10.06.1999

Lenin, Kautsky and the Communist Party

Barry Biddulph accuses the CPGB of following the road of bourgeois modernisers

Jack Conrad invents a Lenin who was able to see, before 1914, the future Russian Revolution as an expression of permanent revolution (Weekly Worker May 13).

The political truth is rather different. Prior to the theoretical betrayal of the orthodoxy of the Second International in 1914, and even up to 1917, Lenin’s perspective and strategy for the Russian Revolution was flawed. Lenin was deferential to the authority of Kautsky. Following the leader of German Social Democracy, he thought a phase of advanced bourgeois democracy would precede, and prepare the proletariat for, socialism in Russia and elsewhere.

As Lenin once remarked, thinking of Marx in 1848, even the greatest revolutionaries learn from revolution. Marx had initially adopted a position on the extreme left of bourgeois democracy, given the undeveloped nature of capitalism and the proletariat in Germany. He finished up stressing the independent role of the proletarian party, and issued the battle cry of the revolution in permanence. This lesson of 1848 was not much more than a phrase in Russia until the development of the soviets in 1905. But the meaning was clear: “Make the revolution permanent until the propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat have conquered power” (K Marx The revolutions of 1848 Harmondsworth 1972, p323).

In 1907, at the congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Luxemburgtold the Mensheviks not to start at Marx’s beginning in 1848, putting pressure on the bourgeoisie, but to start where Marx ended. This was a point about developing Marxism as a living product of class struggle. The Bolsheviks applauded this comment. But the facts are that even Lenin’s theoretical creativity was constrained by the powerful influence of Kautsky and the orthodoxy of German social democracy during this period. In his polemic with the Menshevik, Martynov, in 1905, Lenin dismissed talk of the conquest of power in a socialist revolution as semi-anarchist. Ironically, this was the charge levelled against Lenin in 1917 by all the other leaders of the Bolshevik Party, clinging to Lenin’s old Bolshevism.

In 1905, when Martynov had the temerity to suggest the Bolsheviks could not hold state power in the coming Russian Revolution without putting into effect the maximum programme or the socialist revolution, Lenin retorted that Martynov “confounded the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution, the struggle for the republic with the struggle for socialism”(VI Lenin CW Vol 8, Moscow 1977, p297). Lenin went on: “Social democracy has constantly stressed the bourgeois nature of the impending revolution in Russia and insisted on the clear line of demarcation between the democratic minimum and socialist maximum programme.” Moreover, Lenin declared, “If the march of events compels the social democratic party in such a position to set about achieving the socialist revolution despite itself, our programme would be incorrect” (ibid p294). This unintended prediction turned out to true in 1917.

Lenin’s political perspective in 1905 was coloured by Kautsky’s dogma that extending bourgeois democracy was the inevitable historical gateway to socialism in Russia. In ‘Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution’, Lenin’s strategy was to establish a bourgeois democratic republic with plebeian methods: to push the bourgeois republic to its outer historical limits. But for Lenin, “Only the most ignorant people can close their eyes to the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution” (‘Two tactics’, VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p28). And again: “The democratic revolution will not immediately overstep the bounds of bourgeois social and economic relationships” (ibid p85). Very clear and, with hindsight, very wrong.

Lenin’s polemical point was he expected the revolution to transform Russia along inescapable capitalist lines. This was why Lenin envisaged the agrarian revolution taking a capitalist form. But Jack puts a gloss of permanent revolution on Lenin’s ‘Two tactics’. He avoids direct quotes, but one line goes like this: “In the actual circumstances the elements of the past become interwoven with those of the future (bourgeois and socialist). The two paths cross” (ibid p85). This follows a discussion of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry (the democratic revolution) as having a past in the struggle against autocracy and a future in the struggle against private property.

This is the real Lenin, exclaims Jack Conrad: “The revolution could, given the right internal and external conditions, proceed uninterruptedly from democratic to socialist tasks, through the proletariat fighting, not only from below, but from above (from the salient of state power). The revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat thereby peacefully grows over into the dictatorship of the proletariat, assuming internal proletarian hegemony, and external proletarian aid from socialist Europe.” This is not the real historical Lenin, but a view which conflates the Lenin of 1917 - who had shed his illusions in Kautsky, returned to Marx and more importantly learned from revolution to creatively develop Marxism - with the Lenin of 1905, who regarded any talk of socialist revolution and communes in the context of the Russian Revolution as anarchistic.

