02.07.2015

Truth, not myths, serve our cause

Why do comrades on the left insist on repeating evident falsehoods about Lenin and the Bolsheviks, not least when it comes to 1917? Jack Conrad replies to Jim Creegan

Jim Creegan has used this paper on a number of occasions to present his criticisms of Lars T Lih and myself when it comes to the programme and strategy of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Majority).[1] In other words, overthrowing the tsarist autocracy through a national uprising in alliance with the peasant masses, establishing the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship (majority rule) of the proletariat and peasantry and through a process of “uninterrupted revolution” triggering the socialist revolution in Europe and thus opening the road in Russia to specifically socialist tasks. A perspective comprehensively mapped out by Vladimir Lenin during the first revolution of 1905 and then applied in the second and third revolutions of 1917.

Comrade Creegan says that, while Lars T Lih and myself “present significantly different arguments”, what unites us is our mutual “determination to discredit Trotsky’s account” of the Russian Revolution. I know Lars T Lih and rate him highly as a historian of the Russian Revolution. So, on this subject, it hardly needs saying, he is more than capable of speaking for himself. As for this writer, I am not in the least determined to “discredit” Leon Trotsky - if by that one means misrepresenting or defaming him.

No, what I am determined to do is to defend Lenin’s programme, his strategy, his party and his close comrades. To equate that with some sort of pathological anti-Trotskyism or evidence of congenital Stalinism does nothing for the reputation of Trotsky nor the reputation of those who describe themselves as Trotskyists. It was cold war academics such as Karl Popper, Leonard Schapiro and Richard Pipes who made a comfortable living by elaborating upon the utterly bogus narrative of Stalinism being essentially a continuation of Leninism. A claim which, of course, originates with none other than Joseph Stalin and his school of falsification.

Comrade Creegan assures us that he stands alongside those “Marxist historians” who argue that not only did Trotsky predict the course of the Russian Revolution “more accurately” than Lenin. He stands with those “Marxist historians” who argue that Lenin had by April 1917 “abandoned” the old Bolshevik programme and strategy and had to all intents and purposes gone over to Trotskyism: ie, the perspectives formulated by Trotsky in 1906. Note, his Results and prospects was written at a time when the author “adhered neither to one nor the other of the main trends in the Russian labour movement”.[2] Put another way, Trotsky spoke on behalf of the “centre”.[3]

It is certainly true that comrade Creegan can find abundant confirmation for his version of history in the writings of Tony Cliff, John Molyneux, Joseph Seymour, Ted Grant, Lynn Walsh and Ernest Mandel. Another school of falsification. When it comes to Bolshevism, these sect champions are without exception self-serving, often misinformed and frequently downright dishonest. After subjecting What is to be done? to a forensic historical and textual examination, Lars T Lih has proved this beyond any reasonable doubt.[4] Cliff, Molyneux, Seymour, Grant, Walsh, Mandel et al basically accept at face value the Lenin invented by the cold war academics - with one crucial difference. Whereas the first camp comes to damn, the other camp seeks to emulate. An undemocratic Lenin, an inconsistent Lenin, a lying Lenin, a manipulative Lenin is a gift for those whose overriding aim is to build a tightly controlled, semi-secret, confessional sect and whose attitude towards the working class owes more to Mikhail Bakunin and precious little to Karl Marx. But, needless to say, with both camps it is a radically false Lenin.

I believe the same is true with Two tactics and the Lenin who supposedly abandons his programme and strategy in practice, all the while proclaiming in public that he had done no such thing. Here is a story, which, while it might well be intended to elevate Trotsky, actually serves to violently diminish the Bolsheviks. Instead of learning from the programmatic and strategic continuity of the Bolsheviks, the likes of Cliff, Molyneux, Seymour, Walsh, Mandel et al hold out the prospect of their own particular small group of followers being catapulted into the giddy heights of state power merely through riding this or that spontaneous mass movement. If, that is, they, the true believers, maintain their faith in the sect. So all such “Marxist historians” tell the story of the Russian Revolution in a manner which ignores, downplays or sidelines inconvenient truths about the Bolsheviks: their minimum-maximum programme, their open polemics, their unremiting attacks on economism, their success in becoming a truly mass party from 1905 onwards, their positive experience in duma elections, their hugely popular press, their indisputable emergence as the majority party of the working class in 1912, their tried and tested leadership, etc.

