13.01.2005
Marxism, the general strike and the 1905 revolution
One hundred years ago the workers of Russia shook tsarism to its very foundations and announced to the world that revolution was once more back on the agenda. General strikes were central to these events. Marxist thinkers - crucially Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg - drew profound conclusions, which, argues Jack Conrad, have today lost none of their relevance
In this article we shall begin with a brief discussion on strikes under pre-capitalist conditions before turning to the classic Marxist account of the importance and limitations of working class economic struggles. From here we move on to the general strike and how Marxism was informed by 1840s Chartism. We will see that later Engels in particular took responsibility for combating the anarchist general strike strategy. Then we deal with the opportunist attempt to misuse the polemics of Marx and Engels against the anarchists to distort their whole theory of the class struggle. Having done that, we shall show how during the 1905 revolution in Russia Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks learnt from the masses themselves and fought to combine the general strike tactic with the perspective of armed insurrection. Finally we turn to the ideological struggle Rosa Luxemburg conducted to make available the weapon of the general strike to the working class in Germany and ask what significance there was in the different manner she approached the question compared to Lenin. Introduction Sketchy though it may be, pre-class societies provide us with tantalising evidence of what might be called general strikes. Chris Knight, the radical anthropologist, suggested in his book Blood relations (1991) that some 74,000 years ago following the onset of the last ice age there was a female sex strike. A general act of menstrual solidarity which he says paved the way for the revolutionary transition from savagery to primitive communism that we know took place during the upper palaeolithic. And, though it is completely non-historic (maybe pacifist invention?), Aristophanes' play Lysistrata speaks for itself. It has a storyline with a similar collective action by the wives of the Athenian citizenry during the Peloponnesian war. Surely this was more than a farcical idea designed to get belly laughs from the all-male audiences at the Theatre of Dionysus - for sexual gratification these men had ready access to prostitutes or hetairai courtesans. Every fiction has a grain of truth. Who knows? - perhaps in this case some dim memory of primordial resistance to what Engels called the "world historical defeat of the female sex" that happened with the emergence of class society (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 26, Moscow 1990, p165). When it comes to class society itself, we are on firmer ground. Scraps of papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus reveal how the pyramid builders in ancient Egypt unitedly downed chisel and mallet on more than one occasion in order to give a hard edge to their petitions demanding improved rations and living conditions in the necropolis. It is also known that the exhausted state slaves of Athens struck and occupied the silver mines of Laurium in 135-33 BC (see GEM de Ste Croix The class struggle in the ancient world London 1983, p562). The cradle of western civilisation had them walled in and left to starve. In the corporate feudal town apprentices and journeymen, with the coordination provided by their well established societies, could win real advances. Nevertheless their strikes were little more than small acts of indiscipline within a highly fragmented, workshop-based patriarchal system of craft production. Other guild masters regarded them as not much more than a family squabble and an irritating example that others might follow. Writing about pre-industrial England, Edward Thompson makes the telling point that such "insubordination of the poor was an inconvenience; it was not a menace" (EP Thompson Customs in common London 1991, p42). The main collective form of class struggle employed by those below in ancient and feudal times was not the strike. From Spartacus to Wat Tyler, from king Jesus to Thomas Münzer, the popular classes punctured the supposedly seamless fabric of official society with utopian and sometimes despairing revolt - riot in the city, jacquerie in the countryside. Such uprisings could on occasion force upon the upper classes conditions which they regarded as onerous - not the least of which was democracy. However, for all their rights, the Athenian peasant-citizen, the Roman plebeian, the Icelandic yeoman farmer existed in a subordinate position within an oligarchic slave-owning system. There was always the danger of the aristocrats of birth or wealth regaining their unrestricted rule. The mob gets drunk quickly and just as quickly loses cohesion. Because of economic geography the peasant is dispersed to begin with. So even when united revolt overcomes the tyranny of distance, the moment of collective triumph over the manor or town is never permanent. Peasants are pulled back to helpless separation by the irresistible need to plant and harvest. The rulers deserved to fail. But even when the ruled successfully revolted, they could not provide a viable social alternative which abolished the reproduction of class relations. The nascent bourgeoisie - economically a powerful class within the womb of dissolving feudalism - introduced a dynamic element into the never-ending cycle of primitive revolt. When money did not serve them better, when there seemed no other way, the bourgeoisie was quite prepared to smash, terrorise and overturn. To perform such a political act they needed a universal philosophy of emancipation. To remove kingly, aristocratic and church barriers to their developing economic order the bourgeoisie formed itself into a class of liberators. It not only put men of action - Oldenbarneveldt, Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, Garibaldi - at the head of the popular movement. It used preachers, poets and pamphleteers - Calvin, Voltaire, Milton, Paine - as the "enchanter's wand" to inspire the masses with promises of heaven on earth. Hence the classic form of the bourgeois revolution was the barricade behind which stood the people who had been won to believe that they were fighting for liberté, fraternité and égalité or, given different times and countries, something equivalent to it. But, whatever dreams were spinning in their heads objectively, while they remained under bourgeois hegemony, the participants fought not for the rights of man, but public debt and a home market fit for capitalist accumulation and the