The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

Day two

Cult of waste paper

Time and again we will have to reduce the positions of the Moscow movement to the absolute counterfactual denial of the cornerstones of communism. It’s enough now to see the crude banality of the paper manoeuvre with which it is really thought to surmount today’s telluric tremor by keeping the worldwide fair booth still standing (and if it does, it will be by the grace of other, clearly identifiable factors). 

All the «Stalin material» is suddenly taken out of the way and raked back from all the suburban outlets. In its place is suddenly spilled, line by line, the literature of this twentieth congress, more disconnected still, in its filiation from more fathers, than the «scientific» and truly pitiful deliveries of hobgoblin Stalin. The trash heap of the century, the scribes would say; the biggest trash heap in history, we would say: millions and millions of roubles, to the value of waste paper alone. Billions spent on printing in all languages; presses at a pace worthy of this atomic, and asinine, age. 

Medieval scholasticism itself did not go that far when it burned, along with the condemned authors, at times in black robes, the piles of their writings, excommunicated those who read or touched them in the future, and required the faithful to recite by the millions the prayer of imploring forgiveness for heresy, of reconsecrating the violated pulpits and the seats ascended by Satan. 

Scholasticism, a far more respectable historical phase than this one, was justified in being entirely consistent with its organic doctrine of human action and knowledge. For it, the masses are piloted to consciousness, and this is accessible to the operations of «propaganda fide» when the organisation delegated by the supreme body expresses in its formulations the dictate and light of Grace.

Modern bourgeois critical thought, which still does not clear the ground despite the chain of sorry figures on all fronts, rejected the Being, the Grace, and the investiture of infallibility, but pretended to substitute for it a piloting of human action that was no different, i.e. it took men by the head, it raved about the printing press, alphabetism and the mass-produced book, and – ouch for him – about the flood of gazettes; about the Master- torch versus the Priest- snuffer. 

Are no mistaken those who translate this grasp of the man-citizen by the head, into real grasp by the dialectical, if scurrilous, body opposite. 

Very much sinning, we socialists of yesteryear mistook our movement for a new propaganda fide, not realising that the Marxist militant is no longer one who knows how to convince and teach, but one who knows how to learn from the facts, which run ahead of man’s head, while it, wavering, has been trying to chase them for millennia. 

The most mature understanding of determinism has nothing to do with passivism, but makes it clear that man acts before he wants to act, and wants before he knows why he wants, the head being the last and least secure of his limbs. The best use a group of men can make of it will be to foresee the historical moment in which – other than passivism! – they will be catapulted, for the first time with the head first, into a whirlwind of action and battle.

The pundits of inexhaustible resources and manoeuvres that can be contrived in any grasp with cunning success, the superactivists, we have been watching them obscenely proceed for years and years, their faces undaunted, but le-cul-le-premier. 

In the teeth of them we reconsult unparalleled books that have guided us for nearly a century: those gentlemen give an example of their return to Marxism by changing from one day to the next, at the whistle of the counter-master, all the printed paraphernalia, in historical, economic, political, philosophical criticism, certain that in this way they will change the face of the world in their own way.

Precisely because we have not today learnt to dodge the cult of personality, we will always compulse the work of Stalin as needed; we will not value a penny more than this the launched florilegium of congressional bullshit, which today overflows.

Confessed turning points 

On the first day of this Dialogue we examined two aspects of the erasures and rewriting of dogmas carried out at this modern Council, not of Nicaea or Trent, but of Moscow. We are especially concerned with this false creed: «the Russian economy today is of a socialist structure», which has not been thrown overboard so far, and we are concerned with Stalin’s other, no less foolish creed: «in the socialist economy, the law of exchange between equivalents (ill-named law of value) is in force», about which things are still in the same state.

On the economic points that were most closely dealt with in the Mikoyan speech we will pause later. We have so far taken note of changed positions that were already contained in the party secretary’s report and have been developed extensively in other speeches, on historiography and personality. 

The first mutation consists in eating one’s words as slander, i.e., all the accusations of treason levelled at the anti-Stalinist Bolsheviks exterminated in the obscene «purges». The murdered remain murdered, and their massacre retains the form of the destruction of the revolutionary workers’ vanguard: the error of «historiography» will not be saved by a rehabilitation (by those people we supremely cherish being called traitors and fascist bandits, while we would have sacred horror of a rehabilitation on their part!). The error will appear in its historical light on the day when the Marxist position of that mighty movement will shine through as exact (it was tens of thousands of proven militants everywhere selected and executed in the counterrevolution, which has since become blatant, as the true Marxist historiography will record), i.e., when the economic fabric of Russian society will have to be declared non-socialist. This is not yet fully confessed. But the hour will come. 

