Max Shachtman
Archive
Marxist Writers’
Archives
MIA > Archive > Shachtman > Under the Banner
Extract from Max Shachtman, Under the Banner of Marxism, Bulletin of the Workers Party, Vol. IV No. 1 (Part II), 14 January 1949, pp. 67–78.
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.
[We start with the three quotations in which Erber explains how Bolshevism ruined the world.] The ruination began, in the theoretical field, “with Lenin’s revision of the traditional Marxist concept of the relationship of democracy to socialism in favor of the anti-democratic view of the party ruling on behalf of the masses”, and it gathered real momentum in the political field “once the Bolsheviks had dispersed the Constituent Assembly and decided to rule alone”. [that’s plain enough and straightforward. There’s nothing muddleheaded about that; or more accurately, nothing more than usual.]
What is the traditional Marxist concept which Lenin, says Erber, held to firmly up to 1917 and revised in that year and afterward? We will repeat from Erber the quotations wherein it is set forth:
“If there is anything that is certain, it is this, that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is, what’s more, the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the great French revolution has already shown”.
That from Engels. And this from Rosa Luxemburg:
“Democratic institutions – and this is of the greatest significance – have completely exhausted their function as aids in the development of bourgeois society ... We must conclude that the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy, but that, on the contrary, the fate of democracy is bound up with the socialist movement”.
And further, from her Reform or Revolution?:
“We must conclude from this that democracy does not acquire greater chances of life in the measure that the working class renounces the struggle for its emancipation, but that, on the contrary, democracy acquires greater chances of survival as the socialist movement becomes sufficiently strong to struggle against the reactionary consequences of world politics and the bourgeois desertion of democracy. He who would strengthen democracy should want to strengthen and not weaken the socialist movement. He who renounces the struggle for socialism renounces both the labor movement and democracy”.
There is the concept that Lenin revised in theory and practise! As usual, Erber simply does not know what it is he is quoting. He doesn’t know where it comes from, what it refers to, or how to apply it. Lenin said something against bourgeois democracy? Here’s something Luxemburg said in favor of democracy! Fine quotation. throw it at Lenin with full force! Lenin was against parliamentarism? Heres something by engels in favor of a democratic republic. wonderful quotation. throw that one, too. Let us, however, be a bit more careful.]
The quotation from Engels is taken from his long-concealed criticism of the draft of the Erfurt program of the German Social Democracy in 1891. It is not directed at some over-radical opponent of parliamentarism, but at the opportunists in the party. In a letter to Kautsky accompanying the criticism, Engels writes that he “found an opportunity to let fly at the conciliatory opportunism of Vorwärts (the German party organ) and at the cheerful, pious, merry and free ‘growth’ of the filthy old mess ‘into socialist society’.” This gives us a hint of what Engels would let fly today at Erber. What occasioned Engels’ reference to a democratic republic? Perhaps someone in the German party who wanted to disperse a Constituent Assembly and set up a Soviet government? Quotations from our teachers do not decide political questions for us; but if they are used, they should be used in context so that their real sense and purpose is conveyed. Engels complained bitterly about:
“the inroads which opportunism is making in a great section of the Social-Democratic press. For fear of a revival of the (Bismarckian Anti-)Socialist Law and from recollection of all manner of premature utterances which were let fall during the reign of that Law, the present legal position of the party in Germany is now all of a sudden to be treated as sufficient for the carrying out of all the demands of the party by peaceful means. People talk themselves and the party into the belief that ‘the present society will grow into socialism’ without asking themselves if for this it is not equally necessary that society should grow out of its old social constitution and burst its old shell just as violently as the crab bursts its old shell – as if in Germany society had not in addition to smash the fetters of the still semi-absolutist and moreover indescribably confused political order ...”
