Living Marxism

Chapter Four of “On the Marxist Program”

(a)   The Bolshevik Revolution

The victory of the Bolshevik revolution was the most momentous event in the history of the modern world. It vindicated the program of permanent revolution from the time of Marx to the epoch of imperialism.  The slogans for Peace, Land and Bread, summed up the Transitional Program. They were immediate demands, but could be won only by a socialist revolution. Peace was the demand that the workers in uniform refuse to fight, turn their guns on their officers and form rank and file soviets. It ended the war, stopped the counter-revolution of Kornilov and built the Red Army. Land was the democratic demand to win over the poor peasants by expropriating land and turning it over to the tillers. This caused a split in the peasantry along class lines and opened the way for a class alliance with the proletariat. Bread was the transitional demand to meet the basic needs of the workers and poor peasants that could be won only by workers’ expropriation and control of industry. All led necessarily to the seizure of power and construction of a workers’ state. Read Review of China Mieville’s October: The Story of the Russian Revolution.

Marxism was vindicated in its fundamentals. First, only the proletariat, leading the poor peasantry and other oppressed people, could rescue humanity from capitalist decline and reverse the destruction of crises and wars by means of revolution.  All class compromises in or outside parliament led to betrayal. Second, only the vanguard party and program could inject the vital revolutionary subjective factor into transforming the objective factor. All workers parties that attempted to appease the petty bourgeois or labour aristocracy had to be split and the working-class majority won to the vanguard party. Third, the workers’ state was a class state of the armed independence of the workers based on soviets and militias and not mere bourgeois workers governments based on a majority of workers votes. This distinction is manifest in the slogan of ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat’!

The victory of the Bolshevik revolution was met by a wave of enthusiasm from workers the world over, and became the stimulus for the formation of vanguard parties in many countries. This wave became the basis of the new 3^rd International which was formed in February 1919. Its program debated in the first Four Congresses to 1924 summed up the lessons of the permanent revolution in flesh and blood. The new international was devoted to building world revolution not merely as an extension of the Russian revolution but as the necessary condition for its survival. Read Trotsky, Lessons of October.

    (b) The First Four Congresses: 1919-1922

Trotsky’s main writings during the period of the first four congresses are collected in the First Five Years of the Communist International published in 1924. In his Introduction he states that the First and Second Congresses of March 1919 and July 1920 were under the “aegis of imperialist war.”  But “war did not lead directly to the victory of the proletariat in Western Europe. It is all too obvious today just what was lacking for victory in 1919 and 1920: a revolutionary party was lacking”.

Writing in April 1919, Trotsky compares the German revolution to the Russian Revolution. There are similarities, but the differences are key. Germany was an advanced imperialist country and both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were mature and powerful classes. When the armed workers opened the German ‘February’ in November 1918, the bourgeoisie were forced to concede a ‘republic’ led by a Social Democratic government which suppressed the revolution in the “July Days” of February 1919, assassinating its main leaders Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The treacherous role of German Social Democracy proved in Trotsky’s words – “to be the most counter-revolutionary factor in world history.” 

This caused Social Democracy to split, but in the absence of a revolutionary party the proletariat was without a “revolutionary combat organisation…It was compelled to not only fight for power but to create its organization and train future leaders in the very course of this struggle.” Clearly, unlike the Russian “July Days”, events were taking on their own momentum without the guidance of an established vanguard party to avoid a showdown before the conditions for revolution had been prepared. Nonetheless Trotsky regarded the “political and cultural level of the German workers” as capable of rising to the task of winning workers from the treacherous SPD and the Kautskyite USPD, and to build the Spartacist League into a Bolshevik-type party that could lead the revolution to victory.

Writing in May 1919 Trotsky in Thoughts on the Progress of the Revolution draws up a balance sheet of the progress of the revolution so far. He critiques the Mensheviks’ evolutionary view that the revolution would begin in the ‘West’ and move ‘East’.

But events clearly disproved the two-stage ‘mechanical Marxism’ by beginning in the East (Russia) and moving West. Russia led first with the proletarian revolution in 1917 being neither an ‘accident’ or ‘adventure’. The betrayal of the Constituent Assembly in Germany (the Menshevik icon of ‘democracy’) in early 1918 led to the formation of a Communist Party with the slogan “All power to the Soviets”. In Hungary and Bavaria, the workers had the impudence to emulate the Bolsheviks and form workers governments with a “truly genuine democracy in the form of the rule of the victorious proletariat.” “Thus, the proletarian revolution after starting in the most backward countries of Europe, keeps mounting upwards, rung by rung, toward countries more highly developed economically”.

Thus, imperialist war not only disrupts the illusions in peaceful, evolutionary capitalist development, it reveals the interconnectedness of all countries in the imperialist system. While bourgeois democracy resists revolution in the West, its absence facilitates revolution in the East. Underneath the forms of democracy are the relations of oppression between oppressor and oppressed states. The imperialist ruling classes can ‘buy’ the ‘class peace’ with bourgeois democracy and delay civil war in the most developed countries, but cannot delay it in the more backward, oppressed countries which the imperialist bourgeoisies plunder for super-profits.

