The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (Pt. 3)

12 – The Made Up Theory

We have dwelt on the artificial antithesis between two theories, the “old” and the “new”, on the “questions of war, peace and revolution” pleaded in the (official) History of the Bolshevik Party published in Russia.

The author of the new theory on “revolution in one country” is supposedly Lenin, whereas the old theory, typical of the old Marxists, is “simultaneous revolution in all civilized countries”.

We have not said whether this theory is true or false, just that it is a complete fabrication, and that no‑one ever supported it. The old theory coincides with the new. Marx established these points and Lenin defended them. Marxists (excluding those who refer to themselves as such but do not believe in revolution) have always

supported the revolutionary attack even in one country, as a political strategy, as the struggle to take power.

As for the transformation of the social structure into socialism, which using an expression no less theoretically false than the others is called the construction of socialism, whereas it should be called the destruction of capitalism, it has always been considered both feasible and possible even in one country. But under two conditions, set out in crystal‑clear fashion by Marx and Lenin. Firstly: that the capitalism in the country concerned is fully developed; secondly: that the victorious proletariat in that country is cognisant of its role: as the bringer not of peace, but of war!

There is no other theory of war, peace and revolution. The new theories, with one cooked up for every generation, are all of them, Muscovite “History” included, counter-revolutionary.

To demonstrate this we will quote again the passage which invents “the old theory”, and invents the invention of Lenin, who is systematically downgraded from died-in-the-wool Marxist militant to idol for altars and monuments.

“This theory [of Lenin, who, as we reported, according to the text, laid the basis for it in 1905 in his work “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, thereby threading one more pearl onto its string of historical and theoretical gaffes: how do you found a new theory for an “out of date” problem which refers to Germany in young Marx’s time, and France in Babeuf’s time? According to these counterfeiters, Lenin supposedly expatiated on how to construct socialism by means of the democratic revolution, as though he were the worst ultra‑rightist] this theory differed radically from the idea that was widespread among the Marxists of the pre‑imperialist period when Marxists maintained that socialism wouldn’t be able to achieve victory in just one country, but would triumph contemporaneously in all civilized countries”.

We won’t repeat here our critique of the definition civilized. If the adjective civilized had been replaced with capitalist (referring to the economic structure) or democratic (referring to the political structure), the expression might be less devoid of intrinsic meaning but would be equally misleading. These “Marxists” simply never existed. Marx was undoubtedly a Marxist of the pre‑imperialist period. And so? Either Marx is stupid and Marxism is stupid, or within Marxism, a theory born in 1840, the laws of the imperialist stage of capitalism (n.b. stage not separate period) are already set out. Lenin in fact didn’t produce them as a secretion of his brain, but by applying the doctrines found in Capital. Just read it and you’ll see. Referring to the events of the imperialist stage he gave a further demonstration of our theory of capital, and showed again that it excludes peace between States and classes, and that, just as at its first dawning, the closing of the capitalist cycle will be dominated by the flames of social catastrophe and a general explosion of violence.

Tell us their names! That kind of Marxist never existed. We will go further: nor that kind of generic socialist either!

13 – Countries and Revolutions

Ever since it appeared in its utopian-idealistic form socialism wasn’t thought of as international; or even national! It was thought of as socialism in one city, in Plato’s Republic, in Campanella’s City of the Sun, in Thomas Moore’s Utopia (literally “no place”), in Cabet’s Icaria, in the country of the absolute sovereign of the great French utopians, enlightened among his subjects, in Owen’s cooperative factory, in Fourier’s Phalanstery, or if you like, in Benedict’s mediaeval monastery. So was it really Lenin, you bunch of idiots, who put out this stuff as a “new theory”?

This first naïve but noble socialism is considered by its builders – and they actually did build it – firstly as an act of opinion, then of will, transmitted to the people by the wise leader, or even by the great king. Clearly no‑one would subordinate it to a coincidence of these waves of enlightenment in the minds of people in various countries at the same time; even when socialism was utopian it was envisaged within set frontiers, and in the most evocative of these social “projects” the existence of the military strata, the standing army and the defence of the chosen country against the envious enemy, is considered permanent; a concept due more to inertia than being actively maintained, although some ingenious minds, such as the mighty Saint‑Simon, managed to get beyond it.