This already gives us quite a different picture from the one our muddlehead wants to draw for us! We will not grow gradually into socialism, insists Engels. The old shell will have to be burst. And the opportunists are keeping quiet about the need to destroy in the very first place the semi-absolutist political order, the Hohenzollern monarchy. That is why he concludes that “our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic”. Engels is simply posing the democratic republic in opposition to monarchical semi-absolutism! Not an inkling of this from Erber.
Was the democratic republic synonymous, for Engels (and Marx), with bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism? If that is the concept Erber wants to convey, it is his right; if he wants to make Engels responsible for it, it is not his right. Engels, in his Origin of the Family, calls the democratic republic the “highest form of the state”, adding that “the last decisive struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can only be fought out under this state form. In such a state, wealth exerts its power indirectly, but all the more safely.” In his letter to Bernstein on March 24, 1884, Engels writes that:
“The proletariat too requires democratic forms for the seizure of political power, but, like all political forms, these serve it as means ... Further, it must not be forgotten that the logical form of bourgeois domination is precisely the democratic republic, which has only become too dangerous owing to the development already attained by the proletariat, but which, as France and America show, is still possible as purely bourgeois rule ... the democratic republic always remains the last form of bourgeois domination, that in which it is broken to pieces.”
It is under bourgeois democracy that we have the last form of bourgeois domination, and under bourgeois democracy that the rule of the bourgeoisie is broken to pieces. And that is precisely what the Paris Commune almost succeeded in demonstrating, and what the Russian Commune did succeed in demonstrating to the full! Not, as we shall see, if the Russian Commune had followed the free advice of the eminent Marxist Erber, but because it followed the leadership of Lenin.
Does the shattering of bourgeois rule mean that the proletariat dispenses with a democratic republic? Not at all! That follows only for parliamentary cretins who cannot absorb the idea that there can be any democratic republic other than the bourgeois democratic republic and the bourgeois parliamentary system. The Paris Commune was not a bourgeois state. Engels called it a dictatorship of the proletariat. But the Paris Commune was a democratic republic nevertheless, and a thousand times more democratic than the finest bourgeois democracy! The democratic republic is “the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the great French revolution (the Paris Commune) has already shown.”
That is precisely what the great Russian Revolution also showed. The Russian Commune was not a bourgeois democracy, but a democratic republic. Neither in 1871 nor in 1917 did the revolutionary proletariat, in establishing its own democratic republic, set up a parliamentary state, but a Commune type of state. Engels calls the Paris Commune a democratic republic in full knowledge of the fact that it was not a parliamentary regime. How does Erber explain that? He doesn’t. He gives no sign of realizing that there is something here that merits explanation. [In the fog with which he has surrounded himself to match the state of his political mind,] democratic republic and bourgeois democracy become [synonymous and inseparable, democracy and representative government become] synonymous with parliamentarism and inseparable from it. He sees the bourgeois republic and parliamentarism as a tremendous advance over autocracy and despotisms of all kinds, he sees the great advantages they offer the working class. But he cannot see beyond bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism to a workers’ republic which is neither bourgeois nor parliamentary.
[Lenin devoted page after page of his classic, State and Revolution, to showing – in our opinion irrefutably – what Marx and engels saw with their critical eye in the Paris commune, what they learned from it and what they tried to teach the working-class movement. It is simply inconceivable that Erber is unacquainted with what Lenin shows in these passages. That is precisely where Lenin should be grabbed by the throat and exposed for having revised the traditional Marxian concept. there is not a peep out of Erber on this score, not a hint, not even a wink of an eye. Why? Becyause he’s an honest critic, a scholarly thinker and an objective one. Lenin quotes striking and illuminating sections of Marx’s study of the Commune:
“The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time ... Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for workmen and managers of his business”.
[A good deal more can be and has been written about parliamentarism by Marxists, but to save your life could you compress the revolutionary criticism of parliamentarism into so few words as succinctly and unambiguously as Marx has done here? You can argue for years on whether Marx was right or not, but no debate is possible on where Marx stood on this question! We will return to it later!
