The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (Pt. 5)

35 – April’s Benchmarks

There is no doubt that the arrival of Lenin in Russia, and the April Theses, which would follow within 24 hours, mark a historical turning point, a fundamental stage. But this must not be understood in the sense that they send out a new message to the world, give a new version of revolutionary dynamics, or that from that moment, as we wrote so long ago in these texts, the revolutionary socialist vision had been changed. The simplistic version, as though from a professorial chair, is that for the entire world proletariat the syllabus had changed. No more struggle, victory and attainment of power by the wage-earning proletariat as the springboard for the destruction of capitalism, and for the freeing of the productive forces in order to steer them towards the communist order: but struggle, victory and the attainment of the State by the people, by proletarians and semi-proletarians, workers and peasant proprietors: this then the banal and pedestrian interpretation whose lesson supposedly needs to be learnt by the proletarians in the west; in countries, that is, where capitalism has matured and is in an advanced state of decay before being violently put to death!

The turning point does not concern a capitalist country yielding to the process of socialist revolution, but a country with a decaying feudalism, in the throes of a bourgeois and popular revolution.

The April turning point is a powerful grabbing of the helm of the Bolshevik ship which was succumbing to the waves of petty-bourgeois opportunism, and which had strayed off the course that needs to be followed in a bourgeois revolution; it was a grabbing of the helm that required the eagle eyes and Herculean efforts of its steersman, but didn’t require him to plot a new unknown course, but rather to simply follow, and get others to follow, the course that was already indelibly marked on the navigation chart of History.

Everything that Lenin proclaims and sets down on paper in those historic theses is terribly against what they were doing in Russia; not only against what the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties were doing, but what the workers’ parties and his own one were doing as well. But at the same time, he is fiercely conformist to everything that had already been written, to the course mapped out by Marx and Engels in 1848 and a hundred times confirmed; and to the course traced out by Lenin himself from 1900 onwards for Russia. Impatient People who go weak at the knees at the mention of new, modern directives need only understand this: we defend the immutability of the course, but not its rectilinearity. It is full of difficult twists and turns. But these are not whims that arise in the head the capo, of the Leader, as Trotski himself puts it. Leader in fact means driver. Just because the leader of the party has the steering wheel in his hands doesn’t mean he has the arbitrary power to go in whatever direction he chooses; he is the driver of a train or of a tramcar. His power lies in knowing that the track is fixed, although certainly not straight all the way; he knows the stations through which it passes and the destination towards which he is driving, the curves and the slopes.

And he is certainly not the only one who knows it. The historically plotted course does not belong to just one thinking head, but belongs to an organization which transcends individuals, above all in time, forged by living history and by a doctrine, which is (for you a tough word) codified.

If this is denied then we are all of us done for, and no new Lenin will ever save us. We will take our manifestoes, books and theses to the pulping mill, in a common bankruptcy.

The April Theses therefore deal with a given, grandiose historical situation, encompassing a crucial year and the thunderous movement of a hundred and fifty million people. They don’t treat the situation as unexpected or new, as one which requires a makeshift solution, but graft it on to the deterministic lines which the doctrine – unitary and cast en bloc – of history and revolution, or rather revolutions, discovered. And discoveries do not evolve or improve. They are either discoveries, or they aren’t.

It seems therefore that Lenin makes his entrance like those who want to dismantle and smash everything up. To destroy is the only Marxist way of constructing and managing things. In the bourgeois and petty bourgeois swamp, and indeed for all dying classes, knowledge is folly, revolutionary truth is treated with hemlock. But on at least one occasion the scandalised conformists have been forced to swallow it. Stepping down from the train, the engineer lays into the opportunist obstacle with a few deft blows. And the train of history continues along its inexorable track; and along the only path which it could and had to take.

36 – Repel Defencism!

1. (Paragraph one). In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible.

After what we have mentioned repeatedly, no theoretical gloss is required. Clearly if the war was considered imperialist by Marxists when fought by England, France, Belgium, etc, one could hardly think that, since it was imperialist under the Tsar, it ceased to be so under a Russian bourgeois democratic government. In fact it became even more so, because that type of revolution, which Lenin had come to break up, involved a major linking up with the interests of big capital in the West.

