The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (Pt. 9)

74. The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets

The congress opened on 3/16 June 1917 and continued until 24 June/7 July, with long debates which for the time being left the situation as they had found it. However, this congress would mark the end of the Bolshevik Party’s phase of legal preparation, of agitation on the platform established by the April Theses, and a new one would open, not of the party’s transition to the insurrectional attack however, but rather the phase of it being attacked by the counter-revolution, the end of the utilization of the public liberties, of it being forced back “underground”, that is back to the illegal activity which the party was so good at.

In power, as we know, was the coalition government established on 6/19 May between the bourgeoisie and the social-opportunists, consisting of: Lvov, president, ten other ministers, who were either Kadets or Octobrists (the “ten capitalist ministers”), the Mensheviks, Tsereteli and Skobolev, and the Social Revolutionaries and allies Kerensky, Pereverzev, Černov and Peshekonov. Kerensky, who’d sold his soul to the western allies, was at war; the Socialist Revolutionary Party was at that time numerically the most influential party in Russia.

Three months separate Lenin’s arrival from the July insurrection: his rearmament of the party was effective: on the theoretical side through having precisely defined its objectives, on the tactical side with the policy of carrying out, for the present, organizational activity, propaganda and agitation among the masses.

It is from this phase that the tradition would emerge, later excessively trumpeted, of a special ‘recipe’ that ‘Bolshevization’ would confer, as an alarm call to wake up the masses if they dozed off, by tenacious, unrelenting work and so on, like in a hackneyed, demagogic campaign. Such a recipe was employed for the entire duration of Stalinian rule in a hypocritical, philistine and intimidating way, to silence anyone who saw, instead, the true tradition being basely and blatantly betrayed. It was, instead, a matter of a particular approach to evaluating the historic transition, anticipated and expected in the after long theoretical preparation, and not an expedient of charlatans for the resolving of stagnant situations wherever and whenever they occurred. Today we have been stagnating for thirty years, but back then the situation evolved from one week to the next. Not at all times is it appropriate to go to the “great masses”, but only when they are moving in a revolutionary direction: a time that one seeks to understood, not to provoke into being.

Those three months, at that specific time and place, were certainly not wasted. The Central Committee in April had summed up its tasks as follows:

“(1) To explain the proletarian line and the proletarian way of ending the war;

(2) To criticize the petty-bourgeois policy of placing trust in the government of the capitalists and compromising with it;

3) To carry on propaganda and agitation from group to group in every regiment, in every factory, and, particularly, among the most backward masses, such as domestic servants, unskilled laborers, etc., [not from Lenin’s pen, this, or just badly translated, if the domestic servants of city and countryside, deteriorated version of the of the Russian serf, appear alongside purely agricultural workers] since it was above all them that the bourgeoisie sought to use as leverage in days of the crisis;

(4) To organize, organize and once more organize the proletariat, in every factory, in every district and in every city quarter”.

This is an excellent historical lesson in the study of revolutionary processes; it is not a philosophy, as eternal as it is worthless, of organization, a historical form whose effectiveness lies in its content, and which is not revolutionary automatically, and can indeed be the opposite. Indeed it is the explosive play of the social forces that we follow.

On the eve of the congress the Bolsheviks measured the degree of their assiduous preparation: at the Conference of the Factory and Shop committees held between May 30 and 3 June (12 -16 June new style), in which three quarters of the delegates accepted Lenin’s Bolshevik line – well illustrated in the ‘Resolution on Measures to Cope with Economic Disorganisation’ -, at the conference of the Bolshevik military organizations held during the All-Russian Congress of soldiers, and on other occasions and demonstrations. The worker’s trade unions had increased during that period to 130 newly constituted ones in the capital and 2000 throughout Russia.

75. The Line-up at the Congress

The All-Russian Congress, which opened on 3/16 June under the direction of the opportunist leaders in the government and of the capital’s Soviet, consisted of more than a thousand delegates, but only 822 had a deliberative vote. Of these, 285 were Socialist-Revolutionaries, 248 Mensheviks, and these, together with a variety of smaller fractions, were in the overwhelming majority. The Bolsheviks numbered a mere 105. Represented at the Congress were 305 unified local soviets of peasant and soldier deputies from throughout Russia; 53 regional and provincial soviets; 21 organizations from the active army; 8 from the reserve army; and 5 from the navy. This was the disposition of a gigantic, organized, armed force: it showed itself to be totally impotent.

