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Extract from Max Shachtman, Under the Banner of Marxism, Bulletin of the Workers Party, Vol. IV No. 1 (Part II), 14 January 1949, pp. 62–67.
An abridged version is included in the Workers’ Liberty book The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, Vol. 1.
Additional transcription by Einde O’Callaghan (indicated by square brackets).
The complete 120-page document is Shachtman’s response to a document written by his long-time collaborator, Ernest Erber, to explain his decision to resign from the Workers Party.
Marked up by A. Forse & Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
[To us,] the Bolshevik Revolution was the great dividing line between socialism in theory and socialism in practise – it was not yet socialism, but the end of socialism as mere theory and the beginning of socialism as living social practise. In the Paris Commune, the people ruled their own destinies for the first time in history, but only for ten weeks, without support from France, without support from Europe, without the strength, the time, the possibility of mustering such support; without clear consciousness, without clear leadership. It was the dawn, but a false dawn.
In the Russian Revolution, the people ruled for years, the socialist proletariat ruled with understanding of its status and its role, with a leadership such as no class in history ever equalled. They proved – in a backward, three-quarters ruined country! – and proved it once and for all, that the socialist proletariat itself can take power in its own name, hold power, and proceed to put the inherited chaos into socialist order. Beset by every conceivable foe, handicapped by every conceivable difficulty, they proved it beyond anybody’s dreams, beyond what they were required to prove, beyond what a working class encircled and isolated in one backward land could be expected to prove. They proved at long last that the proletariat does not have to have a master to exploit and oppress it, that there is no quality inherent in the proletariat that precludes its taking power for itself. They proved that in the dark mass for which all rulers and their retainers have such lordly contempt are hidden deep and powerful springs of resourcefulness, idealism, passion for liberty, capacity for brotherhood, enormous creative genius, which await only revolutionary release to inundate and fructify the social soil corrupted by the rule of man over man until it blooms for a peaceful world.
They not only proved that this dark mass, once lighted up by revolutionary fires, can govern itself, but they found once more, to an infinitely higher degree than the Paris Commune or the Revolution of 1905 in Russia, that natural state form which the working class needs for its own rule until there is no rule by anyone over anyone – the Commune type of state, the Soviet type of state. It was there to be found, not because it had been invented and artificially imposed upon the people by some doctrinary, but because it developed naturally in their class struggle first as a fighting weapon and then also as the form of their rule. With this new and highest form of democratic representative government, they passed above and beyond bourgeois parliamentarism just as surely as parliamentarism had in its time passed above and beyond monarchical rule by divine right. And even after they succumbed to powers beyond their strength, the proof was not undone, for they succumbed not because the socialist proletariat had dared to take power but because the proletariat in other countries had not dared.
Practically every bourgeois in the world recognized whose revolution it was and who ruled Russia. Millions of workers and colonial slaves recognized it too. That is why revolutionary Russia was able to light the fires of freedom all over the world. That is why it aroused passions and hopes, combativity and confidence in millions and tens of millions who were never before inspired. History does not know of another event like it; this old world was never before shaken as it was by the triumph in Russia.
It was our revolution. It remains our revolution, our victory and vindication – even now! Even now when it has been killed, strangled by its imperialist encirclers, deserted by those who should have been its socialist comrades-in-arms, speared in the back by its Stalinist assassins, dragged in the mud by every backslider and faint-heart, it is our revolution. How easy and contemptible it is to draw near the slain Achilles and kick his head now and spit on him. Every craven, every deserter, every dilettante can now track his dirty boots on to the imperishable page and relax his wretched bowels over it. That is cheap, it is popular in the most respectable quarters, it requires no courage.
The defence of the Russian Revolution moves along with the attack on it in the same way and with the same aim that the fight for socialism goes on by the side of the fight against socialism. Read all the “socialist” attacks on the Revolution that have been written in recent times, including Erber’s. If their authors have the slightest awareness of what is really involved, they give no evidence of it. The attack upon the Russian Revolution conducted nowadays by the traditionally anti-socialist and anti-working-class bourgeoisie is not different in a single essential from what it was beginning with 1917–1918. All that is new in it is the ammunition that Stalinism has provided it with. Otherwise, the attack remains the same. It has a political meaning determined by its class aim and the class interests that prompt it. What does it boil down to? We have indicated that before:
“You workers, whatever else you do, do not take state power, do not even think in such terms! We have been warning you against it since the days of Marx. In Russia, they didn’t listen to us, and look what happened. Lenin carried through a Marxian revolution. We are even ready to admit that Lenin himself was a noble idealist, but that didn’t mean very much. Once started on the road, the movement had an iron logic of its own. Its inevitable outcome is the Stalinist state they have today, which even the radical Trotskyists say is an inferno for labour. Once you abolish private property, once you put all economic power into the hands of the state, we are all done for, you as well as we. Socialism is a Utopia. Capitalism is not absolutely perfect, but so long as we have free enterprise and democracy, you can get as much out of it as we can. Go ahead with all the reforms you want to. We will disagree with you here and there. But learn from Russia! Do not think of revolutionary socialism!”