It is worth highlighting this: the Bolsheviks had failed in revolutionary dialectics. They hadn’t understood that in Russia democracy was accepted, invoked and preached as an inevitable transitional bridge, but not as a situation in which the opposition between State and proletariat should be slackened just because the State passed to the bourgeoisie had assumed parliamentary forms: they hesitated to issue the defeatist slogan in the combatant army, merely because it was Lvov in Moscow and not Nicholas. Lenin wipes the whole thing away.

1. (Paragraph two). The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.

Firstly, we must draw attention to a formula which is by no means new, but is stated here very clearly, which develops the classic concept of the dictatorship of the workers and peasants, involving the “the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat”, and to be illustrated later on. But the important point to highlight is that due to doctrinal rigor, no less than to avoid blocking oneself in in future public situations (as will be seen) Lenin, although under enormous pressure to react to the “sympathy for the war”, which after February threatened to wreck everything, did not use the raw formula of “we are against all wars”. It is a fact that here simplistic extremism is ready to commit both errors: the pacifist and the militarist one.

Another important point that clearly needs to be made: the Russian war in 1939-45 was not revolutionary defencism because none of Lenin’s conditions were met: power was not in the hands of the proletariat and the poor peasants – there was no renunciation of annexations after the war, because in the first phase Poland was subjugated, in the second phase half of Europe – and not only was there no break with the interests of capital, but a brazen alliance with it: with German capital to get hold of Poland, and with Anglo-American capitalism to get hold of the rest.

37 – Defeatism Continues

1. (Paragraph three). In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is IMPOSSIBLE to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.

Lenin, who had seen defencism infiltrating his own party, fully evaluates the real extent of this danger of “cossack” national patriotism and ingeniously links it to the “pacifism” of the masses. The latter believes that it is Nicholas, William and Franz Joseph pushing for the war to continue, and that the “democratic” governments will quickly put a stop to it. It is necessary to explain that the opposite is the case, and that in our words “War suits democracy” more than it does despotism. The last excerpt is the one we need to know how to read. Lenin underlines the word IMPOSSIBLE, and if we had the original text we would see that the exact construction is: you shouldn’t invoke a democratic peace without violence, because therein lies only error and illusion, but call for the overthrow of capitalism. A shortlist of democratic capitalist States is not a guarantee of general peace, but a condition for imperialism. A thesis that is the opposite of the one, held in common by all those currently present at the Geneva Convention, which seeks to ward off war with “political honesty”; which maintains that peaceful coexistence is possible, and so on and so forth… whereas they are all plundering wolves.

1. (Paragraph four). The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the front. Fraternisation.

The urgency of the moment meant that this international point is indicated with a few strokes of the chisel. The illegal organization of military defeatism, the downing of weapons to embrace the enemy soldier, was not because Nicholas and his supporters (the provisional government however wanted to come to terms with Grand Duke Michael!) were in command of the army, but it was something that had to be carried out no less vigorously under the committee and the government of the Duma! The Cossacks ad honorem are flabbergasted, and try in vain to hide under the table.

38 – Transition: Between Which Two Stages?

2. (Paragraph one). The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is the TRANSITION from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.

Here the noun revolution is written without the adjectives which we have no hesitation in adding. In both the first and the second stages, we are dealing with a bourgeois and democratic revolution, an anti-feudal, non-socialist revolution.

A text is interpreted, normally, in such a way that the various passages and sections are susceptible to being ordered in a logical way. And the following excerpts, as well as the hundred and one formulations for over twenty years of the same thesis, clearly evidence this. There is more: the first stage, that gave power to a bourgeoisie that neither could nor wanted to carry out the anti-feudal revolution on its own, was only possible, as a simple prologue to the anti-tsarist revolution which everybody was expecting, due to the international fact of the imperialist war, which lent power to, and imposed obligations on, the local bourgeoisie, and which – due to the failures of the European parties when war broke out – caused disorientation among the nascent Russian proletariat, with the semi-proletarians leaning on the bourgeoisie and not on the workers.

It is now a matter of recuperating. Not in order to do more of what we were determined to do back in 1905, but of making up for the failure of having done much less than set out by the theoretical programme, namely: capitalist revolution with democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

2. (Paragraph two). This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally recognised rights (Russia is AT THE MOMENT the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.