The second mutation examined so far is that of the condemnation of the cult of personality, which is also the mere effect of a forced determination, and totally inadequate, to the Marxist position. The cult of Stalin is dismissed, with the grim interpretation that Stalin himself founded it, and the assertion that in the place of the sole leader must be put the leading «college» of the state and the party. Here, too, the new position is flimsy, and the correct solution of the relationship between class and party does not live in it. If it were possible for one man to force an entire collectivity into the myth of his personal power, it would not be the mistake of a bad Marxist, but a decisive historical proof against Marxism. 

Since the first speech circulated was Khrushchev’s, more striking than the mutations (which later appeared resounding) on the first two points mentioned, was his position regarding the task of the communist parties (very few have not changed this name; and it would be better to say the parties linked with Moscow) in the countries «outside the Curtain». In all countries – he said – our programme remains the advent of communist society; we have by no means renounced it (this confession will take even more time). But as for the historical process that leads from capitalist society to communism, we do not believe that it must necessarily pass through civil war, the use of violence, the proletarian dictatorship, as Lenin advocated in 1917 (Khrushchev also made reservations about this) and we admit that there may be paths other than that, and different from country to country. He argued that there may also be the path of winning a parliamentary majority, and that the parties must use in this struggle not the support of the wage-earners alone, but the alliance with them of the middle classes, the consensus of the people and all educated men of goodwill. He did not, however, rule out the possibility that in certain situations instead of taking this peaceful path, or when this is barred by capitalism, civil war may be resorted to.

This crass statement was all prompted by the need to support the well-known theses of international politics: coexistence with capitalist countries, avoidance of war with them.

Here (for the most part) there are no breakthroughs with respect to Stalin’s position, and therefore it was not a clamorous mutation, as on the history of betrayals and the one-man leadership. It was a matter of lowering the mask and saying, just as the first points were being asserted to return to orthodox Marxism and Leninism from those errors and deviations, that the same political action would be conducted, in foreign countries, that the social-democratic and petit-bourgeois parties have always conducted.

Logical, therefore, to note the meeting of the new with the old opportunism and the complicity of both with the salvation of the bourgeois order. But it is not enough for us Marxists to say that the first wave and the second wave of opportunism are the same, nor is it to hastily deduce that the capitalism of the West and that of the East, indifferently, are the same. The historical paths of the two opportunisms are different (the second is much worse), and the way in which capitalism in the two camps has developed and the revolution will overcome it, is different; different, but in neither case peaceful.

Is this Khrushchev’s confession then perhaps brand new? We must look again, of course repeating what we have always said, at the question of the road to power, and class power.

Clashing forces in the world 1956 

If human society in its history presents a series of clashes and conflicts, its murky present picture certainly does not escape this fate. 

This congress could not escape such scrutiny. And the problem of the social and political struggle in those countries outside the frontier of the USSR and the famous «curtain», the problem of the «internal politics» of the «capitalist» countries, is not, in everyone’s opinion, the only one. There is that of Russian politics to which we know how Khrushchev and his comrades answer: there is no classes and class struggle, there is concord around the socialist government, completely unanimous. The answer is the whole examination we are making of the Russian economic and social structure. In the deformed figuration of Stalin’s converts (to everything but Marx and Lenin), in Russia and its sister countries there would no longer be a clash between state and society, in Engels’ sense, but there would only be this in the Atlantic countries, where there is class struggle (and that too in a bastard sense). 

Having thus divided the states of the world into two groups, the problem of the relationship of forces between them arises. This occurs in three ways. Relations between the states of one group and those of the other – relations among the states of the eastern group – relations among the states of the western group. We are here in the midst of the problems we dealt with in Dialogue with Stalin. In economics: single world market or double market? In politics: peace or war? A question that also concerns the two latter cases, within homogeneous groups. 

The mutations here seem to us to be these. Co-existence, in the sense of «non-war» and «everyone minding their own business», was affirmed at the 19th and is affirmed at the 20th congress. Emulation or economic competition in the sense of descent into a single market (we demonstrated how rigorous was a bourgeois economist’s demonstration that this is tantamount to admission of the similar mercantile and capitalist nature of the economies on both sides), appears clearly accepted at the 20th congress, whereas it was strongly reserved under Stalin. Was this congress a Marxist academy, as it claims, or did it not rather smash the Stalin idol to satisfy the demands of the Business Chamber of World Capitalism? 

As for inter-state relations within the Eastern Group, the impossibility of their contrasts is emphasised, and external gushes of joy are hot. But who will believe these ruts between cold-blooded animals? Who will catch Gronchi and granchi (crabs, for blunders)? Among the reasons, however, why Stalin and his bones get out of the way, is perhaps that of some corns treaded on the Asian side, where it seems that the satellite role is acted less leniently than on the European side. 

The third problem, of the clashes between states in the west, between those where it is a matter of big granchi with real pincers, also seems to be mutating. But, illustrious twenty-congressmen, here was more Leninist (we talked to him about this claim) the ci-devant (you reek from a thousand miles of bourgeois Jacobinism!) star of science Stalin! The war between the states of capitalist imperialism in the western group remained inevitable. It is the oriflamme of the Social Revolution, even if it was already reduced to a vain bogeyman then, was only half-lowered. 

