"No one in the
Marxist camp, and least of all Lenin, had regarded the peasantry as a
factor of socialist development. Without the aid of a proletarian
revolution in the West, he reiterated time and again, restoration is
unavoidable in Russia. He was not mistaken: the Stalinist bureaucracy is
nothing else than the first stage of bourgeois restoration"
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| The proletariat ... |
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| ... and the peasantry |
The birth of Bolshevism
In contrast to the distorted Stalinist histories of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks did not stride unswervingly along a clear and untroubled theoretical path to victory. Just like the proletariat, the leadership of that class has to learn from its experiences and mistakes, sharpening its theoretical weapons at each stage through study and debate.
In parallel with their harsh struggle against the Czarist regime, the Russian revolutionary movement was schooled through an often fierce discussion about the nature of the revolution in a backward country like Russia, a discussion which was to become an extremely significant part of the events of 1917.
The earliest political ideas of the revolutionary movement arose amongst the liberal Russian intellectuals in the mid-19th century. These "Narodniks" (from 'narod', meaning people) looked to the peasantry as the revolutionary section of Russian society and believed that Russia could advance to a form of socialism based on peasant collectives without undergoing a capitalist development.
As Marxism predicted, any movement based on the hope of an independent peasant struggle was doomed to failure and the Narodniks began to disintegrate.
One section turned to the idea of using individual terrorism in the hope of provoking a peasant uprising. The hanging of Lenin’s brother after an assassination attempt on the Czar certainly influenced the young Lenin to reject the ideas of the Narodniks.
Lenin instead turned towards the 'Emancipation of Labour Group' which Plekhanov had set up as a break from Narodnik politics, based on the ideas of Marxism.
After 1900 several of the remaining Narodnik groups formed the "Social - Revolutionaries" (S-R's) a 'socialist' party based largely on the peasantry that was an important factor in the 1917 revolutions.
Plekhanov's group argued that Russia could not advance on some unique historical course of a peasant "democratic" revolution as the Narodniks imprecisely labelled it, but would also have to go through the capitalist stage of development following a “bourgeois " revolution, just as Western European nations had done before. Plekhanov argued that Russia would then be able to expand its industry until the working-class, through its experience of capitalism, was ready to bring about a socialist revolution.
From these Marxist foundations the RSDLP was built and grew in the underground workers movement. In 1903 it met for what was in name its ‘Second Congress’ but was in effect the founding meeting of the Russian mass workers’ party.
As a typical example of the problems of illegal work that the RSDLP faced throughout its early history, with its leaders usually in exile abroad, the 1903 Congress planned for Brussels had to break up in mid-session with the 50-odd delegates forced to reconvene in a London warehouse.
After various wrangles indicative of the inexperienced and rather middle-class nature of the new party, the Congress unexpectedly split into two factions over seemingly insignificant disagreements about the interpretation of Party Rules.
Lenin, leader of the majority "Bolshevik" group was shocked by the events and he did his best to bring about unity with the minority "Menshevik" group. But by 1904 he was forced to admit the existence of two definite tendencies in the RSDLP and formally set up his Bolshevik faction.
Under the impact of events such as the defeated revolution of l905, the two tendencies gradually crystallised out into two distinct political parties. Lenin's Bolsheviks finally made a formal split in 1912, although not until they were confident of the support of a large majority of the organised workers.
Interestingly, since the, Stalinists later vastly exaggerated its significance, Trotsky disagreed with Lenin in the 1903 dispute and so originally found himself in the Menshevik minority but was later in life to honestly admit that Lenin had been right about the organisational issues then under debate.
Trotsky soon broke with the Mensheviks in 1904 over the question that was to mark the central political difference between the two tendencies - the attitude of the revolutionary movement to the liberal bourgeoisie.
Like others in the Party, Trotsky tried to build on the mood for unity created by the experiences of 1905 and campaigned for the two factions to unite while personally taking up an independent position outside both groups.
Trotsky made the mistake of over-estimating the importance of winning over the 'left-wing' of the Mensheviks, whereas Lenin had correctly recognised that the political differences had become insurmountable. Lenin saw that the Party would only be built into a healthy revolutionary force by waging a ruthless political struggle against Menshevik ideas.
However, in the key moments of 1917, Lenin and Trotsky were to find themselves united against the opposition of both the Mensheviks and even some of Lenin's own party leadership in warning of the disastrous results of any alliance of the workers’ movement with the so-called 'liberal' Russian bourgeoisie.
The ideas of Menshevism
Lenin, Trotsky and the Menshevik leaders were all in agreement with the basic idea that Plekhanov had first put forward against the Narodniks - that the immediate character of the coming revolution was "bourgeois".