What Erber does not understand (as you see, we are very polite) is that] Lenin opposed parliamentarism not because it was democratic and not because he was “for dictatorship”, not in order to replace democratic by anti-democratic institutions, but for contrary reasons. “The way out of parliamentarism”, wrote Lenin, “is to be found, of course, not in the abolition of the representative institutions and the elective principles, but in the conversion of the representative institutions from mere ‘talking shops’ into working bodies”. On what grounds did Lenin attack parliamentarism? Because of its inferiority to despotism or because of its inferiority – from the working-class point of view, of course – to the Commune type of state?
“Take any parliamentary country, from America to Switzerland, from France to England, Norway and so forth – the actual work of the ‘state’ there is done behind the scenes and is carried out by the departments, the offices and the staff. Parliament itself is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the ‘common people’.”
The real government machine of the bourgeois-democratic state is the locust horde of bourgeois and bourgeois-minded bureaucrats, growing in number, power, arrogance and contempt for the masses every year. Even an Americanized “Marxist” ought to know this by now. If the American people as a whole do not know it better than the people of other countries, they are being forced to learn fast.
Even an Americanized “Marxist” ought to know /ndash; that is, ought still to know what he once knew and taught others that] of all the bourgeois democracies, the American is the most reactionary and the least responsive to the will of the masses. No other bourgeois democracy has a political system so cunningly calculated to thwart the will of the people: with its states’ rights, its division into a bicameral legislative body, its enormously bureaucratized executive with unprecedented powers, its appointed judiciary with law-making and law-breaking powers, its outrageously undemocratic system for amending the Constitution, its broken-field system of electing Congressmen every two years, Presidents every four and Senators every six, with its boss-patronage political machine which parallels and mocks the legal government machinery from top to bottom – to mention only a few of the traditional and fundamental characteristics of our bourgeois democracy. The mass proposes; the bureaucracy disposes. The mass is allowed to vote once a year and to “petition” the government at all times. The rest of the time, it has nothing to do with running the government, with the adoption of the laws of the land, and even less to do with carrying them out. The parliament talks; it adopts the laws; the executive, the locust-horde of the bureaucracy, carries them out in its own fashion. That is in the very nature of parliamentarism. And that is why the Paris Commune and the Soviet system marked such an enormous advance in genuine democracy. In the Paris Commune, Lenin noted,
“Representative institutions remain, but parliamentarism as a special system, as a division of labor between the legislative and the executive functions, as a privileged position for the deputies, no longer exists. Without representative institutions, we cannot imagine democracy, not even proletarian democracy; but we can and must think of democracy without parliamentarism, if criticism of bourgeois society is not mere empty words for us, if the desire to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is our serious and sincere desire, and not a mere ‘election cry’ for catching workingmen’s votes, as it is with the Mensheviks and the SRs, the Scheidemanns, the Legiens, the Sembats and the Vanderveldes”.
This was written by Lenin in the middle of 1917, before the Soviets took power, while the Bolsheviks were calling for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly which the bourgeoisie and the Mensheviks and the SRs and all the later champions of the Assembly were sabotaging with all the strength and tricks at their command. It was not written after the Bolsheviks dispersed the Assembly and in order to give a “theoretical cover” to their action. It was written in broad daylight, for everyone to see, and no political person had the right to misunderstand what the Bolsheviks stood for.
So far as Luxemburg is concerned, again Erber just doesn’t understand what he reads and so imprudently or inappropriately quotes. Luxemburg is attacking the Bernsteinites, the revisionists, the opportunists, [the very ones whose pathetic ideas Erber has already swallowed hook and line and is preparing to swallow sinker too.] If any criticism is to be made of Luxemburg’s formulation, it is that it tends to be a little absolute. But that does not concern us at this time. As a general statement of the Marxist view it is unassailable. It does not in the least speak against Lenin or the Russian Revolution; it speaks against the muddlehead! “We must conclude that the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy, but that, on the contrary, the fate of democracy is bound up with the socialist movement.”
