugoff describes as the main historical task of the revolution.

No sooner, however, had the peasants overthrown the old ruling class in the country than a new one began to appear in the towns. This new class grows at the expense both of the peasants and the urban working-class, converting by degrees the former into the latter. Thus, in spite of certain differences, economic history in Russia repeats that of Western Europe.

The temptation to quote Yugoff’s three final chapters at some length is great, but the following brief extract must suffice:

“Behind the Socialist facade the features of a society which, though new, though born out of the revolution, is fundamentally capitalist, are disclosing themselves more plainly day by day; we must do our utmost to dispel the illusion that this revolution is a Socialist one, so that the working class (hitherto deceived) may be enabled to hold at least the second line of its revolutionary position, and may escape being crushed politically and morally as soon as the nature of the masquerade becomes plain to all the world.” (pp. 320-1).

For Yugoff sees quite plainly that the adversaries of Socialism can make good use of the Communist Party’s failure.

“They declare that the failure of nationalisation in Russia is tantamount to the failure of Socialism. . . . They consider that the Russian experiment provides them with a powerful weapon of defence against the struggle of the working class for Socialism” (p. 95).

To thoroughly appreciate Yugoff’s book, however, it is necessary to compare it with others that profess to cover similar ground. Mr. Maurice Dobb’s volume, “Russian Economic Development,” for instance, while more fully detailed, is vitiated by economic inaccuracies, chief of which is the fallacy that Russian development is Socialist. Mr. Farbman’s writings, while illuminating in many particulars, make no attempt to offer an explanation for the effects which he describes. They cannot therefore be classed as scientific. Anatole Baikaloff’s little book, “In the Land of Communist Dictatorship,” remains equally superficial, in spite of the author’s industrious accumulation of data exploding the stories of the Workers’ Paradise.

Yugoff’s book will be far from welcome to so-called reformers, Communist and Labour Party alike, to whom nationalisation is the panacea for working class ills. Miss Ellen Wilkinson, for instance, in the July “Plebs,” finds it somewhat “disturbing.” More important, however, than this, it spikes the guns of reactionaries, Tory and Liberal, who, ever since the introduction of the New Economic Policy, have sedulously paraded the legend that Socialism has failed in Russia. By laying bare the economic forces actually at work the author has stripped the Russian Revolution of its romance and enabled us the better to understand its reality.

Both publishers and translators (Eden and Cedar Paul) are to be congratulated on the results of their efforts,

Eric Boden

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

Letters: “Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary” . . . (1970)

Letters to the Editors from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary”

Dear Sir.

‘Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary’. This was quoted in the July issue of the Socialist Standard as The Socialist Party of Great Britain's viewpoint on the overthrow of the capitalist system (Debate with IS Group). In the same issue the Standard also makes its readers aware of the logical thought that Socialism could not be introduced, nor indeed function properly, unless the majority understood it to be the obvious method of organising society in absolute equality and freedom (About Ourselves). It is to this end—opening the eyes of the majority—that the SPGB surely works? How then could the SPGB actively ever work forward into a situation that would give rise to violence? It obviously knows that men who are forced to comply with an imposed system, not understanding that system, are of no value to that society, and are not helped or liberated themselves.

May we then see a published affirmation that the SPGB docs not agitate for that brand of struggle that requires violence? Or otherwise an explanation of that phrase which must grate on so many: ‘violently if necessary'.

R. Molony.

Bridport, Dorset.

Reply: 

“Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary” only applies when once the vast majority of society are already in favour of the establishment of Socialism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always said that Socialism cannot be established unless and until it has majority support and has always emphatically rejected minority violence. We are actively working to avoid violence by seeking to persuade in an open, democratic and peaceful manner a majority of the merits of Socialism.

The socialist revolution will be essentially peaceful precisely because it will be the act of a conscious majority. Unfortunately, whether isolated incidents involving violence may occur does not depend on the majority, but on the anti-socialist minority.