Stages of abandonment

According to comrade Creegan, prior to 1917 “Lenin had not completely broken with the Menshevik theory of stages”. Thankfully, though, in practice, Lenin and “eventually through him” the Bolsheviks, “abandoned their earlier concept of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, and - once again in practice, if not in word - embraced the theory of permanent revolution elaborated by Trotsky in 1906”. A couple of sentences which are worth a little probing.

Lenin stands accused not only of being dishonest - after all, he did not admit his debt to Trotsky in any publication, speech, letter or telegram (something he was never shy of doing when it came to the “renegade” Karl Kautsky). Worse, not least given our current leftwing lexicon, he is accused of being a semi-Menshevik from 1903, when the Bolshevik-Menshevik split happened, till presumably 1917, when he wrote his Letters from afar (March 1917).

Yet the fact of the matter is that it was Trotsky who was a semi-Menshevik between 1903 and 1917. Having sided with the Mensheviks in 1903, he split from them in 1904, but remained on friendly terms. Indeed he breezily dismissed the Bolshevik-Menshevik split as a superficial phenomenon. In that semi-Menshevik spirit he became an inveterate unity-monger. Indeed in 1912 Trotsky brought together a motely crew of Bundists, Menshevik liquidators and Bolshevik boycottists - the August bloc - in a direct attempt to sabotage the 6th (Prague) Conference of the RSDLP. A move which Lenin furiously denounced as an attempt to “destroy the party”.[5] Needless to say, it was the “uncultured”, “barbaric”, “sectarian”, “Asiatic” Bolsheviks whom Trotsky considered the biggest obstacle to the unprincipled unity he was desperately seeking.[6]

All Marxists in Russia envisaged the coming Russian Revolution as having two stages (Trotsky being no exception here[7]). The first was the “bourgeois” or “democratic” stage; the second was the “socialist stage”.[8] However, there was a fundamental difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

The Mensheviks wanted to avoid the danger of participating in a revolutionary government during the first stage of the revolution. Why? If the working class succumbed to the temptation of power, it would cause the bourgeoisie to “recoil from the revolution and thus diminish its sweep”.[9] Secondly, without an already established European socialism, the working class party in Russia would be unable to meet the economic demands of its social base. Failure to deliver substantial improvements in living standards and overall conditions would inevitably produce demoralisation, confusion and disorganisation. So encourage, push the bourgeoisie, help it overthrow tsarism - absolutely. The “bourgeois stage” had to be crowned with bourgeoisie power and a parliamentary democracy. Only that would put Russia on the road of ‘normal’ European development. However, in step with the subsequent growth of capitalism, the working class grows too. Eventually this class eclipses and finally replaces the peasantry in population terms. Then alone does socialism becomes feasible.

The Bolsheviks, by contrast, were both willing and eager to play a leading role in a provisional revolutionary government. And, far from this being a mere prelude to the bourgeoisie assuming power, as claimed by comrade Creegan, the party of the working class had every interest in spreading the flame of revolution to Europe. Lenin seems to have seriously contemplated war for the “purpose” of “taking” the revolution into Europe. One of his key slogans was for a “revolutionary army”. [10] Depending on their success in furthering the world socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks looked towards a purely working class government in Russia and embarking on specifically socialist tasks. Because the tasks of the provisional government included uprooting every last vestige of tsarism, enacting sweeping land reform, putting in place extensive democratic rights, defeating bourgeois counterrevolution … and maybe even fighting a revolutionary war across Europe, I have suggested that the provisional government might have been expected to last not a few brief months, but years. A proposition dismissed out of hand by comrade Creegan. However, my main argument is that the Bolsheviks were not committed to handing political power to the bourgeoisie, as comrade Creegan contends.

Permanent

Comrade Creegan gave his second article a rather strange title - ‘Democratic dictatorship vs permanent revolution’. Anyone who has seriously read Lenin will understand that the Bolshevik perspective of forming a provisional government - a government embodying the class alliance of workers and peasants - is in itself an example of permanent revolution. After all, the anti-tsarist bourgeois revolution was to be crowned by the political domination not of the bourgeoisie, but the working class.

