Class Consciousness and Organisation

Pamphlet of the £3/$4/€4 Communist Workers’ Organisation Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation Pamphlet of the Communist Workers’ Organisation

Affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency in Britain

Introduction 1

1 Idealism and Bourgeois 2

2 How Working Class Consciousness Develops 7

3 Marx, Engels and Proletarian Organisation 11

4 The Era of Social and the Fight Against 15

5 On the Eve of : the Debate Between Luxemburg and Lenin 21

6 Class Consciousness and Working Class Political Organisations 28

7 Party and Class in the Revolutionary Wave 1917-1921 33

8 The Decline of the and the Cult of the Party 37

9 The Idealism of Bordigism 43

10 By Way of Conclusion: Towards Proletarian 49

For correspondence write to:

BM CWO London WC1N 3XX

email: [email protected] or visit our website: http://www.leftcom.org

Subscriptions to Revolutionary Perspectives (3 issues) and Aurora (at least 4 issues): UK: £15 (€18) Europe: £20 (€24) World: £25 (€30, $30)

How to pay: By cheque made out to the “CWO” and sending it to the address above. By emailing us at [email protected] and asking for our banking details. By Paypal using the “Donate” button on our webpage. You can also take out a supporter’s sub by adding £10 (€12) to each sum. This will give you priority mailings of Aurora and other publications including free pamphlets as they are published. Introduction

The issue of class consciousness is one of the most important for the working class, and for its revolutionary minorities. Behind it lies the really big questions, such as “How can be destroyed?”, and “Is the working class capable of creating a new society?”. Some, impatient to bring about the end of a system which has plainly outlived its usefulness for the vast majority of humanity, have even despaired of the fight because they say “the working class has been bought off” or because “’s control of the media is so complete that workers can easily be fooled into accepting capitalist ideas”. Others, like the various Bordigist “parties”, argue that the only sense in which the actually exists as a class is if it forms a political party which is the sole expression of its revolutionary consciousness. Still others (and these seem to be a growing band today), believe the whole question of revolution will be posed without worrying about revolutionary consciousness at all. For them revolution is basically a spontaneous issue which will arise directly from the daily economic struggle of the working class.

It is our aim to address these, and other questions here, but not as abstract philosophy. Our approach will be unashamedly historical and attempt to draw out the real experience of the working class in its struggles of the last two centuries. is not just a theory or ideology but the expression of the real movement of the working class in its fight against exploitation. This struggle is not a linear one, progressively homing in on an inevitable victory but now advances, then retreats, as we have seen in the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian of 1905 and 1917. One thing though, it never completely vanishes, for capitalism’s contradictions constantly recreate the material conditions for the existence of a separate working class consciousness. In this historical approach we are in conformity with Marx who rejected speculation for a study of real life. When,

Empty talk about consciousness ceases and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. (The German Ideology)

Or to borrow from his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach our aim here is not merely to interpret the world but to contribute to the revolutionary practice required to change it.

In this sense our short pamphlet is only part of a work in progress, a contribution to debate and to the future struggle of our class. The pamphlet has its origins in a series of articles which appeared in Revolutionary Perspectives. For this reason some arguments tend to be repeated but we hope that this adds rather than detracts from its overall message. We would like to thank all the comrades who have sent in corrections for this reprint but we know that It is not by any means exhaustive and does not deal with questions like, for example, how a party comes to be organised inside the working class under present conditions (this is dealt with in our other publications) but it is a statement about where we think the class struggle has so far brought us on this long road to the freedom for not only the world working class but, through it, for the whole of humanity itself.