We gave Khrushchev credit for a robust prophecy on inter-Western relations, although he spoke more of clashes between business axes than war axes. But undoubtedly this messenger has taken other reefs in the sails of the revolutionary threat, in connection with the spectre of war, and the canvas has been lowered three-quarters of the way.

Who will be left to do these operations, of such navigators with precarious careers, when without merit and without mercy the wind of the Great Storm starts blowing again? Play for a while, leaders of a neo-bourgeois Russia, with your Coty-scented «Marianne» cyclone.

For now, let us devote ourselves to the classic problem of power in a capitalist country, and take your newborn «creator» theories with a grain of salt: they smell rotten.

First the aim, then the means 

Naturally, the first comment the international capitalist press made was to feign astonishment: how, such a rush to general détente, and then the first thing Khrushchev says is that his movement is always for socialism and communism in every country? No more war, neither hot nor cold, but always propaganda for revolution within the countries, with which relations of correct friendship are maintained? This game on both sides will last for many, many years to come: deliciously playing dumbs.

But where are you, Trotsky, who proclaimed that with the Polish war – although in your military capacity you feared it precipitated – the Proletarian Revolution was to be brought to the heart of bourgeois Europe? The way in which Khrushchev always declared himself a communist is quite special. He lashed out at the foreign bourgeois who find contradiction between the declared peaceful coexistence and the claim to have communism everywhere as programme. According to him, «bourgeois ideologues confuse the questions of ideological struggle with those of relations between states» and instead «the great Marxist-Leninist doctrine» states «that the establishment of a social regime in this or that country is an internal question of the peoples of the respective countries». 

All Khrushchev admits is that communists are not supporters of capitalism! Did this sound like thundering Jupiter language to the bourgeois pen-pushers? But he added that communists do not meddle in the internal affairs of countries with capitalist systems. So, mr. Karl Marx, what were you meddling with back in 1850? Were you snoring, waiting for them to found the State of Israel, the only one on whose affairs you would have a voice to pontificate? So where did this scythian study the «great doctrine», by Adam’s horns?

Let us leave these pearls.

The speech, in our own modest interpretation, reads like this: I secretary, in Russia I am not only an ideological but a constructive communist (a fine word in today’s fashion that, as in a hundred other cases, competes, in yellow gloves, with parallel style, on both sides of the curtain) but abroad I am an «ideological» communist, and that’s it. By now, with coexistence comes reciprocal tourism: will the Yankee traveller say, at the sight of the hotel bill (it seems quite steep): pay? Oh ho, in your home I am a capitalist, but a purely ideological one. 

So let us be content with ideological communism, but let us look at it against the light for a moment. We know enough about socialism after our conversation with Baffone Stalin: it is based on the law of market exchange. We will only have to wait for communism, when its «ideologists» will have constructed it, according to the great doctrine of… Fourier-Owen. For now, the secretary ideologist explains it this way: communism… will be a social regime… in which every man will work enthusiastically according to his ability and receive, IN EXCHANGE FOR HIS WORK, according to his needs. 

But this is the great doctrine of the junkman and the grocer seller round the corner! The exchange of labour against consumption survives, society keeps the account book of each individual subject, it does not even dream of doing what today’s society does in narrow sectors; collecting labour, and distributing objects and services satisfying needs, even when those in need do not give adequate work, no longer getting lost in writing the mercantile equation! If Khrushchev’s goal is ideologically so easy, then perhaps his tortuous equivocal ways are worthwhile to achieve it!

Means: violence 

The phrase is right: our enemies like to present us Leninists as the partisans of violence, always and in all cases. For us, the element of violence is not the «discriminating» element between the revolutionary Marxist and those who are not. One cannot be a partisan of violence because it is not a goal, but a means, a passage. Communist society will be without exchange and only then without violence in the end. For only then will it be classless.

There may however – this is the point! – there may be the non-violence partisan who will say: ideologically I want the emancipation of the proletariat, but if violence is needed to achieve it, I abandon that claim. Whoever says this is not a Marxist: every «immediate» pacifist rejects Marxism. And Lenin rejected, on the word of Marx, those who are against all war, always and everywhere; we explained this at length in Part One of the «Structure of Russia». 

But Marxism equally condemns these very old theses: civil violence was a suitable means for the emancipation of citizens from feudal and despotic rule, and becomes so again if the achievements of personal freedom and democracy are threatened; but as long as democracy is respected, the political struggle must be peaceful.

It condemns no less this other: from the time of the Paris Commune, or at least the founding of the Second International, the transformation of bourgeois society into socialist will take place gradually and without recourse to violence, with measures implemented by the proletariat with the weapon of suffrage, which will lead its party to power. 