This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the SPECIAL conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.

The words we have put in capitals were in italics in the original. In this passage the italicised words at this moment, and special, are the most eloquent. Dialectics teaches that often the response to the hypothesis that negates the existing state of affairs (democratic freedom), matters more than the response to that state of affairs itself (proletarian revolution).

Lenin was bombarded with objections about us being in the minority, that the workers do not understand (or, perhaps it is the professors of Marxism who don’t understand a damn thing?), that power is in the hands of the provisional government and the Soviet is in the majority for him and not for us, who have the advantage of being able to meet, talk, publish newspapers, etc… So then, says Lenin, how could it be better? Is this a reason for writing and talking rubbish? Should we maybe thank the liberal government for what they have bestowed by licking their boots, or at least (that gigantic blockhead Nenni having already shown how) by becoming its gallant and loyal opposition?

We must certainly take advantage of such largesse though: as Marx always said, the proletariat is, in spite of the victorious bourgeoisie, educated by it; not in school, but by being called to struggle, by being drawn into politics. In this lapsus of liberty we must sail against the current, open the eyes of the masses, get the upper hand.

But take heed: this much is possible in this special moment. Here the political leader keeps a firm grip on his followers, but the far greater theoretical leader already sees clearly what lies ahead. Freedom, no violence against the masses: for now. But would you tell them that the situation is a definitive one, a guaranteed victory of the revolution? Soon we will have to fight on non-legal terrain! The revolution must still be carried out (and not because the socialist one is still to be accomplished) and within months; for if it is not us attacking the bourgeois-opportunist government, it will be them putting us outside the law! In July Lenin already had to go into hiding. But by now the masses had understood. Maybe by reading the “theses”? Never. It was the theses that had understood history. And those blind until then, or dazzled by the splendour of democracy, hesitatingly opened their blurry eyes.

39 – The Provisional Government to the Pillory!

Thesis 3: No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that THIS government, a government of capitalists, should CEASE to be an imperialist government.

This is a direct response to the Party’s manifesto in March and to the articles in Pravda, which considered the government which succeeded Tsarism, although it hadn’t been a part of it, a revolutionary conquest, and restricted itself to inviting it to carry a series of “impossible” political measures such as a “democratic” peace initiative, without declaring that it was a government mandated by international capital to keep the war going, and that the war had to be stopped in spite of it, by overthrowing it, which was the only way peace could be achieved. The Lvov government, no less that those than came after it, expressed the requirements of the national bourgeoisie, which was nurturing hopes of taking its seat at the banquet of victory over Germany and the division of the imperialist plunder, which would give to a bourgeois and militarist Russia a hitherto undreamt-of boost. It reciprocated the aid from the Entente by committing itself to stay in the war through the course of Russian Revolution and see it through to the end, which was possible only if the force of the working class was behind it. It counted on winning over the workers’ leaders just as the governments of France, Belgium, and Germany had done, and it achieved its first successes on this path with the complicity of the mensheviks and the populists in the Soviets: this no-one had been able to say before the April Theses. No-one had yet moved on from their joy over the fall of the Tsar. Today in Italy the proletariat is immersed in unconsciousness because no-one (apart from us) has moved on from a far more imbecilic victory: over Mussolini, which wasn’t even a turning point in the historic struggle between classes, but just a military episode during the war.

40 – Party and Soviet

Thesis 4. (Paragraph one). Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so for a small minority, as against a bloc of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries down to the Organising Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat.

The well-known situation – the majority in the Soviets in the hands of the right-wing socialists, delegation of power by these to the Provisional Government elected within the Committee of Oppositions of the old tsarist Duma – is engraved by Lenin in the general formula of opportunism: the bourgeoisie influences and controls the right-wing socialists, the latter influence and control the working masses in favour of the former.

The revolutionaries disapprove of the submission of the Soviets to the Provisional Government, and they are obliged to fight against it. How should they act towards the present leaders of the Soviets, who en bloc, are at the service of a capitalist and military policy? To maybe denounce Soviets, as such? Or to say instead that, given that the “democratic majority” within the Soviets votes to support the bourgeois government, this should be ratified in homage to the usual “proletarian united front”?

To a such an alternative Lenin shrugs his shoulders. Neither of the two.