But before we can fully embark on that task, we need to first remind ourselves how the whole issue of consciousness arose…

CWO May 2018

1 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Consciousness in General to human beings (alienated from them in philosophical terms) and this could not be 1 deas do not spring from thin air. The source fully understood by them as it was God- Iof ideas, or consciousness, has occupied given. It was only under the impetus of the the ideologists of class society for thousands scientific revolution, which was predicated of years. For them the great problem was on the early development of capitalism, Idealism and the distinction between mind and matter, that this approach began to break down. between the animal bodies of human beings The Copernican revolution overturned the Bourgeois Materialism and their capacity for abstract thought. Biblical and Ptolemaic understanding of the In ancient society, particularly in Ancient cosmos. This in turn opened up the way for Athens, philosophers like Plato saw ideas as crude materialist philosophy. being “innate”, only being brought into the light of day by the articulation of thought. This took several forms from the rationalism For him the real world was the world of of Descartes (who came up with ideas only ideas and the material world contained only using reason - he boasted he made his best shadows or partial reflections of these ideas. leaps in knowledge in bed!) to the empiricism The material world was thus a secondary of Bacon who had the merit of understanding world dependent on the world of ideas, that the world was a product of humanity’s and without the world of ideas the material material existence. Bacon was the father of world would not exist at all. By studying the modem English empiricism in that he argued shadows and reflections in the secondary that what could not be proved by immediate material world the wise man can come to experiment was unscientific. know the world of ideas or the real world. Consciousness of the real world is attainable The same type of vulgar materialism can only to the philosophers who can undertake be found in the works of Thomas Hobbes this study. The rest of humanity is deceived and John Locke. Locke, both in science and by the world of shadows, and consequently politics, upheld the rule of law. For him have “false consciousness”. It was no accident scientists like Newton, who systematised that such an idea was developed within a whole branches of knowledge (like physics leisured class in a society where slaves did and mechanics), gave new laws to explain the all the work, and where labour was seen as order of the universe. For Locke, the English something close to animal activity. “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-9 brought the same spirit of law and order to British society These Greek aristocrats are the earliest of after the turbulence of the and what we would call the “idealists”. For them, Commonwealth. There was little room for the ideas have an existence independent of supernatural in either Newton’s or Locke’s human activity and are the prime motive view of the world, a fact which brought them of all historical change. In some ways, both criticism from the established Church. this idealism was an advance on the Not surprisingly this initial bourgeois later Christian philosophers of the feudal materialism developed strongest in Britain, period such as Thomas Aquinas. He re- a country where capitalism and industrialism interpreted Aristotle’s world-view for the was already advancing rapidly. It was to expanding Christian Church. He placed the remain so for a further century. Thus, ‘The Judaeo-Christian God (rather than “The summit of eighteenth century science One” in Greek philosophy) as the fount of was materialism” (Engels, The Position of human consciousness. For the Christians England in the Eighteenth Century). This was our thoughts belonged to the soul which certainly an advance since it established the departed the animal body after death. Long fundamental basis of the materialist world before the advent of Christianity, humanity outlook that: All consciousness is derived as a species that is aware, came to explain from the material world and experience of that awareness by discovering something this world. outside itself in religion. Religion, throughout most of human history, was a substitute for But, whilst this materialism was opposed science. Or as Marx put it in the Economic and to the spiritual subjectivism of religion, it Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 could not seriously challenge it. This was due to several reasons which can only be The gods in the beginning are not the dealt with schematically here. In the first cause but the effect of man’s intellectual place, the rising tended to see confusion. human nature as a constant that had not op.cit. [Lawrence and Wishart, 1959, p82] changed throughout history. They equated the rise in science and reason to something Throughout the Middle Ages, authority that was inevitable since they could not fully rather than reason became the doctrine of understand that it was the rise of a new mode the Christian Church. Nature was external of production dominated by themselves 2 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Quoted in J.D. Bernal, Science in History, Minerva only flies when dusk has fallen. Vol. 2 (Pelican, 1969), p540 “Preface to Rechtsphilosophie”