These are already theses not moral or philosophical or «ideological», but strictly historical. Lenin himself cleared up the long-debated doubts about Marx’s and Engels’ statements, the version according to which until 1865 they thought a peaceful victory of the proletariat was possible in England, and that at his death Engels thought it was possible in Germany. Theoretically, it can be admitted that a bourgeoisie under unfavourable conditions would relinquish political power to a party with a socialist programme: but the violent clash would arise soon afterwards. Lenin notes how Marx (replying after a conference in Holland) denied the possibility even in England of a «resignation» of the bourgeoisie from power, and as for Engels his much-discussed preface only suggests, in Germany 1890, that the initiative of the conflict should be left to the government.

What we say here for the medium of violence, applies to the medium of insurrection, civil war. In theory, they are not, in all cases, thinkable and desirable. Their use has historical limits.

This limitation was found by Lenin and all radical Marxists, in a second European cycle following the classical one of 1848-1871, in the beginning of the imperialist phase of 1900, and demonstrated it crossed in all developed countries at the date of the First World War.

These historical premises would have changed, according to Khrushchev, and thus cases could appear where the proletarian seizure of power could take place without violence and civil war. 

We first challenge the factual circumstances invoked: The forces of socialism and democracy have grown. False. At the time when Lenin established the historical theory all of Europe was parliamentary and the followers of socialist parties numerous in all countries. Economic imperialism, that’s according to Marx and Lenin, later generated the totalitarian political forms, beaten in the war, but not in the social type of super-developed capitalism: why is it declared in the same pages the danger threatening democracy in America, England, France, Germany, etc., whose governments, yesterday allies, are often depicted as fascist brigands? Or was this just Stalin music?

Will the insertion, after the 1890-1910 «idyllic period», of two fierce wars count for nothing? 

«The field of socialist countries numbers over 900 million people». We contested socialism – and democracy, which we care little about – as a new form in that field. A historical novelty has moved these 900 million men, only a blind man can contest it. But how? Through flashes of violence and civil war. It only takes one of these two terms to rule out that, softly softly, the rest of the world turns upside down without cannon shots.

As for the «force of attraction» and the «ideas that have conquered minds…» we leave them… to the new Marxist philosophy.

However, if we admit, for a moment, what has been contested, let us also grant, for dialectical purposes, that in some countries capitalism leaves the helm out of modesty for old events, out of Christian resignation, out of paralysis by dropsy, out of fair play, out of whatever the heck the hypersecretary wants; it would leave it shouting: by golly, you have emulated me in a peaceful competition, you have regularly outclassed me: I recognise you… more capitalists than me!

The philosopher’s Stone 

So let us accept for a moment the hypothesis of political power taken by the proletariat, for once, sine effusione sanguinis, without violence, without riot, without putsch, without blanquism, without insurrection. All these are not discriminatory elements: let Khrushchev be right.

There is one more, the ONE, the GREAT, the UNSTOPPABLE, the UNNOMINATED at the 20th Congress: THE DICTATORY OF PROLETARIAT.

Something – in the great doctrine of Marx and Lenin – did not change between 1848 and 1917, although in the interval the bourgeois world took a quarter-century plunge into milkweed. 

Would it have changed afterwards? In the time of two wars that set the entire planet ablaze? Of the greatest revolutionary victory in history, that of October, more and longer bristling with weapons than the epic one of 1793, which made the heroic cry of the bourgeois Carmagnole echo more thunderously: vive le son, vive le son, vive le son, du canon!? Of the drowning in blood not only of the Communes of Berlin, of Budapest, of Munich – after the first war – and of Warsaw, of Berlin again, after the second? Of the passing through the firing squads of Zinoviev, of Kamenev, of Bucharin, of Radek, of ten and ten other supreme masters, of a hundred and a hundred sergeants and veterans of Bolshevism, of a thousand and a thousand class soldiers, sons of the glorious war of the proletariat of Russia? Of the very bloody although bourgeois mask that degeneration placed on the faces of European proletarians in the false partisan uprising against the massacres of the capitalist dictatorship in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, the Balkans and everywhere? Of forty years of civil strife in China, in which immense armies in turn raged from the extreme north to the south? Of a hundred episodes of colonial struggles in eight or ten empires, dripping with blood, in which the deeds of the most democratic Europeans make those of the reactionary regimes pale, in the unspeakable series from the Belgian massacres of the Congo natives, before the 1914 tears over the martyred people, to the recent sinister Albion deportation of the Cyprus bishop, with all the rest?

Everything that passed on the historical canvas, between the two dates that connected the two giants, whose names are besmirchedby the Kremlin’s quotations, was romance for young girls, when compared to the cannibalistic events that have been unfolding in the world since the terrible example of the October Dictatorship launched such a challenge to the mammonist world of Capital, which has only Death as its stake. 