At this congress the solid Bolshevik fraction had neither the aim of achieving a Bolshevik majority, nor that of attacking the congress from without if it rejected its proposals. The step being taken then was just promoting as widely as possible the revolutionary program which the party had adopted in April.

Sitting in the presidency for the Bolsheviks were Kamenev, Zinoviev, Nogin and Krylenko. The main speakers were Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. But the work of the fraction was quietly being led by two strong-arm organizers – Stalin and Sverdlov, who never went to the tribune. Trotsky was not yet in the Bolshevik Party. He rightly remarks that if Sverdlov hadn’t died, soon he would have assumed the role, close as he was to Lenin, of the party’s organizing secretary.

However, the Bolsheviks, who as the facts would show were already in control of the masses in the capital Petrograd and could have exerted pressure on the congress from without, for the last time waged a great battle of words and ideas, on a neutral terrain, a declaration of war alongside the bourgeoisie as much as the opportunists, who were still vested in dividing up the legacy of Tsarism between them.

The primary question was the attitude to take towards the provisional government. The Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks would uphold the position, in the All-Russian Congress, which had hitherto prevailed in the Petrograd Soviet, that is, to leave governmental power to the coalition ministry, formed outside the Soviets, inside the equivocal committee which claimed to trace itself back to the old Duma “elected” under the Tsar. And meanwhile everything should be deferred until the Constituent Assembly, to be democratically elected “as in the liberal, civilized countries”.

Tsereteli, one of the most talkative speakers, repeated for the umpteenth time:

“At the present moment, there’s no political party in Russia that says: give us power, leave, we will occupy your place. Such a party in Russia doesn’t exist”.

The old rhetorician was confident of his effect on the audience, but a voice – Lenin’s – answered him from one of the delegates’ benches:

“Such a party exists!”

Amidst much commotion and astonished comments Lenin took the platform:

“He [Tsereteli] said that there is no political party in Russia that would express willingness to take all State power into its hands. I say: ‘Such a party exists! No party has a right to refuse power, and our party does not refuse it. Our party is ready at any moment to take all power into its hands!”.

76. Lenin’s Interventions

This narrative is perhaps a bit fictionalized, but we have in Lenin’s “Works” two texts: the first is the speech that he gave on June 4th on the question of the attitude to take towards the government, and the other concerns the proposed resolution on the burning agrarian question.

In the speech (official minutes of the non-Bolshevik Soviet?) we can read the response to Tsereteli’s quoted sentence: evidently Lenin followed up on his earlier interruption and the statement that he was ready to take power. There follows in parentheses: (Applause, laughter). Indeed, the congress partly applauded the open declaration; the congress leaders, poor saps, snickered ostentatiously: they were the ones who had claimed back in April: Lenin will remain alone, while we will stand at the head of the revolution!

The first task of the Marxist movement, declared to be an organization for making historical forecasts, is to tirelessly compare the facts with the predictions of those good men who treat us as visionaries. And this is what we have to offer.

Before quoting the passages that made Tsereteli’s laughter fall flat, let us emphasize for a moment this historical fact: the party NEVER conceals that it is constructed to hold power, on its own.

Mind you: at the very moment that Lenin, as regards the tactics he defends, is deemed to be an unpredictable and unscrupulous tightrope walker, an acrobat of unprincipled double-standards – by those who have never understood anything – he deals his cutting blow very calmly. The situation is this, he says, it is not a matter of constructing a socialist society, of implementing the socialist program; nor is it even about threatening to take action in the streets tomorrow, about insurrectionary violence, or of using the platform to advocate that to the masses; he declares that the aim is still to use the available legal channels for propaganda purposes; it is not said – though it will be said, and, as we shall see, in the doctrine it is theorized from now on – that by remaining in the minority one would see to it that the majority were edged out; the Soviet isn’t asked to immediately assume power, under threat of a boycott. None of all this, but, by the infernal Gods, while neither announcing nor threatening that revolution was at the door, it is loudly proclaimed that the party of the working class exists to achieve this sole aim: to seize power from the government, and certainly not, particularly in the phase most unfavorable to it, to participate in it only to end up being dragged along in the train of some other administration.