unrestricted exploitation of man by man. Haunting the rise of bourgeoisiedom and the consolidation of the capitalist state - whether monarchical or plutocratic - was the ever-present threat of popular democracy. Levellers and sans culottes wanted a political system that would have greatly curbed the power of capital. However, the greatest threat to capitalism was its own creation - the modern proletariat. Sucked into factories, mines and mills by the never-ending and most elementary needs of capital, the 'swinish multitude' was transformed not only by a new common relationship to capital, but into a class because of a common struggle against capital. Marx and Engels were emphatic that individuals become a class only to the extent "they have to carry on a common battle with another class" (K Marx Pre-capitalist economic formations London 1978, p132). For workers then, it was not only material conditions of everyday life - housing, education, leisure and work - which moulded them into a class. It was the war against capital: beginning with combinations to limit competition between themselves as otherwise atomised sellers of labour-power. EP Thompson considers that our working class was formed through self-making economic, political and cultural struggle between the years 1780 and 1832; by which time "most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers" (EP Thompson The making of the English working class Harmondsworth 1981, p11). Marx and Engels were among the first to grasp the universal nature of this new class. Uniquely, because of its place in history and relationship to other classes and the means of production, it had an inescapable interest in not only improving its own lot. Precisely through its own condition, the working class is compelled to act in a revolutionary way, which ultimately must have as its object the abolition of class relations and the liberation of humanity. Those who own no means of production other than their ability to work have a ready and for them a self-evident weapon at hand to achieve their immediate ends, no matter how limited: the collective withdrawal of labour-power. That does not mean that once a strike begins there is a pre-set mechanism which operates to take workers up an inexorable series of organisational, political and ideological steps which ends in final liberation. In and of itself, what Marx called in his pamphlet Wages, price and profit the "incessant struggle" in the workplaces can only be a matter of resistance to the encroachments of capital (K Marx, F Engels Selected works Moscow 1968, p224). No different in essence then to the resistance of artisans, slaves, peasants and journeymen of previous times. That explains why during the early stages of capitalism communistic philosophers (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, etc) limited themselves to utopian dreams about what society should be like. The working class had yet to constitute itself as a militant class. But once it had done so, the real movement began to develop its own momentum and capability for qualitative self-development. Even by 1833 the Owenites were actively canvassing an "alliance between the trade unionists of England, France and Germany" (EP Thompson The making of the English working class Harmondsworth 1981, p912). When it came to this real movement, both Marx and Engels stressed the relationship and yet at the same time the difference between economic and political struggle. The strike to compel a particular employer or a particular group of employers to up wages or reduce hours is and will remain a purely economic struggle, and therefore a containable movement of the underclass. On the other hand the movement to force through a general wage increase or a general limitation on the working day is political in that it has as its object the enforcement of general interests "in a general form, in a form possessing general, coercive force": ie, it contains within it the seeds of a new social hegemony (K Marx, F Engels Selected works Moscow 1968, p683). It is not an either-or situation. Through, or out of, the training provided by separate economic movements the conditions are provided for a political movement in which the working class takes the lead against the state. The political movement of the working class can, however, only come about because there has been a certain degree of previous economic organisation. Capitalism in part does this spontaneously. With the concentration and centralisation of production workers come to possess a huge latent economic and therefore political power. One point, one area, one branch of production relies and is connected with another in a mosaic of national and global interdependence. Strikes affect the immediate employers. They also, if they are generalised, threaten not only the profits of other individual capitalists, but the collective power: ie, the "political power of the ruling class" (ibid p683). Having been cleaved into separate categories by the rise of capitalism, economics and politics come together again in the working class (the class that can become both the subject and object of history). After even the first few steps the generalised economic struggle can take on new dimensions. Met by the forces of the employer and the state's laws and courts, fighting in an integrated economy where scabs can easily be brought in, police employed and production transferred, workers are predisposed to and actively search out the totalising world view of communism: ie, their own self-knowing scientific theory. Through these politics the working class can express its championing of all who are oppressed by the state and its own will to power. Even on the lowest level the cooperation, rigid discipline and primacy of need over profit means that within themselves strikes contain a kernel of both proletarian economics and proletarian state power. As I have said, that does not mean there is an A-to-B course from the trade union strike against the employer to the socialist order. Nevertheless, as we shall see, there is a living connection between the generalised strike and a challenge to the system itself. Proving it, the history of the working class under capitalism (and bureaucratic socialism for that matter) is replete with strikes which, because of their internal dynamic, start off with the most modest economic demands and yet lead to the question of state power. Marxism and the general strike Throughout their political lives Marx and Engels, the founders of scientific communism, intransigently argued against the proposition that the working class could liberate itself by the simple device of staging one big general strike. Given the division of labour that existed between