Although at this very congress, in boasting of new beginnings and diversions, and in boasting of chain breakthroughs that broaden Marxism, it was repeatedly admitted that there are certain principles that cannot be touched or changed, here is the principle of principles that is being attacked, and without which we, from the last to the first, we, millions of revolutionaries of yesterday, today and tomorrow, cease to exist. 

The new word of the Party that raises its Manifesto against the world in the convulsive 1848, is about the transition to socialism, treated at the 20th congress in an idiot manner. «All these social measures (which untie the knots of bourgeois oppression) have as their premise the organisation of the proletariat into a ruling class – afterwards into a political party – and the DESPOTIC intervention in all bourgeois relations of production». Despotism – or force of persuasion, oh gentlemen?!

The Manifesto is silent (on the cited page) about the armed insurrection. It is more than a revolt of slaves. It is the impersonal productive forces that revolt, and the expropriation of the expropriators comes about by solving a scientific equation. Not rumbling here in the Manifesto for the cannon. But the Dictatorship rests its steel fist on the enemy, even defeated, captive, surrendered. 

In the epic of the 1848 defeat of the Paris proletariat, the watchword echoes: destruction of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class! It echoes because, as a hundred other times it has happened and will happen, the middle class insurgent against the right drowns in blood, after its victory, the confident advance, the naive «emulative competition» of the proletariat. Then, against these agents of the bourgeois system condemned by historical inertia to act as executioners of the socialist revolution, as in 1831, the cry is raised, which with equal unfortunate heroism will rise in 1871: dictatorship of the working class! Silence in the chokehold of every other section of the people! Not only of the patrons and banquiers, but of the filthy, épiciers of the streets of Paris! Silence in the chokehold of Jacques Bonhomme (the French peasant) with his bas de laine, the sock bulging with bourgeois gold. 

And the alleged anti-insurrectionist Engels, so many years later, at the end of the persecution of the German socialists, cries out: you ask, O philistines, what is dictatorship? The Paris Commune: this was the dictatorship of the proletariat! Even then for an abdicating bourgeoisie (and even if it were in the hands of a Khrushchev!) and defenceless, hostages will be taken, and the dictator proletariat, under the given conditions, will make use of them as it did in 1871 in Paris, responding lionheartedly, in the sacrifice of the Federates, and in the apology that Karl Marx made for it on the face of the executioners, before history.

The essentials in Marx – Lenin 

In the second edition of «The State and Revolution», by Lenin in 1918, he included the passages from Marx’s letter to Comrade Weydemeyer, already mentioned by us, because he felt that they «express what substantially and radically distinguishes Marx’s doctrine from that of the bourgeois thinkers, and the essence of his doctrine on the state».

We wanted to concede that the essential does not lie in the use of violence, civil war, insurrection, that is, that there can be a historical case of bloodless dissolution of the class struggle. But the original, the essential for the «great doctrine of Marx and Lenin» is not even class struggle, it is the dictatorship, and it is the destruction of the state. How better to say it than by Lenin himself?

«In 1907, Mehring, in the Neue Zeit, published extracts from Marx’s letter to Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852. This letter, among other things, contains the following remarkable observation: «And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes (in which foolishly, we note in passing, certain very recent groups with very old errors want to read the whole of communism). What I (Marx) did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production (a thesis concerning the non-eternity of classes: there have been and there will be forms of human society without classes); (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society». 

Lenin, having said of essential, substantial, and radical doctrine, makes it the «touchstone» for the understanding and effective recognition of Marxism. He adds: he is not a Marxist unless he extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

It is crystal clear that all purported routes to socialism that do not extend the recognition of the class struggle to that of the dictatorship, characterise opportunism, against which Lenin’s theoretical and material battle was waged in those years, and that this is a basic principle that applies to all times and all revolutions. This original discovery of Marxism is not a «creative conquest» of historical experience, about which so much chatter has been made: Marx established it when a proletarian dictatorship, let alone a suppression of classes, had not yet been seen in history. Lenin makes it an inescapable principle (after Engels had pointed to the Paris Commune as the first historical example of a proletarian dictatorship), shortly after the first stable dictatorship had resoundingly triumphed, but exercised amidst violent enemy assaults, and always long before a historical example, still a long way off today, of the disappearance of classes and the state was seen. 

Whoever wants can come along and say that the lesson of history has disproved Marx and demonstrated that in the development of forms of production there will be dictatorship-free courses; but what cannot subsist is the proclaiming of a return to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin, who in this page proclaim in agreement at a distance of 70 years the «discriminative character» of the common theory, the recognition today by Moscow of a form of the class struggle, which develops in the world camp as peaceful coexistence and emulative competition, and in some national camps as «ideological struggle» and as parliamentary conquest of the state.

