03.05.2000

Tony Cliff May 20 1917 - April 9 2000

A 20th century revolutionary - part III

Unlike most disciples of Trotskyism Tony Cliff must be distinguished by his rejection of a revolutionary programme of any kind. Short-term advantage rules. As a result the SWP is unable to present its own membership and the working class as a whole with its principles, methods of struggle and strategy for achieving the aim of socialism (and communism) in the form of a testable and democratically sanctioned set of logically unfolding statements.

Socialist Worker's thumbnail 'Where we stand' column is all very well for introductory purposes. But its skeletal abstractions bear little or no relationship to daily practice or any discernible vision of how the working class is to make itself into a ruling class. That, when it comes to the SWP, is a mystery.

For comrade Cliff the fact that the Socialist Workers Party has no programme was a positive advantage (rumour has it that Chris Harman produced a draft programme sometime in the 1970s, yet it was never allowed to see the light of day). Absence of programme was perceived to serve the interests of 'party'-building. That was everything. Unencumbered by either an elaborated long-term strategic road map or democratically binding principles, Cliff and the SWP leadership could perform the most sudden about-turns. In the main 'party-building' for the SWP has therefore been about swimming with what was evaluated as the most fertile tide. Cliff's famed intuition took the place of debate and a democratic vote.

Yet without a programme and a democratic internal life the rank and file cannot judge or control the leadership. Nor can it be held to account and recalled. Incidentally, because one must begin as one means to carry on, here we have in miniature an elitist socialism - a socialism from above, not below. That aside, since the SWP came into existence as a trend, its history has consequently been one of zigzags - whether it be adopting a neutral stance during the Korean War, giving fulsome backing to the NLF in Vietnam, or alibying the regime of Slobadan Milosovic over Kosova; turning to 'electoralism' after decades of automatically leaving parliament to Labour; mocking the fight for a general strike in the 1984-5 miners' Great Strike, while demanding that a craven TUC 'get off its knees' and call one in 1992. Virtually any line can be adopted as long as it goes to build the 'party' - usually measured arithmetically in crude membership figures.

Needless to say, such an approach is contrary to the spirit and example of the Bolsheviks, which Cliff claimed as his model for the SWP - at least since the turn from 'Luxemburgism' in the late 1960s. Lenin's party, it should be emphasised, united around and fought on the basis of a minimum-maximum programme first presented to the 2nd Congress back in 1903 (the minimum revolutionary programme sets out the aims and demands to be fought for under existing socio-economic conditions and provides a bridge towards the maximum programme, which concerns socialism and the transition to the higher stage of communism).

It is surely no exaggeration to say that without the revolutionary programme there would have been no revolutionary party or successful revolutionary movement in Russia. Tactical flexibility is, of course, essential for any serious working class party or organisation. The Bolsheviks undeniably showed a commendable ability to manoeuvre. Underground committee work gave way to mass agitation, street combat to a semi-legal press and parliamentary activity, etc. Even when it comes to programmatic strategy and principles, there must be room to question and change in light of new opportunities. This the Bolsheviks did - for example over the land question in 1917 when they 'stole' the agrarian programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries. There was also modification of the programme due to new circumstances: eg, the fall of tsarism and dual power in 1917. But such changes only came about after serious, often exhaustive, debate and a democratic vote.

The programme was considered of cardinal importance by the Bolsheviks. That is why attempts to compromise or water it down met with the fiercest hostility. Around the programme the Bolsheviks were able to organise the workers - not merely in defence of their own economic terms and conditions, but as the hegemon or vanguard of the democratic revolution. The tiny working class was empowered by the scientific rigour of the programme - it summed up the Marxist analysis of Russia, the attitude of the workers to the state and the various classes, and put Russia's revolution in the context of the world revolution and the practice that flowed from it. So equipped, the working class came to master, and take a lead in, all political questions - national self-determination, anti-semitism, war and peace, women's equality, etc - and crucially was able to put itself at the head of the broad peasant masses in the fight to overthrow tsarism.

The SWP's now almost forgotten 'Action programme' would seem to represent a break with the past. After it was first published in September 1998 not only was it reproduced as a glossy brochure, but there was an effort to get labour movement bodies to adopt it as their own and finance propaganda around it. Sad to say, what we actually had was another zigzag, not a conversion to Bolshevism.