Luxemburg is a Marxist. She distinguishes between bourgeois democracy and ... democracy. She is saying nothing more than this (it is a good deal!): The victory of socialism does not depend upon the preservation of bourgeois democracy; genuine democracy depends upon the victory of socialism, upon strengthening the socialist movement, upon the independence and militancy of the proletariat, upon the unrelenting struggle for the socialist goal, on no compromise with bourgeois politics. “He who renounces the struggle for socialism renounces both the labor movement and democracy”.
[Does Erber undeerstand whom Rosa Luxemburg is speaking of here? Of the man who, decades later, was to attack the Bolsheviks for establishing a workers’ state instead of a bourgeois democracy, for expropriating the russian bourgeoisie and taking socialist measures instead of maintaining capitalist economic relations. That man’s name? Erber will find it on his birth certificate. “You mean Erber?” We do. “The same Erber who just quoted Luxemburg?” the same. “But Erber could not have attacked the Bolsheviks that way; it’s impossible; I don’t believe you.” You will, as soon as we have quoted from Erber. Agaion, do not be so dogmatic about what is possible nowadays and what is impossible.
We are not finished with the quiestion of Lenin’s “revision” of teh Marxist theory. We will not even attempt to finish with this theoretical and historical question in these pages.] The reader is referred to the rewarding study of at least three basic documents without which a serious discussion of the question is impossible: Lenin: State and Revolution, Karl Kautsky’s reply to Lenin, and the indispensable sequel by Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade. [If we return to the question, it will be in connection with the political reality of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle for Soviet Power.]
“The Bolsheviks”, writes Erber, “rose to power in the Russian Revolution on democratic slogans: ‘Down with the Kerensky Dictatorship! Only the Soviet Power Will Convene the Constituent Assembly!’ However, after the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly, democratic slogans became a weapon of their socialist opponents, while they tried to give the relationship of democracy to socialism a new interpretation: Not through political democracy, but through its overthrow, would socialism be achieved, ran the new Bolshevik doctrine. Democracy was considered the fortress of the bourgeoisie, dictatorship the weapon of the working class. Democratic processes and institutions were described as bourgeois weapons to blind the masses”.
It is doubtful if the editor of a liberal weekly would sink to such political vulgarity or such studied stupidity – it is hard to say which. there is no doubt that the editor of some cheap bourgeois rag could rise to it without any dfifficulty. It positively stinks with the odor of teh unscrupulous and illiterate bourgeois journalist.]
Lenin, Erber explained to us, first revised the Marxian concept on democracy and socialism in the early and middle parts of 1917. In its place, he adopted the “anti-democratic view of the party ruling on behalf of the masses”. But, continues Erber’s explanation, after adopting the anti-democratic view Lenin still put forward democratic and not anti-democratic slogans. Why? Was there a “cultural lag” in Lenin’s mind? No, democratic slogans were the only ones by which the Bolsheviks could rise to power. A supremely clever trick! For, once in power by exploiting the democratic sentiments of the masses, the Bolsheviks dropped their mask and showed in practise what their revision of Marxism really meant. It meant the destruction of political democracy and the establishment of dictatorship. Democracy was denounced as bourgeois, so were democratic institutions and processes; and “democratic slogans became a weapon of their socialist opponents”. [a clever trick which shows what the Bolsheviks really were, and, you will agree, a trick so despicable that it makes Erber’s delicate nose twitch and curl.]
Because the Bolsheviks attacked bourgeois democracy as bourgeois and defended proletarian democracy as a thousand times more democratic, it follows, like apricots from acorns, that the Bolsheviks were against democracy. Because the Bolsheviks attacked bourgeois representative institutions and the bourgeois democratic process as bourgeois, it follows, like an oak tree from an apricot pit, that they were against democratic representative institutions and processes. Because the Bolsheviks attacked the twisted, subverted, formal political democracy that exists under bourgeois rule, under the ownership of the means of production and exchange by an exploiting minority which gives it the power of life and death over the masses; because they supported the Soviet system of government as one which gives the masses real control and power – it follows, like Erber follows Marx, that they were for destroying political liberty.