Because, here’s the great point, when you say that with constitutional upheavals in certain countries (which would then be only two in the whole world, France and Italy) you hope to have power (even if you do not exclude, strictly speaking, recourse to armed struggle if, in violation of the constitution, they do not hand it over to you after an electoral victory), you do not say at all, indeed you deny in theory and in practice, that you will destroy the apparatus of the old state, nor that you will imply the parliamentary loss of power in further stages, suppressing all political rights to the non-working classes: dictatorship is this and nothing else.

The aftermath of the conquest of power 

Having made another concession – no less fictitious than that of coming to power without an insurrectionary struggle – that is, that you tend, as is said in some passages, to stable power after the «popular» conquest, and that you make a commitment to defend such stability by force in the event that the electoral majority fails you, it is easy to see that this is a commitment impossible to maintain, and therefore to assume. 

These concessions and absurd historical assumptions we immediately take back: fear not the reader that we in any way believe we are really dealing with socialists and communists «in the ends», guilty only of making blatant blunders about «the means». The very title of «transition to socialism» is bestiality. The term transition serves what the elegant modern jargon (of the young gentlemen Lenin slaps down) calls petting: back off, you dirty petters of the Revolution! Which is clash, collision, explosion, fruitful bloody breach in history! 

We have therefore assumed that a «socialist» government has come to power by the «constitutional» route «by uniting around the working class the working peasantry and intellectuals, all the patriotic forces». Will the government founded on such a majority be able to retain it – indeed: will it ever be able to achieve it? – if it says: let us not allow subsequent elections to take it away from us, and let us stay permanently in power, either by not holding any more elections, or by holding them in the way that has now been learnt from all bands: vote, voters, freely, but only in favour of the government? 

What will the peasants say, what will the intellectuals say, what will the patriotic forces say (read, to make reference to Italy, the «left-wing», indeed centre-left, Catholics)? Evidently they, imbued with constitutionality at all costs, might even take up arms if history repeated the situation of a right-wing dictatorship before or after a popularly won election, but they will not do so for a dictatorship of proletarians that suspends the sacred guarantees in the name of which they will have mounted all the hype. But what will the genuine proletarians themselves, endowed with a revolutionary and Marxist spirit, say? They will say nothing, because there will be none, otherwise the hypothesis of the elephantine popular front would not even have been reached. 

Khrushchev therefore carefully avoids the scandalous word Dictatorship. He speaks in a purged edition of «political leadership of the working class headed by its vanguard». He echoes Marx’s translators who instead of revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat wrote critique of the proletariat.

Indeed, he goes so far as to say that «where capitalism has a huge military and police apparatus, the reactionary (?) forces will put up strong resistance». Here, in this country of exception, it is given grace that «the transition to socialism will take place through a bitter, revolutionary class struggle».

We have therefore arrived at the recognition of the class struggle in some special case, but not at the recognition of dictatorship after the conquest of power. This is what Lenin calls having reduced Marx to a common liberal. Even the most conservative liberal jurist admits that citizens use force when one of their constitutional rights is violated. We will therefore only allow ourselves to fight bitterly against the reactionary forces once we have shown them that they do not have a parliamentary majority!

We are neither repeating here the demonstration of the impossibility of using parliament for class purposes, nor explaining to the Khrushchev-Togliatti that their method will fail them. We know very well that this is how they must speak and why they must speak this way. They are organ pipes in which the very will to not let the proletariat come to power blows, and if there were anyone among them who does so without being fully aware of this, even this would say nothing to us.

Only one point is important to us: this resounding repudiation of Stalinism can be explained in any way, with the deductions of the case from the play of international and internal social forces in Russia, and we are certainly doing it, but it cannot be passed off, even to the most naive, under the banner of a return to Marx and Lenin doctrine.

The inept and sloppy formulations of the 20th Congress, even taken as «literature», openly contain a rejection of the central point of the invoked doctrine: «dictatorship as a transition to class suppression», i.e. dictatorship after the conquest of power. The thesis that they achieve this without a battle could also be true, because it could be entirely convenient for the bourgeois order.

Kautskyan Leninists

One easily responds to this vaunted new edition of Leninism with the voice of Lenin himself, as he could speak after the 20th Congress. 

Quotations from Lenin have of course been made by many of these gentlemen. The passage on which Khrushchev relies, according to which it would be a false application of historical materialism to give a general scheme of a succession of pre-established stages that should occur identically in all countries, is as usual invoked divorced from the author’s integral development. Lenin wrote in open polemic with the right-wing socialists who had in the name of Marx idiotically stipulated that Russia, and in it the proletariat, the Bolshevik party, should not move because historical materialism dictated that the Russian revolution could only be proletarian after all other European revolutions; and it had to be directed by the bourgeoisie until the Russian economy could catch up with those in the West. For forty years we too have been waging this battle, against the bestial idea that the Russian revolutionary form should be democratic and not dictatorial, for reasons of «economic determinism». In our study of Russia, we are analysing in the following paragraphs Lenin’s writings that construct this theory of the Russian revolution with a true masterpiece of consistent continuity from the beginning of the century. Lenin is not to be quoted with two figures: volume and page. It’s not us to say this to Khrushchev, whose interlocutors we are only in metaphor: Lenin says it to him, when he says it in his writing The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

