2. THE RUSSIAN PROBLEM It is the historical task of the bourgeois revolution to overcome the absolutism of the feudal era and to procure for capitalism, as the new economic system, legal recognition and social acceptance in the framework of the bourgeois-liberal state order. In all countries with a formerly feudal economy and absolutist form of government the bourgeois revolution has fulfilled this task. It never had the aim and function of infringing or even suspending the principle of the economic basis and the social order dependent on it, that is private property in the means of production. It only changed, for the time being, the class which exercised authority over the whole as the representative of this principle. While in the feudal epoch the nobility forms this class, supported fundamentally by private property, holding dominion in the despotically administered patriarchal state, organised by estates with the monarch at its head, in the capitalist era the bourgeoisie -- as private possessor of goods and money -- takes over the government, which is established in the constitutional state with Parliament and Cabinet, at its most ideal in the form of the parliamentary republic. The bourgeois revolution, everywhere it has manifested itself, brought the bourgeois class to the fore. This class was more or less conscious of its historical mission. It had also prepared the revolutionary movement, at least economically, often ideologically too. Under the pressure of unavoidable necessities resulting from the conflict of the old and new tendencies, it had finally become the leader of the revolutionary action and had won political power, in order to use it immediately after the victory for the erection of the bourgeois state and social order. The success alone of the revolution, which consists in the creation of the capitalist economic order and the social order appropriate to it, determines its nature as a bourgeois revolution. The circumstances that proletarian strata also form a part, now smaller, now greater, of the revolutionary fighters, does not come into consideration in determining the historical nature of the revolution. Even when the proletariat is already formed as a class and marches in the revolution with its own political class aims -- perhaps indeed influences its development considerably or even controls it -- nothing of the historical nature of the revolution is changed. The weak or strong proletarian admixture in a bourgeois revolution can slow down or accelerate, sometimes deflect or disturb, its completion ; can temporarily obliterate or deform its face ; can affect or sometimes endanger its success, but to the essence of the revolution, its socio-economic content, it can make no difference. Likewise in the bourgeois state and in the army the workers form the strongest contingent, they make up a large class grouping -- and yet no one will be tempted on this account to call the bourgeois state proletarian or to speak of a proletarian army. Even the Red Army of Soviet Russia, consisting solely of peasants and workers, is a military machine constructed on a bourgeois model and functioning according to the laws of bourgeois state policy, which only political demagogy, with the intention to deceive, can describe as a 'proletarian' army. Where and whenever proletarian strata play a role in the bourgeois revolution, they always appear in the train of the bourgeois class, partly as paid mercenaries, partly as fellow-travellers, partly as political auxiliaries of uncertain tendency. They often form the rump, mostly the tail of the movement, never the head. The last is always with the merchants, bankers, professional politicians, lawyers, intellectuals, literati. Here the demands are formulated, the programme developed, the goals fixed, the statements given out. Here bourgeois policy is made. The historical face of the revolution receives its imprint from here outwards. In the first bourgeois revolutions the proletariat could not yet figure at all as a class because up till then it was not developed as such. At first in England it began to mark itself off as a class from the main body of the bourgeoisie, combined in strong organisations. But it was still always closely intermingled with petty-bourgeois elements and its programmes never went beyond the radicalism of these sections. Thus the Levellers marched beside the left Puritan sects at the very front of the revolutionary forces, yet their whole attitude to the revolutionary problem stayed bound up with the ideology of their time, which was at best bourgeois. The pivot of all bourgeois orientation is : that private property remains protected. To the extent that radical groups and sects transgressed this, it arose out of a wrongly understood primitive Christianity, whose postulates, too literally interpreted, would have been condemned to be shattered with the very first attempts at realisation, because all the conditions of the socio-economic milieu were against them. Likewise in the French Revolution the proletariat was not present as a class : the extent of the development of the bourgeois