Whether a minority of anti-socialists, faced with an overwhelming democratic decision in favour of the establishment of Socialism, would dare to take up arms in a futile gesture against the Socialist majority is very much open to question. But if they do, the Socialist majority must have a policy for dealing with them. We think it reasonable that steps should be taken to restrain them, even to the extent of using actual physical violence if need be. After all it will be they who began the violence and acted in an anti-democratic way. Not to act against them would be to allow a few fanatics to hold up the establishment of Socialism.

Editorial Committee

" . . . false and sterile position."

The April issue of the Socialist Standard throws an interesting light on the theory of state capitalism as supported by the Socialist Party of Great Britain and also as supported by the leadership and majority of the International Socialism group.

The concept of slate capitalism as put forward by the Socialist Party of Great Britain is based on essentially contradictory premises. The article, “Just a Russian Revolutionary”, shows this. You, in contrast to Menshevism, admit that the Russian capitalist class was incapable of carrying out its bourgeois democratic tasks. This would lead one to conclude, in accordance with the theory of Permanent Revolution, that the working class would have to carry out the tasks of the bourgeoisie as well as creating a socialist state. Instead you are forced to say that the intelligentsia is a class, which could take state power and institute a bourgeois revolution! The intelligentsia is not a class per se, having no specific relationship with the means of production. It generally forms part of the petit-bourgeoisie, a class which, due to its peculiar economic position, tends to vacillate between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. As an intermediate class, it cannot exist independently in capitalist society and thus cannot take state power.

To add to this confusion, the intelligentsia also became a bourgeois class when it assumed power and ruled over a “capitalist state” in Russia. They managed to do this, despite the fact that the Russian capitalists “were dependent both on Tsarism and on foreign investors”, both of which would have liked to crush Lenin's “state capitalism”!

In the article on IS's position on the Soviet Union, you correctly state that IS failed to see all the implications of the state capitalist theory. Yet for all its faults (and I accept many of your criticisms but draw different conclusions) IS’s concept comes a hundred times closer to the correct interpretation of the Russian Revolution than the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s false and sterile position.

Bruce Robinson.

London, N.W.1.

Reply: 

We did not say that “the intelligentsia” were a class; we said they were “a social group peculiar to the Russia of that time”. Intelligentsia is in fact a Russian word and “the intelligentsia of diverse ranks,” composed of professional people of non-noble origin working mainly for the government, was one of the legal orders into which Tsarist society was divided, the others being nobility, clergy, merchants and peasants. This social group — or feudal order, if you like — is not at all the same as those who in modern capitalist society are loosely called “intellectuals”. Those employed for a wage or salary to do mainly intellectual work today are members of the working class as much as those employed in factories or down coal mines.

The Russian revolutionary intelligentsia were inspired by the ideals of the French bourgeois revolution. They wished to free the Russian “nation” from the yoke of Tsarism and to establish a democratic, and even a “socialist”, republic. These revolutionists knew that they could not overthrow Tsarism on their own; they knew their revolution needed a mass basis. At first they looked to the peasants. Then, as the development of capitalism in Russia produced a class of wage earners, they turned to the working class. Most of the Russian Social Democrats, and especially the Bolsheviks, shared the assumption of the peasant-oriented Narodniks that they, the revolutionary intelligentsia, were to be the general staff of the coming Russian revolution with the workers and/or the peasants as the rank and file.

Bolshevism — with its theory of the vanguard party and of the inability of the working class to evolve beyond reformist ideas — was an adapting of the Russian revolutionary tradition to the conditions created by early capitalist development in Russia.

Everywhere in the early stages of capitalism the workers incline towards blind violent revolt. It is a sign of their immaturity. It was Lenin’s genius as a Russian revolutionary, helped by some understanding of social forces he had gained from Marxism, to realise that this revolt could be harnessed to overthrow the Tsar, and to establish a democratic republic (the Bolsheviks' aim till 1917). In contrast to Menshevism and correctly, Lenin realised that Russia's bourgeois revolution would have to be carried through without the bourgeoisie.