Too often comrades who should know better associate permanent revolution exclusively with Trotsky. Of course, the phrase long predates him, going back to the “literature of the French Revolution.”[11] From there it spread far and wide, becoming a common “programmatic slogan” of European radicals, socialists and communists, including Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels.[12] And, as Hal Draper helpfully explains, for Marx, the word “permanent” in permanent revolution, describes a situation where there is “more than one stage or phase” in the revolutionary process. He usefully adds that the expression “retains its specifically French and Latin meaning”. It does not mean perpetual or never-ending. It is employed by Marx to convey the idea of “continuity, uninterrupted.”[13]

Bearing this in mind, consider Lenin’s “uninterrupted revolution”. A typical example from 1905. Lenin declares: “We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way.”[14] He wants to take the anti-tsarist revolution to the socialist stage through a process that does not halt at some artificial boundary. No, the Bolsheviks will push the revolution forward both from below and above (ie, employing state power).

Not without interest in this respect, when it came to Russia, Kautsky too can be cited as an advocate of permanent revolution. He was, remember, a close ally of the Bolsheviks till August 1914. Almost an honorary Bolshevik. Here is Trotsky’s own - albeit rather jaundiced and self-serving - description of Kautsky’s approach “when he was a Marxist”:

At that time [1905-06] Kautsky fully understood and acknowledged that the Russian Revolution could not terminate in a bourgeois-democratic republic, but must inevitably lead to the proletarian dictatorship, because of the level attained by the class struggle in the country itself and because of the entire international situation of capitalism. Kautsky then frankly wrote about a workers’ government with a social democratic majority. He did not even think of making the real course of the class struggle depend on the changing and superficial combinations of political democracy.

At that time, Kautsky understood that the revolution would begin for the first time to rouse the many millions of peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie and that, not all at once, but gradually, layer by layer, so that, when the struggle between the proletariat and the capitalist bourgeoisie reached its climax, the broad peasant masses would still be at a very primitive level of political development and would give their votes to intermediary political parties, reflecting only the backwardness and the prejudices of the peasant class. Kautsky understood then that the proletariat, led by the logic of the revolution toward the conquest of power, could not arbitrarily postpone this act indefinitely, because by this self-abnegation it would merely clear the field for counterrevolution. Kautsky understood then that, once having seized revolutionary power, the proletariat would not make the fate of the revolution depend upon the passing moods of the least conscious, not yet awakened masses at any given moment, but that, on the contrary, it would turn the political power concentrated in its hands into a mighty apparatus for the enlightenment and organisation of these same backward and ignorant peasant masses. Kautsky understood that to call the Russian Revolution a bourgeois revolution and thereby to limit its tasks would mean not to understand anything of what was going on in the world. Together with the Russian and Polish revolutionary Marxists, he rightly acknowledged that, should the Russian proletariat conquer power before the European proletariat, it would have to use its situation as the ruling class not for the rapid surrender of its positions to the bourgeoisie, but for rendering powerful assistance to the proletarian revolution in Europe and throughout the world.[15]

I do not deny in the least that Bolshevik ideas, perspectives and expectations went unchanged from 1905 to 1917. Far from it. It seems clear to me that with the outbreak of World War I Lenin and other Bolsheviks, maybe inspired by none other than Kautsky[16], began to envisage steps towards socialism in the immediate aftermath of the anti-tsarist revolution (Lenin’s writings on this subject were later culled by the Stalin and Bukharin duumvirate in order to scholastically justify their theory of socialism in one country). No, what I insist on is programmatic continuity. Eg, a river will be added to by tributaries, will broaden, but it continues to flow towards the sea. There is no abandonment, no break.

Both comrade Creegan and myself are native English speakers and words have socially established meanings. I realise that a dictionary will not overcome our differences, but it might help bring some clarity. So here is how my Chambers 20th century dictionary defines ‘abandon’:

abandon vt: to give up; to desert; to yield (oneself) without restraint; to give up all claims; to banish.