class did not give rise to it at all. Not even sixty years later, in the French as in the German revolution, did a proletarian segment come to light. Only half a generation later did Lasalle's agitation work begin, with the aim of preparing, through the awakening of class feeling among the proletariat the general education towards class consciousness. From the beginning, the Russian Revolution -- in accordance with its historical conditions -- could only be a bourgeois revolution. It had to get rid of tsarism, to smooth the way for capitalism, and to help the bourgeoisie in to the saddle politically. Through an unusual chain of circumstances the bourgeoisie found itself in no position to play its historical role. The proletariat, leaping on to the stage in its place, did make itself in a moment master of the situation by an unprecedented exertion of energy, daring, tactical readiness and intelligence, but fell in the following period into a fatal predicament. According to the phaseological pattern of development as formulated and advocated by Marx, after feudal tsarism in Russia there had to come the capitalist bourgeois state, whose creator and representative is the bourgeois class. But government power from 1917 was occupied not by bourgeois, but by proletarians who repudiated the bourgeois state and were ready to institute a new economic and social order following socialist theory. Between feudalism and socialism yawned a gap of a full hundred years, through which the system of the bourgeois epoch fell unborn and unused. The Bolsheviks undertook no more and no less than to jump a whole phase of development in Russia in one bold leap. Even if one admits that in doing so they reckoned on the world revolution which was to come to their aid and compensate for the vacuum in development within by support from the great fund of culture from outside, this calculation was still rashness because it based itself solely on a vague hope. Rash too was the experiment arising from this calculation. The first act of the Bolshevik regime was the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. But this treaty, concluded with an advanced capitalist bourgeois government, was an act of bourgeois politics. A really proletarian revolution would have maintained a hostile attitude, would have tied up the German fighting strength further, to thwart German imperialism of victory in the west, and on its part would have mobilised all forces for the furthering of the world revolution. Rosa Luxemburg gave the sharpest expression to this view in her time. In connection with the treaty, the Bolsheviks declared themselves for the right to self-determination of nations on the basis of which ensued the severing of Finland, Poland, the Baltic, the Ukraine and the Caucasus from Russia. This statement was the outcome of bourgeois political orientation. The result was on the one hand the Russian national state -- which is not a proletarian goal -- and on the other the collapse of the proletarian revolution in the detached states. A proletarian revolution would have had to establish solidarity over all frontier posts and beyond national turnpikes. The Bolsheviks, however, began the greatest fall from grace with the distribution of the big estates to the peasants. Through this the peasants obtained private property. But socialism should begin not with the introduction but with the elimination of private property. And so the measure was a slap in the face of the socialist idea. As obvious as this act would have been for the government of a bourgeois state power (more or less as at the time of the French Revolution), it is similarly inadmissible -- in fact, grotesque -- as an expression of proletarian policy. For, with the peasantry having attained private property, about 85% of the population of Russia was thereby recruited to enmity against socialism. The consequence of this policy is manifest in the irreconcilable opposition between country and town, peasantry and industrial proletariat. It led to the boycott of the towns, to the refusing of food, to the sabotage of the state supply organisations : it compels tactics of concessions to the capitalist-orientated peasantry -- a policy directed towards peasant interests and a capitulation to profit. In fact the Bolshevik regime had to go this way. While it still based itself in 1918 on the landless, and the poor peasants with the industrial workers made up its surest following, it now sides with the property owning peasants, creates tenant farmers and big proprietors, sets the grain trade free, permits and encourages in this way the rise of a peasantry with capitalist interests, whose political business it takes care of. Parallel to this, in the same bourgeois tracks, ran the economic policy vis-à-vis industry. The Bolsheviks carried out the nationalisation of industry, of transport, banks, factories, etc., and thus awoke quite generally the belief that socialist measures were involved here. Nevertheless, nationalisation is not socialisation. Through nationalisation you can arrive at a large-scale, tightly centrally-run state