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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. 92–99.
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.
All our muddlehead proposes, with that insight you get only from hindsight, is that the Bolsheviks should have followed exactly the same course as the Mensheviks. The high revolutionary role which he asks that the revolutionary party should have assigned itself in the Russian Revolution boils down to this: Maintain capitalist economic relations (in plain English: capitalism) which the workers themselves were smashing; and smash the state power of the “teeming, creative, democratic Soviets” which the workers themselves were maintaining. And what, we ask in a conspiratorial whisper, what if some of the workers resisted the execution of this modest program? No problem! It would be, to quote the muddlehead, “for the vanguard to act and explain later’’. The workers would have “to be handled firmly, for their own good”. The only trouble is that when the Mensheviks and SRs, with a little help from Kaledin, Alexeyev, Kornilov, Churchill, Wilson and Poincare, did try to execute this program, for the good of the workers and peasants – the rabble didn’t know what was good for them.
“Lenin subjected to merciless ridicule Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution right up to the outbreak of the February Revolution”.
Thus Erber [from whom nothing can be kept secret. So what? This:]If Lenin had kept up this merciless ridicule, and stuck to the theory of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, the Constituent Assembly would be going full blast to this day and “despite capitalist economic relations”, the world would be a distinctly pleasant place to live in, free from Fascism and above all from Stalinism. But what happened? We don’t know exactly why it happened or how, we don’t know what got into Lenin’s democratic head, but that which did happen was the worst thing imaginable: Lenin took over Trotsky’s mercilessly ridiculed theory. From then on Russia, along with the rest of the world, was a gone goose. The Bolsheviks “set foot on a course from which there was no turning back”.
Now you know everything, for just as no secret can be kept from Erber, so Erber keeps no secrets from you. We have Stalinism today (and Lord alone knows what else) because of the theory of the permanent revolution. All you Social Democrats, liberals, ex-Marxists, ex-Trotskyists and other professional anti-Bolsheviks, take note! Do you still think Stalinism flowed from Leninism? You are wrong! From Leninism, the authentic, the genuine, the unrevised and unretouched, would have flowed milk, honey, democracy and a world of other blessings. [The real truth has finally been discovered by the Wise One Who Drips Water after thirty years of world history and thirty weeks of concentrated meditation. It deserves to be set off in a separate paragraph:]
Stalinism flows from Trotskyism!
[We don’t even dream of questioning a conclusion of such epoch-making proportions. We can only say, once ourn breath has come back to us, that sweeping though it is, it is not sweeping enough.] Why from Trotskyism alone? The course of the Bolsheviks, seduced by Trotsky, followed very strictly (more strictly than even they knew at the time) the prescriptions of Marx and Engels on the course that revolutionary socialists should follow in the bourgeois revolution, the course they will have to adopt toward “democracy”. In this connection, a few highly revealing words from Engels will suffice to show where the responsibility for the Error really lies, where it all began. We quote from his letter to August Bebel on December 11, 1884:
“As to pure democracy and its role in the future I do not share your opinion. Obviously it plays a far more subordinate part in Germany than in other countries with an older industrial development. But that does not prevent the possibility, when the moment of revolution comes, of its acquiring a temporary importance as the most radical bourgeois party ... and as the final sheet-anchor of the whole bourgeois and even feudal regime. At such a moment the whole reactionary mass falls in behind it and strengthens it; everything which used to be reactionary behaves as democratic... This has happened in every revolution: the tamest party still remaining in any way capable of government comes to power with the others just because it is only in this party that the defeated see their last possibility of salvation. Now it cannot be expected that at the moment of crisis we shall already have the majority of the electorate and therefore of the nation behind us. The whole bourgeois class and the remnants of the feudal landowning class, a large section of the petty bourgeoisie and also of the rural population will then mass themselves around the most radical bourgeois party, which will then make the most extreme revolutionary gestures, and I consider it very possible that it will be represented in the provisional government and even temporarily form its majority. How, as a minority, one should not act in that case, was demonstrated by the social democratic minority in the Paris Revolution of February, 1848 ...