The poor fellow simply cannot think in any but bourgeois terms. His mind is tightly boxed in by them. Proletarian democracy, soviet democracy, is a blank space to him; he cannot see it. The minute you are opposed to bourgeois democracy, not from the standpoint of despotism or Fascism, but in the name of a Soviet democracy, you are in for it so far as Erber is concerned. He cannot forgive you. It is clear to him that opposition to bourgeois democracy is opposition to democracy – full stop. That’s the only kind of democracy there is. No other democracy is possible, and don’t try to fool him. The minute you are opposed to parliamentary representation, it doesn’t matter what you are for – Erber knows you are against representative government, democratic institutions and processes, and political democracy in general. And don’t try to confuse him with a lot of talk about classes and class antagonisms, because you’ll be wasting your time too.
Let us see just what it was that the Bolsheviks did do, and what happened with the “democratic slogans (which) became the weapon of their socialist opponents”.
The key to the first door of the mystification is given in the second part of the sentence above. How is it that “democratic slogans” became the weapon of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionists only after the Bolshevik Revolution? It was certainly a powerful weapon before November 7, 1917. These slogans were certainly popular with the masses of the workers and peasants. In fact, they were so powerful and popular that the Bolsheviks were able to rise to power with their aid, as Erber notes. How is it that the “socialist opponents” didn’t use this weapon against the Bolsheviks before they came to power, in order to prevent them from coming to power and bringing our whole world to its present dismay? Weren’t they in an exceptionally favorable position to raise these slogans and to carry them out in political life? They were chiefs of Kerensky’s Provisional Government and at the same time they were the chiefs of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Soviets. They enjoyed, for months after the overturn of Czarism, the undeviating and enthusiastic support of the masses. They had all the political power and support that anyone would need to do anything he wanted to, certainly so far as raising democratic slogans and carrying them out is concerned.
[Now that our memory is refreshed by Erber, we too seem to recall that] they didn’t do anything of the kind. They refused to convene the Constituent Assembly. They refused to give the Finns, Ukrainians and other peoples yoked by Czarism their national independence. They suppressed the peasants who tried to throw off the landlords and take the land. They persisted in carrying on the Czar’s imperialist war which had bled and sickened and tired the people. They did nothing of consequence against the bourgeoisie which was sabotaging and crippling the economy. They did nothing of consequence to crush the counterrevolutionary monarchist nests in the country. But they did what they could to crush the Bolsheviks, their press and their freedom of action.
Strange, isn’t it! What inhibited these unterrified democrats? Were they lured away from the Marxist concept of the relation between democracy and socialism by Lenin’s revision of it? [That was not quite the case, as we remember. Or did Erber fail to reach them in time with a copy of engels’ letter to Conrad Schmidt (if not in full, then in selected excerpts) plus his own theory on how the state can adapt itself to teh economic movement and fulfill, bot a class, but a “social” function? that explanation, too, while interesting, does not seem to be adequate. Or] maybe the Bolsheviks, or the workers and peasants themselves, prohibited these “socialist opponents” from becoming champions of democracy? That, too, is worth considering, but obviously not for long.
The “socialist opponents” did not fight for democratic slogans and democracy when they were in the best position to fight for them. Why? Because to fight consistently and militantly for democracy under conditions of the sharpest conflict between the classes, that is, under conditions of revolution, required a break with pure-and-simple parliamentary methods and modes of thought, a break with the bourgeois democrats and bourgeois democracy. Because such a fight required, for the realization of its objectives, the installation of the working-class state power and led inexorably to this state power.
There is the hitherto well-kept secret of the failure of the “socialist opponents” and the success of the Bolsheviks, [which we are at last compelled to make public under Erber’s ruthless pressure.