Kautsky said that the whole question of dictatorship comes from a «little word» that Marx once wrote. With a pandering series of quotations he attempted to empty the fundamental weight of this concept in Marx, reducing it to an unfortunate choice of lexicon. That is why in the other world the face of this theorist, who had at length defended Marx against the right-wing revisionists, and on whose pages Lenin had been trained, as much as on those of Plekhanov, who had ended up like him, the face of this spectre bears the indelible mark of the disfigurement of Vladimir’s whipping of his hand, which to so many at the time seemed unjustly bloody. 
«To call this famous inference of Marx’s, which constitutes the sum total of his entire revolutionary doctrine, a little word is to make a mockery of Marxism, it is to deny it completely. It must not be forgotten that Kautsky knows Marx almost by heart; that, judging by all his publications, he has in his desk or in his head a whole filing cabinet in which Marx’s writings are carefully classified, in the most convenient way to quote them. Kautsky cannot be unaware that both Marx and Engels spoke repeatedly of the dictatorship of the proletariat … that this formula is the most complete and scientifically exact exposition of the task of the proletariat to break up the bourgeois state machine, of which task Marx and Engels spoke, taking into account the revolutions of 1848 and 1871, from 1852 to 1891, for a good forty years». 
«From the beginning of the war onwards Kautsky, with increasingly rapid progression, achieved great virtuosity in the art of being a Marxist in words and a lackey of the bourgeoisie in deeds». 

The speakers at the 20th Congress had a better file of Lenin’s Works than Kautsky’s for Marx, electronic perhaps, as an outlet for the silly envy that surfaces in all their speeches for the often clownish American technology. They have thus well surpassed the then record «of virtuosity in the art of being Marxist-Leninist in words and lackey of the bourgeoisie in deeds». 

Kautsky explained the little word like this: dictatorship means the suppression of democracy. Lenin’s lengthy historical analysis shows that it will also eventually lead to the suppression of any democracy: once classes and the state have disappeared, the word will be meaningless, and the fact long since unknown. 

But he rectifies Kautsky’s dirty «liberalism» with scientific rigour: «Dictatorship does not necessarily mean the suppression of democracy for the class that exercises this dictatorship against other classes, but it does compulsorily mean the suppression of democracy for that class, against which the dictatorship is exercised».

This is very clear and applies to the two opposing dictatorships of modern times: bourgeois and proletarian. Can you hear Khrushchev-Togliatti saying to the bourgeoisie: we will exercise dictatorship after we have overthrown you by means of democracy, but if you suppress democracy for us when we are a minority, you are a reactionary force?

The threesome scene 

All of distorted Lenin’s passages refer not to the capitalism of modern western countries, but to those places and times where three forces struggle: feudalism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is then that there are multiple paths to socialism in a country: when there are only two, the historical problem now consists entirely of the victory of the socialist revolution in the developed capitalist society. The novel of the isolated national country, on the other hand, must necessarily be written when feudalism is exited and national state centres arise. Here is a bridge to socialism, and here alone are multiple aspects «with this or that form of democracy, with this or that variety of dictatorship of the proletariat».

In the text we have referred to, Lenin, after scientifically defining dictatorship in general, goes on to define proletarian dictatorship as follows: «a power won and maintained by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, a power not bound by any law».

How does this strong citrus fruit taste for you, intellectuals, patriots, and other insects? 

Further on, the author refers to the threesome scene, recalling that before 1905 in Russia all Marxists defined the revolution as bourgeois: the Mensheviks inferred the policy of understanding with the bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks foresaw the struggle of the proletariat allied with the peasantry first against feudalism, then against the bourgeoisie. Kautsky invoked Russia’s social backwardness to assert «this new idea: that in a bourgeois revolution one cannot go further than the bourgeoisie», Lenin says sarcastically. He adds: «And this, despite everything Marx and Engels said comparing the bourgeois revolution of 1789-93 in France with the bourgeois revolution of 1848 in Germany!»

Between the Leninists of the 20th Congress, and Leninism, runs this difference: Lenin and history proved that the proletariat cannot do without dictatorship in the course of a bourgeois revolution, without being defeated. Those of today claim it must do without it in exclusively proletarian revolutions, in which it is no longer a question of overthrowing feudalism, but capitalism!!

They make insurrection inessential, they suppress dictatorship no matter what, they even delete the «little word». And are they Leninists? Speak, again, Lenin (again in Kautsky, at the beginning). «If Kautsky had wanted to reason seriously and honestly he could have asked himself: are there historical laws of revolution that know no exception? The answer would have been; no, there are no such laws. Such laws consider only the typical case, what Marx once designated as the “ideal”, in the sense of an average, normal, typical capitalism». 