The Bolshevik military coup of November 1917 was not a working class or socialist revolution (as IS, whose views on this Bruce Robinson commends, claim). It was essentially a stage in the revolution that cleared away feudal obstacles to the development of an economic system in Russia based on production for profit, money, the wages system and the accumulation of capital — Russia's capitalist revolution.

Once in power the Bolsheviks had no choice but to develop capitalism since (given that the rest of the world was staying capitalist) this was the only way forward for Russia. Over time the top members of the Bolshevik party and their hangers-on (including those recruited from the working class and the peasantry) gained a solid privileged position on the basis of exploiting wage-labour through their State-run industries and became a definite Russian capitalist class.

Editorial Committee.

Crypto-Leninistic?

It is difficult to avoid the impression that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is Crypto-Leninistic when it claims that capitalism was necessary to build up the organization of production until it could be replaced by democratic control of society. If people are inadequate to develop their economy communally and co-operatively, then by what means does competence magically descend on them after elitist-controlled growth. It takes blindness to ignore the achievements in voluntary collectivization (free sharing of talents and resources) of the Spanish anarchists in the 1930’s and to disregard the potential of the Mahknovites in the Russian Revolution. Again on what grounds does the SPGB condemn the Bolshevik usurpations when it alleges that capitalism is necessary in primitive countries (see p.45 Russia 1917-1967). I am very disappointed in the Companion Parties (WSP. SPGB. et al). This lack of faith in the ability of the people to control their own destiny was certainly not shared by Rosa Luxemburg who is otherwise favourably regarded by the WSP. 1 regret having to be so critical and I hope this disagreement is based on a misunderstanding.

Yours for Socialism.

Roger Lee.

Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A.

Reply: 

Roger Lee will be pleased to know that he has misunderstood us. When we say that the development of capitalism was necessary before Socialism could be established, we are thinking in world terms. By the end of the last century capitalism had performed this task of building up the material basis for Socialism. From then on it has been a reactionary system everywhere. We reject the view that the coming of capitalism to the backward countries now (or to backward Russia after 1917) is necessary before Socialism can be established.

When we wrote on page 45 of our pamphlet Russia 1917-1967: “That Russia had to follow the capitalist road and employ capitalist methods was inevitable”, we meant this to be understood in the context of the conditions then existing, i.e., that Russia was economically backward and that a majority of the workers both there and in other countries of the world did not want or understand Socialism. In fact we specially spelt this out on the previous page of the same pamphlet:

  . . . in the conditions that existed in Russia and the absence of a strong world socialist movement no other development was possible. Russia had to go through the stage of capitalism (emphasis added).

The land area of Russia and its people could have formed part of a world socialist community after 1917 had there been a majority of Socialists in the industrialised parts of the world. The brutal Bolshevik industrialisation of Russia was not historically necessary, whatever “crypto-Leninists" might say (if that is what they do say).

We are aware that throughout the history of capitalism there have been examples of workers (and peasants) organising themselves democratically to produce wealth. These however were not examples of Socialism but they do confirm that ordinary people can run society's affairs without a boss class — an argument we have always put forward.

Editorial Committee.

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.).

1989 and All That: The Fall of the Russian Empire (2019)

From the November 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirty years ago this month the Berlin Wall came down marking the end of the Russian State-capitalist Empire. We recall that, right from the start, we realised that Russia was not heading for socialism.

Of all the groups which arose during the Russian Revolution, those who came nearest to getting it right were arguably some of the ‘Mensheviks.’

The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party had split, before the Bolshevik coup, into Bolshevik (majority), and Menshevik (minority).

The Bolsheviks followed Lenin and their belief, amid the turmoil following the Tsar’s abdication (the Revolution had been underway since March 1917), was that the working class was too weak to make a socialist revolution. This was true, and the Mensheviks agreed. The two factions disagreed over the following.