And the latter applies to Lenin’s “pupils”, who say they have learned from him that flexibility which call-girls learn from their pimp, and (today 1955) that their party has no other aim than the good of the nation, and to that end anyone who wants to can govern it. Swine!

77. The Bolshevik Position

It is in a hostile environment that Lenin speaks, and the other incident is accurately recorded in the minutes.

(Chairman: Your time is up).

Lenin: I’ll be through in half a minute… (Noise, requests that the speech be continued, protests, applause).

(Chairman: The presidium proposes to the Congress that the time of the speaker be extended. Any objections? The majority is for extending the time).

The speech will end amid “applause from a part of the audience”.

Lenin begins by asking: what type of institution is this assembly? Can you say it exists in any other country in the world? No. And so the question is this: either a bourgeois government as exists in all other countries today, or this institution to which we are appealing today to decide on the question of power. Now this new institution is a government, of which examples can be found in the history of the greatest revolutionary upheavals, as, for example, in France in 1792 and 1871, and in Russia in 1905.

Lenin’s conclusion is familiar to us: it is a conclusion opposed to coexistence. The bourgeois government of the parliamentary type, and the Soviet, cannot co-exist: therefore, either the former is suppressed, or the latter will be crushed by the counter-revolution or at best make a laughing-stock of itself.

In accordance with this doctrine (Vain is the thought, Lenin cries out, that this is only a theoretical question), from then up to now, we have always called ‘blabbermouths’ those who, in the absence of any real movement, and with a bourgeois parliamentary government still firmly in place, want to “found Soviets in Italy”.

Everyone is fond of building, constructing and founding. The bourgeois animus of the building firm! We are revolutionaries insofar as we aspire only to tear down, demolish and destroy!

But we would like to dwell a moment on the very remarkable claim that an institution of government which arose from the exploited masses occurred not only in 1905 Russia and with the Paris Commune, but also “in 1792 France”.

This is a thesis of Marx and Lenin’s that rests on very solid foundations. The French Revolution of 1789-1793 was a bourgeois revolution, i.e., it was determined by the pressure of the capitalist mode of production which needed to replace feudalism; nor could there have been any other social perspective than the passing of economic privilege and political power from the feudal nobility to the big bourgeoisie. But the clash manifested itself as a collision of the mass of urban and rural poor against the ancien régime and its defenders: and it is precisely a revolution that historically straddles feudalism and capitalism that can best be described as a truly popular revolution. It was a class revolution fought for the bourgeoisie, but not by the bourgeoisie, who sent the poor, and the middle class intelligentia, to fight for them. Our revolution will be a true class revolution rather than a popular one, because the proletariat will engage in a revolution for itself, and what is more it will abolish all classes; the working class will make this happen, and it alone

In 1917 Russia, between February and October, we don’t have the historic problem of the revolution in-between capitalism and socialism, but rather that of the revolution from feudalism to capitalism. In distant 1792 there was a second bourgeois revolution, and the poor people were able to fight but not govern, whereas in the more recent one in 1917, we are talking about the… penultimate bourgeois revolution, and the proletariat, already with a significant presence, had to fight with the whole of the people and govern with them – exerting hegemony over them.

78. “Popular” Revolutions

We won’t at this point examine what Marx and Lenin had to say about a dualism of power in the anti-feudal revolution which had already revealed itself in the French Revolution of the 18th century (and we could say also in the English ones of the 17th Century, in the time of Cromwell and then of William of Orange’s) and ended up in both those cases with the defeat of the embryonic “people’s power” and the triumph of the minority propertied class of manufacturers, bankers and bourgeois landowners. In this conception we see counterposed to the first Parliament, to the Estates General, of 1789, the extremist Convention of 1793, which expressed the revolutionary ardor of the urban sans-culottes and the incendiary serfs from the countryside, succumbing in the Thermidor to the power of the big bourgeoisie, as quite a while after the Commune would succumb to Thiers’ thugs.