When Lenin uses words like ‘uninterrupted’ and ‘interwoven’ in 1905, this is not a perspective of permanent revolution. He is making the point that theory is grey and life is green. In life, there will be no clear, neat separation of historical stages, as in a theoretical schema. Although Lenin’s tactics and strategy were obviously far more revolutionary and more concrete than Kautsky, he had not entirely broken from Second International orthodoxy. In discussing how the two paths cross, in ‘Two tactics’, he states clearly his boundary or base line: “We all counterpose the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution; we all insist on the absolute necessity of strictly distinguishing between them” (ibid p85).

Martynov and Plekhanov were wrong when they pedantically and lifelessly expected the Russian Revolution to be a bourgeois revolution led by the bourgeoisie. But they surely had a point when they argued that Lenin’s strategy of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry was not rooted in the lessons drawn by Marx in Germany in 1848.

For Marx, petty bourgeois democrats would betray the revolution the first hour after the democratic victory. As Marx put it, “Our concern cannot be to modify private property, but to abolish it; not to hush up class antagonisms, but to abolish classes; not to improve the existing society, but to found a new one” (K Marx The revolutions of 1848 p232). The slogan ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ does suggest an above-class democracy, in the manner of Kautsky. It also implies a process of the Bolshevik Party doling out democratic increments to socialism from above. Martynov described the slogan as Millerandism or reformism - something he knew a lot about.

The sharpest and most accurate criticism of the strategy came from Trotsky, in Our differences. This was his polemic with old Bolshevism, free from the later cult of Lenin, when criticisms became blunted. The snag with the strategy was that it dissolved the workers’ revolution into a democratic coalition. The struggle for socialism would reappear only after the establishment of the democratic republic. Before the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Bolshevik Party would subject itself to a bourgeois democratic limitation (Kamenev and Stalin 1917). This would be a betrayal of working class interests and sever the Bolsheviks’ organic links with workers.

For Trotsky, the strategy defined the state structure as democratic, not socialist. It left open the question of which class would lead or predominate in the democratic coalition. But surely the slogan of the democratic dictatorship also blurred class democracy, as if democracy was neutral, or above classes, as in Kautsky’s concept, which Lenin later denounced. Trotsky predicted that in the Russian Revolution the workers would make inroads into capitalist rights and property. In turn the capitalists would respond with lockouts. The workers would attempt to control and seize the factories. And so it turned out.

The historical facts are that prior to 1917 it was Trotsky who more accurately analysed the general character of the coming Russian Revolution. The class dynamics of the revolution would bring the proletariat to power, and without the dictatorship of the proletariat the fundamental tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution could not be carried out. This was Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. It was a bold and at the time unique concept for Russian social democracy, which Trotsky learned in the school of the revolutionary audacity of the Russian workers in 1905. There were many polemical exaggerations between the two leaders, but there still remained a vital difference. Trotsky had seen the road to socialism not through taking the workers through the school of advanced capitalist democracy, but through the self-activity of workers’ power.

The core of the old Bolshevik notion of the democratic revolution was the expropriation of the landlords and the nationalisation of the land. These measures were carried out after the October revolution. Lenin made this point in 1917: “Private land ownership in Russia cannot be abolished except by carrying through a gigantic economic revolution by bringing the banks under popular control, by nationalising the syndicates and adopting the most ruthless revolutionary methods against capital” (VI Lenin Between the Russian revolutions London 1978, p328). So much for advanced bourgeois democracy.

Jack Conrad attempts to downplay Trotsky’s contribution with the concept of permanent revolution. But in doing so he merely underestimates Lenin’s contribution to the further development of Marxist theory in the heat of revolution and war. It was Lenin who returned to Marx’s revolutionary conception of the proletarian semi- or commune state. After 1917 Kautsky accused Lenin of betraying the democratic programme of old Bolshevism, but Lenin had a crushing reply: to remain within the limits of bourgeois democracy (the democratic revolution) would betray the proletariat.