Thesis 4. (Paragraph two). The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only POSSIBLE FORM of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire State power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.

As usual we focus on what is underlined: only possible form. The theses are as follows: any government or power based outside the Soviets is not revolutionary. The only government that can be revolutionary is one based on the majority in the Soviet. But he does not say: the Soviets democratically express the will, the free opinion of the workers, and therefore, any government based on it is revolutionary, conforms to proletarian interests, and should be supported. This would be patently false. Today the Soviets express the opinion of a proletariat that has been deceived and misled: they make decisions neither from a revolutionary perspective, nor from the standpoint of the “practical needs” of the masses.

In these circumstances the Soviet, this historic form expressed by the bourgeois Russian Revolution, and a direct introduction to the tasks of the proletariat, is neither cast aside like rubbish, nor forcefully attacked; rather, its errors are systematically denounced.

What directive is offered for this difficult campaign? The famous slogan: All State power to the Soviets.

All means that the Soviets do not recognise other organs of political power not emanating from themselves; that they do not accept divisions of powers, as such divisions are tantamount to a renunciation of any power at all.

Therefore (dialectics!) we recognize the Soviet because it is the only possible form of revolutionary government. We recognize it in principle when its majority is against us too, and do not declare it our enemy. We do not say to it: you either pass into our hands, or we attack you. We say to it: since we can govern only with the Soviet we will recognize this government even though we are in a minority, and even if the Mensheviks and populists are in the majority. But it must demand all power, and therefore disavow the Duma committee and the Lvov cabinet, cutting its links with it and not negotiating power with parties that are not based exclusively on workers. The Mensheviks and the SRs have a choice: either with the bourgeoisie in the provisional government, or with us in the Soviet that has all power, and which heads the State. This the masses led by the right-wing socialists would understand very well.

41 – Impeccable Tactics

When Lenin explains this to his party comrades, he doesn’t omit to mention that it is well known what the opportunists would choose: the provisional government and not a government of the Soviet with the Bolsheviks; a compromise by which the Soviet would not be the sole organ of power, but the bourgeois ministers would remain, and power being mandated to politicians appointed outside the Soviet would not be denied. Once this choice had become clear, the majority of the Soviet would abandon the opportunists as traitors, and the latter, along with the bourgeoisie, would have been defeated, as they wouldn’t be in the way when the inevitable violent clash between the organs of bourgeois power and the Soviet broke out.

The actual development of the revolution in Russia confirmed the accuracy of this forecast in such a luminous and powerful manner that unfortunately the fact that it was not a new way of conducting the socialist revolution got lost from view. This way was not new at all, because it corresponded to the by now rancid politics of the legalitarians, reformists, revisionists, and supporters of collaboration between the petty bourgeoisie and the workers, who had denied all along Marx’s conception of the revolution by which one passes from the capitalist mode of production to the socialist one.

Lenin’s tactic, within that historical setting, was, we repeat, impeccable. The setting is the Russia of the tsars which is emerging from feudal forms of production, the heyday of this great struggle runs from 1880 to 1917.

The tactic is right, and it is irreproachable because it is precisely the one which should be followed in an anti-feudal revolution, in a bourgeois revolution.

And here we make a connection with a topic that would arise in the future; the struggle that the Italian left conducted between 1918 and 1926 and beyond, and also with Lenin, against the view that the same tactic should be used in the proletarian revolution in capitalist Europe.

42 – Down with Parliamentarism!

Thesis 5. (Paragraph one). Not a parliamentary republic – to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step – but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.

We believe that it was here the atom bomb exploded. And yet – and no-one proved it better than Lenin – they are the classic Marxist words from 1848, even if these, seventy years earlier, rigorously described the forms that needed to be destroyed and not yet those that would replace them. He who from these brief comments fails to understand that Marxism culminates in the destruction of democratic parliamentarism is no Marxist, but a complete toerag.

We come now to the contingent historical situation. We have shown how most of the Bolsheviks reasoned. The provisional government is not our government, but what can we impute to it if it is provisional? It has the mandate to call free elections (utter rubbish), thirst for which has tormented Russians for over a century: and after handing over to whoever has the parliamentary majority, the constituent assembly will be gone: therefore, until then let us prepare for the elections, and that’s that.