them, it was invariably the latter who took the lead in the associated polemics. On a number of occasions Engels understandably referred back to his brilliant book - published in 1845 when he was only in his mid-20s - The condition of the working class in England. We will do the same. In it, after all, Engels touched upon how in 1839 the world's first proletarian party, the British Chartists, agreed a resolution calling for a 'holy month'. This had nothing to do with worship of the godhead. It was a proposed month-long general strike which would - or so its advocates thought - be more than enough to get the Tory government to meet their, in effect, revolutionary demands for universal male suffrage and secret voting. Robert Owen had prepared the ground for this strikism with his disdain for political action. The years that followed were rich with proposals to use strike action for political ends: the Grand National Holyday in the industrial districts canvassed by Benbow; the lectures of John Francis Bray; the Society for National Regeneration with its recommendation of a general strike in order to achieve the eight-hour day. Ironically, again as explained in Engels' book, it was the bourgeoisie of industrial northern England who were consciously responsible for putting the 'holy month' to the test in July 1842. It was not, Engels said, that workers wished to quit work, but that the manufacturers "wished to close their mills and send the operatives into the country parishes upon the property of the aristocracy" (F Engels The condition of the working class in England Harmonds-worth 1972, p257). Putting aside their social contract with the aristocracy and their law-abiding creed of moral persuasion, the industrial bourgeoisie seem to have provoked, or taken advantage of, a general strike in order to use the working class as pawns. Letting loose proletarian anger was meant, in Richard Cobden's words, to "frighten the aristocracy" - so much so that it would bow before demands for the repeal of the Corn Laws and bring the industrial bourgeoisie one step nearer the day when it could finally crown itself the governing class. The Corn Laws kept the price of gain artificially high by levying a protective duty on imports. Here was a piece legislation first introduced in 1804 by a parliament dominated by landed interests which blatantly served their own narrow interests. Naturally they were much resented and fought over. Especially by the class of industrial capitalists. Big landlords maintained their enormous estates and bloated fortunes, but for the mass of the population that meant a high price for bread and for the employers an upward pressure on the price of labour-power. However, counterrevolutionary war with France had flung backwards the burgeoning radical and revolutionary movement in Britain and imposed internal conditions of reaction, oppression and arbitrariness whereby the most parasitic elements could hang on to governing power and thereby continue to live at the expense of the bourgeois nation. A combination of Anti-Corn Law League agitation and the famine in Ireland was eventually responsible for their final repeal in June 1846. As for the industrial bourgeoisie, it secured full voting entry into the parliamentary political system with the Reform Act of 1832. Edward Thompson suggests that this resolved a revolutionary situation in Britain and hence prevented an explosion that would have undoubtedly gone way beyond the Jacobin Year II of France. Maybe even putting political power into the hands of a British version of the enragés (see EP Thompson The poverty of theory London 1981, pp257-266). Though real capitalism was now the dominant mode of production, even after the decisive reformist moment of 1832 the industrial bourgeoisie failed to constitute itself an independent - let alone dominant - political force in parliament. Except for the handful of Radicals, the industrial bourgeoisie continued to line up behind the Whig Party (a prefiguration of the reformist entry of working class voters onto the parliamentary scene less than half a century later). Capital exercised power not through a bourgeois political class, but socially, as a dominant mode of production. The landed aristocracy - which had through capitalist farming and charging capitalist ground rent on mines become bourgeoisified - continued to staff the governing heights throughout the 19th century. Between 1818 and 1900 there was no discernible increase in the number of commoners in British cabinets. Indeed before Edward Heath most Tory leaders boasted a long aristocratic pedigree. Anyway, back to July 1842. Predictably, because the industrial bourgeoisie and their Anti-Corn Law League led from behind; because for those below there was no clear goal in mind; because the workers were driven into revolt by a plan hatched from above; because none wished to be shot for the sake of ending the Corn Laws; the whole thing did not take long to fizzle out. For our purposes, however, it is particularly germane that at its height the general strike "involved up to half a million workers and covered an area which stretched from Dundee and the Scottish coalfields to South Wales and Cornwall" (M Jenkins The general strike of 1842 London 1980, p21). An independent working class politics was being forged - politics which went much further than those resulting from the simple antagonism that is by definition endemic between employer and employee. Economic demands were joined with demands "for the revolutionary transformation of society"(ibid p23). As well as striking against pay cuts and short-time working, drawing the plugs from mill boilers and 'sweeping' out those still in the factories, workers burnt the property of those they hated and stormed workhouses - loathed by the poor and loved by the free-market liberals. Led by Thomas Cooper, a minority argued that there ought to be a physical-force insurrection to carry through the programme of Chartism. The majority around Fergus O'Conner agreed, but considered such a move premature (see D Thompson The Chartists Aldershot 1986, pp271-98). For the industrial bourgeoisie it was all too much. The propertyless were threatening "the destruction of those who had property" (The lord chief justice, quoted in M Jenkins The general strike of 1842 London 1980, p15). Having been released and shown itself self-willed and uncontrollable, the proletariat had to be returned to its dark hovels. The industrial bourgeoisie resumed a constitutional stance, abandoned its last Jacobin vestiges and moved to place itself at the service of the government. Its trusted retainers were armed and sworn in as special constables and in Preston were given the command to fire upon the