Although skipping such an analysis we will quote a passage from Lenin which confirms that the Russian Revolution was a wholly bourgeois revolution, and of all of those it played out as a “truly popular” one – which does not contradict the thesis that it triumphed in October as a revolution that was politically socialist, but which aimed to achieve an anti-capitalist social development, even though, at the end of the cycle, with the defeat of the revolutionary and internationalist party after the defeat of the European communists, it withdrew – no less than the French revolution of 1793 did – into the great feudalism-to-capitalism transition. The passage is this, from “State and Revolution”.

“If we take the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we shall, of course, have to admit that the Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions. Neither of them, however, is a “people’s” revolution, since in neither case does the mass of the people, their vast majority, come out actively, independently, with their own economic and political demands. […] The Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 [Lenin is writing between February and October, at the time of the June congress in fact, and here denounces Tsereteli, just a few days after the speech we are examining, for having put forward his candidature for the job of executioner of the Bolsheviks] was undoubtedly a “real people’s” revolution [a phrase taken from Marx and Engels, who relentlessly denounced the lack of this historical breakthrough in bourgeois Germany] since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest groups in society, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed”.

Here it is made clear that of all the bourgeois revolutions the Russian one was an exquisitely popular one, and that Lenin conducted a popular revolution in 1917, and was perfectly aware of the fact. And throughout all of this he remained on the path of the European anti-capitalist revolution, in a Europe in which the conditions of 1871 no longer existed:

“In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in any country on the Continent,” as he says immediately after the previous passage.

But vile and traitorous are those who say that it was Lenin himself who charted a new course for Europe’s class revolution, by demoting it to a “truly popular” one: whereas in fact the latter constituted a real promotion for a capitalist-bourgeois revolution, arising as it did, in Russia, from historical feudalism.

Had such a revolution occurred, which he did not see, the Russian revolution would not have descended from a popular to a capitalist one, but suddenly truly ascended from a popular one to a proletarian, classist and communist one.

But let us return to the First Congress of Soviets.

79. “Revolutionary Democracy”

Lenin derides the obsession the opportunists have with this phrase. He does not depart from the line he’d been following for twenty years (as Stalinism would have it) and does not deny at all that he is proposing in the democratic revolution is a dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants. It is you, he says, who shouldn’t be talking about revolutionary democracy, but rather of “reformist democracy with a capitalist ministry”. And it’s here that the speaker turns to someone he certainly doesn’t call comrade, but “citizen-Minister of Posts and Telegraphs” and gives him the answer that aroused the aforementioned laughter in the opportunists.

“You can laugh as much as you please, but if the citizen-Minister confronts us with this question [about power] side by side with a party of the Right, [an old expedient of the renegades!] he will receive a suitable reply. No party can refuse this. And at a time when liberty still prevails, when threats of arrest and exile to Siberia—threats from the counter-revolutionaries with whom our near socialist Ministers are sharing government—are still no more than threats, every party says: give us your confidence and we shall give you our programme. This programme was given by our conference on April 29. […]. I shall try to give to the citizen-Minister of Posts and Telegraphs a popular explanation of our resolution, and our programme”.

Lenin follows up with an exposition of the ideas and proposals set out in April. The government wants the war to continue, because it is in the interests of the Russian and foreign capitalists, and it’s a government of that very class.

But Lenin’s confutation of Tsereteli on the right of parties under a liberty endorsing regime had a great dialectical and polemical flavor. Lenin was unfortunately never able to review the volumes of his Works… Lenin foresaw it would be a matter of days before the Bolsheviks were outlawed, as the only enemies of the coalition with the bourgeoisie, i.e., of serfdom under the bourgeoisie.