The Mensheviks said that capitalism must be developed in Russia and industry and technology built up to the level of western Europe. Then, and only then, would the working class grow and achieve the strength in numbers and the awareness to carry out a socialist revolution. Socialism must be global and achieved by the workers themselves. In the meantime, they said, it is important for all to have freedom of press and assembly, and an open parliament, so that the free circulation of ideas can accompany social development. Russia, said the Mensheviks, could not jump over capitalism, but this had to be gone through. Parliamentary democracy was therefore the best option.

The Bolsheviks didn’t want to wait. They said (like the Leninist parties today) that the workers will never become aware of the need for socialism, and must therefore be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals (meaning the Bolsheviks themselves)

So, in November 1917 (October by the old Orthodox calendar), Lenin, Trotsky, and a handful of Bolsheviks plotted and carried out a minority coup d’etat against the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, and got workers to support them with the slogans ‘Bread!’ and ‘Stop the war!’ In the countryside, Bolsheviks put forward the slogan ‘Bread and Land!’ as well as ‘Stop the war!’

The Bolsheviks’ campaign to stop the war reached the West, and in 1915 they had attempted to have their anti-war declaration published. Every paper in Britain refused except the Socialist Standard, which published the Russian Bolshevik declaration on its front page, proclaiming solidarity with all workers wanting the war stopped.

Lenin and Trotsky, after seizing power in November 1917, kept their promise to stop the war, winning massive support. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed with Germany, taking Russia out of the war.

Almost immediately, the Western Allies blockaded Moscow and shut out all information concerning Russian events. British and US armies were dispatched to Russia’s north-west; in the south and east, Tsarist armies terrorised the countryside, while in Moscow and Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Lenin and Trotsky gave into hysteria similar to that of the revolutionaries in Paris in 1793.

In Ukraine, Makhno’s Anarchist cossacks defeated the Tsarist army there and made an alliance with Lenin and Trotsky, which the Bolsheviks reneged on later.

Responding to the conditions of the military blockade, the Bolsheviks cracked down with their own terror, abolishing freedom of the press and arresting and executing political dissidents. In the naval port of Kronstadt, the sailors mutinied, demanding the socialism the Bolsheviks had promised, and bread for the workers at least. Trotsky sent raw young frightened Red Army recruits against the sailors and many were killed. Finally the Red Army overran Kronstadt and those sailors who were not killed escaped to Finland.

Fleeing for their lives, many Mensheviks escaped to Georgia and held out briefly there against the Bolshevik government forces. Trotsky then turned his attention to destroying the Ukrainian Anarchistsas Lenin’s government became more secure.

Having seized control of the Russian state, Lenin found himself faced with the enormous task of transforming a vast peasant economy in ruins into a capitalist nation-state. Just as the Mensheviks had told him, Russia wasn’t ready for socialism and had to build a capitalist economy. Now he was faced with the task, having closed parliament outlawed all parties besides his own and established a dictatorship based on tyranny over the working class.

He thus elaborated an ideology which would permit the ruthless development of capitalism under a one-party state and still keep a ‘Marxist’vocabulary.

He renamed the Bolshevik RSDLP the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, redefined socialism as state-capitalism, and said that this ‘socialism’ must be an immensely long ‘transition period’ before communism (real socialism) can become a reality. A transition period which, naturally, would be ruled over by the CPSU.

By 1918, it was obvious to us that what had occurred in Russia was not a socialist revolution, but a coup d’etat by a group of opportunists, paving the way for a semi-feudal economy to be transformed into a modern capitalist state. However it took nearly 70 years before Russia finally dropped the pretence of being socialist and did away with its pseudo-Marxist terminology and emerged as the openly capitalist power it is today.

A.W.

Russia: Leftists in Dispute (1976)

From the January 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1968 was published an English translation of Ernest Mandel’s monumental work of Trotskyite orthodoxy, Marxist Economic Theory. This was reviewed in International Socialism and led to an exchange of pamphlets between I.S. and Mandel’s supporters in Britain, the International Marxist Group. IMG have republished this controversy with the title Readings on State Capitalism, which has a certain interest for Socialists as discussion centres on the view that Russia is State capitalist.