crowd. The unintentional general strike therefore stood opposed not only by the government, but all exploiting classes. Arising from the events of July 1842 a number of Chartists were arrested, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced. There were, however, far more positive consequences. Crucially, the industrial bourgeoisie and the working class "decisively" separated (F Engels The condition of the working class in England Harmondsworth 1972, p259). Chartism freed itself from bourgeois hangers-on and became a purely proletarian movement. The British industrial bourgeoisie had burnt its fingers trying to manipulate working class revolution. Chastised, it refused any longer to listen to physical-force talk. Fear of the working class now weighed more heavily than dissatisfaction with the governing landed aristocracy. Polemics with the anarchists Despite the negative experience of history's first proletarian general strike, the idea was taken up by socialists in France and Belgium after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. That said, it was the anarchists, under the leadership of Mikhail Bakunin, who in the 1860s and 70s made the general strike strategy their own. Bakunin (1814-76), a Russian, was one of anarchism's founders and a leading ideologist. He was also an active revolutionary. In February 1848 he took part in the Paris revolution, was imprisoned in Saxony in 1849 and handed over to the tsarist authorities, who sent him into exile in Siberia. In 1861 he managed to escape. However, as a member of the First International, from 1864 he waged a fierce factional struggle against its general council led by Marx. The general strike, in the anarchist programme, became the lever which in their hands would bring about the social revolution. Engels mercilessly tore into this abstract perspective, not least in his pamphlet The Bakuninists at work. "One fine morning," he mocked, the anarchists imagine "all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use the opportunity to pull down the entire old society" (K Marx, F Engels CW Vol 23, Moscow 1988, p584). Events in Spain in 1873 gave an "unsurpassed example of how a revolution should not be made". Here was a country where the anarchists enjoyed a considerable following. Confronted by a serious revolutionary situation, however, the anarchists were compelled to ditch virtually their entire programme. Instead of abstaining from political and electoral activity and abolishing the state, they constituted themselves an impotent rump within an archipelago of patently bourgeois 'cantonal' governments. Finding themselves drawn into useless, senseless and uncoordinated uprisings, their only remaining so-called principle of federation and local autonomy gave counterrevolution the initiative and allowed it to concentrate its forces and crush one town at a time before turning to the next. Obviously anarchist politics stood in flat contradistinction to the living economic and political struggle. Indeed, even as the Spanish fiasco unfolded, the hopeless utopianism of its general strike strategy could still be found peppering their pronouncements. Despite that, at the September 1 1873 Geneva congress of the anarchist Alliance of Social Democracy, it was admitted that to carry out the general strike strategy, there had to be a perfect organisation of the working class and a full war chest. Engels had no problem in pointing out that here was the "rub". On the one hand, no government would sit idly by while workers religiously accumulated their pennies for such a project. On the other hand, almost by definition, the real class struggle would bring about the liberation of the working class long before any perfect organisation, with colossal reserves of funds, had ever been achieved. Furthermore, if by some strange quirk such an organisation had been built, then surely there would be no need for the "roundabout way of the general strike" in order to attain the objects of the working class. Here was the reasoning that shaped the Marxist approach to the general strike strategy and which went on to colour the attitude of the Second International. Formed in 1889, the Second International expanded at a fantastic pace. By the early years of the 20th century it included within its ranks every mass working class party in the world (they were often newly formed). Unlike the First International - which was a smaller, but very broad affair, embracing not only Marxists, but Proudhonists, Blanquists, Owenites and British trade unionists, as well as anarchists - the Second International accepted Marxism as its natural world outlook. (Bakunin and other anarchists were expelled from the First International at its Hague congress in 1872. A similar fate befell the anarchists at the Second International's 1896 congress in London.) Anarchism found itself completely marginalised, losing almost all the influence it once enjoyed. The Second International grew in an extended period of social peace. Fertile conditions for many of its parties and their most prominent leaders to be seduced by the specialised business of trade unionism, parliamentarianism, journalism ... and the bourgeoisie. Hence there was a large body of influential social democratic theoreticians, editors, MPs, officials and trade union functionaries who wanted to forget (even censor) the countless and very inconvenient revolutionary statements found in the writings of the Marx-Engels team. How, for example, they called for the smashing of the capitalist state, proletarian rule and insurrection. Instead, all that was recalled were the attacks on the anarchists - who were now little more than a phantom - not least their dreams of the general strike making the revolution. It is true that in 1891 and 1893 Belgian workers staged two 24-hour general strikes to force the government to extend the franchise. That in 1903 a strike on the Dutch railways grew into a brief general strike. That in Italy, in 1904, a wave of violent strikes saw street fighting in several cities. Nevertheless, among most theoreticians of the workers' movement the general strike was seen as something primitive or unobtainably utopian. In that spirit the German opportunist Ignaz Auer coined the catchphrase, "Generalstreik ist Generalunsinn" (general strike is general lunacy). The Russian Revolution of 1905 changed all that. It anticipated the end of capitalism's peaceful period of development and the beginning of a period of wars and revolutions. It also catapulted the general strike question to the forefront of political action and debate. From general strike to insurrection Russia's first revolution started on January 9 1905, a cold and terrible Sunday. (Before February 1 1918 the Julian