What about ‘break’?

break vt: to divide, part or sever, wholly or partially, by applying a strain; to rupture; to shatter; to crush; to make by breaking; to destroy the continuity or integrity of; to interrupt.

Corresponding forms

If one takes comrade Creegan’s reading of Two tactics as correct, as accurate, then it is undoubtedly the case that in practice Lenin abandoned his old approach in 1917. Remember, strategically comrade Creegan paints Lenin and the Bolsheviks as basically advocating the Menshevik theory of stages. In his account the victorious workers’ party sweeps away tsarism, introduces basic reforms and then, after a short space of time, organises elections, then graciously retires to the wings, as the bourgeoisie triumphantly forms a government.

He argues - again he is putting forward what he thinks Lenin thinks - the only possible outcome in Russia would be the “social-economic dominance of the bourgeoisie and the political forms corresponding to it” (comrade Creegan’s italics). Hence, far from an RSDLP-led, worker-peasant regime lasting years and carrying out a programme of uninterrupted revolution, as I see the plan, comrade Creegan is convinced that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would be nothing more than a fleeting moment that is preordained to make way for the rule of the capitalist class.

Well, let us track through Two tactics (after all, comrade Creegan objected that I did not supply enough quotes in my article).

I say that the Bolsheviks were determined that the anti-tsarist revolution would see the fulfilment of the party’s entire minimum programme. And we do indeed find Lenin approvingly quoting the RSDLP’s 3rd Congress resolution to that effect: in a provisional revolutionary government “the proletariat will demand the realisation of all the immediate political and economic demands of our programme (the minimum programme)”.[17] Completely fulfilling this programme being a requisite for the “next step forward, for the achievement of socialism”. [18]

Does the democratic revolution (yes, bourgeois in its social and economic essence) have to take place in a way that is mainly advantageous to capitalism? No, not at all. The revolution can both clear the way for further capitalist development, not least in the countryside, and take forward the interests of the broad masses. Lenin wants not “political forms corresponding” to capitalism. Putting an equals sign between the two categories is a mechanical, not a Marxist, approach. No, even in the French Revolution some form of domination by the sans-culottes was achieved over the years 1789-94. Lenin held out the prospect of a “republican-revolutionary democracy” with the working class leading the peasant masses.[19] What was briefly possible in 18th century France could be more than matched in 20th century Russia. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would not only usher in far-reaching domestic changes … but, as already noted, “carry the revolutionary conflagration into Europe”.[20] This will not immediately transform Russia’s democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. However, it does lay the foundation for, provide the shortest route to the victory of socialism.

Hence Lenin roundly castigated his Menshevik opponents, who spoke about the “limited historical scope of the Russian Revolution”. This, Lenin thundered, “merely serves to cover up their limited understanding of the aims of this democratic revolution, and of the proletariat’s leading role in it!”[21]

Lenin tells us that the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has a “past and a future”. Its past is the struggle against autocracy, serfdom, monarchy and privilege. What is its future? “Its future is the struggle against private property, the struggle of the wage-worker against the employer, the struggle for socialism.”[22] These stages are distinct, but, given the balance of class forces, particular struggles and demands overlap, interweave or race ahead. However, the revolution must be conceived as an uninterrupted process. Hence, if the democratic revolution achieved a “complete victory”, that would mark the “beginning of a determined struggle for a socialist revolution”.[23] Therefore, meeting peasant demands for land, crushing counterrevolution, achieving the freest democratic republic will mark the real beginning of the proletariat’s struggle for socialism.

It is certainly the case that amongst the aims of the provisional revolutionary government would be convening a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage. For his own reasons comrade Creegan assumes that under such circumstances the bourgeois parties would gain a majority and would thus form an unambiguously bourgeois government. But it is perfectly clear that Lenin held a different view. A constituent assembly dominated by big capitalists and landlords would be “a miscarriage”.[24] Instead Lenin looks forward to a situation where the “peasant and proletarian element predominates”.[25] In other words, the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry shifts in form. From being a revolutionary provisional government it becomes a revolutionary government.