As we shall show in part four, the 'Action programme' was based on a fundamentally incorrect grasp of the period and, for all the revolutionary verbiage designed to sell it, the contents amount to little more than a repackaging of economism. Instead of a fully rounded and comprehensive alternative to Blair's constitutional revolution from above - ie, a revolutionary minimum, or immediate, programme from below - the SWP leadership concentrates entirely on minimal questions of pay, hours and union recognition. The workers are to be left as an economic class of slaves, not elevated to a political class of self-activating revolutionaries.

When it does make an appearance, politics is entirely within the narrow horizons of militant trade unionism. Reducing the arms bill, curbing financial speculations, etc. All very well and good, but completely inadequate. How our rulers rule through the UK's constitutional monarchy system is entirely absent. No mention then of crucial political questions like abolishing the UK monarchy system and the second chamber, or an annual parliament and recallability of MPs, or the fight for self-determination for Ireland, Wales and Scotland. That is, no struggle for a "more generous democracy" under capitalism which would facilitate the organisation of the workers as a class, thereby enabling them to take command of all democratic questions and issues. The SWP leadership effectively leaves such matters to Blair. In other words the SWP remains programmeless (or more accurately it has a minimalist programme of convenience - another name for which is economism or opportunism).

The SWP's erroneous anti-programmeism has, I believe, two main theoretical sources. The first lies in Cliff's unconventional, but relatively perceptive, reading of Trotsky's Transitional programme in light of developments following World War II. Whereas orthodox Trotskyites such as Ernest Mandel (comrade E Germain) dogmatically refused to acknowledge an unprecedented economic boom and awaited expectantly for predicted imminent slump, Cliff bravely made the attempt to come to terms with reality (eg, see the September 1947 essay, 'All that glitters is not gold', in T Cliff Neither Washington nor Moscow London 1982, pp24-39). The other source of Cliff's anti-programmism is his conventional, but misplaced, Trotskyite rejection of pre-1917 Bolshevism and its minimum-maximum programme. Let me expand on the observation, beginning logically, not least in terms of chronology, with Cliff on the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. We find his ideas on this subject most fully articulated in the first two of his four-volume study of Lenin.

3.1. Cliff on Lenin's programme

Cliff is quite correct to characterise the attitude of the Mensheviks as tailist. According to their vulgar evolutionist schema the overthrow of tsarism had to be followed by the class rule, and a western-style parliamentary government, of the bourgeoisie. Tsarism was viewed as an antiquated and semi-feudal obstruction on the linear ladder of progress. Russia was certainly not ripe for socialism - socialism being the first stage of communism. Before socialism and working class power could arrive on the historical stage the bourgeoisie would have to carry through its preordained tasks.

The historically determined job of the bourgeoisie was to develop capitalist production under conditions of bourgeois democracy - the bourgeoisie and democracy were wrongly, but invariably seen as inseparable. Alongside capitalist relations of production and reproduction a mass working class inexorably rises. Eventually this class would eclipse and finally replace the peasantry in population terms. Only then was socialism feasible. If the forthcoming revolution against tsarism was bourgeois, reasoned the Mensheviks in a conference resolution of April-May 1905, then the working class and its party "must not aim at seizing or sharing power in the provisional government, but must remain the party of the extreme revolutionary opposition" (quoted in T Cliff Lenin Vol 1, London 1975, p197).

So for mainstream Menshevik thinking the role of the working class was at most to critically support or push the reluctant bourgeois parties forward into their predetermined position as leaders of the revolution. Taking power, or participating as coalition partners in a revolutionary government, had to be avoided. Why? Because if the working class party seized power it would not be able to satisfy the needs of the masses; immediately establishing socialism was an illusion entertained only by non-Marxists such as the Socialist Revolutionaries. Like Pol Pot their socialism was peasant-based. Moreover if the working class aggressively pursued its own short-term interests or succumbed to the temptation of power it would lead the bourgeoisie to "recoil from the revolution and diminish its sweep" (quoted in ibid).