calendar was in use in Russia, this is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, therefore January 9 in the Russia of 1905 corresponds to January 22, according to the calendar we use.) Partially through stupidity, partially through premeditated plan, tsarist troops were ordered to open fire on the huge march led by the priest (and police dupe) Gapon. Pushed on by disgust with the futile Russo-Japanese war, mass deprivation and a crop of economic strikes, he had intended submitting a half humble and, because of communist agitation, half threatening petition to the 'little father' in his St Petersburg Winter Palace. It listed almost every popular grievance and demand. Everything from workshops open to "draughts, rain and snow", withdrawal of the navy from abroad, the eight-hour day, "separation of church and state", to the convening of a Constituent Assembly elected by "universal, secret and equal suffrage" - the "most important of our requests". In its final peroration the famous petition bluntly and ominously stated that there were only "two paths". Either "happiness and freedom" or the "grave" (quoted in Neil Harding [ed] Marxism in Russia Cambridge 1983, p312). Tsarism horrifically proved it was the path to the grave. In the hail of bullets hundreds were killed, thousands more injured. Exact figures are impossible to calculate because the tsarist authorities did their best to hide its crime - the dead were secretly buried. Certainly though, the number of dead ran into the hundreds; the number of wounded into the thousands. Gapon all of a sudden found himself world-famous. From afar his mix of Ezekiel and Marx made him appear some sort of new age prophet. Fakir he was. But not one destined to be Russia's Gandhi, its Mahdi, its Makarios or its Khomeini. Even while his "halo of indignation" dazzled liberal opinion and his "pastor's curses" still rained down on the tsar's head, the communists had emerged from the underground and after overcoming initial mistrust began to exert a decisive influence over the people. Initiative slipped from the petty bourgeois individual, the insubstantial Gapon, and slowly passed to the proletarian Party, the "politically conscious workers who had been through the school of socialism". Again in the words of one of its foremost future leaders, a certain Lev Bronstein, it formed "an iron ring" around Gapon, "a ring from which he could not have broken loose even if he had wanted to" (L Trotsky 1905 Harmondsworth 1973, p93). So it was not the naive orthodox priest employed at a St Petersburg transit prison, but the working class which was to be the tsar's real protagonist. The January 9 massacre - Bloody Sunday, as it instantly became known - provoked outrage and a rolling nationwide general strike. One million workers stopped work. They took to the streets and shook the tsar and the whole autocratic system to its foundations. Without any guiding strategy, in many cases without advancing any clear demands; stopping, starting, "obedient only to the instinct of solidarity"; for almost two months the "strike ruled the land" (ibid p98). A spontaneous general strike wave such as January and February 1905 could only but exhaust itself. It had no idea of consummating itself in revolution. Moreover, these strikers did not get strike pay. Such an action thus had physical limits determined by the workers' stomachs, not trade union coffers. The revolutionary situation, however, continued unabated. Breaking out here as peasant land seizures, there as sailors' mutiny and everywhere as street demonstrations and clashes with police and troops, the decisive moment was coming. October was its herald. Trumpeted by a strike on the Moscow-Kazan railway, things quickly and enormously fanned out in terms of numbers, character and prospects. Isolated trade union strikes again became general political strikes. Demonstrations united workers and radical students around revolutionary slogans. Strike committees came together to establish workers' councils or soviets - organs of struggle - and, as Lenin was soon to appreciate, "embryonic forms of a new revolutionary authority" (VI Lenin CW Vol 10, Moscow 1977, p155). Clearly the situation had changed since January. What was unconscious had, like the human embryo, nine months after conception become conscious. Now, the revolution possessed a guiding strategy. Now, it had clear political demands. Now, for the most advanced detachments, the call for general strike was combined with preparation for armed uprising. Responsibility for this qualitative development rested entirely with the Communist Party - the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, as it was then known - and its power and prestige, which with every month grew in leaps and bounds. On the eve of the revolution, in January 1905, the Bolsheviks consisted of no more than 8,400 members. By the spring of 1906 membership of the reunited Russian Social Democratic Labour Party stood at 48,000, of whom 34,000 were Bolsheviks and 14,000 Mensheviks. In October of that year membership exceeded 70,000 and in 1907 the figures given at the London congress show that there were 84,000 members (that did not include the Bund, and the Polish and Lettish sections). The Bolsheviks were still the largest trend with 46,000 supporters, compared to the Mensheviks' 38,000 (figures from M Liebman Leninism under Lenin London 1980, p47). To organise and make effective the sudden release of popular anger and surge of self-movement Lenin had quite rightly almost straightaway demanded the opening up of the Party and mass recruitment, especially of young workers. That did not mean he rejected as wrong his ideas of building the revolutionary Party outlined in the celebrated 1902 pamphlet What is to be done? The Party would still be built and directed top-down. But now centralism was to be complemented and completed with mass initiative and democracy from below. The fact of the matter was that communists in Russia could on the changed terrain operate with considerable freedom. The battle lines had been shifted. The enemy's defences had been breached, its forces were in disarray and those of the workers in rapid advance. Tsarism was powerless to prevent the flow of ideas and growth of the Party. Exiles returned from Britain, Switzerland, France and Siberia as popular heroes. The cadres, formed until then without the oxygen of open mass activity and trained only by internal faction fights, no longer worked underground, no longer operated as persecuted committee men. Now they led and gave political clarity to an army of trade unions, student societies and workers' soviets which had sprung up like the dragons' teeth of Aetes. Standing before the people as