“In any case our sole adversary on the day of the crisis and on the day after the crisis will be the whole collective reaction which will group itself around pure democracy, and this, I think, should not be lost sight of.”
An absolutely remarkable letter! An absolutely remarkable anticipation of what happened in Russia in 1917–1918 and of just how it happened! No wonder we revolutionists have such tremendous esteem for our two great teachers, Marx and Engels. Such intellectual titans come but once a century, and not always that often. And what did Engels means by how “one should not act in that case”? What was his reference to the February 1848 revolution in Paris? He explained in a letter to the Italian socialist, Turati, on January 26, 1894:
“After the common victory we might perhaps be offered some seats in the new Government – but always in a minority. Here lies the greatest danger. After the February Revolution in 1848 the French socialistic democrats (the Reforme people, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Flocon, etc.) were incautious enough to accept such positions. As a minority in the government they involuntarily bore the responsibility for all the infamy and the treachery which the majority, composed of pure Republicans, committed against the working class, while at the same time their participation in the government completely paralyzed the revolutionary action of the working class they were supposed to represent”.
Now perhaps Erber will know, from Engels, who was not present in the Russian Revolution, but who, in exchange, had over Erber the advantage of revolutionary understanding and revolutionary spirit – what the bourgeoisie and the “whole collective reaction” had to cheer about when it “grouped itself around pure democracy” in the form of the Constituent Assembly and its struggle against the Soviet Power. Now perhaps he will know why the Bolsheviks refused, in advance, his kind proposal that they enter as a minority in the Grand Coalition he dreamed up. Perhaps he will also understand why Eastman and others like him, in rejecting the Bolshevik Revolution, also and necessarily reject Marx, why they do not come to a ridiculous halt after condemning Lenin and Trotsky but go right back to the “source” of the Error. Once they have rejected the Russian Revolution and Marx, they have the elementary decency not to pretend that they are still interested in the fight for socialism.
We will dwell even less upon Erber’s third “charge” against Lenin – that he gambled everything on a victory of the revolution in Germany. Not only because the charge is false and was specifically repudiated more than once by Lenin himself, as everyone who has read Lenin’s writings knows and as everyone who takes the right to talk about the question ought to know, but because it does not deserve more than a few contemptuous words.
To Lenin, you see, the whole Bolshevik revolution, the whole course he pursued in it, was a gamble. “If Lenin won, history would absolve the Bolsheviks of all the charges their socialist opponents made against them.” A fine democrat’s morality this is! A fine piece of gross and typically “American” success-philistinism this is! If the revolution had triumphed in Germany, all Lenin’s crimes against Marxism, against socialism, against democracy, all his anti-democratism and contempt for the masses who have to be shot for their own good, all of this and more would have been pardonable. Scheidemann, who saved Germany from the socialist revolution, therewith saves our stern judge from the unpleasant task of pardoning the criminal.
Contrast this low-quality philistinism with Marx, whose revolutionary spirit Erber will never see in a mirror – with Marx writing about the Paris Commune, which, we may recall, he was at first opposed to establishing. “World history would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favorable chances”, he wrote to Kugelmann. Give Erber infallibly favorable chances, and he’ll plunge into the revolution with only the least bit of hesitation. And not he alone...
Contrast Erber and every word he writes with the critical appraisal of the Bolsheviks written in prison by Rosa Luxemburg, who is invoked against revolutionary socialism nowadays by every turncoat and backslider who wouldn’t reach up to her soles if he stood on tiptoes:
“That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political far-sightedness and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their policies”.
You will never see that quoted by the turncoats who have drafted Luxemburg into the crusade against Bolshevism against her will. Nor will you see this quoted:
“The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan – ‘All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry’ – insured the continued development of the revolution...
“Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary program: not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics”.