He contrasts the two alternatives: If, in order to prevent the proletariat, and our party, from getting in to power, you take repressive measures against us, against our being able to agitate in the Soviet elections, in the press, etc, this would demonstrate the correctness of our thesis very well. But as long as you assert that democratic freedom has triumphed with you, then why, after the consultation of the laboring classes within a revolutionary democracy, do you demand that the assembly of Soviets on principle respect the power of a pre-established center that is outside it? You invite workers to elect Menshevik and SR delegates, you invite them to follow these parties that call themselves socialist; but by what logic, if these parties claim on principle that they don’t want to come to power?

This argument, which is as clear as it is incisive, aims to achieve the following set of results: only the Soviets are to have power and form the basis of the government. But for this to be possible it is necessary that within the Soviets there cannot prevail parties that declare themselves to be workers’ parties, but which renounce at the outset any possibility of taking power.
80. Political Economic Measures

Lenin’s speech also throws light on the question of practical anti-capitalist measures which the coalition government is powerless to implement. The opportunists here defend themselves with the usual ruse: the economic situation is serious; Russia is poor and has been further impoverished by the war. Calling for measures against big industry means claiming to “install” socialism: they call themselves socialists, but they object, entirely out of context, that socialism follows only on the basis of developed capitalism. Lenin explains that this isn’t what it is about, but only about going forward in the sense of pursuing the workers’ interests and opposing bourgeois interests. In April we merely asked, he said, for an investigation into the 500-800 per cent profits obtained by the war magnates from war contracts, by chucking a few of them into prison for a while so they can reveal all, and by means of workers’ control in the factories. This is not socialism.

We’re still at the same point in the polemic. They are a series of steps which can be taken in our class struggle, possible even when socialism isn’t, which as a point of arrival is not to be found within the revolution in Russia, although it must remain the final aim of the class and the party. So, we are talking about workers’ control, about compulsory cartelization, that is, the establishment of State-controlled industrial trade unions. Bourgeois governments also do this (in Italy the various “Institutes for Industrial Reconstruction”) but for the purpose of increasing capitalist profits with State money: the revolution must do this in order to forfeit a part of the profits. And finally, but only later, will the Bolsheviks propose the nationalization of factories.

From 1918, and in 1921, Lenin will explain that this is not, even with expropriation without compensation, a question of socialism, but of climbing the rung of State capitalism, which is on the march towards socialism.

But you must pose the question as a concrete relationship of political forces. The revolutionary party gives the order for the nationalization of the factories of the heavy arms industry, to strengthen the armed power of the State itself and the political power of the working class. The opportunists oppose this, because they don’t want to take either profits or power from the capitalists, and they assume that socialism not being mature, it is not the time to nationalize the great means of production! The correct response is twofold: nationalization of industry is State capitalism, and not yet socialism (not even in the sense of the lower stage of communism). But in denying this measure and in supporting it one has an act of fighting against socialism and for socialism, with the proletariat leading the latter fight even in the knowledge that it comes to administer the political power, still under a democratic form, of a bourgeois society.

81 – The Congress Recoils

Lenin will conclude by saying that the revolution cannot rest: it must take all those real steps forward, or must surrender to the counterrevolution if it retreats. But the time is not yet ripe, and this First Congress draws back, voting for Tsereteli, and for Chernov. But not before the Bolsheviks had given a full demonstration that what the government wanted, and was conducting, was a war of imperial conquest; that it was preparing disastrous military offensives; that it was not upholding the rights of the urban workers against the greed of the bosses; and that it was deceiving the peasants by stopping any land reform until after the Constituent Assembly had deliberated on it.

In this connection, for the umpteenth time, powerful indeed is Lenin’s draft of the – rejected – resolution on the agrarian question, in the plan drawn up by him for the First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Deputies on May 17th-June 10th (i.e., May 4th-May 28th old calendar).

The socio-economic formulas are the well-known and strictly Marxist ones: “It is necessary to encourage the conversion of all large, landed estates into model farms, cultivating the land collectively with the aid of the best implements under the direction of agricultural experts and in accordance with the decision of the local Soviets of Agricultural Laborers’ Deputies”.

More than ever the populist partition and peasant ownership of small parcels of land is fiercely condemned.