tribunes of the oppressed, the communists addressed mass meetings by the score, legally published and widely circulated their literature, and in a moment encadred a generation - workers and students joined the Party in their tens of thousands and fused into a single alloy (Lenin welcomed the fact that "revolutionary workers and radical students no longer regarded each other as outsiders at open actions by the people" - VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p348). Even before the beginning of Bolshevism as a trend in 1903, Lenin had argued that only a proletarian-led insurrection, with the mass of peasants actively supporting it as allies, could rid Russia of tsarism and carry through a social transformation. With the events of January 1905 and the revolutionary months that followed, preparation for this became a matter of urgent necessity. That meant arming the people. The Mensheviks objected: "We have to arm the workers, not with weapons, but first with the burning consciousness of the necessity of arming themselves." The Bolsheviks gave an excellent answer: "You regard Russian workers as little children, you want to 'arm them with consciousness'; but that time has passed; they have the consciousness, now they need to be armed with rifles to strike at the tsar and the bourgeoisie" (quoted in G Zinoviev History of the Bolshevik Party London 1973, p123). Only an armed people could defend themselves and their new-found liberties. Only an armed people could look to the future with confidence. Only an armed people could win over sections of the tsar's army. As Lenin said, "The sooner the proletariat succeeds in arming, and the longer it holds its fighting positions as striker and revolutionary, the sooner will the army begin to waver; more and more soldiers will at last begin to realise what they are doing and they will join sides with the people against the fiends, against the tyrant, against the murderers of defenceless workers and of their wives and children" (VI Lenin CW Vol 8, Moscow 1977, pp98-99). If October was the herald, December was the decisive moment. Generalised political strikes once more broke out across the country. Demonstrations attracted ever greater numbers. Soviets began to exercise local power. The hour had arrived for nationwide insurrection. This time Moscow, not St Petersburg, was the torch-bearer. The St Petersburg soviet, first under the Menshevik Khrustalev, and then under Trotsky and Parvus - two outstanding Mensheviks who were moving away from Menshevism - decided against a physical confrontation with tsarism. Trotsky, writing before he became a Bolshevik, pleads in mitigation that the "indecision" in the capital could be explained "by the fact that the Petersburg workers realised very clearly that this time it was not a matter of a strike or demonstration, but a life or death struggle" (L Trotsky 1905 Harmondsworth 1973, p249). Moscow did not flinch before that challenge. Its Bolshevik leadership had been getting ready for months. Workplace meetings had declared for an uprising. Fraternisation with the local garrison produced a soldiers' soviet. Party cells were established in the army. Weapons illegally imported from abroad. Workers instructed in their use. Fighting detachments were formed too ... The people had been armed! Though members of the Moscow Bolshevik committee had just been arrested, the decision was made to go ahead. On December 7 it began. Key buildings were seized. Barricades webbed the city. Against enormous odds, but with the active support of its proletarian population, some thousand guerrillas broke the grip of tsarism in Moscow for nine days. Operating in small units of three or four, these druzhinniki "proved", in Lenin's words, that the "open, armed struggle of the people is possible even against modern troops" (VI Lenin CW Vol 10, Moscow 1977, p152). Uprisings broke out in Krasnoyarsk, Motovilikha, Novorossisk, Somrmovo, Sevastopol, Kronstadt, the Donetz Basin, Georgia, Finland and Latvia. The Moscow garrison vacillated. Sadly no more. Having concluded a peace with Japan, the tsarist government managed to bring in substantial reinforcements. They were free of Bolshevik contamination. Officers gave instructions to spare no bullets and take no prisoners. Artillery was used to smash and blast buildings and barricades. Morale among the populous began to wane. The druzhinniki fought on. But, lacking an authoritative directing centre, the uprising faltered and began to break apart into a series of disconnected defensive actions. The initiative was lost. A fatal weakness. Moscow was crushed. The other outposts of the revolutionary uprising followed. Engels was right when back in 1882 he suggested that Russia might become the world's revolutionary centre (in 1882 Engels had declared: "Today ... Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe" - F Engels 'Preface to 1882 edition' Manifesto of the Communist Party Moscow 1973, p11). The December 1905 uprising was therefore not simply a local event. It was a precursor, a mirror of what was to come in other countries. Marx's old mole had resurfaced in Moscow. Where it would burrow next in time and space no one could tell, but clearly capitalism as a whole was facing a new general crisis. After over three decades, the era of peaceful parliamentarianism and trade unionism was coming to an end. A new era had arrived - an era of revolution. That meant new tasks and new tactics. Marxism by definition always learns from life. It organises, generalises and gives conscious expression to the struggles and creative developments brought about by the masses themselves. Unlike anarchists and reformists, Marxists have no ready-made formulas nor a list of forbidden methods of struggle. In principle we positively recognise all tactical forms. So naturally with its shattering of social peace, its soviets and its new general strike and barricade tactics, the 1905 revolution had a profound effect on Marxist thinking. "There are," as Zinoviev said, "defeats which are more valuable than any victory." Eg, James Connolly was particularly impressed by how Moscow had advanced barricade tactics. Writing in May 1915, he wrote how it was "wise" that, unlike the French revolutionaries of an earlier time, the Russians did not "man the barricades", but used surprise tactics, attacking only when the enemy was in "range of their inferior weapons" (J Connolly Selected writings London 1988, p226). The revolution had through its own momentum created alternative organs of power on the pattern of the 1871 Paris Commune: ie, workers' soviets. That this had been done with a general strike acting as midwife in no way refuted Marx and Engels. On the contrary it bore out their method