We can see now how much right Erber has to drag Rosa Luxemburg into court as a fellow-detractor of the Bolsheviks, how much right he has to mention her views in the same breath with his own. Fortunately, Luxemburg is not a defenseless corpse. She left a rich political testament to assure her name from being bandied about by soiled lips. Read this:
“The real situation in which the Russian Revolution found itself narrowed down in a few months to the alternative: victory of the counter-revolution or dictatorship of the proletariat – Kaledin or Lenin. Such was the objective situation, just as it quickly presents itself in every revolution after the first intoxication is over, and as it presented itself in Russia as a result of the concrete, burning questions of peace and land, for which there was no solution within the framework of bourgeois revolution”.
[Not much room here, not so much as a crevice, for Erber’s “alternative”, is there? Not much room here for his “capitalist relations.”] This is a revolutionist writing – not an idol-worshipper of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but still a revolutionist, a tireless, defiant, unflinching champion of the proletariat in the class struggle.
“In this, the Russian Revolution has but confirmed the basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy and resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counter-revolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution. And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.”
Read it over again, especially that wonderfully priceless last sentence! [And tell us if it is not directed straight at Erber, word for word and line by line! It is much too exactly fitting to be quoted only once! “And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.” If ever Erber gets up enough of what he lacks to look into a mirror, there is a ready-made one for him. If anyone thinks he can improve on this stinging answer to Erber and his home-made wisdom, he is just wasting good time.]
“Still, didn’t Rosa criticize the Bolsheviks for dispersing the Constituent Assembly?” No, she did not. She criticized them for not calling for elections to a new Constituent; she criticized them for the arguments they made to justify the dispersal. But in the first place, her criticism has next to nothing in common with that of the latter-day anti-Bolsheviks (or, for that matter, of the anti-Bolsheviks of the time). And in the second place, she was wrong, just as she was wrong in her criticism of the Bolshevik position on the “national question” and of the Bolshevik course in the “agrarian question”. And in the third place, what she wrote in prison, on the basis of “fragmentary information” (as the editor of the American edition of her prison notes admits), was not her last word on the question. Before her cruel death, she altered her position on the basis of her own experiences, on the basis of the living realities of the German revolution. Lenin’s State and Revolution was checked twice – first in the Russian Revolution and then in the German revolution! We will give the reader an idea of what she wrote before her death so that he may see why our present “champions” of Luxemburg never find time, space or inclination to quote her to the end.
The German workers, a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, overturned the Hohenzollern monarchy and, just as spontaneously as did the Russians before them, they formed their Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (Räte, Soviets). The German Mensheviks – Scheidemann, Noske and Ebert – feared and hated the Councils just as much as did their Russian counterparts. They championed the National Assembly (German counterpart of the Russian Constituent) instead, calculating thereby to smash the Councils and the struggle for socialism. Haase and Kautsky, the centrists of the Independent Socialists, oscillated between the Councils and the Assembly. What position did Rosa Luxemburg take, what position did the Spartacus League and its organ, Die Rote Fahne, take? Here once more was the problem of workers’ democracy versus bourgeois democracy, the democratic republic of the Councils versus the bourgeois republic, dictatorship of the proletariat organized in the Councils versus the National Assembly – not in Russia but in Germany, not in 1917 but a year later, not while Rosa was in Breslau prison but after her release.
Here is Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne of November 29, 1918, writing on the leaders of the Independents:
“Their actual mission as partner in the firm of Scheidemann-Ebert is: to mystify its clear and unambiguous character as defense guard of bourgeois class domination by means of a system of equivocation and cowardliness.
“This role of Haase and colleagues finds its most classical expression in their attitude toward the most important slogan of the day: toward the National Assembly.
“Only two standpoints are possible in this question, as in all others. Either you want the National Assembly as a means of swindling the proletariat out of its power, to paralyze its class energy, to dissolve its socialist goal into thin air. Or else you want to place all the power into the hands of the proletariat, to unfold the revolution that has begun into a tremendous class struggle for the socialist social order, and toward this end, to establish the political rule of the great mass of the toilers, the dictatorship of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. For or against socialism, against or for the National Assembly; there is no third way”.