The transition from Utopianism to Marxism occurred not because the notion of socialism was refined and subjected to a “rethink”, but due to the appearance of capitalist production. Marxism founded its doctrine and programme mainly on the work it did on England. This one country, and it really was just one country, provided a framework for proving that a socialist economy, at a certain stage of commercial-industrial development is not only possible and feasible, but an implacable necessity; the condition for it no longer technical-productive and economic, but just historical, that is, that the ancient bonds, relations of production, and property are shattered and swept away and overcome by uncontainable productive forces, not by brilliant advances in the realm of opinion.

When therefore the theses on the capitalist economy and the more general ones on historical materialism arose, they arose thanks to the dynamics of English society in the 17^th and 18^th century.

The socialist programme arises not as a millennial prophecy but as a possibility based on already acquired conditions, but only in ONE country: in the strict sense England, without Ireland, where the bourgeois agrarian revolution was still expected, and minus most of Scotland.

At the dawn of the 19^th Century France is fully bourgeois but not completely capitalist: France is not an island, but the engine of Europe; its historical task is to extend the flame of the Great Revolution to the west. Only between 1831 and 1848 does the proletariat begin its epic struggle, which is still not constructing socialism, but spreading the revolution eastwards: let us consider the audacious hypothesis that the Paris workers had won in 1848; far more pressing than the task of destroying capitalism at home would have been a revolutionary war against reaction in Europe: still in a broad sense we have the historical problem of the Two Tactics, and not yet the question of whether a socialist France was possible. But for historical reasons, which has nothing in common with the same necessity of waiting for there to be the economic conditions for socialism across the Rhine, across the Danube or across the Alps.

14 – Back to the Roots: The Manifesto!

By 1848 however, in the year communism comes of age, we have what they derisively call “the communist Bible”: the Manifesto of Marx and Engels. The question of the proletarian revolution is already fully and insuperably posed: not only is there is no trace of simultaneous revolution in all countries, the idea attributed to the old‑time Marxists, but the socialist revolution in one country is clearly proposed. And not only is it proposed and allowed, it features throughout the whole of the powerful unitary construction, and nor could it be otherwise.

In 1893, in his final years, Frederick Engels dictated the preface to the Italian edition of the Manifesto. Well then, in this short preface there are some historical passages, like the one stating: The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in the past. The first capitalist nation was Italy. And Engels dates the transition from the feudal Middle Ages to the modern era to 1300, to Dante’s time.

However, he returns to the situation in 1848, and in recording how from Milan to Berlin and to Paris it was the workers who were first on to the barricades, and in highlighting this trait of European “simultaneity” in the revolution as a war involving all classes, he adds the significant words: “only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government, had the very definite intention of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the French workers had as yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class”.

From this we can draw various corollaries – apart from usual one we touched on earlier, of the colossal foolishness of engaging in an anti‑mediaeval struggle in Italy in 1945, or indeed … in the 1955 Sicilian elections. Six and a half centuries of horrendous errors. The first bourgeois metropolis, more than anywhere else was in Sicily: the Palermo of Frederick ll.

In 1848 Engels thinks the socialist transformation of the economy is not possible in ultra‑bourgeois France! He, who had traced out the sure prospect of it from his youthful studies of the English economy!

Therefore the damn construction of socialism was viewed by the oldest Marxists as something that occurred in one country, and no need for Lenin to discover it in 1905 or 1914.

In addition: was the struggle of the Paris workers pointless then? Never! Engels says that the capitalist exploitation of the revolution led to the national formation of Italy and Germany, and he mentions that Marx used to say that the men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were its testamentary executors.

Therefore the notion of the proletariat fighting for the capitalist revolution, which has to fight for it, and which should do so if in a position to choose, is also not something Lenin invented in 1905.

What history reserved for the French workers in 1848, it reserved for the Russian workers in 1917: Lenin saw it and theorized it decidedly in advance; the facts of history highlight it today with dazzling clarity: fighting with a developed class organization, and socialist party consciousness, in a proletarian revolution, whereas the outcome of the revolution is the installation of capitalism.

However we will call once again on the content of the Manifesto in this regard, well known though it is.

15 – Harmonic Structures

Need we recall the “systematics” of our historical codex? The first figure to appear on the scene is the bourgeoisie, about whom their worst enemy writes an incomparable “chanson de geste”. The bourgeoisie scours and conquers the world, shakes secular institutions to their very foundations, unleashes huge forces in the realm of human activity, and in diabolical fashion summons up its gravediggers, the proletariat.