and showed that the anarchist strategy of overthrowing the bourgeoisie with one big general strike was a non-starter. The land of Bakunin's birth provided an unsurpassed example of how to make a revolution. Yet no thanks to the marginalised anarchists. It was the Marxists who led and gave the general strikes, mass demonstrations and urban uprisings their revolutionary programme. Even the terroristic Socialist Revolutionaries claimed, albeit falsely, to be followers of Marx. LeninNot only did the anarchists play no significant role whatsoever, but the idea of a general strike as a panacea was explicitly rejected. Not only was the general strike as a tactic - "essential under certain conditions" - discovered; so too were its limitations (VI Lenin CW Vol 11, Moscow 1977, p214). The spontaneous general strike might have sounded the approach of revolution. However, even if led by the Party, it could not take things to the finish. To do that an armed uprising was necessary. That is why Lenin argued in the course of the revolution that as an "independent and predominant form of struggle" the general strike was "out of date". The combination of general strike with insurrection was needed. That was the main lesson Lenin wanted to drive home when it came to the temporary reunification of the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings of the RSDLP in 1906. In the "tactical platform for the unity congress" the Bolsheviks wanted amongst other points the following accepted: "With further growth of the movement, the peaceful general strike proved inadequate, while partial recourse to it failed its aim and disorganised the forces of the proletariat .... In the present stage of the movement, the general political strike must be regarded not so much as an independent means of struggle as an auxiliary means in relation to insurrection; that therefore the timing of such a strike, and the choice of its place and of the industries it is to involve, should preferably depend upon the time and circumstances of the main form of struggle: namely, the armed uprising" (VI Lenin CW Vol 10, pp152-3). Needless to say, most Mensheviks were not prepared to accept any such thing. For Plekhanov, leader of the Mensheviks, the key lesson of the Moscow uprising was that "they should not have taken up arms" (quoted in G Zinoviev History of the Bolshevik Party London 1973, p127). A view shared in no uncertain terms by the right wing in the Social Democratic Party of Germany - the most prestigious party in the Second International. Those deputies in its large parliamentary fraction who had grown complacent in that self-important little world, those bureaucrats who had become dismissive of anything beyond the narrow confines of trade union politics, those who had succumbed to the blandishments of the bourgeoisie viewed not only Moscow's barricades and guerrillas with disquiet, but Russia's general strikes as well. Though social tensions were becoming more intense, general strikes would be completely out of place in the Vaterland, they chorused. True, the Jena congress of the party in 1905 adopted a resolution moved by August Bebel which agreed to the use of the general strike. Yet only in defence of the franchise! But in February 1906 the SDP's central committee secretly agreed with the trade union leaders not to implement the Jena resolution. Despite that, in the following years the Second International, in which the German party played a vanguard role, passed a number of resolutions which threatened the use of any means - and everyone knew that also meant a general strike - in the event of an inter-imperialist war (see J Riddle Lenin's struggle for a revolutionary International New York 1984, pp23, 25, 33-37). In the same year the Cologne trade union congress scandalously ruled out any discussion of the question. To do otherwise would be "playing with fire". Luxemburg and the general strike Those who paid lip service to Marx but feared the very idea of going beyond parliamentarianism and trade unionism met a brilliant, devastating and deflating opponent in Rosa Luxemburg. After it had been fearfully sidelined by party and trade union leaderships, she was determined to reopen discussion on the general strike and take the whole issue to a higher level. This she did primarily in her The mass strike, the political party and the trade unions - a pamphlet usually simply known as The mass strike. The conclusions in it were different from Lenin's. In part that arose from whom they were out to convince. Lenin had no hesitation in enthusiastically embracing the general strike tactic. That said, his main concern was to emphasise to Russian workers the limitations of the general strike, compared with the armed uprising. Luxemburg, on the other hand, wanted to show German workers the vistas offered by the general strike tactic compared with the dull routine that surrounded and limited accepted practice in Germany. So there was a different approach stemming from national conditions. Between 1905 and 1907 Russia experienced a tremendous revolutionary convulsion. Germany only the slow decay of social peace. However, though she was intimately associated with Russian politics and a critical ally of the Bolsheviks, her account fails to fully appreciate the crucial role of the Party and scientific theory. This was not the result of what Gramsci unfairly called her "iron economic determinism" (A Gramsci Prison notebooks London 1973, p233). Rather it was Luxemburg's tendency to produce universal theories based on only partial - ie, one-sided - truths. Thus on the national question Luxemburg came out in opposition to self-determination as a principle because of her correct view that the workers of Russia and her native Poland had no interest in fighting for separation (the bulk of Poland was at that time part of the tsarist empire). In the same way, having adopted Germany and the German workers' movement, she hardened her theoretical over-reliance on the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses. Given her earlier opposition to Lenin's "ultra"-centralism, this was true to form (see R Luxemburg Selected political writings New York 1972, pp93-105). Her belief that "the directing organs of the socialist party ... play a conservative role" and that revolution is primarily "a spontaneous act", theorised against Lenin in 1904, was confirmed by later personal experience of something more than mere bureaucratic ineptitude by the social democratic apparatus in Germany. She was, even at this stage, sure it would act as a barrier to revolution. So the spontaneous movement of the future was not to be led by the Party, but freed from its "barbed wire" (ibid pp102-103). Libertarian and unsatisfactory