Lenin held to an evolutionary schema similar to that which informed the Mensheviks. However, as a consummate revolutionary, Lenin never let a bad theory get in the way of making a good revolution. His thought was rich and dialectical and therefore soars above the parched categories insisted upon by the Menshevik wing of the party. Russia might not be ready for socialism - if by that one means leaving behind commodity production and what Marx called "bourgeois right" - ie, equal pay for equal work, as opposed to the higher communist principle of 'each according to their ability, each according to their need'. The existing social and economic material conditions of an emerging capitalism explain why Lenin and the Bolsheviks described the coming revolution against tsarism as bourgeois.

But against the Mensheviks Lenin insisted that to make such a revolution one had to aim to take power. To fulfil the party's minimum programme - overthrowing the tsarist monarchy and a democratic republic, arming the people, separation of church and state, full democratic liberty, decisive economic reforms such as an eight-hour day, etc - it was necessary to establish a revolutionary government which embodied the democratic rule of the mass of the population. Lenin summed this up in the following famous algebraic formulation: the democratic dictatorship (ie, in Marxist terms, rule) of the proletariat and peasantry.

Such a regime would not bring full liberation for the working class. Economically Russia would continue to progress as a capitalist country - albeit one under the armed rule of the working class and peasant masses. Indeed the Bolsheviks envisaged a stage of controlled development of capitalist production and economic relations. Shades of NEP. Without that the working class could not grow in numbers, organisation and consciousness. Lenin argued that this last-named subjective factor was in the final analysis bound up with objective conditions.

The Bolsheviks knew that the class balance of a revolutionary government of the proletariat and peasantry could not be determined in advance. The class struggle itself decides such matters. Needless to say, the Bolsheviks planned in their minimum programme and fought tenaciously in practice for working class leadership. In other words a workers' state supported by the peasant majority. Something that relied not primarily on forces internal to Russia, but on sparking the external socialist revolution in the west. Without that general conflagration a working class-led regime in Russia was bound to be short-lived.

The bourgeoisie was both cowardly and counterrevolutionary. The bourgeois parties wanted a compromise deal with tsarism, not its overthrow through a people's revolution. Russia had no Cromwell or Milton, no Washington or Jefferson, no Marat, Saint-Just or Robespierre. The only force capable of gaining a decisive victory over tsarism, overcoming bourgeois counterrevolution and ensuring the full sweep of the revolution was the proletariat in alliance with the peasant mass. Russia, it hardly needs saying, was overwhelmingly rural. Naturally the proletarian party laid great stress on its agrarian programme. Landlord power would be smashed and land nationalised and democratically distributed to the peasants without any redemption payments. This was not a socialist measure for Lenin. It would though help clear away the Asiatic features of traditional Russian society and allow capitalist relations to develop along an "American path".

How long was this stage of working class rule combined with controlled capitalist development to last? According to Cliff up to 1917 Lenin "anticipated that a whole period would elapse between the coming bourgeois revolution and the proletarian socialist revolution" (T Cliff Lenin Vol 1, London 1975, p200). Here in Cliff we have a devious formulation. After all how long is "a whole period"? One might as well ask, how long is a piece of string. It also leaves unanswered what Cliff means by socialism and whether or not the October Revolution of 1917 actually ushered in not a working class-led state, but socialist relations of production and exchange. I have argued that the post-October 1917 regime was a proletarian-peasant alliance - albeit it with bureaucratic deformations and a Communist Party substituting for the active leadership role of proletariat - till the 1928 counterrevolution within the revolution. The notion that the USSR was socialist represented a Stalinite conceit that was still to come. Only in the mid-1930s did Stalin announce that the Soviet Union had completed the transition to socialism.

Cliff cynically sets Lenin up as an advocate of the "theory of stages" - by definition a cardinal sin for any self-respecting Trotskyite. First stage, the anti-tsarist revolution. Though it could not be led by the bourgeoisie, neither could it go beyond bourgeois economic norms. A democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would for a "whole period" witness and encourage capitalist development, albeit under democratic conditions. Only after such a "whole period" could the working class think about putting forward its own distinctive social agenda.