The classic enunciations on the “organization of the proletariat into a class, and consequently into a political party” apply to the national framework of “one country”. There is in fact the famous observation: the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle, though in form rather than substance. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

This famous thesis is then further emphasised in the no less well‑known sentences which follow the passage about workers having no country: “Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy [interpreted by social traitors as universal suffrage!], must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word”.

These words, frequently discussed and greatly distorted at the outbreak of the first world conflagration, succinctly sum up the Marxist theory of power and the State. The bourgeoisie had the goal of constructing the national State – the proletariat has as its aim neither the permanent construction of the State nor of the nation, but, since it has to grasp the weapon of power, and of the State, precisely when it has only gained the collapse (“at first”) of its own bourgeoisie and its own bourgeois State, it builds its own State, its own dictatorship, and constitutes itself as the nation, i.e., it defends its territory against external bourgeoisies, while waiting for them, in their turn, to be overthrown by the proletariat as well.

All this, therefore, is already contained in those first tabulations of how the revolution would come about, working out the hypothesis of the victory in one country as the rulenot the exception, and the theory of it existed from the dawn of Marxism.

How otherwise to read what for a century philistines have been reading back to front, that is the final programmatic part: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible”?

This though is just the beginning of “entirely revolutionizing the means of production” which requires “despotic inroads” and “economic measures that are insufficient and untenable”. Old stuff, for sure. But that is precisely what we need to demonstrate: that the theory of the taking of political power and the transformation of society is not a new theory but an old one. How else could the text have continued than: “These measures will of course be different in different countries”?

And would not the Manifesto add a list of them for the most advanced countries, relevant to the 1848 period?

And how else could the final chapter trace out the prospects, nation by nation, of the revolutionary conquest of power if not by basing them on the concept, which drives everything, that the revolution could begin in any country where the development of production had formed a modern proletariat, and even in Germany before England and France because Germany was on the eve of a bourgeois revolution “with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century”?

16 – From 1848 to the Commune

After the disastrous defeat in 1848, the proletarian conquest of power in the European countries became a more distant prospect. In the long period that follows bourgeois nations and States are established in a series of wars; the proletarian parties become less important, and Marxist policy focuses on the wars that lead to the defeat of the reservoirs of reaction, namely Austria, Germany, France and above all and in every phase Russia, something on which we have elaborated at great length.

The new arrangement arises out of the magnificent episode of the Paris Commune. This time the proletariat not only undertakes to overthrow the national bourgeoisie, it actually does so, though faced with two enemies, the victorious Prussian army, and the armed forces of the recently republicanised bourgeois State.

Here the memorable Marxist analysis in the classic works stands out: You wanted to understand the proletarian revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the socialist State? Here’s the first historic example: the Commune!

In taking the side of the Commune, did Marx, or any one of the Marxists at the time, ever dream of condemning it because the proletariat in the other capitals of Europe, and especially in Berlin, didn’t take action, as happened in 1848, since clearly the German army would intervene against the socialist State in Paris if the bourgeois forces of France were not enough?

Was there not already a theory of the revolution in one country; a theory, moreover, which was unique, and which had arisen at the height of the pre‑imperialist phase of capitalism? And did not this theory describe the first steps of the social transformation, raised in its classical form by Marx, and by Lenin, following in his exact footsteps, in his well‑known decrees and edicts?

What Marxist, even from less ardent tendencies, ever disavowed the Commune, or suggested it lay down its arms, on the grounds that to have a revolution in France you needed to have one in the whole of Europe?

There were two different positions in the First International at the time, the Marxist and the Bakuninist ones; two “versions” of the Commune, and both unreservedly praised the revolt, its brief life‑cycle, and its glorious fall, and the disgrace and shame of the “civilized” regimes.

Neither of these currents can be linked to the made up theory of the contemporaneous revolution in Europe.

The libertarian view is that the Paris Commune wasn’t a political State, but was responding to the myth of the local commune which, within its narrow compass, liberates itself by rebelling against State tyranny and social oppression by establishing a self‑sufficient collective of free and equal individuals. It is on record why we Marxists consider this, at best, a dream; but we mention it here in order to rule out the idea that this wing of the socialists (socialist anarchists they used to be called) ever believed in the notion of simultaneous revolution: far from it in fact; for them revolution need not even take place on a national scale, but could be on a city, municipal or communal level.