That is the only political meaning of the “theoretical struggle” to prove that Stalinist totalitarianism was the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution, that Stalinism flowed “logically” from Leninism which the bourgeoisie understands perfectly to have been nothing but revolutionary Marxism. That “theoretical struggle” is part and parcel – a very, very big part today – of the bourgeois struggle against socialism and against the working class. You have to be a permanent resident of one of the remoter planets not to see this demonstrated a hundred times over in the daily ideological and political life of our times.
When we defend the Russian Revolution, its great principles and its great achievements, it is not because we are hopeless stick-in-the-muds. We are not idol-worshippers or iconoclasts in principle. We are not traditionalists or innovators in principle. We do not believe that what is old is gold or what is new is true. Our defence of that Revolution, even more than our defence of its pioneer, the Paris Commune, is nothing but the continuation of our fight for the socialist emancipation of the people. And whoever does not know ought to know that the whole line of the bourgeois attack on the Revolution is the continuation of the century-old fight against socialist liberty and part of the century-old fight against the working class.
“Come now, are you saying that any attack on the Russian Revolution or criticism of it is reactionary, bourgeois, a blow to socialism and the working class? Isn’t that dangerously close to the method of argument used in the notorious Stalinist amalgams?” We anticipate the familiar question. Since that is not what we said, we are no closer to the Stalinist method than we ever were.
Lenin submitted the Russian Revolution and its course to criticism; Trotsky had his criticism, during the great days and later in his life; Rosa Luxemburg criticized it; we ourselves have a critical re-evaluation to make. Marx criticized the Paris Commune, but so also did the British bourgeoisie. It all depends on what you are criticizing, what you are attacking, how you criticize or attack it, on what is your political point of departure, on what is your political conclusion. We do not even dream of denying anyone the right to criticize the Russian Revolution or the labor movement in general. We hope in turn that we shall not be denied the right to criticize the critics. There is the proletarian, the socialist or Marxist criticism of the Russian Revolution; there is the bourgeois criticism of it. And there is the “intermediate” criticism which renounces or rejects the struggle for socialism without yet adopting in full the position of our class enemy.
[Erber’s criticism, like those it is patterned on, does not belong in either the first or the second category. It is “Intermediate” between teh two ... but not equidistant from them.] Read Marx’s memorial to the Paris Commune. It was not an uncritical eulogy of everything the Communards thought or did – far from it. Indeed it was written by a man who, a few weeks before the establishment of the Commune, regarded the idea as preposterous! But every line vibrated with a challenging defence of the revolution.
“Workingmen’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators, history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”
Read Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of the Bolshevik Revolution which she set down in 1918 in her fragmentary prison notes. She did not draw back from what she felt she had to say about the regime of Lenin and Trotsky. But she was blood-kin of Marx, she was a revolutionist to her finger-tips who never for a moment relaxed the struggle against the enemy for socialist freedom. What right – political, moral or any other – do the backsliders and tired and retired radicals have to pull into their camp the revolutionist who ended her critical notes with these clarion words:
“What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the policies of the Bolsheviks ... It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: ‘I have dared!’
“This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.”
[Where can you find so much as a lingering trace of this spirit, this attitude, this intellectual axis, in all of Erber’s document, which sniffles as though it had a perpetual cold, which moans and groans and sqeaaks as though it ached in every joint? No use looking for it. It isn’t there;. His political fever has burned it, out of him.
“Still, abuse him all you want, you ought to take up his views objectively, oughtn’t you? Just because he rejects Loninism and Scheidemannism, does it follow that his views should not be given a hearing, or that they should not be answered – if you can answer them?”