In other words, the immediate tasks of the revolutionary movement were clearly to overthrow the Czar and to break the power of the feudal landowners in a similar way to the classical bourgeois revolutions of the past like the French Revolution of 1789. However, from this general principle, the two factions of the RSDLP began to draw very different conclusions that were reflected in their actual political activity.
Increasingly after 1905 the Mensheviks began to abandon the struggle, some advocating the dissolution of the underground party while building a comfortable parliamentary niche for themselves in the Duma. The small forces of Bolshevism were left to fight alone alongside the workers during those difficult years of reaction.
Whereas the Bolsheviks were reflecting the pressure of the revolutionary aspirations of the workers and poor peasants, the Mensheviks' tactics reflected the fact that for a layer of middle-class intellectuals a simplified view of Marxism seemed to reassuringly suggest a progressive role for the Russian bourgeoisie.
In reality, from the same starting-point, the two factions were heading down two completely different roads - one to reform, the other to revolution.
The theoretical position of the Mensheviks was based on a crude and mechanical view of Marxism that amounted to the idea that a bourgeois revolution could only be led by the bourgeoisie, with the workers and peasants playing only a supporting role.
According to the Mensheviks, feudalism, capitalism and socialism must follow each other in a clearly defined and well separated succession in every country so that for now any talk of socialism in Russia was not only premature but dangerous adventurism.
Speaking at the 1906 RSDLP Congress, their chief tactician, Axelrod, summed up the position of Menshevism - "The social relations of Russia have ripened only for a bourgeois revolution. We must not even so much as mention the direct fight of the proletariat against other classes for political power. It is fighting for the conditions of bourgeois development. Objective historical conditions doom our proletariat to an inevitable collaboration with the bourgeoisie in the struggle against our common enemy" (8).
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| Axelrod |
Menshevism, reflecting the thin upper layer of workers and petty officials who had no stomach for the socialist fight, preached collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie.
For example in 1905, "Iskra", by now in the hands of the Mensheviks, warned: - "When looking at the arena of struggle in Russia, what do we see? Only two powers: Czarist autocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie ... our task consists in the support of the second force ... we must encourage it, and on no account frighten it by putting forward the independent demands of the proletariat" (10). In effect, the workers' movement could only put forward demands that the bosses could agree with!
In the final analysis, Menshevism was a theoretical veneer to justify the cowardice and treachery of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals, in reality a middle layer caught between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Frightened of revolution, they would always retreat at the critical moment and bow down before the big bourgeoisie, exactly as they did in 1917.
As Trotsky points out, “the petty bourgeois parties, having in everyday circumstances shown an extraordinary pretentiousness and satisfaction with themselves, as soon as they were raised by a revolution to the heights of power, were frightened by their own inadequacy and hastened to surrender the helm to representatives of capital. In this act of prostration is immediately revealed the terrible shakiness of the new middle caste and its humiliating dependence upon the big bourgeoisie" (11).
Lenin’s conception of the revolution
By 'dictatorship' Lenin meant not a lack of democracy but that a workers' and peasants' government would have to fight against the desperate resistance of Czarism, the landlords and the bourgeoisie. ‘Democratic’ expressed recognition of the bourgeois, rather than socialist, character of the tasks to be carried out by the revolution.
Lenin was adamant that the Russian bourgeoisie, far from being a friend of the workers, would inevitably side with the counter-revolution. "The bourgeoisie in the mass", wrote Lenin in 1905 "will inevitably turn towards the counter-revolution, towards the autocracy, against the revolution, and against the people, as soon as its narrow, selfish interests are met, as soon as it 'recoils' from consistent democracy (and it is already recoiling from it!)". (12)
Lenin, together with Trotsky, pointed out that it was not tactlessness or rudeness that had driven the bourgeoisie into the camp of reaction in 1905 but their basic class interests.
In a backward country like Russia the weak bourgeoisie had come too late onto the historical scene to lead a bourgeois revolution and, on the contrary, were forced to side with the counter-revolution by their links with the landlords and the imperialists internationally.
The landlords owed the bankers millions of roubles in loans and mortgages. The capitalists could not risk default on these repayments by agreeing to redistribute land to the peasants!
The industrialists themselves often had big landed estates of their own. The feudal landowners in turn had investments in industry. Both sections were also under pressure from foreign investors and military powers to hold back the revolution.
The new layer of capitalist farmers that the regime had created was also bound to be opposed to the demands of the peasantry for a fair distribution of land.
Entangled in this web of interests with the landlords, the bourgeoisie were hardly likely to stir up the peasantry and carry out a thorough-going agrarian reform. However, this was precisely the main task of the 'bourgeois' revolution!
Neither did they want to make too many concessions to democracy and stir up the threatening proletariat even more.
Scared by the events of 1905 and increasingly subservient to the wishes of foreign capital, the bourgeoisie became less and less 'liberal' and increasingly conservative and suspicious of the workers' threat to their economic power.