A few years later they would fight to establish anarchy in Spain and in some of its provinces, tortuously asserting that they had neither armies nor States, before succumbing to the inexorable critical demolition of Marx and Engels.

But whatever mistakes they made, not even there can we find supporters of the idea: no to revolution, unless in ten countries at once.

We have then the orthodox, Marxist, version of the Commune, the version which pours scorn on the manipulators of fables and half‑truths, and deserving to be called Leninist.

The Commune isn’t just the twice‑sieged municipality of Paris; it is France, the French proletariat finally formed into a class, which on the banks of the Seine raised the banner of its constitution as the ruling class; which erected the revolutionary State of the French nation. Not a nation in the bourgeois sense and against the German nation, but in the sense that with its cannons it tried to cut off the traitor Thiers from his seat of control over the whole of France; and shedding, in pursuit of this objective, the freely given blood of red Paris, even knowing – as the indigenous executioner advanced – that the workers in Berlin, Vienna and Milan hadn’t picked up their rifles.

It is the theory which in its blazing splendour becomes white hot history; and after the final volleys against the wall of the Père Lachaise had fallen silent, it would become the patrimony and content of the world revolution, its victorious conquest, and it will continue to exist in the general consciousness of Marxists that, one day, from a first victorious national Commune, there will arise the progressive, unstoppable incineration of the world of capital.

17 – Social-democratic Revisionism

It was in 1900 that Lenin’s hated enemies came up with a “new theory” that claimed to be Marxist, a modern version of Marxism; and with this they prepared for the catastrophe in 1914, which according to the fraudsters in Moscow induced Lenin to overhaul all of Marxism’s previous statements on War, Peace and Revolution.

While in the workers’ camp Bernstein and all the others are elaborating a gradualist reformism – itself not new, but rather a horrible concoction of the heresies which Marx fought against his entire life, of the Prussian State socialists, of Lassalleanism, of French social radicalism, of English trade unionism, and so on – the bourgeoisie is meanwhile elaborating its theory of war and peace, relying on the myth of disarmament, arbitration and universal peace. This old stuff too had already been battered by Marx’s hammer blows, when following 1848 he took on the bourgeois radical left, Mazzini, Blanc, Garibaldi, Kossuth and such like, and well we know with what furious indignation he saw them off.

Legalitarian revisionism dismantles the Marxist vision one bit at a time. First of all it throws out insurrection, violence, arms, and the dictatorship. For a brief period a denicotinized “class struggle” is allowed, although it is forced to take place within the bounds of State legality, through winning elections and seats in the political assemblies. The model for this is German social democracy, a monstrous electioneering machine, not above making reprehensible use of one of Frederick Engels’ final utterances: that its distance from power could be calculated from the statistics on the increasing number of votes it obtained. But Engels also correctly observed that once a certain line was crossed, capitalism would resort to terror!

We don’t need to repeat here our critique of this tendency and the prospect it held out: majority in parliament, legal socialist government, a set of progressive laws that attenuate the exploitation of the proletariat and bourgeois profits until a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism is set in motion: nor need we recall how bit by bit, in France, Belgium and elsewhere, the class struggle itself, on paper, was bartered away by accepting the entry of the workers’ parties into bourgeois cabinets as minorities; thereby founding what would be known as ministerialism, possibilism or Millerandism. The Second International condemned it – in peace time – but shamefully threw open its doors to it when war broke out it, unleashing the anathema of Lenin. He couldn’t know that the Third International would also eventually allow and extol such participation not only in war but in peace, the only justification being that it might suit some Nenni or other.

But whatever we may think of this august gathering, can we find amongst them any of these mysterious pre‑imperialist Marxists, who supposedly wanted to conquer power in all of the civilized countries on the same day?

Evidently if the taking of power no longer derives from armed action, action in the streets and the collapse of the very foundations of capitalism, but happens as a result of an increase in the number of “socialist” votes cast instead, it matters not at all whether the glorious day of a socialist premier being elected to power happens everywhere on the same day or not. In fact you can be sure that it will happen in an extremely unsynchronised way and nothing will prevent dozens of regimes, whether they be 100% capitalist, 10% socialist, or 20% so, etc, from living alongside one another, smiling at one another, arbitrating with one another, disarming one other, awarding Nobel prizes to one another, giving Picassos to one another, across the borders.