Mandel, Kidron and Harman (who took over the IS banner half-way through the controversy) agree that Russian society is not Socialist. Mandel, however, maintains that Russia is a very degenerate workers’ state, which has begun a transition towards Socialism with an economy “marked by the contradictory combination of a non-capitalist mode of production and a still basically bourgeois mode of distribution”. A capitalist mode of distribution on the basis of a non-capitalist mode of production is not only contradictory but, from a Marxist point of view, an absurdity; for it is the mode of production which in the end determines the character of all other aspects of society, including the mode of distribution (i.e. the way the social product is divided).

Kidron and Harman describe Russia now as state capitalist, but think that “Russia in the 10 years after 1917 . . . was not itself capitalist”. What then was it?

Discussion about the nature of Russian society is discussion about the meaning of both capitalism and socialism, and Mandel has well grasped the nature of Socialism as a moneyless, wageless, stateless society, with the “free distribution of goods and services”, existing on a world scale: “Socialism means a classless society. It therefore presupposes not only the suppression of private property of the means of production, henceforth managed in a planned way by the associate producers themselves, but it also calls for a level of development of the productive forces which makes possible the withering away of commodity production; of money, and of the state”.

Kidron, on the other hand, describes “socialism” vaguely as “workers’ control of production”, with the implication that this could be control of the production of commodities.

So we have Mandel denying Socialism properly, but saying that a world Socialist revolution is an impossibility and that instead the working class of each country should aim at establishing “a society in transition from capitalism to socialism”, based on nationalization under workers’ control; and we have Kidron saying correctly that no transitional society between capitalism and Socialism is possible (“socialism is a total system; it cannot grow piecemeal within the interstices of a capitalist society”), but defining Socialism wrongly and meaning by it precisely the same as Mandel’s impossible “transitional society”!

If Mandel were claiming that Russia cannot be described as capitalist, but some new form of exploitative society, then his argument would be stronger. But he is claiming that Russian society is better and more progressive than what exists in the West: basically a society which workers should support. This is dangerous nonsense. To suggest that Russia, where trade-union rights like strike action and democratic rights available in the west are denied, offers a precedent for future working-class development, is to mock the sufferings of the working class there.

But the main reason for saying that Russia is capitalist is the existence of the wages system there. As Marx pointed out, wage-labour and capital presuppose each other. Wage-labourers produce value, some of which returns to them in the form of wages, the rest going to those who monopolise the means of production as surplus value; this surplus value is re-invested in production and so becomes capital, wealth invested in production with a view to profit.

That capital accumulation out of the surplus value produced by wage-labour has never ceased in Russia since 1917 should be obvious enough, but Mandel puts forward the view that what has governed production in Russia has been “the consumption desires of the bureaucracy”. He paints Russia as a society where usurpers (the bureaucracy) have come to power and live off the workers who continue to produce under non-exploitative conditions. Mandel actually says that Russian workers, though paid wages, are not exploited at the point of production as in the West; but that they are robbed as consumers by a “parasitic and pilfering” bureaucracy

Mandel says the IS view is essentially a Menshevik one. According to Mandel the Mensheviks held that “a socialist revolution in a backward country is impossible and that whatever you do, capitalism, and only capitalism, can flower there,” and that “whatever one did, capitalism was on the agenda in that country (as long as it would not have been overthrown in all or most of the industrially advanced countries of the world)”. The Mensheviks may have held these views, but the fact remains that it is an analysis and in accordance with the Marxian materialist conception of history. Socialism can only be established on a world scale and on the basis of an advanced industrial economy; in the absence of the Socialist revolution all that can develop in so-called backward countries is capitalism.

We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain have always been logical on this point. Yes, we reply; Russia is state-capitalist and, yes, the Russian revolution was not a Socialist revolution, but a seizure of power by a political party which later came to form the nucleus of a new state-capitalist ruling class. This was inevitable, given the absence at the time of Socialist consciousness amongst the majority of the workers of the world. This is what we said at the time and subsequent developments in Russia have proved the soundness of the Socialist Party’s analysis.