But it’s the second point that’s politically interesting. “The peasantry must, in an organized manner, through their Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies, immediately take over all the land […] without however in any way prejudicing thereby the final establishment of land regulations by the Constituent Assembly or by the All-Russia Council of Soviets, should the people decide to vest the central power of the state in such a Council of Soviets”.

Here the text is influenced equally strongly by positions of principle and doctrine and a historical perspective that is confidently sketched out.

The Soviets, if they are not to disappear, and having failed on top of all the other tasks in that of collectively receiving the land of the big landowners, and preventing its fragmentation, will certainly reach the point of having to take over the central State power themselves and liquidate the Provisional Government. With the latter eliminated, there will be no more need for the Constituent Assembly since the “constituents”, in agrarian matters and in every other matter, will be the Soviets and the Supreme Central Council.

We can already envisage the condemnation, which seemed – to idiots – an impromptu stopgap due to not having won a majority, of the future Constituent Assembly to a not very flattering liquidation so soon after its birth!

No constitutional or organizational form can, on its own, work miracles on the basis of its own inherent virtues.

This congress, opportunist and fearful of capitalist power, proved it. Soon we would hear Lenin deliver a very different condemnation; the slogan Power to the Soviets applies only so long as the Soviets act as a class-based force, otherwise the formula must be changed, as would indeed happen: the class and its party can, if necessary, take power without the Soviets and against the majority within them.

Neither the external wrapper of parliamentary democracy, nor the particularly unstable and fleeting one of “revolutionary democracy” have any right to arrogate to themselves an exclusive claim on the revolution; which may proceed without, or even in opposition to, such forms, even when, as in fact was the case, the revolution is socially anti-feudal, and conducted as an anti-capitalist revolution only in the “potential” sense, and not yet in an “actual” sense.

During and after the Congress events would follow thick and fast.

82 – The June Struggles

During the Congress, which Menshevik and SR parties were sure they would control to the bitter end, the latter parties had prepared a rally in honor of those who died fighting for the revolution, setting the date for June 12th. But as concerns about the mood of the Petrograd proletariat began to set in, they hesitated, then reset the date to June 18th (July 1st). But on that same day, by a fateful coincidence, the new offensive on the German front would be unleashed, which the semi-demented Kerensky had fomented, and the plans for which, ready for some while, were the same as those of the Tsarist General Staff back in February, with the complicity of a number of counter-revolutionary generals, later to become notorious, such as Kornilov and Denikin.

The June demonstration achieved the exact opposite of what the Congress hucksters expected. The Petrograd workers took to the city squares with flags, placards, and a bold proclamation that thoroughly echoed the words of the Bolshevik party, “All Power to the Soviets!” – “Down with the ten capitalist ministers!” – “Peace, Bread and Freedom” – “Workers’ Control of Production” and the like. Although even before day 12 of the Congress there had been ranting by Dan and Tsereteli against the Bolsheviks, who were accused of counterrevolutionary plotting and sabotaging the revolution, the June 18th demonstration saw the peaceful mobilization of half a million citizens from Petrograd and the neighboring centers. The extremely few groups with slogans which expressed confidence in the Provisional Government were mocked and dispersed by the demonstrators themselves, and the opportunists became seriously afraid. The Menshevik newspapers would write stuff like this: “The June 18th demonstration turned into a demonstration of lack of faith in the Provisional Government. Outwardly it produced a deplorable impression. It seemed that revolutionary Petrograd had broken away from the All-Russian Congress of Soviets… A few days earlier the latter had given its vote of confidence in the government. On the 18th, the whole of revolutionary Petrograd seemed to express its clear lack of faith in it”.

For the Bolsheviks an armed confrontation on this occasion was not their intention at all, and they would contain the movement within the limits of a massive but peaceful demonstration. But in the meantime events were coming to a head: the opportunists were planning repressive measures, which they had bragged about in a public meeting, the soldiers were shuddering at the news of the successive mobilizations of units to the front, and the Petrograd workers, including not a few impatient Bolshevik comrades, were starting to ask themselves whether it wouldn’t be better to concentrate all forces on attacking the government and attempting to overthrow it.