Not even in this camp then do we find anyone who is against the building of socialism in one country. For if it is to be built bit by bit, by means of laws passed by the bourgeois State, and merely by changing the party that heads it, the requirement of European simultaneity is no longer something anyone need aspire to; and nor did anyone for that matter, ever.

18 – Only the Opportunism is New

It was not Lenin, but the renegades castigated by him who used the turning point of 1914 to devise a new theory of war, peace and revolution. And they would leave barely a single word of the old theory, of Marx’s unique theory.

Marx said the proletarian revolution is accompanied by civil war between classes and the overthrow of the State – they denied it.

Marx said that war between States would only come to an end with the fall of capitalism and never by means of a general accord between the bourgeois States. They denied it.

Marx said that wars between capitalist and pre‑capitalist States could contain matters of interest to the proletariat and it should participate in them, but that after 1871, within the sector of western capitalism, every army is ranged against the proletariat and this is opposed to all European and inter‑capitalist wars. They denied both the first and second idea and said that in any war between two States the proletariat must support its “own side”, however unlikely it is it will be defeated. They were pacifists as long as there was no war, pro‑war as soon as it broke out.

Lenin restored the processes of peace, war and revolution to the important position they had always held within Marxism. And, as had always been stipulated by Marxism, he called for defeatism and proletarian rebellion everywhere, unilaterally and in one country too, on the battlefield and on the historical course opened by the civil war of 1871.

He didn’t generate a new theory, but wanted to throttle the new theory of social-patriotism.

When from this historic and powerful work of restoration of the not old, but unique, doctrine, they wanted to make arise, as something original, the obvious strategy of attacking the bourgeoisie also unilaterally on the national terrain, as enunciated in the Manifesto and in all Marxist texts, amongst which those on the Commune, for Lenin sacrosanct and fundamental, as indeed are hundreds of his own writings; and when this not new thesis was translated into the notion that without a revolution in Europe you could have a social transformation in a communist sense in Russia, the all‑seeing midwives of the Kremlin attempted an outright substitution of the infant, attributing to the person they considered the Little Father of the revolution in Russia an obnoxious bastard; they didn’t turn him into the destroyer of an outdated theory of non‑existent old Marxists, but the destroyer of a theory which he himself, on the backbone of the general system, had promoted in a truly ingenious way, the essence of which was: in a revolution that doesn’t spread beyond Russia, the proletariat will have to take power, but in order to accomplish the democratic revolution and favour thereby the advent and development of the capitalist system of production, which can only be overthrown when there has been a victorious proletarian revolution in other European countries.

A theory which Lenin constructed with truly astounding thoroughness, whose truth he would see confirmed; which he would never repudiate or retract.

And it is pointless to insult him by insinuating, with outright falsifications, that he did so, given that history has shown he was right about the subsequent phases, which occured in the order he said they would.

19 – The Socialist Transformation

The question of the transition of Russia from the republic controlled not by the bourgeoisie but by the victorious proletariat, with a social programme of nationalization of the land and State control of industry, to a socialist economy, is not in its right place if posed at the moment the much earlier problem of liquidating the war arose. When the Second International collapsed the prospect for Russia (even before Lenin learned of the betrayal of various socialists there) appeared no more favourable than it had been before the war. Up until 1914 Lenin was relying on the Marxist workers’ movement in the more developed countries to shorten the course of capitalism in Russia, which by now, it was believed, could not be avoided. But when the mighty German social democracy succumbed to opportunism, along with the other big parties in the industrial countries, it became increasingly unlikely that an anti‑Tsarist democratic revolution in Russia would be followed by a proletarian revolution in the European countries, which would have rendered the socialist transformation of Russia a less distant prospect.

At this key turning point in 1914 we saw how Lenin recapitulated the programme in the Seven Theses.

In Russia, work intently for the country’s defeat, the collapse of its army and its dynasty. The programme that follows remains the same: do not govern with the bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois parties, but run the republic with the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants. Socially such a republic will nationalize the land, bring in the eight hour working day, set up a State bank and put into effect other measures achievable within the confines of capitalism.

In Europe: struggle to eliminate the opportunists, organization of a new proletarian International, new groups and parties to lead the defeatist struggle against the war. Wherever possible, the attempt should be made to take power under the rallying‑cry of the proletarian dictatorship of the communist party.