Actually, as we have illustrated, such a theory of artificial stages in Russia was advocated by the Mensheviks. Their analysis flowed from a vulgar evolutionist schema and was thus very superficial. The long and the short of it was that in the event that a popular revolution proved successful in Russia the proletariat puts the bourgeoisie in power. Obeying the 'laws of history', it then patiently waits in the wings, as a "party of extreme opposition", until capitalism has been fully developed and the conditions created for socialism. For Mensheviks then, there would have to be two revolutions in Russia. One bourgeois with a bourgeois state. The other, coming a long time after, was socialist, with a socialist state. The two are separated by a definite historical stage, or a "whole period", and crucially by distinct and antagonistically opposed regimes.

Yet, as we have seen, Lenin explicitly rejected this mechanical theory. Lenin considered the bourgeoisie in Russia counterrevolutionary. As a class it could not even begin the 'bourgeois revolution'. The workers would have to take the initiative in overthrowing tsarism at the "head of the whole people, and particularly the peasantry". The main political slogans of the Bolsheviks were 'abolish the monarchy' and 'for the democratic republic'. If their popular uprising proved successful - and remained under proletarian hegemony - the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would not meekly make way for the bourgeoisie. Yes, capitalism would be "strengthened": ie, allowed to develop. But there would be strict limitations. Not only an eight-hour day, full trade union rights and complete political liberty, but an "armed proletariat" in possession of state power. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would wage a "relentless struggle against all counterrevolutionary attempts", not least from the bourgeoisie.

Such a hybrid regime could not survive long in isolation. It would, and must, act to "rouse" the European socialist revolution. The proletariat of advanced Europe would in turn help Russia move to socialism (which requires definite material conditions in terms of the development of the productive forces). Inevitably there would, with the course of economic progress, be a differentiation between the proletariat and the peasantry. But not necessarily a specifically socialist revolution: ie, the violent overthrow of the state in Russia.

Put another way, there would not be a democratic or bourgeois stage and then a socialist stage at the level of regime. Democratic and socialist tasks are distinct and premised on different material, social and political conditions. But particular elements interweave. 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: ie, from a 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 a socialist Europe. Here is Lenin's theory elaborated in his pamphlet Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution (see VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, pp15-130).

So in truth then Lenin employed an entirely elastic formulation concerning the "whole period" of capitalist development under the democratic rule of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin's "whole period" spoken of by the ventriloquist Cliff could theoretically be reduced to zero in terms of time. In other words Lenin and the Bolsheviks had a programme of permanent revolution of the sort Marx and Engels worked out in Germany during and after the great revolutionary wave of 1848. So why does Cliff mischievously present Lenin's theory as no more than a variation on a Menshevik schema?

Cliff along with the usual run of orthodox Trotskyites wants us to believe that programmatically Lenin was essentially a Menshevik up to April 1917. Trotsky supposedly had an altogether superior theory. Trotsky is approvingly quoted, by implication against Lenin, as stating that in his view "power must pass into the hands of the workers" through a revolution "before the politicians of bourgeois liberalism get the chance to display to the full their talent for governing" (quoted in T Cliff Lenin Vol 1, London 1975, p202).

The peasants are for Trotsky "absolutely incapable of taking an independent political role". The proletariat can however from the vantage point of state power align the peasantry to itself. Furthermore the proletarian political domination is incompatible with "its economic enslavement". Therefore, reasoned Trotsky, the workers are "obliged to take the path of socialist policy" (quoted in ibid p202). Thankfully in April 1917 Lenin saved himself by apparently undergoing a Trotskyite conversion. Lenin's 'Letters from afar' and the documents now widely known as the April theses "marked a complete break" with the old notion of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. (T Cliff Lenin Vol 2, London 1976, p124). Conditions of dual power which proceeded from the fall of Tsar Nicholas II and the establishment of dual power exposed the "bankruptcy" of the 'old Bolshevik' formula (ibid p128). Predictably Cliff condescendingly writes that before 1917 Trotsky "differed fundamentally from Lenin in his view of the nature of the coming Russian revolution" (T Cliff Lenin Vol 1, London 1975, p201).

