An Analysis of October and Perspectives on the Future in a Text by Lenin

The text we are presenting here (Better Fewer, But Better) was written by Lenin on March 2, 1923 and first appeared in Pravda two days later. Presented as the last article he wrote in his own lifetime, it was intended as a further contribution towards solving the tough challenges faced by the Russian Revolution. According to political gossipers, it represented his “political testament”, together with a bunch of other documents first made public after the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956, with the intention of denouncing Stalinism from a “right-wing” perspective, using arguments that were even worse, more counter-revolutionary and late-bourgeois reactionary than those of Stalin in his lifetime; arguments that were therefore even further from those of Lenin and of all authentic communists past and present.

We have no need to learn the “last words” of our teachers, and still less their “last will and testament” in the sense of passing on private property. The complete Lenin, with all of his gigantic collected works spanning 30 years, the man and the party comrade, always informed by the complete Marx, stands for a coherent reading of social reality in accordance with our monolithic and scientific historical doctrine. It has neither beginning nor end in the continuum of party life. If Lenin’s health had not deteriorated he would have continued to write in this way, or perhaps we should say he would not have been prevented from doing so by the infamous maneuvers within the party.

The choice of this text is therefore partly random, since we could draw on any one of many others by Lenin to point to similar conclusions. This one lays out the situation of Russia in 1923 and assesses the first five years since October. We have already referred to this document in our 1955 work, Economic and Social Structure of Contemporary Russia (“Struttura”), in particular Chapter 101 of Part 2, entitled “A farewell to Lenin” and earlier chapters [This work is available also in French, “Structure économique et sociale de la Russie d’aujourd’hui” and in Spanish “Estructura economica y social de la Rusia actual”].

The situation was objectively complex and difficult. Post-revolutionary Russia was a society of phases, the opposite of homogeneity, in which layers of social geology lay one upon the other and which, as Lenin taught, extended from partiarchy, to small-scale mercantile agriculture, to private capitalism and right through to State capitalism and the embryonic forms of communist economy: all evolving and in opposition and struggle against each otherl. Politically, we have the dictatorship of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets, led solely by the communist party; but the revolution was far from having been accomplished, the powerful forces of the bourgeois counter-revolution, even though for the moment driven from the field by the weapons of the red army, still offered blunt resistance, both inside and outside Russia, in a network of dethroned classes and the embassies and general staffs of the leading capitalist States, planning and organizing their counterattack.

In a backward country the burden of tradition, which is more feudal than bourgeois, is particularly onerous; tradition seeps “through every fissure” and even the Soviet State’s own structure cannot be made water-tight.

Capitalism was germinating powerfully and spontaneously in Russia, out of historical necessity. And despite the desperate economic conditions of the country, this represented progress, even in our sense, as it created the material premise for an ineluctable transition towards socialism: both economically, since this lays the modern structures and infrastructures without which socialism is impossible, and socially, because the resurgence of an extensive, developed and concentrated industrial class of wage laborers, which is the true foundation, driving force and source of energy for communist power.

Therefore, communists in Russia, if they want to stay in power, must at the same time:

1. Continue to maintain good relations with the peasantry, as they have simultaneously triggered and won the revolution in the countryside and fought courageously in the revolutionary army; Soviet power and the only communist and working class party is based on the alliance with them; the peasantry, of whom by far the greatest part are small or very small producers as a result of the revolution and the dispossession of the great landowners, constitute a petty bourgeoisie with a mentality that is as conservative as may be imagined; yet they are essential to feed the cities and the army.
2. It is therefore necessary to accede to, and foster the development of capitalism, which implies the re-establishment of internal free trade; there is not yet an industrial complex that can be controlled by the Soviet State and that could supply the peasants with its own products (machinery, fertilizers and so on) in exchange for grain. It is still not goods that are required but commodities, regardless of where, how and by whom they are produced, that can be exchanged for money.
3. We must push this reborn capitalism towards the most modern forms of automation and large-scale industry all the way to State capitalism; hence the need to resort to loans from abroad, from our implacable enemies in England and France who, as members of the bourgeoisie, cannot help but run wherever they smell good business; we must also seek out the advice of the necessary experts and technicians etc. and pay the going rate.
4. All of this while maintaining the communist power of the working class by means of its party, not with the perspective of “building socialism” in isolated Russia, but in anticipation of the revolution in the West, even if, as we said, “it takes 50 years”. It was a matter of keeping a tight rein, for so long as possible, on the infernal anarchic and subversive forces of revived capitalism, which were exerting pressure on all sides, internally and internationally; we could only rely on the strength of the working class in power, seizing the conquests of the revolution, first of all through State ownership of all the land and the monopoly of foreign trade. There was no path open other than to seek to hold capitalism “under siege” with the power of the communist State.

This was the extremely difficult situation that the party was faced with at the time, which Lenin investigates and deconstructs and for which he tries to identify not “new paths” but the correct Marxist line of action.