Yes, you are right. He should be given a hearing and an answer, which is why we printed his document who needn’t have, and why we are writing this commentary. You are right, dear reader, but do not be too surprised if Erber’s rejection of Lenin “and” Scheidemann turns out to be of electrono-microscopic importance. As Morris Raphael Cohen once said with a skepticism we frankly share: “The notion that we can dismiss the views of all previous thinkers surely leaves no basis for the hope that our own work will prove of any value to others.” We shall soon see what value Erber’s work has.]
It is no great problem to attack the Bolshevik Revolution today. Buy any of a dozen such attacks and you find all the raw materials required by an enterprising person. For a modest investment, you get two or three standard blueprints plus a wide range of parts to choose from for the finished product. You get: what Trotsky said about Bolshevism before the revolution; what Luxemburg said about Bolshevism after the revolution; what Lenin said about the revolution before and after; a few loose facts and figures about the Constituent Assembly; a selection of stories about Kronstadt by any number of people who weren’t there, authenticity guaranteed or your money back, plus a choice of figures on how many sailors were murdered by Lenin or Trotsky or Dzerzhinsky (one, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand – whichever looks better); a selection of quotations from Lenin and Trotsky about (1) dictatorship and (2) democracy; a calendar showing that Stalin took power after Lenin died, proving with actual dates that Stalinism flowed from Leninism; differently colored bits of gossip, all very spicy and revealing, about various Bolsheviks, certified by a number of political Peeping Toms; labels marked “Cheka Terror”, “Secret Police”, “Suppression of Socialists”, all lithographed in scarlet to imitate bloodstains and scare children; an assortment of wiring, string, nails, screws, matchsticks, nuts and bolts, and a bottle of rubber cement. All the quotations are easily pasted together, for they come carefully chopped out of context and cut down to convenient size. No special skill or training is required; any child can follow the directions and assemble all sorts of articles from the kit, including a full series for the New Leader which can be expanded, with the aid of a little more work and ingenuity, into a full-length book for a venturesome publisher.
Once you have this handy little kit (more elaborate ones are available if you want to invest in more of these second-hand books), you can write a critique of the Bolshevik Revolution [as good as Erber’s]. We urge the reader to believe that very little skill is required for this sort of job. They will all come out looking about the same.
In the beginning, there was the Error. At the other end are the woes of the world today. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You draw a straight line between the beginning and the end, and you get a clear and complete understanding not only of the development of the Russian Revolution but of all world politics for the past thirty years. It is a triumph for one of the elementary principles of plane geometry.
But where is the three-dimensional reality of the country known as Russia in all this, with its class stratifications and their reciprocal relations, with its economic and social situation and the urgent political and social problems it posed at a given time, with its relations to the rest of the capitalist world in which it actually lived? Doesn’t exist. It is just a discrete point on the straight line.
Where are the classes in Russia at the time of the revolution and afterward, what was their position, what were they thinking, what were they doing, what did they want? Were there other political groupings in Russia, apart from the Bolsheviks, and did they play any role in the development of Bolshevik policy, in the development of the Revolution? Not important. Each class and each party gets no more than one discrete point on the straight line.
The same question with regard to the classes and their struggle outside of Russia, the political groupings, especially the Social-Democratic parties, and their policies, and what effect they all had on the Bolsheviks and the Revolution, gets the same answer. Not worthy of note. A few more discrete points on the straight line.
But at least the straight line is made up of all these discrete points? No sir! Got nothing to do with it! The line projected itself by a logic of its own right out of the heart and substance of the Error itself, just as mundane wickedness emanates from original sin. [Erber knows all there is to know about the interaction between one force, the economic, and anopther, the political.] What about the interaction of the multitude of economic and political forces which affected the development of Bolshevism and the Revolution? Not important. Waste of time. [Therefore, not one word about it in his “reexamination” of the revolution.] What about Trotsky’s studies and analysis of the course and the causes of the degeneration of the Revolution, [which Erber must surely have read while he was still alove]? Of no value. Doesn’t have to be refuted. Doesn’t even have to be mentioned. Waste of time. I’m working with my kit.
“Wait a minute! Do you mean to tell me erber has written a reevaluation of teh Russian Revolution and Stalinism without dealing with Trotsky’s analysis, which he himself shared for many years?” Yes. “And he doesn’t even mention it?” That’s right. “But that’s utterly impossible. I can’t believe you!“ then read erber’s document yourself, dear friend, and don’t be so dogmatic about what is impossible nowadays. We, meanwhile, will proceed to Erber’ reevaluation in some detail.
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Last updated on 23 February 2015