Cliff has to admit that Trotsky badly misjudged the Bolsheviks. He did not realise that Bolshevism would have to break through the "bourgeois democratic crust" of their programme - because they based themselves on the dynamic of the struggle (ibid p205). Of course, we need not rely only on Cliff vis-à -vis Lenin and Trotsky. We can use Trotsky's own words concerning the course of Russian history, which embraced periods of defeat and reaction and three revolutions - 1905, February and October 1917. In essence Trotsky took a centrist, "conciliationist" position from 1903 until May 1917, when he returned from the USA and placed himself "at the disposal of the Bolshevik Party". Trotsky later maintained that until then his "revolutionary ideas or proposals amounted to nothing but 'phrases'". Lenin on the other hand carried out "the only truly revolutionary work". That was, a contrite Trotsky argues, "work that helped the party take shape and grow stronger" (L Trotsky The challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-25, New York 1980, pp265, 267). Was Trotsky right in this assessment? In my opinion there can be no doubt about it.

3.2. The Lenin v Trotsky debate

Let us examine more closely the supposed "fundamental" difference between Trotsky and Lenin. Cliff supplies us with extensive quotes from Trotsky's Results and prospects published in 1906. Trotsky outlines his application of the theory of permanent revolution to Russia. Like Lenin he dismissed any revolutionary potential of the bourgeoisie. The working class had to form a revolutionary government "as the leading force". They would do so in "alliance with the peasantry". But, given the circumstances of Russia, the fact of proletarian state power would destroy the "borderline between the minimum and maximum programme; that is to say, it places collectivism on the order of the day".

One should not interpret such a formulation to mean Trotsky imagined a backward and isolated Russia as ripe for socialism. No communist then believed any such thing. Trotsky, to his credit, remained implacably hostile to "national socialism" till his untimely death in 1940 (L Trotsky The permanent revolution New York 1978, p159). On the contrary Trotsky understood that the revolution would have to be permanent, or uninterrupted, if the working class in Russia was not to be "crushed". European revolution was vital.

All in all, to any objective observer the differences with Lenin's theory are therefore evidently those of nuance. True, in Results and prospects and in Lenin's so-called replies there was a very unrewarding polemic between the two men. Factional interests produced more heat than light in both cases. Trotsky dismissed out of hand any suggestion of a "special form of the proletarian dictatorship in the bourgeois revolution". He was intent on rubbishing and equating both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Lenin in his turn attacked Trotsky for "underestimating" the importance of the peasantry by raising the slogan, 'Not a tsar's government but a workers' government'.

On the basis of such evidence Trotsky is no doubt right when he concludes that Lenin had "never read my basic work". The above slogan was proclaimed not by Trotsky but his friend and collaborator Parvus. "Never did Lenin anywhere analyse or quote," says Trotsky, "even in passing, Results and prospects" (L Trotsky The permanent revolution New York 1978, p166). Moreover he goes on to cite the "solidarity" that existed between himself and the Bolsheviks during and immediately after the 1905 revolution. And for those who demonise the term 'stage' and belittle Lenin, Trotsky's boast that he "formulated the tasks of the successive stages of the revolution in exactly the same manner as Lenin" should provide food for thought (ibid p168). The same can be said for Trotsky's proud affirmation about how "Lenin's formula" closely "approximated" to his own "formula of permanent revolution" (ibid p198). Cliff can claim that Trotsky's theory was far superior to Lenin's democratic dictatorship. But that only shows Cliff had an agenda which owes very little to analysing the substance of the matter and even less to the actual revolution of 1917 itself.

What of Lenin carrying through a "complete break" with his theory of the democratic dictatorship in order to lead the October revolution, as artlessly claimed by Cliff? Here was a myth in part created, hatched and fostered by Trotsky himself after Lenin's death in 1924. No doubt he was desperate to counter the campaign against 'Trotskyism' launched by the triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. By pretending that Lenin had become a Trotskyite in April 1917, Trotsky could enhance his own standing and at the same time highlight the secondary or negative role played by his opponents during 1917: Kamenev and Zinoviev famously 'scabbed' against Lenin's call for 'All power to the soviets' and a second revolution.

In February 1917 tsarism collapsed in the midst of a huge popular outburst. A provisional government was formed headed first by prince Lvov and, following his departure from the scene in July, by the Socialist Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky. The provisional government continued Russia's involvement in the imperialist slaughter, refused peasant demands for land redistribution and constantly delayed the convening of a constituent assembly. In short the proletariat and peasantry had "placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie". Nevertheless Russia was the freest of the belligerent countries and alongside, and in parallel to, the provisional government there stood the soviets, or councils, of workers, soldiers and peasants. There was dual power.