Only after the war had brought about at least a partial collapse of bourgeois power in Europe would it be possible to address the problem of the socialist transformation of Europe and its support for economic and technical evolution in Russia.

Thus the question of how to make Russia alone socialist wasn’t posed at the moment official history assumes it was by Lenin and posed for the first time and for the first time resolved in a positive outcome: how to build socialism in a Russia emerging from feudalism and surrounded by capitalist countries.

Similar shifts in Lenin’s thinking will require an explanation later on, and explain them we will, namely: at the moment Tsarism fell; on his arrival back in Russia; in the struggle for all power to the one Bolshevik Party; in the period after the conquest of power, to that of the first economic measures and the fundamental shift represented by the New Economic Policy (NEP), this as well nothing “new”, to the extent it was never referred to as such by Lenin.

The very fact of having invented this conversion of Lenin outside of historical time and its appropriate context, of having sneakily brought it forward, demonstrates the false position which underpins the entire policy of the Russian State, after the death of Lenin and the well known events enucleated from the situation.

20 – Power and Economy

As this question of the socialist transformation in relation to a conquest of power in a non‑capitalist country has to be posed in general terms, we need to explain it better in order to avoid any serious misunderstandings, and, as always, we need to pay attention to the distinction between the economic and political aspects of the transition from one mode of production to another.

Our resolute defence of the thesis that we never expected to see in Russia a working socialist economy, production and distribution, given its social structure and its feeble economy after the war, may shock some readers who might see in it echos of the opportunist position which for years on end hurled slanderous accusations against the Bolsheviks.

According to Marxism the transformation of the economy of a country into a socialist one cannot get properly underway unless its predominant features are large‑scale industrialisation, big business capitalism, a generalized market economy, and the commercialization of all of its land and products. When these conditions are met, the transformation is not gradual and spontaneous, but, as stated by Marx, Lenin and the revolutionary left, it will not happen without the political revolution, in other words, the violent overthrow of the capitalist State and the founding of the new State of the proletariat, with the Marxist Party clearly at the head of it.

To guarantee the socialist transformation, triggering this political struggle and conquering power is therefore not enough.

However, just as it would be wrong to say that by means of a simple political coup, a putsch of the Blanqui type, we can introduce full socialism in New Guinea, it would likewise be wrong to exclude those situations where we should take power even in the full knowledge on that basis alone the socialist transformation will not take place.

Therefore, those who said: “Bolsheviks! Without the revolution in Europe you will not build socialism” were not wrong. But that wasn’t what the philistines said. They said that as the communists were unable to guarantee the socialist transformation, they should not take power, even if – as history would bear out – they had the capacity to do so; they should instead delegate power to other classes and parties, or at any rate they should support, and put themselves at the disposal of, a Lvov or Kerensky provisional government.

But the Russian communists did not reply that they wanted – and had to – take power because it was the means to make Russia, even on its own, socialist. At that time they weren’t even dreaming of that. They had, and proclaimed to the world, a different set of historical reasons, far more wide‑ranging than the problems of the future Russian economy. It wasn’t a race to administer Russia as if it were a big farm or manufacturing trust. It was a race to expel from power and overthrow political and class forces which would undoubtedly have postponed indefinitely the future Russian and global socialist transformation, further destabilised the country’s contingent economy, and exposed Russia to the serious threat of counter-revolution, not in the sense of keeping a Kerensky or a Miliukov in power, but in the sense of abandoning power to the reactionary governments emanating from the imperialist countries in the German or the Anglo‑French bloc; or even to the resurgent forces of tsarism, which would have reared its head again in its classic role as policeman of the democratic revolution in Russia, and of the proletarian revolution in the rest of Europe.

The only party which had a clear vision of these developments, which was able to face up to these dangers, and which made the impotence and progressive betrayal of all the other parties abundantly clear was Lenin’s. The communists in all countries applauded it when it took all power into its own hands, invited it to keep a firm hold on it, and did all they could to parry the blows of its thousand and one enemies. They didn’t ask it to build socialism, but they did expect – less so the petty bourgeois exiles – to be shown how socialists should live.

And the Russians would have been bound to ask the same of the Europeans. It came, preceded by another clear request: overthrow capital where it is fully mature, take power, proclaim the dictatorship as an intrinsic historical task of the proletariat, of it alone; of the Communist Party.