“come now, you are joking. Erber knows this ‘secret’ and he mentions it in one sentence.” We are joking only a little bit. erber knows the secret like a village journalist knows the Rosetta stone. He can take a picture of it, he can describe it's dimensions, he can even copy the writing, but he hasn’t the remotest notion of what it means. Erber “knows” the secret, but he has no idea of what it means, although that requires none of the abstruse and esoteric skill of an Egyptologist. He] writes:
“Against the Menshevik policy of subordinating the aims of the Revolution to the imperialist program of the bourgeoisie, Lenin advanced the policy of subordinating the Revolution to the full or maximum socialist program of the proletariat”.
That he doesn’t know what he’s talking about in describing Lenin’s policy, is clear to anyone who has read what Lenin advocated and did in 1917. But his ignorance on this score has no special distinction since it is no greater than his general ignorance (the part is never greater than the whole, we were taught in school). In any case, it belongs to anotehr discussion.] What he says about the Menshevik policy has the distinguishing merit of being a fact, and shows that he has some notion of the “secret”.
Now, if we adopt the daring hypothesis that a policy of subordinating the Russian Revolution to the program of the bourgeoisie – its imperialist program, no less! – was not quite the right thing to do, what, in the opinion of the Wise One, was the right policy for Marxists to pursue? On this question, we can call on Marx himself for a suggestion. Scared to death of being denounced as Marx-worshippers, we hasten to say that Marx’s words do not “settle” the problems of the Russian Revolution. But they do help to “settle” them and, at the very least, they show how Marx (not Lenin the revisionist, but Marx the Marxist) would have approached these problems.
Marx is writing about the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany, in his famous and all-too-little-known Address to the Communist League in 1850. [we do not ask Erber to read it, because it is much too simple, crude and static for him to understand, and we have no desire to overtax the facilities at his disposal. But the reader is asked to read our very long excerpt with the patient and rewarding attention it merits, bearing in mind, as he reads it, what actually happened in russia, what the Bolsheviks actually said and did in russia, and what the bourgeois democracy and the “socialist opponents” actually said and did in russia.
“As heretofore, so in this struggle the mass of the petty bourgeoisie will maintain as long as possible an attitude of temporizing, irresolution and inactivity, and then as soon as the victory is decided take it in charge, summon the workers to be peaceful and return to work in order to avert so-called excesses, and so cut off the proletariat from the fruits of the victory. It does not lie in the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this, but it does lie in their power to render their ascendancy over the armed proletariat difficult, and to dictate to them such terms that the rule of the bourgeois democrats shall bear within it from the beginning the germ of its destruction, and its displacement later by the rule of the proletariat become considerably easier. Above all things, during the conflict and right after the battle, the workers must to the fullest extent possible work against the bourgeois measures of pacification, and compel the democrats to carry into action their present terroristic phrases. They must work to prevent the immediate revolutionary excitement from being promptly suppressed after the victory. They must keep it going as long as possible. Far from setting themselves against so-called excesses, examples of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings with only hateful memories attached to them, they must not only tolerate these examples but take in hand their very leadership. During the struggle and after the struggle the workers must at every opportunity put forth their own demands alongside those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers the moment the democratic citizens set about taking over the government. They must if necessary extort those guarantees, and in general see to it that the new rulers pledge themselves to every conceivable concession and promise – the surest way to compromise them. In general they must restrain in every way to the extent of their power the jubilation and enthusiasm for the new order which follows every victorious street battle, by a calm and cold-blooded conception of the situation and by an open distrust of the new government. Side by side with the new official governments, they must simultaneously set up their own revolutionary workers’ governments, whether in the form of municipal committees, municipal councils or workers’ clubs or workers’ committees, so that the bourgeois democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers, but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word: from the first moment of victory our distrust must no longer be directed against the vanquished reactionary party, but against our previous allies, against the party which seeks to exploit the common victory for itself alone.