What was Lenin's programme during this "first stage of the revolution"? Did he junk his old theory? On return from exile in April 1917 he issued the call for the Bolshevik Party to amend "our out-of-date minimum programme" (VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p24). Obviously the demand to overthrow the tsar was now obsolete.

The key was to combat 'honest' popular illusions in the provisional government and raise sights. The Bolsheviks were a small minority in the soviets. Their task was to become the majority by agitating for the confiscation of the landlords' estates and the nationalisation and redistribution of land, the abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy, and the amalgamation of the banks into a single bank under workers' control. This would prepare the conditions for the "second stage of the revolution" and 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" (ibid p23). Lenin made no claims that the Party's "immediate task" was to "introduce" socialism. Only that production and distribution had to be put under workers' control to prevent the impending meltdown of the economy.

Do these 'stageist' programmatic 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 again turning to Lenin himself 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" (VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p38).

Lenin faced stiff opposition from amongst the 'old Bolsheviks'. Their confused and semi-Menshevik position brought about by the unique situation was summed up by Kamenev in Pravda: "As for comrade Lenin's general scheme, it appears unacceptable, inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution."

The criticism was wrong on two accounts. Firstly, though state power had been transferred, that did not fully meet the immediate programmatic aims of the Bolsheviks. Things were very complex. The old Romanov order had been politically overthrown. To that extent, argued Lenin, the programme had been fulfilled. But the 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants' in the form of the soviets had voluntarily ceded power to the bourgeoisie. Life for the moment was in that sense closer to the programme of the Mensheviks. To bring it in line with that of the Bolsheviks required carrying through the agrarian revolution - the landlords still held their estates - and splitting the peasants from the bourgeoisie. "That," asserted Lenin, "has not even started" (VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p44).

Repetition of the slogan 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' in general had become a mere abstraction. Events had "clothed it with flesh and bone, concretised it and thereby modified it" (VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p45). The soviets were real. The Bolsheviks, or those whom Lenin was now calling the communists, had to deal with the actual situation, where, instead of coming to power, this 'revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' existed side by side with, and subordinate to, a weak government of the bourgeoisie. Lenin energetically fought for the Party to struggle for influence in the soviets. Once the Bolsheviks won a majority, the programme could genuinely be completed.

The dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry had therefore become interwoven with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution had gone further than the classical bourgeois revolutions of England 1645 or France 1789, but in Lenin's words "has not yet reached a 'pure' dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" (ibid p61). There can be dual power but no dual power state (whether it be a monarchy, a theocracy or a democratic republic). One of the dictatorships had to die. Either the revolution was completed under the hegemony of the proletariat or popular power would be killed by counterrevolution. It was one or the other.

Secondly, there was Kamenev's fear of voluntarism, of going straight to socialism. Lenin swore that there was no such intention. "I might have incurred this danger," explained Lenin, "if I said: 'No tsar, but a workers' government.' But I did not say that, I said something else": ie, that power must pass to the workers' and peasants' soviets (ibid p48). The peasant movement could not be "skipped". The idea of playing at the seizure of power by a workers' government would not be Marxism, but Blanquism. Power had to be exercised by the majority.

Far from making "a complete break" with his old formulation of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', Lenin quoted his 1905 Two tactics pamphlet to back up his concrete application of it in 1917. Like everything else such a slogan had a "past and a future". Its past is "autocracy, serfdom, monarchy and privilege ... Its future is the struggle against private property, the struggle of the wage worker against the employer, the struggle for socialism" (ibid p52). Kamenev and the 'old Bolsheviks' could only see the past. That is why they sought unity with the Mensheviks. But in 1917 the future had begun, above all around the attitude towards 'defencism' and preventing the economic collapse caused by the imperialist war. Russia and its people could only be saved by the soviets of workers and peasants. That was not socialism. But it would bring socialism nearer.

Again then I ask why was Cliff so determined to belittle Lenin and paint him a Menshevik. Basically the answer is to be found in the fact that Cliff, along with all orthodox Trotskyites, took an economistic approach to contemporary politics, whereby democratic questions are viewed at best as secondary, if not irrelevant. A subject we will explore more fully in the concluding, fourth, part of this article.