Whereas the bourgeoisie of France and England had completed their revolutions without too great a threat from below, the Russian bourgeoisie looked over their shoulders at a youthful and revolutionary proletariat numbering at least 10 million, with their families over 25 million-strong.
So, while frustrated by the power of the landlords and the Czarist bureaucracy, the impotent Russian bourgeoisie had to content itself more or less with the status quo.
It was clear, therefore, to Lenin that the basic tasks of the bourgeois revolution such as distribution of land to the peasants - and the building of a democratic republic could not be carried out by the bourgeoisie themselves.
The bourgeois revolution would have to be led by the proletariat in alliance with the peasant masses, spurred to battle under the banner of its own interests. It would require a spirit of fierce hostility towards both the landlords and the bourgeoisie.
However, Lenin warned, this "democratic dictatorship" could go no further in itself. This was because the peasantry, once satisfied with the agrarian reform, would begin to turn against the demands from the workers for anti-capitalist measures.
To Lenin, the peasantry could not be a socialist ally of the workers for it had its own petty-bourgeois interests at heart and would be satisfied with the limited gains of the bourgeois revolution. Writing in 1906 he explained: "The peasantry will win in a bourgeois democratic revolution and thereby will completely exhaust its revolutionism as a peasantry. The proletariat will win in a bourgeois democratic revolution, and thereby will only begin really to unfold its true socialist revolutionism". (13)
Lenin was clear that the workers could not rely on the liberal bourgeoisie. But he also believed that, once the "democratic dictatorship" had been victorious, the proletariat would not then simply have to submit to a peasant counter-revolution.
However, for Lenin the only way to prevent such a retreat, difficult though the task might seem, was as follows (from the 1906 Congress). "The Russian revolution can achieve victory by its own efforts, but it cannot possibly hold and consolidate its gains by its own strength. It cannot do that unless there is a Socialist revolution in the West. Without this condition restoration is inevitable... for the small proprietor will inevitably turn against the proletariat. Our democratic republic has no other reserve than the Socialist proletariat of the West" (14).
So for Lenin, the fate of the revolution was inextricably linked with the world revolution. Marxism had always explained that socialism had to be based on a planned world economy overcoming the artificial barriers of national boundaries. Lenin felt that a bourgeois revolution in Russia could not go on to socialist tasks on its own but could, however, spur on the proletariat of the advanced countries that were ripe for socialist revolution.
In Lenin's internationalist perspective, the allies of the Russian proletariat were not the treacherous bourgeoisie but the workers of the world: - "The Russian proletariat can win a second victory. The cause is no longer hopeless. The second victory will be the socialist revolution in Europe. The European workers will then show us 'how to do it' and then together with them we shall bring about the socialist revolution" (15).
Trotsky’s “permanent revolution”
The two chief conceptions of the Russian revolution were therefore the Mensheviks' support for an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie as opposed to the Bolsheviks' perspective of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. But there was also a third conception - that of Leon Trotsky.
However, drawing on his analysis of the Law of Combined Development, Trotsky put forward his famous theory of "Permanent Revolution", a theory which was to provide the clearest perspective for the events of 1917.
Just as Russia combined backward feudalism with the latest advances of international capitalism, so the Russian revolution could combine the overthrow of feudalism with a 'permanent' or 'uninterrupted' move to socialist tasks, ending in international revolution.
Trotsky's formulation had an important difference to that of Lenin. Prior to 1917, Lenin’s formula left it unclear as to how far the revolutionary workers in Russia could go beyond implementing just the ‘bourgeois’ tasks of the revolution - summed up in the Bolshevik slogans of ‘Democratic Republic’, ‘Confiscation of the Landed Estates’ and ‘8-hour Working Day’. But Trotsky suggested that the Russian proletariat itself might come to power and, rather than be limited to merely bourgeois tasks, begin the international socialist revolution in Russia itself.
Both leaders recognised the inability of the bourgeoisie to lead the revolution but, rather than putting forward the perspective of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, Trotsky drew the conclusion from the 1905 events that, in the given conditions in Russia, it would be possible for the working-class to take power in its own "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Writing in 1906 Trotsky explained: “In an economically more backward country the proletariat may come to power sooner than in a country more advanced capitalistically. The conception of a kind of automatic dependence of the proletarian dictatorship on a country's technical forces and means ... has nothing in common with Marxism. It seems to me that the Russian Revolution will create such conditions that the power may (in the event of victory, must) pass into the hands of the proletariat before the politicians of bourgeois liberalism will find it possible fully to unfold their genius for statecraft". (16).
Trotsky also agreed that the revolution had to be bourgeois but that it would be a mistake to overlook the perspective that "upon coming to power the proletariat would inevitably, with all the logic of its situation, push itself toward the management of the economy, at the expense of the state. Coming into the government not as helpless hostages but as the leading force, the representatives of the proletariat will by virtue of that alone ... place collectivism on the order of the day. At what point in that tendency the proletariat would be stopped will depend on the interrelation of forces, but certainly not on the initial intentions of the proletariat's party" (17).