capitalism, which may exhibit various advantages as against private capitalism. Only it is still capitalism. And however you twist and turn it gives no way of escape from the constraint of bourgeois politics. So also in Russia, then, they came to make great concession to foreign capitalists, to whom mineral wealth and labour power have been handed over for exploitation -- profit-sharing with the state. The stock exchange is open again. A host of dealers, entrepreneurs, agents, brokers, bankers, profiteers, speculators and jobbers has turned up again and settled in. By the decree of 27 May 1921 the right of possession over factories and workshops, industrial and trading establishments, instruments and means of production, agricultural and industrial produce, financial stock ; the right to inventions, copyright, trade marks ; the right to take up mortgages or lend money, like the testamentary or legal right of succession, was expressly acknowledged again. With this the bourgeois order is established in its entirety and in all essential components. To this also belongs, besides the bourgeois jurisdiction whose organisational structure is being constructed, the Red Army : a thoroughly bourgeois army functioning in accordance with bourgeois-capitalist interests. In the context of policies dictated in the first instance by the protection of the agrarian profits, it represents the sharpest weapon of basic defence -- first against the Cossacks, Denikin, Wrangel [3] and so on, but sooner or later also against the demands of the proletarian socialist revolution. Not last is a striking expression of bourgeois politics, the dictatorship of the Communist Party leaders set up in Russia, which is falsely described as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Behind this pseudo-revolutionary protective screen hides, as everyone knows, the omnipotence of a small handful of people who are the commanders of the authoritarian, centrally organised commissariat-bureaucracy. As inverted tsarism this party dictatorship is a completely bourgeois concern. These few contentions show and prove that the Russian regime, contrary to its doubtless honest intention to pursue proletarian socialist policy, has been pushed step by step by the power of facts into bourgeois capitalist policy. Even where they succeeded for a while in developing the shoots of a social revolution and creating the beginnings of an economic and social order of a socialist nature, the pains they took ended finally with a failure, so that they were forced to demolish the attempts and experiments. And as the best and most honourable of the fighters for a social revolution opposed this, the Bolshevik authorities did not shrink for a minute from throwing them by hundreds and thousands into prisons -- quite in the bourgeois-capitalist-tsarist manner -- sending them to Siberia, or condemning them to death. A Trotsky played the executioner of the Kronstadt sailors with the same cold-bloodedness as a Gallifet [4] having French revolutionaries, or a Noske [5] German revolutionaries slaughtered. It was an historical error to believe that the Russian Revolution was the start of a social revolution. And it amounts to a demagogic fraud to awaken and maintain this belief in the heads of workers. When the socialists in the Russian government, after the victory over tsarism, imagined that a phase of historical development could be skipped and socialism structurally realised, they had forgotten the ABC of Marxist knowledge according to which socialism can only be the outcome of an organic development which has capitalism developed to the limits of its maturity as its indispensable presupposition. They had to pay for this forgetfulness by a wide, troublesome and victim-strewn detour which brings them in a space of time to capitalism. To institute capitalism and to organise the bourgeois state is the historical function of the bourgeois revolution. The Russian Revolution was and is a bourgeois revolution, no more and no less : the strong socialist admixture changes nothing in this essence. So it will fulfil its task by throwing away, sooner or later, the last remnants of its "War-Communism" and revealing the face of a real, genuine capitalism. The struggles within the Bolshevik party are preparing this conclusion, and with it the end of the Bolshevik party dictatorship. The line of development -- whether that of a party coalition which hastens and alleviates the launching phase of capitalism, or that of a Bonaparte who protracts and aggravates it -- is not yet clear ; both are possible. The parallelogram of forces will find its correct diagonals. Footnotes [3] This refers to some of the armies of the counter-revolution in Russia in the period of `war communism'. [4] Known throughout the workers' movement as the `butcher of the Commune' for his leading role in the suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871. [5] Right-wing German social-democrat who organised the suppression of the November revolution in Germany in 1918 and of the subsequent revolutions of early 1919 - the January riots and the `March days'. |