Adam Buick

Same Difference? (2019)

The Wood for the Trees Column from the August 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the less used items from within the dialectical toolbox is the sameness/difference duality. Its paradoxical nature is highlighted in the much used retort: ‘but that’s like comparing apples with oranges’; a phrase often used to emphasize the inappropriateness of a particular analogy. This kind of critique always insists on difference rather than similarity, a familiar feature of contemporary ideology, but sometimes what is important about apples and oranges is that they are both fruits.

During a discussion about narrative structures within literature and films I found myself more interested in the idea of the ‘meta-structure’ of the quest storyline. From The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey through The Morte D’Arthur to The Big Lebowski , Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter stories we see many similarities. Indeed the rise of ‘genre’ entertainment has led to an expectation of formulaic similarities within the modern audience. An objection to this approach to understanding narratives is that it can overwhelm the subtle aesthetic differences that make the telling of the tale meaningful to a contemporary audience. So a balance is needed to produce an insightful and relevant critique of any art form; or, for that matter, of just about any experience.

Consumer capitalism attempts to surround us with novelty; it continually proclaims to have reinvented the wheel. On the supermarket shelves we see what appears to be an endless variety when in fact beneath the bright packaging we find much the same ingredients. The ability to see hidden realities beneath superficial facades has always been celebrated as one of the highest human intellectual achievements – with the scientific adventure being the supreme example. 

A great danger of being surrounded by hyperbole is that the truly new and important can be overlooked. This is where a dialectical approach can be a powerful help. Political ideologies come and go with great rapidity: ‘monetarism’, ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘the third way’, ‘Leninism’, ‘Trotskyism’, ‘populism’ etc, all proclaim to be something new and different but for a socialist they are just a tired repackaging of capitalism.

Hence we emphasize the sameness of such ideologies and not whatever subtle differences may or may not exist. Our perspective is purely pragmatic – will these ‘new’ ideologies substantially change the lives of working people? Upon consideration, using the methods explained above, we have reached the conclusion that such minor variations of the capitalist system cannot and will not change the lives of the majority for the better – and, thus far, we have been proven correct in our conclusions.

It might be surprising to some that, given the bitter and destructive nature of the class struggle, we do not emphasize any substantial difference between the vast majority and the tiny parasitic minority in terms of their humanity. The Left love to demonize the individual capitalist as evil and greedy – which he or she might be – but what is important here is to emphasize that they are trapped in their role just as the working class are trapped into making the lives of the rich possible. Obviously the economic concerns of the rich are very different from those of us who have to sell our labour power to them in order to exist but as human beings they also share many of our anxieties albeit in a different form. Life and death, physical and psychological well-being and human relationships dominate their lives as much as they do ours.

Given the social nature of our species the rich can suffer loneliness (the continual doubt about the possible monetary motivation of friends and loved ones) and the alienation born of privileged social exclusion and the continual quest for more wealth and power that provides status within their peer group. With this in mind we focus our critique on capitalism and not on individual capitalists. We stress the difference in economic and political terms and emphasize sameness in relation to our shared humanity and its deepest needs – a dialectical insight and balance is achieved.

The decision whether or not to emphasize one or other of these elements present in all political ideas is wholly dependent on historical development; for instance given the dominant mode of production in Russia in 1917 (agrarian and feudal) the sameness of the political and economic interests of the minority bourgeoisie (immanent) and the working class (future) at that moment in history made it imperative that both these minority classes worked together to overthrow the autocracy of the Czarist regime.

Had the Mensheviks the wisdom to reject participation in the then raging First World War the Bolshevik coup d’état would most likely never have happened and Russia would probably have progressed to a more traditional form of capitalism. The Bolshevik insistence that their regime was a form of socialism, and the acceptance of this by many intellectuals, is testament to the dangers inherent in wrongly emphasizing the difference of the social origins of a new elite and their confused statist economic experiment rather than insisting on the sameness of authoritarian structures inherent in all forms of capitalism from the perspective of the overwhelming majority.

Wez

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.)