Depending on the momentum of the anti-tsarist revolution and the balance of class forces, there was every reason to believe that the RSDLP could rally behind it not only the entire working class, but semi-proletarians, poor peasants and all manner of petty bourgeois forces. There was then the distinct possibility of a coalition government that aligned the party or parties of the revolutionary peasantry with the RSDLP. Of course, what alone makes this temporary arrangement principled for a Marxist is the explicit commitment of any such a government to carry out the full minimum programme of the RSDLP.

Inevitably, there would, within Russia, be a differentiation between the proletarianised rural masses and the emerging class of capitalist farmers. But not necessarily, as argued by comrade Creegan, a specifically socialist revolution: ie, the violent overthrow of the state. Put another way, for the Bolsheviks there would not necessarily be a democratic or bourgeois stage and then a socialist stage at regime level. Democratic and socialist tasks are categorically distinct, premised on different economic, social and political conditions. But the revolution could, given favourable internal and external conditions, proceed uninterruptedly from democratic to socialist tasks through the proletariat fighting not only from below, but from above: ie, from a salient of state power. The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry could thereby peacefully grow over into the dictatorship (rule) of the proletariat. As the size, organisation and consciousness of the urban and rural working class grew, so would the strength of the workers’ party. The necessity of a coalition government would at some point disappear. The tasks of the maximum programme then come to the fore.

Events

Of course, actual events in 1917 proceeded in a completely unexpected fashion. Instead of tsarism being overthrown by a national rising, it ignominiously collapsed. There was a hastily put together provisional government, but this was not a government of the revolution: it was a government of bourgeois counterrevolution. Though Alexander Kerensky’s ministry, formed in July, contained many who had previously been hunted by the tsarist secret police - Skobeliev, Tseretelli, Chernov, Avksentiev, Savinkov, Nikitin, etc - no Marxist will find such designation at all strange. Programme, policy and current practice determines class content.

Hence the provisional government continued Russia’s involvement in the imperialist slaughter of World War I, prevaricated over peasant demands for land redistribution and fearfully delayed convening a constituent assembly. And, making matters even more complex, this government was supported by the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary majority in the soviets, which had been created by workers, peasants and soldiers. The dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry had become subordinated to and entangled with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

How did Lenin react under these circumstances? Did he abandon or desert his long-established strategy? Did he break with the old perspectives of the Bolsheviks? Emphatically not. Let me repeat my argument … and supply all the necessary references.

After firing off five short articles which went under the title Letters from afar, Lenin finally managed to return to Russia. He travelled, along with his second-in-command, Grigory Zinoviev, and a whole bevy of other political exiles, in the famous sealed train provided by imperial Germany. Having finally arrived at the Finland station, Lenin began an on-the-spot campaign to bring the Bolsheviks into line with his April theses. A text which he slowly read out twice - first to a meeting of Bolsheviks and then to a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Lenin caused outage with the Mensheviks, but even met objections from some old Bolsheviks, most notably Lev Kamenev.

What was Kamenev saying in February-April 1917? He was not urging support for the provisional government. No, he was placing demands on the provisional government with a aim of exposing it and thus prepare the conditions for another revolution. Basically, though, he was insisting that the bourgeois democratic revolution remained to be completed.

Lenin dismissed this “old Bolshevik formula” and went on to argue that, while the bourgeois democratic revolution of the “usual type” had been “completed”, alongside the “real government” there existed a “parallel government, which represents the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”. This “second government” has though ceded power to the bourgeoisie.[26] An exceedingly complex example of dual power.

Did Lenin junk the old Bolshevik slogan demanding the overthrow of tsarism and replacing it with “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”? Obviously the answer is ‘yes and no’. Of course, he no longer called for the overthrow of tsarism. Russia had become a republic. In the same way it could be said, to employ comrade Creegan’s peculiar terminology, that Trotsky abandoned his ‘Not a tsar’s government, but a government of the people’, and the followers of Parvus broke from his ‘Not a tsar’s government, but a workers’ government’.