The text that we are presenting here is therefore as difficult as the complexity of the situation we were going through. It is always amazing the way that Lenin presents the lofty and severe historical dialectic, with crystalline simplicity and always in an orthodox reading of Marxism. He drills through all the overlapping strata of Russian society: pre-bourgeois, middle-bourgeois, large-bourgeois, a reality that he connects to the situation of global imperialism, for which he advances valid considerations and forecasts: a capitalism in deadly crisis, but always on the rampage against the first ever Communist State. But his thinking, as ever, is focused on another phase, that of our worldwide revolution.

For the purpose of strengthening the Soviet State, “in pitiful conditions”, Lenin therefore proposed reforming the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection with a view consolidating it and its greater authority and prestige within the State’s organs and within the Party. There should be, in his words, a high-level institute of technicians, of educated and expert workers, that draws its members both from the Party and from the State; that imposes itself thanks to the general respect for which it has proved worthy.

Not that Lenin ignores the latent, ineluctable, explosion of the conflict of interests between the two revolutionary classes, the workers and the peasantry, but he sees the possibility of containing it, or of putting it off “for some decades”, in a “civil” and “cultural” development, which in Marxist language means acquiring technical knowledge already typical of bourgeois societies and the capitalist ability to employ them practically on a large scale. So: let’s reopen factories, at least the pre-war ones, let’s bring electricity to the farms of the boundless country, together with tools, seeds, fertilizers and agronomists; with incentives from the State, these farms will be encouraged to regroup in cooperatives, where the low productivity of agricultural labor will be raised, freeing former peasants, who will be welcomed into new factories as wage laborers.

Thus, while this is certainly not yet an instrument of communist planning “of things”: simply an ”inspection”, for the moment principally against corruption and waste, to “hold out”. This is so, even if we want to catch a glimpse of something in that direction, something extra that is post-corporate and purely “technical”; something also joyful, as our struggle for communism always is, or even jocular, as Lenin comes to write. This of course has nothing to do with the Stalinist “plans”, which reduced this dialectic to the mere accumulation of capital, not to then be able to overthrow its power in capitalist States and to break up social relations based on wage labor and commodity exchange.

The opportunity to proceed in the direction of communism was an international and not a merely Russian issue; a condition for this was that the communist party should stay in power and stay communist. We know that on the contrary, in the space of a few years, the politics of the Russian party changed direction by 180 degrees to dedicate itself to “building socialism” in Russia alone, having become a party devoted to the accumulation of national capital as an end in itself. The alliance of workers and peasants was therefore turned on its head, with the interests of “kolkhozized” peasants prevailing socially over those of the workers and politically against any socialist and internationalist perspectives. The “Soviet” State became a facade, just like the “democratic” States of the West, to hide the dictatorship of national and international capital.

In the last part, which we publish in full, Lenin goes on to lay out the future prospects for the international revolution, against the backdrop of a deep crisis among the capitalisms of Europe, especially in Germany, and the growing clash of interests between the United States and Japan, which already led him to predict the next war.

But he regarded the setting in motion of the populous countries of the Orient as a massively progressive factor. Here we had full confirmation of how powerful revolutionary processes matured and how they broke out. Here too, however, the lack of a faithful, wise and coherent Marxist communist leadership of the insurgent masses of workers and peasants prevented, over the course of a few years, the exceptional and inevitable phenomenon of the Russian October from being favorably repeated in China.

The historic cycle of the double revolutions, as Marx and Lenin had already predicted in our communist doctrine, according to which the global working class achieved its first victory in October, maintaining it for a few years, and had glimpsed the next in the Orient – this cycle has been fulfilled with the universal assertion of national bourgeoisies over the old regimes and the old classes. One hundred years later and ahead of the future revolution of the working class and its only party, the great lessons of October remain chiseled, not yet in the minds of the proletariat, but in the hard granite of the impersonal historical experience of the class party, anticipators of the future. Along with Lenin, we list these as:
     1. October set the definitive seal on authentic left-wing Marxism as the only adequate scientific reading of history, the basis of the program for the emancipation of the working class and its consequent social action;
     2. The need for the Party to stand at the head of the proletariat for its constitution as a class and as a ruling class, in the phases of the preparation and seizure of political power, is confirmed;
     3. The necessary historical course of the assumption of power and the installation of a revolutionary State, exclusively directed by the Communist Party, is reaffirmed;
     4. The need for an entire phase of State dictatorship of the proletariat for the repression of counter-revolutionary attempts by the dispossessed, but not yet dispersed classes.
     5. For the demolition of democracy in theory to the practical dismantling of its institutions.
     6. The condemnation of the imperialist war on both sides, defeatism; the repudiation of all military alliances and putting an end to imperialist war with the revolutionary war.

We, today’s small party, claim to orient ourselves and continue to move on the lines marked out by this great and permanent magnetic field of social forces, in the certainty that the truths of October, after the fallacies and inconsistencies of false disciples and opponents over a century, will return to impose themselves on the scene of the revolutionary struggle between classes.