2, But in order to be able energetically and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The arming of the whole proletariat with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition must be carried out at once, and the revival of the old bourgeois militia, directed against the workers, resisted. Where this cannot be effected, the workers must endeavor to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard with chiefs and a general staff elected by themselves and put themselves under orders not of the state but of the revolutionary municipal councils established by the workers. Where workers are employed in state service, they must arm and organize in a separate corps or as a part of the proletarian guard with the chiefs elected by themselves. Arms and munitions must not be given up under any pretext; every attempt at disarmament must if necessary be thwarted by force. Destruction of the influence of the bourgeois democrats upon the workers, immediate independent and armed organization of the workers, creation of the most difficult and compromising possible conditions for the momentarily unavoidable rule of the bourgeois democracy – these are the main points which the proletariat, and consequently the League, must have in mind during and after the coming uprising”.
This utterly amazing document – amazing for the compactness and unequivocalness of its summary of Marx’s views on the bourgeois-democratic state and bourgeois democracy, on the role and tactics of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and amazing for its almost uncanny word-for-word anticipation of the course of the Bolsheviks in the Revolution – deserves reading in full, down to the last line in which the German workers are told that “Their battle cry must be: the Permanent Revolution!”
(If we may be permitted a “personal note”, we add the incidental information that it is to be found complete in a compilation of Marx’s most important writings made by Max Eastman in 1932, which we helped to assemble, translate and edit. In his introduction, Eastman, referring to Marx’s Address of 1850, says that “it will perhaps more than anything else written by Marx convey a full sense of the degree in which he was the author and creator of all the essential outlines of what we call ‘Bolshevism’.” Right, a hundred times over and over again! Eastman’s advantage over Erber lay in his knowledge, understanding and attempt at consistency. When, therefore, he repudiated the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism, he also repudiated Marx and the fight for socialism. It was a triumph for logic and what he called “the Anglo-Saxon mind”.)
Let us jump from Marx in Germany in 1850 to Lenin in Russia in 1917. The Wise One [Erber] writes:
“The Kerensky regime had done its utmost to block its further advance by frustrating the efforts of the masses to end the war and divide the land. The regime sought to stretch out its undemocratic authority as long as possible by repeatedly postponing the election of a Constituent Assembly. If the revolution was to advance, Kerensky had to go. Only the Bolshevik Party was able to show the way to the teeming, creative, democratic Soviets of 1917. The revolution broke through the impasse and opened a road toward a resolution of the land and peace questions. Far from carrying out a coup d’etat, as their opponents charged, the Bolsheviks rode to power on the crest of an upsurge that sought to realize the long-promised objectives of land and peace”.
We are beginning to get an idea of what the Marxist policy should have been, and it’s not bad as a starter. “If the revolution was to advance, Kerensky had to go.” Right is right. But Kerensky alone? Really, now, would that have been fair? Should Kerensky have been made the scapegoat for the “Kerensky regime,” that is for the Kerensky government? What about the “socialist opponents” – the Mensheviks and SRs – who made the existence of the regime possible, who were part and parcel of it, who were fully co-responsible with Kerensky in trying to “stretch out” the “undemocratic authority” of the regime “as long as possible,” and doing “its utmost to block” the advance of the revolution “by frustrating the efforts of the masses to end the war and divide the land”? What gives them immunity and not Kerensky? Whatever our opinion may be, we know the opinion of the Russian workers and peasants; the whole kit and caboodle had to go! Their place had to be taken by – write it down again! – “the teeming, creative, democratic Soviets of 1917.” Led by whom? By Lenin and Trotsky, because – write this down, too! – “only the Bolshevik Party was able to show the way” to the Soviets. Only the Bolsheviks.
That way was the seizure of power by the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets, which proceeded to give the land to the peasants, control of the factories to the workers, peace to the whole country, and to usher in the greatest victory for the socialist working class in all its history.
Max Shachtman Archive |
Marxist Writers’ Archives |
Last updated on 23 February 2015