On December 1st, Luxemburg spoke on the situation at a meeting of the Spartacus League in the hall of the Teachers’ Union. At the end of the meeting, a resolution was adopted setting forth her views and giving approval to them:
“The public people’s meeting held on December 1st in the Hall of the Teachers’ Union on Alexander Street declares its agreement with the exposition of Comrade Luxemburg. It considers the convocation of the National Assembly to be a means of strengthening the counter-revolution and to cheat the proletarian revolution of its socialist aims. It demands the transfer of all power to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, whose first duty is to drive out of the government the traitors to the working class and to socialism, Scheidemann-Ebert and colleagues, to arm the toiling people for the protection of the revolution, and to take the most energetic and thorough-going measures for the socialization of society”.
In her first editorial in Die Rote Fahne of November 18, she writes under the title, The Beginning:
“The Revolution has begun ... From the goal of the revolution follows clearly its path, from its task follows the method. All power into the hands of the masses, into the hands of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, protection of the work of the revolution from its lurking foes: this is the guiding line for all the measures of the revolutionary government ...
“(But) What is the present revolutionary government (i.e. Scheidemann and Co.) doing?
“It calmly continues to leave the state as an administrative organism from top to bottom in the hands of yesterday’s guards of Hohenzollern absolutism and tomorrow’s tools of the counter-revolution.
“It is convoking the Constituent Assembly, and therewith it is creating a bourgeois counterweight against the Workers’ and Peasants’ representation, therewith switching the revolution on to the rails of the bourgeois revolution, conjuring away the socialist goals of the revolution ...
“From the Deutsche Tageszeitung, the Vossische, and the Vorwärts to the Freiheit of the Independents, from Reventlow, Erzberger, Scheidemann to Haase and Kautsky, there sounds the unanimous call for the National Assembly and an equally unanimous outcry of fear of the idea: Power into the hands of the working class. The ‘people’ as a whole, the ‘nation’ as a whole, should be summoned to decide on the further fate of the revolution by majority decision.
“With the open and concealed agents of the ruling class, this slogan is natural. With keepers of the capitalist class barriers, we discuss neither the National Assembly nor about the National Assembly ...
“Without the conscious will and the conscious act of the majority of the proletariat – no socialism. To sharpen this consciousness, to steel this will, to organize this act, a class organ is necessary, the national parliament of the proletarians of town and country.
“The convocation of such a workers’ representation in place of the traditional National Assembly of the bourgeois revolutions is already, by itself, an act of the class struggle, a break with the historical past of bourgeois society, a powerful means of arousing the proletarian popular masses, a first open, blunt declaration of war against capitalism.
“No evasions, no ambiguities – the die must be cast. Parliamentary cretinism was yesterday a weakness, is today an equivocation, will tomorrow be a betrayal of socialism”.
It is a pity that there is not space in which to quote far more extensively from the highly remarkable articles she wrote in the last few weeks of her life, before she was murdered by those whose “parliamentary cretinism” became the direct betrayal of socialism – by those for whom Erber has now become a shameful apologist by “showing” that the defeat of the revolution in Germany was as much the responsibility of the masses as it was of the Scheidemanns and Noskes! The articles as a whole show the veritable strides that Luxemburg took away from her prison criticism and toward a policy which was in no important respect different from the one pursued by the Bolsheviks toward the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats, toward the Mensheviks and other “socialist opponents”, toward the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets. With these criticisms of hers in print, to mention her today as an enemy of the Bolsheviks, as a critic of their attitude toward bourgeois democracy and the Constituent, is excusable only on the grounds of inexcusable ignorance.
The course of the German Revolution, life, the lessons of the struggle – these left us the heritage of a Rosa Luxemburg who was, in every essential, the inseparable comrade-in-arms of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. To claim that this firm solidarity did not exist, is simply an outrage to her memory. What is worse, it shows that nothing has been learned of the lessons of the Russian Revolution and nothing of the lessons of the German Revolution – the two great efforts of the proletariat to test in practice what is, in the long run, the question of life and death for us: the state and revolution. And on this question, with Lenin and with Luxemburg, the real Luxemburg – we remain under the banner of Marxism.
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Last updated on 23 February 2015