            (c) The programmatic gains of the First Four Congresses

In his Report on the Fourth Congress (to the Communist Fraction of the 10^th All-Union Congress of the Soviets,) Trotsky summarises the international situation of the world labour movement.  The three prerequisites for socialist revolution are the level of productive technique, working class maturity and a class-conscious vanguard.

First, capitalism is overdue for replacement by socialism. “…25 years ago and more, the replacement of the capitalist mode of production by socialist methods would have already represented objective gains, that is, mankind could have produced more under socialism than under capitalism.”

Second, the working class “must become sufficiently powerful in the economic sense in order to gain power and rebuild society”.  “The working class in all countries plays a social and economic role sufficiently great to be able to find a road to the peasant masses, to the oppressed nationalities, and in this way assure itself of the majority.  After the Russian revolution this is not a speculation, not a hypothesis, not a deduction, but an incontestable fact”. (307).

Third, the ‘subjective factor’. “[T]he working class must be conscious of its power and must be able to apply this power.” “During the post-war years, we have observed in the political life of Europe that the working class is ready for the overturn, ready in the sense of striving subjectively toward it, ready in terms of its will, moods, self-sacrifices, but still lacking the necessary organisational leadership”.

Trotsky presents this leadership as the role of the party. “In the most critical year for the bourgeoisie, the year 1919, the proletariat of Europe could have undoubtedly conquered state power with minimum sacrifices, had there been at its head a genuine revolutionary organization, setting forth clear aims and capably pursuing them, i.e., a strong Communist Party. But there was none. On the contrary, in seeking after the war to conquer new living conditions for itself and in assuming an offensive against bourgeois society, the working class had to drag on its back the parties and trade unions of the Second International, all of whose efforts, both conscious and instinctive, were essentially directed toward the preservation of capitalist society.”

In his balance sheet of the Third Congress Trotsky calls the Congress the “highest school of revolutionary strategy” because it seeks answers to the failure of revolution outside Russia. “Many of us imagined the task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie much simpler than it actually is, and as reality has now proved to us.” While the bourgeoisie is now parasitic on the forces of production it is desperately fighting for survival, expending economic resources in propping up its state, the task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie is not a “metaphysical” or “mechanical one” but one which, “…requires for its fulfilment: revolutionary energy, political sagacity, experience, broadness of vision, resoluteness, hot blood, but at the same time a sober head. It is a political, revolutionary, strategic task.” 

In Trotsky’s Report on the Fourth Congress, he states that the Congress faced two big “intimately interrelated tasks”, to defeat centrism (social democrats, Mensheviks, etc.) and to win the majority of the working class. First, the CI demanded a “complete break with the bourgeoisie” programmatically. Second, the CI argued that this could only happen by means of the tactic of the united front which can win workers from bourgeois parties and centrist parties linked to the bourgeois program of class collaboration. Trotsky addresses the centrists, ““You do not believe in our revolutionary methods and in the dictatorship. Very well. But we Communists propose to you and your organization that we fight side by side to gain those demands which you are advancing today.” This is an unassailable argument. It educates the masses about the Communists and shows them that the Communist organization is the best for partial struggles as well”. (Report, 323)

Communists raise their full program in every united front.  The tactic is subordinated to the strategy, not vice versa! Trotsky says: “From the united front flows the slogan of a workers’ government. The Fourth Congress submitted it to a thorough discussion and once again confirmed it as the central political slogan for the next period. What does the struggle for a workers’ government signify? We Communists of course know that a genuine workers’ government in Europe will be established after the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie together with its democratic machinery and installs the proletarian dictatorship under the leadership of the Communist Party.”

Trotsky then concludes that the Fourth Congress recognised a majority workers’ government in a bourgeois state as a genuine transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat only if it was carried into power by the majority of workers in a revolutionary situation capable of using it as a platform to seize power. In other words, a workers’ government must be actively transitional to soviet power. “That is to say, a moment may arrive when the Communists together with the left elements of the Social Democracy will set up a workers’ government in a way similar to ours in Russia when we created a workers’ and peasant’ government together with the Left Social-Revolutionaries. Such a phase would constitute a transition to the proletarian dictatorship, the full and completed one.” (ibid 324)

In summary, the first four Congresses mark the rapid development of a new Communist International learning from the experience of the war, revolution and counterrevolution in Europe between 1918 and 1922 to test its program and correct its errors. The result was the affirmation of the vital role of a democratic centralist vanguard party armed with the tasks and methods to break the masses from reformism and centrism by means of the tactic of the united front on all immediate and democratic demands, and at the same time raising the transitional program that posed the theory/program of permanent revolution.  The demand which captured the essence of this program was the Workers’ Government.