(On the margin of our old copy of «Kautsky» we had marked here: find this passage from Marx. We indicated a number of them in the text, not printed in full, of the report to the Milan meeting on the «invariance» of Marxism and even of the earlier revolutionary class theories; and they are quoted on the question of the «model» of bourgeois society in the series on the agrarian question of three years ago).

The historical law of dictatorship is thus inseparable from the doctrine as a whole. Against falsification Lenin thus formulates it: «Proletarian revolution is impossible without the violent destruction of the bourgeois state machine and its replacement by a new one».

Withdrawal of concessions 

Having unmasked the theoretical fakes – worse than those found in Stalin’s texts on economics – we can «withdraw» the concessive historical assumptions, and proclaim the no less resounding historical fakes.

Kautsky, like Khrushchev, also tried to speculate that Marx and Engels would make an exception for England and America, until the 1870-1880s. Lenin’s answer is fundamental. The necessity of dictatorship is above all linked to the existence of militarism and bureaucracy. These forms did not exist in those two countries and at that time. «Today, however (1918) they do exist, as much in England as in America».

Has Mr. Khrushchev any news that such forms have disappeared in the two countries since then? Did he and his fellows and their master Stalin have such monstrous forms well in their eyes, whether they treated them as brotherly allies or as cold enemies?

But here we have to give another blow to the wondrous description of a world today that would be, for the most part or nearly so, brimming with democracy and socialism.

Opportunism, the denial of dictatorship, the denial of Marxism, had long since used this argument, which Kautsky incredibly copied from his opponent of many years Bernstein: we have passed from the era in which the proletariat aimed at violent upheaval, to the era of possible peaceful upheaval!

What different historical reading did Khrushchev, and several others with him, use in 1956 to astound the world? Them, armed as they are with Lenin’s filing cabinet as Kautsky was with Marx’s?

Let them answer themselves with the same filing cabinet: and that the world of advertising novelty consumers learn. 

«The ‘historiographer’ Kautsky so shamelessly falsifies history that he forgets the essential point: that pre-monopoly capitalism – which reached its apogee precisely in the decade 1870-1880 – was distinguished, by virtue of its essential economic traits, manifested in a typical manner particularly in England and America, by a relatively great love of peace and freedom. Imperialism, on the other hand, i.e. the monopoly capitalism that matured definitively only in the 20th century, is distinguished, by virtue of its essential economic traits, by a minimal love of peace and freedom and by the maximum and universal development of militarism. Not to note this, in examining to what extent a peaceful uprising or a violent uprising is likely or typical, means to descend to the level of the most vulgar lackey of the bourgeoisie».

We have enough to draw the final conclusions on the laughable «transition to socialism» of the countries «in no particular order».

False historiography was invented long before Stalin, and is all but dead after his expulsion from glory.

For Marx and Lenin, dictatorship is a general law. And with it terror, another sinful word put out of use. And yet Engels used it in the Italian Republican Almanac, this other little word, no less forgotten at the 20th congress: «The victorious party, if it does not want to have fought in vain, must continue its domination by authoritarian means, with the terror that its weapons inspire in the counter-revolutionaries». (1874: it was then a matter of refuting the anarchists, who disassemble the armed force an hour after victory). 

In Marxism-Leninism, the fundamental law on the conquest of political power is the necessity of dictatorship after conquest. An exception could perhaps have been made to this law precisely in the conditions of Russia. The world value (Khrushchev’s adjective) of October lies in the grandiose fact that it is precisely in Russia that dictatorship has historically imposed itself. Tomorrow it will therefore impose itself everywhere, with no other exceptions.

In twentycongressism, the democratic path to power becomes the general law, as it already was for the worst, old and surviving social democrats.

An exception is made for the case that capitalism has a huge military and police apparatus.

Is this an exception? Where are these modern countries without bureaucracy, militarism and police apparatus? In the only two modern countries where parliamentary majority rule might have occurred, France and Italy, one can ask the rebels of Algeria and the farm hands of Venosa and Barletta about such apparatuses (apart from the laws for the herd of state bureaucrats supported at swordpoint by the Kremlin’s cronies). And more briefly the press of Kremlinism itself.

But the optimism that resurrects the Kautskyan prospect of peaceful upheaval, buried by Lenin, is all about the countries of the East, popular democracy, socialism.

Is it therefore on that side that there are no armies of officials, armed men and police? The Secretary General evidently believes that those bodies are not called such when they depend on the branches of his Central Office. And, knowing how the public likes the dramatic version of political events, he hopes to make people believe that they have disappeared since civil death was inflicted on Generalissimo Stalin, and death on the gallows on superexecutioner Beria.

Will history be able to write about the current Russian «leaders of the avant-garde» as different and better than those two characters? Untie the knot that has tied them to the same function for so many years?