However, for Lenin, life itself had given concrete form to the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”. The soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers represented the future and the immediate task of the Bolsheviks was to combat “honest” popular illusions in the provisional government and win a majority by agitating for the seizure of landlord estates, the abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy, etc. This would prepare the “second stage of the revolution” and with it the transfer of all power into “the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”. The “only possible form of revolutionary government” was a “republic of soviets of workers’, agricultural labourers’ and peasants’ deputies”.[27]

Do these formulations and the perspective of a workers’ and peasants’ republic indicate an abandonment or a development of Lenin’s theory in light of new and unexpected circumstances? I make no excuse for once again turning to Lenin for an answer.

In the article, ‘The dual power’, he writes the following:

The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old ‘formulas’ - for example, those of Bolshevism - for, while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to be different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.[28]

Kamenev feared that due to his isolation in Switzerland Lenin was ignoring the vital importance of the peasantry and wanted an immediate bid for socialist revolution. The peasant movement could not be “skipped”, writes Kamenev. The idea of playing at the seizure of power by the workers’ party without the support of the peasantry was not Marxism, he said, but Blanquism. Power had to be exercised by the majority. And Lenin, in some of his writings, seemed to be implying that the peasantry had gone over to social chauvinism and defence of the fatherland. Therefore, perhaps he had concluded that the peasantry had become a hopeless cause.

Lenin, however, insisted that he was “not” proposing the “immediate task” of introducing socialism (as contended by comrade Creegan).[29] Lenin is quite clear. On the peasantry, however, it is certainly the case that Lenin began to change his stress. State power was to be placed in the “hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”.[30] Nevertheless, party unity was quickly recemented. Subsequently, Lenin talks of the differences between himself and Kamenev being “not very great”. He also joins with Kamenev in opposing the leftist slogan of ‘Down with the provisional government’, as raised by the Petrograd committee of the party. A slogan to which comrade Creegan seems sympathetic. The situation was not yet ready for the overthrow of the provisional government in April-May 1917. Hence, together with Kamenev, Lenin insisted that the “correct slogan” was: “Long live the soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies”.[31]

The Russian Revolution had gone further than the classical bourgeois revolutions of England 1645 or France 1789, but “has not yet reached a ‘pure’ dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”.[32]

This final quote is from Lenin’s ‘The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution’, a draft platform dated April 10 1917. I see development, concrete application, yes. But, no “abandonment”, no “break” with the old slogan for a “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”.

Notes

[1]. Letters, March 5, March 25; J Creegan, ‘April in Petrograd’ Weekly Worker April 16 2015; and J Creegan, ‘Democratic dictatorship vs permanent revolution’ Weekly Worker May 21 2015.

[2]. L Trotsky The permanent revolution New York 1978, p30.

[3]. VI Lenin CW Vol 12, Moscow 1977, p451.

[4]. See LT Lih Lenin rediscovered Chicago 2008.

[5]. VI Lenin CW Vol 17, Moscow 1977, p23.

[6]. www.marxists.org/archive/kamenev/1924/11/trotskyism.htm#1912.

[7]. See L Trotsky The permanent revolution New York 1978, p168.

[8]. VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p32.

[9]. Quoted in ibid p245.

[10]. Ibid p128.

[11]. “Kautsky describes the policy of the sans-culottes in 1793-94 as one of ‘Revolution in Permanenz’ - quoted in RB Day and D Gaido (eds) Witnesses to permanent revolution Leiden 2009, p537.

[12]. H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution Vol 2, New York 1978, p204.

[13]. Ibid p201. Marx’s most famous use of ‘permanent revolution’ can be found in his 1850 ‘Address of the Central Authority of the Communist League’, K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 10, New York 1978, pp277-87.

[14]. VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p237.

[15]. L Trotsky The permanent revolution New York 1978, pp33-34.

[16]. See ‘Kautsky, Lenin and the “April theses”’ Weekly Worker January 14 2010.

[17]. VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p24.

[18]. Ibid p28.

[19]. Ibid pp52-53.

[20]. Ibid p57.

[21]. Ibid p84.

[22]. Ibid pp84-85.

[23]. Ibid p130.

[24]. Ibid p47.

[25]. Ibid p47.

[26]. VI Lenin CW Vol 24 Moscow 1977, p50.

[27]. Ibid p38.

[28]. Ibid p38.

[29]. Ibid p244-45.

[30]. Ibid p22.

[31]. Ibid p244-45.

[32]. Ibid p61.