But Jack attempts to show that Lenin did not junk the strategy of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in 1917. This is a serious misunderstanding. Trotsky once said that there had been no democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in his lifetime. Certainly there has not been an historical example since. Stalinist attempts to make it a reality have resulted in tragic defeats for the workers’ movement.

Lenin did not have a detailed map of permanent revolution in his pocket in 1917. He did not know the revolutionary route in all its details. His political greatness was in his ability as a revolutionary socialist general to improvise tactics in the midst of battle. There were contradictions, hesitations and ambiguities. In the crucible of 1917 Lenin theoretically rearmed himself and the Bolshevik Party. But Lenin and the party had been educated in the minimum programme and the democratic revolution. It was not easy to unravel old Bolshevism.

It is not true that Lenin argued that the February revolution represented the completed bourgeois revolution. This is a myth. What Lenin wrote in the April thesis was: “State power in Russia has passed into the hands of a new class: namely the bourgeois, and landowners who have become bourgeois. To this extent the bourgeois revolution is completed” (ibid p80). “To this extent” was an important qualification. How could the alliance of workers and peasants in the soviets - the organisational form of the workers’ or commune state - and the dictatorship of the proletariat represent some kind of democratic, non-socialist state?

After all, in the April thesis, Lenin said that the old tsarist power had not been destroyed, the monarchy had not been formally abolished and the landed estates had not been confiscated. Kamenev made the obvious point that the Constituent Assembly had not been convened. And dual power had not passed definitely to the bourgeoisie. The thrust of the April thesis was that democratic revolution would be a step backwards compared with the socialist potential of the soviets.

The February revolution in 1917 was an aborted socialist revolution. The reason power was not seized by the workers was, in the words of Lenin, “because of insufficient class consciousness and organisation of the proletariat and peasantry” (ibid p78). The political essence of dual power for Lenin was the unstable interlocking of two dictatorships: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. There was no middle way of democratic dictatorship. In his article, ‘The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution’, Lenin believed the term ‘democracy’ had put blinkers on the eyes of the workers, preventing them building up the new soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies as the sole power in the state. His message in 1917 for the Party members who wanted to hang on to the slogans of old Bolshevism was simple: put the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in a museum; it is dead.

However, as Trotsky pointed out, “Lenin’s approach to this question [in 1917], at different times, was not one and the same. Lenin’s thought must not be taken dogmatically, but historically” (L Trotsky Permanent revolution London 1982, p67). Lenin’s polemic with Kautsky was a more rounded and finished evaluation of the events of 1917. Lenin did not produce his own comprehensive lessons of October. Nor did Lenin adopt a fully fledged version of Trotsky’s permanent revolution. But the debate with Kautsky was the nearest Lenin came to a summing up of the Marxism of October.

In the debate over soviet power, Lenin denounced Kautsky as a lifeless pedant for droning on about the virtues of bourgeois democracy over absolutism and medievalism, irrespective of the barbaric and ruinous circumstances of imperialism and war. Kautsky was a liberal stressing the advantages of democracy in general. Lenin hammered the point over and over. There was no intermediate democratic regime: it was either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of capital.

Lenin demolished the orthodoxy of the Second International. Bourgeois democracy was a democracy for the rich: it was a machine for the suppression of the proletariat. It was a fake and hypocritical regime designed to deceive the workers. Contrary to the certainties of Kautsky, Lenin’s key point against his old slogan of the democratic dictatorship, was this:

“The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms and civil war in connection with any profound divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie” (VI Lenin The Renegade Kautsky Peking,p23).

Jack follows Dave Craig of the RDG, and unhistorically misapplies Lenin’s ‘Two tactics’ to the lessons of 1917 and even the modern bourgeois state in Britain. The CPGB have taken up the bourgeois modernisers’ slogan of a bourgeois federal republic, in the Kautsky manner, of the road to socialism through an extreme democratisation of the capitalist state. But even as early as Lenin’s ‘Letter from afar’ in 1917 on the proletarian militia he wrote: “We need a state. But not the kind of state the bourgeois has created everywhere - from monarchies to the most democratic republics.”

It is Jack Conrad who has the big political problem, due to his uncritical acceptance of the Kautskyite schemas of the RDG.