21 – Production and Politics

But if no immediate prospect of socialist production is in sight, and you have to grit your teeth and witness, as though it were new, the capitalist form spreading, is not economic determinism contradicted by the fact is that a socialist political power rests on an economy that is not yet socialist? The argument is a specious one. For a start a genuine socialist economy, once it has emerged from capitalist and mercantile forms, has no need to generate powers, socialist or otherwise: on the contrary, it does without them.

Anyone who gets bogged down in this difficulty has entirely failed to understand the great historical polemic on the dictatorship. We would not be telling the anarchists that the State and dictatorial violence will be needed after the overthrow of the bourgeois State, if we were unable to demonstrate that in a far from brief period in the super‑industrialised countries themselves, the proletariat will be the governing, politically dominant class, while yet remaining economically in large part an exploited class.

The super‑structure of the capitalist mode of production equates with the inertia that exists in the ideology and behaviour of both the capitalists and of those they oppress. It will disappear very slowly, and the revolutionary government has a duty to suppress it.

The precise formula is not that the superstructure of State power differs according to the form of production (absolute monarchy for feudalism, liberal republic for capitalism and so on) but is that established in the pages of the Manifesto: the State is an organ for the domination of one class by another.

The following two situations are therefore plausible: capitalist State which guarantees the domination of the bourgeoisie over the workers; and socialist State which having only just started to eliminate the capitalist mode of production, ensures its destruction by being the organ of the domination of the force of the proletariat over the remaining exploiters. These situations are followed by a third: no more exploiting or exploited class, socialist mode of production, no more State.

If a mode of production, like the Russian one, is for the most part feudal with capitalism established in a few spots, history has realized a case in which the control and rule of a State held by proletarians alone is dedicated to the complete eradication of the feudal mode and does not yet attack the capitalist one; and it is not possible to say when such a conjunctural period will end, it being determined and influenced by all the diverse productive structures in the various countries of a highly complex zone.

But clearly such a period cannot go on indefinitely, and as a matter of fact a time limit was set on it by both Marx and Lenin: it was the time the impure Russian revolution would take to spread to a pure European one, which both thought would be shorter.

The component parties in the same international may historically be handling an impure revolution on one side, and a pure (developed socialist) revolution on the other, or just revolutionary action against the bourgeois powers that haven’t yet fallen. This relation of forces must reach a point where the equilibrium is broken: and reached it was, tipping in the direction of counter-revolution.

22 – Infamy and Philistines

But it is really too much to have to put up with those infinitely hypocritical objections to Russian communism disguised as accusations of violation of Marxism. They shout that the terrorist dictatorship of the Bolsheviks was ferocious and unjust using the theoretical pretext that the latter was unable to uproot all bourgeois relations. But if it had done so, how much louder they would have screamed!

In fact those who were scandalized by the communist dictatorship in Russia were those who were scandalized, with the renegade Kautsky at their head, that we wanted to apply it in Europe, ready for rapid socialist transformation though it was.

In reality the arguments were not about the negative aspects and backwardness of the Russian economy, but about a loathsome subjection to bourgeois ideologies, to limitations of bourgeois origin which the proletariat was supposed to impose on itself. We were told we should wait until capitalism was in full bloom, because then the number of workers would be such that the path of persuasion and of the class idyll would lead to a non‑violent victory. It was therefore in the name not of hastening to reach socialist society, but of the “absolute value” of the democratic principle and bourgeois idealism that it was claimed the Bolsheviks had stopped trampling on the parties which, for example, had more votes than them in the “freely elected” constituent assembly.

Now, the condition on which the Bolsheviks could have kept their Marxist credentials intact, and hung on to power in Russia for much longer – although certainly not for ever – was by continuing to declare, as Lenin had always done without pretending otherwise, that they were still unable to build socialism.

And their credentials certainly remained intact on the hundred and one occasions when, in successive waves of genuine revolutionary action, they throttled the openly counter-revolutionary forces and stifled the ignoble caterwauling of the defeatists. Because not only did they prevent an even more unfavourable and counter-revolutionary situation existing today, but they confirmed the teaching that the sermons and mind‑bending conjurations of bourgeois prejudice won’t necessarily be powerful enough to stop the hand of the proletariat once it is up on its feet; and that material power need not be subjected, before its inexorable deployment, to the censorship of its treacherous adversary, which with power in his own hands would not consider giving it up for a single second or give a damn about human life, unless it is his own.