So, for Trotsky, the proletariat through its own rule could begin the socialist tasks of building a workers' state and taking the means of production from the capitalists, without having to artificially hold back its demands.
At that point however, in agreement with Lenin's internationalist perspective, Trotsky said that the fate of the revolution would rest with the European proletariat who, spurred on by the Russian workers, could come to power. By linking their revolutions, they could together build a socialist federation which could alone protect backward Russia from bourgeois restoration.
Trotsky's main difference with Lenin was that he drew the conclusion that the peasantry could never play an independent role as a class and either had to support the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. He felt that it was, therefore, incorrect to talk of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" as this suggested that the peasantry could play equally as important a role as the working-class.
For Trotsky only two perspectives were possible - either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the peasants being used as an instrument of reaction, which would fall into the camp of Czarist reaction - or the dictatorship of the proletariat leaning on the peasantry as an instrument of revolution.
Trotsky felt Lenin's conception was too vague, an 'algebraic' formula that, probably intentionally, left history to fill in the unknown of whether peasantry or proletariat would have the dominant role. Trotsky was certain that it had to be the proletariat that dominated.
These differences might seem of a minor nature but Trotsky was confident that only his conception of "permanent revolution" gave a clear perspective. He feared that Lenin's vague formula could, at the critical moment, open the door to Menshevism by suggesting that the workers might need to be held back in case they tried to go too far beyond bourgeois limits.
As early as 1909, Trotsky wrote: "If the Mensheviks, starting from the abstraction 'Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution' arrive at the idea of adapting the whole tactic of the proletariat to the conduct of the liberal bourgeoisie, even to the point of a conquest by it of the state power, then the Bolsheviks starting from an equally bare abstraction 'a democratic and not a socialist dictatorship' will arrive at the idea of a bourgeois democratic self- limitation of the proletariat in whose hands the governmental power will be found. To be sure, the difference between them on this question is very considerable: while the antirevolutionary sides of Menshevism are expressed in their full strength even now, the anti-revolutionary traits of Bolshevism threaten a great danger only in the case of a revolutionary victory" (18).
Trotsky's warnings were to be precisely borne out by the struggles within the Bolshevik party in 1917. Fortunately, Lenin’s own intervention ensured that Bolshevism did not retreat in the hour of revolution. Returning from exile in April, Lenin explained that the old formula had been rendered ‘obsolete’. He managed to steer Bolshevism onto a course which was essentially that first outlined by Trotsky. ‘Permanent Revolution’ became an accepted part of Bolshevik theory after the socialist revolution that it so accurately predicted.
Stalinism and Menshevism
After 1917, the proletariat was able to hang on to power in Russia against an imperialism weakened after the First World War, despite the isolation it faced following the failure of socialist revolutions in Europe.
However, the counter-revolutionary pressure of the peasant masses, that Lenin and Trotsky had feared, now helped give rise to the Stalinist counter-revolution. The attack on ‘Permanent Revolution’ became a hallmark of the bureaucracy's fight against Marxist ideas, now labelled as "Trotskyism".
The banner of international revolution was replaced by the impossible slogan of ‘socialism in one country’. Turning its back on Bolshevism, the Stalinist bureaucracy instead adopted exactly those ideas of the petty-bourgeois Mensheviks of a "two-stage" theory of colonial revolution. The socialist revolution was relegated to a distant future goal while workers in the meantime were urged to content themselves building alliances with the 'liberal bourgeoisie'.
This abandonment of Marxism led to countless tragedies such as the bloody defeat of the Chinese revolution of 1925-7 at the hands of Chiang Kai Shek whose capitalist Kuomintang party had been taken into the Communist International as a sympathising section in 1926. Only Trotsky had voted against.
The colonial revolution became derailed along the distorted lines of ‘Proletarian Bonapartism’ where petty-bourgeois leaders set up totalitarian regimes in the image of Russia instead of the proletariat playing a leading role in fighting for healthy socialist regimes.
In the light of these tragedies, not to mention others such as Spain and Chile, the arguments over these different conceptions of the Russian Revolution can be seen to be not a scholarly debate but a matter of life and death.
Indeed, looking to the later collapse of Stalinism, it is revealing to read Trotsky's words, published in 1941, a year after his assassination: - “After twenty odd years of the new regime the fact remains that prior to the October Revolution, or rather prior to the year 1924, no one in the Marxist camp, and least of all Lenin, had regarded the peasantry as a factor of socialist development. Without the aid of a proletarian revolution in the West, he reiterated time and again, restoration is unavoidable in Russia. He was not mistaken: the Stalinist bureaucracy is nothing else than the first stage of bourgeois restoration " (19).
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