At this point, idiots would later say, Lenin went really mad. For now, the bourgeoisie governs. The Soviet remains to monitor things and delegates substantive power to the provisional government. Then if in the elections to the constituent assembly, the bourgeoisie and their lackeys, all supporters of the war, form the majority, as it certainly will, and definitive power passes to the parliamentary government, what does the Soviet do then? It realizes that what was provisional was itself and disbands, because one can sleep easy knowing there are parliamentary guarantees! It advises proletarians to fight heroically at the front against the Germans, and to make sure it doesn’t get involved in that scandalous activity of organizing soldiers’ deputies alongside the worker and peasant deputies…

Interpreted in such a way the Soviet is an organ of struggle for revolutionary times, and its life restricted to times of struggle. Its historical task is supposedly to lead the masses during the insurrection, and having generously shed its blood, to rejoin the ranks, and let the legal power govern undisturbed.

Here we can discern Lenin’s greatness. The Soviets are not organs of revolutionary struggle but much more: they are the form which revolutionary State power takes. They are what is contained in the words: democratic dictatorship. The proletariat takes power during the antifeudal revolution and implements the social transformation which in substance is the creation of capitalism, but during this period it not only takes power from the bourgeoisie and the big landowners, but this power is organized in such a form that they are entirely excluded from it, including any right of representation.

The only political delegation there will be lies at the heart of the network of Soviets running from the periphery to the centre; the State will be supported on this foundation; the bourgeoisie not only has no power but it won’t figure as a party of opposition either.

Herein lies the great blasphemy. The form that is appropriate for the anti-feudal revolution in Russia will not be a parliamentary assembly as in the French Revolution, but will be a different kind of organ, based on the class of workers of the city and countryside alone.

Not only the pretext of waiting for the election of the Constituent Assembly collapses, but the very necessity for it as well: the cycle will close with its forced dissolution. We are talking about an entirely different road: conquering a Bolshevik majority in the Soviets, working legally (1848: to organize the proletariat into a political party), then the conquest of all power to the Soviets (organizing the proletariat into a ruling class) which clearly involves the forceful overthrow of the power of the provisional government.

In the socialist revolution the proletariat will overthrow the power of the stable parliamentary, but bourgeois, government and will organize its dictatorship of wage-earners alone, led by the communist party.

Here – never forget it – history is still searching for the forms of proletarian power during a belated democratic revolution.

43 – Police, Army, Bureaucracy

Thesis 5. (Paragraph two). Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy (that is: the replacement of the standing army with the armed people).

Practically speaking the February government had changed the ministers, but not the network, the machinery of national administration. The Black Hundreds had gone, but rather than being an official police force they were a reactionary party/sect. The generals, the senior central and local functionaries, had changed little from the time of the tsar. The revolution, even insofar as it was bourgeois, was incomplete. If one had to assume political power in order to carry out social tasks corresponding to the liquidation of feudalism and not yet of capitalism (which was only possible if the revolution broke out in Europe) it was necessary, nonetheless, to break up the traditional State apparatus.

The proletarian power of the Soviets could only be based on the armed working class. It would not be a citizens’ army insofar as bourgeois and landlords would be excluded from it, as from the representative organs, the aim being to repress any counter-revolutionary attempt to foment civil war.

Only in a revolution that remains socially only capitalist, but in which the proletariat loses control, does the classic permanent national army of the Napoleonic type go back to being the mainstay of State power.

Thesis 5. (Paragraph three). The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.

This principle persistently defended by Lenin was, as is well-known, upheld by the Paris Commune. It is a principle for a transitional economy in which the wage system remains fully intact. But it marks a great step towards the elimination of the social division of labour, of the sub-division of society between those who live with uncertainty and those who have “a career”. To abolish careers is to deliver an economy in which basic consumption is guaranteed to all, although within limits determined by plans. Today, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie tends to do the opposite: not suppressing those with assured careers, but turning everyone into careerists, especially the industrial workers.

In fact Lenin’s policy – by which the administrator (coincident with the political representative) was a simple producer who was temporarily moved, following a decision by his Soviet, to perform that role, from which he could be recalled at any time – would be abandoned when the Republic, which still calls itself Soviet, became a capitalist State ruled by the social forces of capital and not by the workers, before fatally proceeding, on an international scale, in exactly the opposite direction to the one which passes from a workers’ dictatorship administering the transition to capitalism to one administering the transition to socialism.