though many aspects of her thought were, we should not let the baby go down the plughole with the bathwater. Luxem-burg's generalisations of the lessons of 1905 might not be fully rounded, but they remain of great value, not least because they recognise the lightening speed with which events can move in any country, once the masses themselves gain confidence. She did not suffer from the dire pessimism of the intellect nor the paralysing construct that the workers of western Europe were forever doomed to trench-like warfare. Taking into account our own situation deep in the dug-out, what Rosa Luxemburg had to say is particularly relevant. There were those on the SDP right who accused her of wanting to foist the general strike - or the mass strike, as she called it - on Germany through winning a 51% congress resolution. Countering them, Luxemburg argued: "It is just as impossible to 'propagate' the mass strike as an abstract means of struggle as it is to propagate the 'revolution'" (R Luxemburg The mass strike London, no date, p17). Resolutions at party congresses do not bring about a general strike. No party - no matter how strong, no matter how high the esteem of its leaders - can call a general strike without regard to the concrete historical situation. Luxemburg was convinced that Germany was heading towards crisis. So was world capitalism. With this in mind there was nothing artificial about the workers' movement in Germany learning from Russia. The general strike was not a specific product of Russia. It was a tactic which objectively resulted from developments in world capitalism and its class antagonisms. The general strike "signifies nothing but an external form of the class struggle". As such its use can have sense and meaning only in "connection with a definite political situation". The general strike which fuses the political and economic into an anti-state movement represented a new and valuable tactical weapon for the future. Nothing more. In principle it was no different from other tactics, such as parliamentarianism or protest demonstrations. Trade union officials had their own particular fears and were quick to voice them. After decades of slow and patient work building the unions into strong organisations they did not want to risk disaster through importing Russia's general strike and unleashing a revolutionary storm. Or so they pleaded. According to Luxemburg, these guardians of the trade unions treated them not as weapons, but "like rare porcelain". The general strike, she argued, is not a crafty device that can speed up the process of objective development. History cannot be cheated. The general strike can only be understood from the point of view of what is historically inevitable. General strikes result from social crises. They cannot produce revolution: the revolution produces them. The bureaucrats had another excuse. The unions were too weak! Luxemburg had no difficulty in holing that one either. General strikes do not come onto the agenda when trade union membership reaches a certain level. The class struggle cannot be conducted by "counting heads". Furthermore, taking the example of Russia, it was clear that out of the "fire and the glow" of general strikes and street fighting there had emerged "like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions". Incidentally at that point in time all major trade unions except the railworkers, postal and telegraph workers and printers had been won to Bolshevik leadership. In the course of the revolutions, because of them, one industry after another spawned unions, till working conditions and hours had been won that in Germany had been "declared in social legislation to be an unobtainable goal" (R Luxemburg The mass strike London, no date, p34). Before the revolution unions hardly existed in Russia. The only independent - ie, non-police - trade union was that of the printers, which was established in 1903. The 1905-07 period of revolution produced a huge number of small unions. Of the 600 or so, only 22 had memberships over 2,000. It was the factory commissions, however, which began to "take charge of all matters affecting the internal life of the factory, drawing up collective wage agreements and overseeing the hiring and firing of workers" (SA Smith Red Petrograd Cambridge 1983, pp57-58). The 1917 revolutions also produced factory committees and even more rapid growth in the trade unions. By October 1917 they had some two million members, with Petrograd having "one of the highest levels of unionisation in the world" (ibid p109). Luxemburg was sure that a general strike in Germany would see the unions enormously grow in numbers and authority. The bureaucrats could do as they like. They were not the agents of history: merely the objects. Once those above cannot rule in the old way and those below refuse to be ruled in the old way, things are ready to move in a revolutionary direction according to the will and determination of the masses. A general strike would be an organic part of such a change. It would be a people's movement which organises the unorganised through a torrent of self-education and self-organisation. The workers would lay hold of the nearest weapon at hand. They would flood into trade unions and, if they could, refashion them according to their new needs. Luxemburg derided those who insisted for their own reasons in presenting the idea of a general strike as if they were debating with the anarchists. The general strike should not be seen as "one act, one isolated action" which overthrows the bourgeoisie. Rather - as an elemental movement made up of millions of people, now being economic, now being political - the general strike would represent the culmination of a whole period of the class struggle which had lasted years, perhaps decades. Drawing in all strands of the class struggle, the general strike leads to a direct confrontation with the capitalist state. Thus the general strike "is inseparable from the revolution" (ibid p47). On the basis of all this Luxemburg advocated that the German SDP and the trade unions take on board the general strike tactic. Not only as a method of defence, but as a method of attack. If that were done it would greatly enhance the morale of the workers. Those who expressed fright at the very suggestion of the general strike were themselves responsible for sapping that morale: "A consistent, resolute, progressive tactics on the part of the social democracy produces in the masses a feeling of security, self-confidence and desire for struggle; a vacillating, weak tactics, based on an underestimation of the proletariat, has a crippling and confusing effect upon the masses" (ibid p52).
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