The task of liquidating feudalism from its deep roots, even more so in fact, that arose in 1917 also needed that guarantee. The worker delegated to govern and administer a society in which the bourgeois and bourgeois interests still exploit the labour of his peers must not be exposed to the risk of becoming a privileged person and potential instrument of capitalist power: which was what, after inevitably getting drowned in the massive inundation of newly recruited bureaucrats, and on a general scale would eventually occur.

44 – Frail Human Nature?

On this was Lenin, who so confidently predicted huge events which are still misunderstood today, nurturing vain hopes? The usual sceptics who resolve these kind of questions with the formula of power unable to resist a craving for wealth, rather than indulging vanity, and which, understood in the vulgar sense, inevitably becomes economic exploitation and despotism, were they perhaps right? Given that such a process is avowedly inherent in all historical climes, and concerns insuperable givens of the hackneyed “human nature”?

It is certainly not the first time we have shown the vile inconsistency of this kind of rubbish; or fought against this very inferior critique of what caused the death of a great revolution. A revolution which, we may add, is not dead, but one which has been channelled into a path that is less rapid historically speaking than was envisaged by Lenin, which lacked precisely the conditions which he posited as necessary.

The Russian Revolution spanned a vast arc of history: from the ruins of a feudal system, which was far more rotten than Louis XVI’s, to the installation of a mercantile capitalism which placed it, in its economic forms, on a par with the elephantine capitalism of the west, incarnated in its State machinery insofar as it was better at extracting profit, and with a bureaucracy in its train even more corrupt than the feudal courts, its privileges and perquisites existing on a scale far more scandalous than those.

And yet the phase of heroic service to the revolutionary power – and perhaps the acceptance of austere misery is more astonishing than giving one’s life, which is far more common – isn’t actually characteristic only of the proletarian revolution, it has been a characteristic of all revolutions, in fact of all social forms of production, and it is easy to read about it in the historical accounts, and even in myths; about which it is precisely idiots who smile, in the belief that the legends which circulate were suddenly cooked one day up by an unbeliever of their calibre.

We need not go back as far as Lycurgus drinking Spartan soup with his peasants and soldiers, to King Agide who divided up all his goods, we need not recall the fasting and renunciations of the Jews, Christians and Muslims in their times of revolution, nor the episodes from Roman history about Cincinnatus, invincible general but insensible to the seductions of power and wealth, bound to the spade with which he dug his land.

The bourgeois revolution itself had its austere champions who forsook titles and privilege to embrace the new cause. The most illustrious of them, Robespierre, known as the Incorruptible, stood out from all the rest. During the rise of modern capitalism, every nation has its Savonarola of politics, following inflexible self-imposed rules. For example, the Italian liberal bourgeoisie of the old intransigent right from Sella onwards boasts a string of real fasters in power, inflexible with themselves before anyone else.

The great Bolshevik generation had such men, who were ready to take it upon themselves, for little more than the bread and cheese of the long emigration, to administer a revolution, and furthermore a revolution carried out by the poor, to found a social form that would elevate the rich. Anyone who laughs at Lenin’s insistence on taking a workers’ wage is a poor soul who envisaged him in the splendid garb of a satrap and never in his threadbare suit: who never saw Zinoviev, Bukharin, and numerous other comrades; who never knew Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, who couldn’t be said to have dressed worse than her maid because she never had a maid, and who never drew attention to herself in any way, even though quite capable, as a Marxist theoretician, of contradicting its greatest exponents.

Lenin’s formula even now was the right one. History took another path, confirming his doctrine in full, but raising to the first rank the modern satraps of the politics of the super-salaried and those mollified by luxury and crassly bourgeois comforts. An efflorescence of mould, not a force and cause of history, an episode alongside other periods of fetid decomposition, of forms of production that must perish.

45 – The Clearly Bourgeois Social Measures

We will close our analysis, forming a fitting conclusion to what we set out to demonstrate, with the three short theses on the social-economic measures.

We need not comment on thesis 9, on the duties, programme and name of the party, nor on thesis 10, on “Renewing the International” since they lie at the centre of all of our extensive and detailed treatments of the subject.

Thesis 6: The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.

Confiscation of all landed estates.

Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (…) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.

This is clear enough, especially to those who have followed our expositions on the disputed agrarian questions. Lenin sees the waged agricultural worker, who was a pure proletarian and not a peasant farmer, as the first priority. Then the poor peasant farmer. Poor means that he has his family as his labour force, not much land, and no working capital: he cannot live from the product of his small strip of land and has to occasionally sell his labour to the country bourgeoisie. The formula is not one of a dividing up or municipalisation of the land, but of nationalisation, that is of confiscation of land rent by the State: a measure so bourgeois that it was proposed by Ricardo. Possession to be entrusted to the Soviet, not to the individual producer. The struggle against small-scale agriculture to be conducted with large model farms. These are not yet referred to as State farms but are controlled by the Soviet: thus agrarian capitalism is allowed.

Theses 7. The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

This measure is also classically of the bourgeois period and already many States have effectively achieved it under various forms. There are banks where there is corporate and merchant capital. Here as well capital is not confiscated but controlled. The State is banker and its clients are private individuals.

Theses 8: It is not our IMMEDIATE task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.

This thesis is clearly about the urban, industrial economy. It is not, consistent with the above, a demand which the provisional government was expected to insert in its programme, but a task entrusted to the proletarian power, and evidently subsequent to these: a) winning over the Soviet to the formula: all power, id est to the communist party; b) overthrowing the provisional government and getting rid of the constituent assembly; c) driving forward defeatism in the imperialist war.

And yet this programme of social transformation, presented by Lenin in April 1917 as the programme for the second stage of the revolution, includes not a single clause about socialist transformation. Lenin says that we are not establishing socialism, a word he uses with extreme care since no government “establishes” socialism: an out and out proletarian dictatorship would disperse bourgeois relations and forms of production: a task of destruction, not of establishing something. In the ensuing conference at the end of April, Lenin would explain everything better, and in more categorical terms.
 46 – Other False Dispersals

We therefore placed the April Theses in the context within which they arose, proving that the pronounced shift of policy by Lenin, within the complicated and difficult process of liquidating feudal and Tsarist Russia, was solely about making the most emphatic of returns to a revolutionary strategy. The revolution was, as we mentioned earlier, divided into two stages with respect to the classic expectation of the Bolsheviks, not because yet another stage had been added but because the first stage foresaw, due to the inherent difficulties of the situation, and partly because of revolutionary weakness, that it would be split in two. The February stage was a false revolution, not just a purely bourgeois revolution. It – if history had not taken an entirely different path – would have led straight to counter-revolution, that is, not just to being controlled by the global bourgeoisie, but even, and in parallel throughout with the intricate vicissitudes of the war, towards an attempted tsarist counter-revolution.

The April Theses obviated this danger. It is therefore another enormous falsehood of Stalinism (after having attempted to attribute to Lenin paternity of the doctrine ‘building of socialism in Russia alone’ at the time of the 1914 theses against the imperialist war and the opportunist betrayal, theses which were about destroying the war with defeatism in every country, including in one alone and also in Russia, but which said nothing about any constructing) to attribute this to him as if he had announced such a bombshell at the time of his return to Russia in that famous April.

Here is an example of how a publication of Stalinist origin expresses it, along with its quotations from texts that are unmistakably Lenin’s: “What marked the situation was therefore the passage from the bourgeois democratic revolution to the socialist revolution, or as Lenin put it the transformation of the bourgeois revolution into the socialist revolution”. But Lenin’s words are the ones above: “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is the transition from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”.

This second text will also be used instead of it. But the case is prepared. The main defect, as even Lenin will say at the subsequent party conference (see chapter 49), is that the socialists pose the question of what to do today in a way that is too general: as the passage to socialism. We cannot claim to be establishing socialism, which would be a monumental absurdity. The majority of the population are small cultivators, peasants who cannot even conceive of socialism. We can only ‘preconize’ socialism.

The historical dialectic lies in this: the man who declared he didn’t want to pass to socialism was the greatest of revolutionaries. Those who say they were instructed by him to build it, and who state they have done it, are nothing but damnable bourgeois.