A perfect illustration that there is no But despite Hegel, ideas do have practical separating science from society. No wonder consequences. To argue that the purpose of they bricked up the door to the public gallery thinking is merely to articulate what actually so that “rude mechanics” could not get in to exists is to rationalise the status quo. Thus hear this clear endorsement of class society! he ended by arguing (in post-Napoleonic Germany), that the Absolute ideal was the But the same which led already existing Prussian State and Church. to the victory of Tory reaction in Britain had In doing this, he not only did violence to the opposite effect in the German-speaking his own ideas on historical change, but world. also split his followers. It was the debate on the legacy of Hegel which coincided G.W. F. Hegel The Defeat of Idealism with the development of capitalism and 1770-1831 the bourgeoisie in Germany. And given In Germany, a series of over 360 separate the state of censorship at the period in which had helped to precipitate it. feudal and semi-feudal states until Napoleon which Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor defeated the Prussians at Jena in 1806, crushed all liberal and national movements Similarly, they viewed human beings idealist philosophy remained the dominant in German-speaking lands (through the simply as disconnected atoms. Thus they force in thinking. As Marx German Bund formed in 1815), the debate saw consciousness as being just about dubbed it, it was “the German ideology”. And was fought out in the obscure language of the individual as such and not about the the dominant figure in this idealist world philosophy. role of the individual in society. This was was G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel was in many ways why they were fascinated by the story of a contradictory thinker. Influenced by the Most of Hegel’s critical followers, the young Alexander Selkirk, who lived for years on a drama of the French Revolution, and even Hegelians, were rooted out of the Prussian desert island, and which was immortalised more directly by the Napoleonic conquests universities after the accession of Frederick in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. All their of Europe (Hegel himself witnessed the William IV in 1840. This included Marx’s own works on economic behaviour started arrival of this “world historic spirit” in Jena), mentor Bruno Bauer, and thus Marx himself. from this very bourgeois figure (who even Hegel recognised that human history was Marx now turned away from the academic has a manservant miraculously provided not unchanging and that it had to be based life to journalism. As a contributor, and later, to do the labour!), as if it was an accurate on reality. editor, of the Rheinische Zeitung after 1841, explanation of how humanity had arrived at Marx admitted that it was an important step capitalism. Marx dismissed these fantasies as What is actual is necessary in itself. Necessity on the road to his acceptance of communist “Robinsonades” in his later writings. consists in this, that the whole is sundered ideas and what we now call historical into the different concepts and that this materialism. As to religion, the British could only throw up divided whole yields a fixed and permanent a sceptic like David Hume who argued that determinacy. However this is not fossilised I experienced for the first time the modern science had shown that we could determinacy but one which permanently embarrassment of having to take part in not be sure about anything. The conclusion recreates itself in its dissolution. discussions on so-called material interests. was that there probably was a God but as we G. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford 1942 Preface to his Contribution to the Critique could not communicate with him then we p.283) of Political Economy (1843) should live life as though he did not exist! A major problem for the bourgeoisie was that What Hegel gives us is a mechanism to First though he had to settle accounts with religion had a social function. As Napoleon understand change (the )1 and even his philosophical past. His experience of brutally put it in 1802 “Simple people need a recognition that this must be rooted in the conditions of the working class (as seen religion”. How would the masses respect reality. For Hegel though, reality only became in his article on the “Debate on the Law on morality if it was not for the restraints of real when philosophers recognise it in what the Thefts of Timber” in October 1842) itself religion? he called “absolute spirit”. This was a actually sharpened his attack not only on Hegel but a cover for God. Hegel’s argument was that also on his followers. The French Revolution, when “the people” as man pursued his quest for understanding turned into the “mob”, drove the British he would logically arrive at the Absolute or This was not something that occurred bourgeoisie back to support for Church union with God. For Hegel the purpose of overnight. Marx was never content with and King against the “god-less French”. The reason was to understand the mind of God. the superficial (hence why after nearly demands of social order decreed that science It had no concrete results. several decades of gestation his project line up with the ruling class as expressed in for Capital was never completed!). He had Humphrey Davy’s introductory discourse at Die Philosophie ist in der tat Gottesdienst. read Hegel very carefully, and had initially the Royal Institution in 1802: [Philosophy is, in fact, in the service of tried to reject Hegel’s thinking altogether, God] but, after intense study, he had succumbed The unequal division of property and of to the powerful dialectical method Hegel labour, the difference of rank and conditions or, as he put it in another famous passage employed. However, when he too realised amongst mankind, are the sources of power the implications of Hegel’s ideas, he joined in civilised life, its moving causes and its Philosophy comes too late to teach the the Young Hegelians who were beginning to very soul. world what it should be . . . The owl of criticise the master’s thinking. Marx, however, 3 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Religion offered thus both a justification This is an essential element of Marx’s views of the existing order and a source of of the inter-relationship of ideas and activity. consolation and rejection of it. The famous They were both the product of human passage on it being the “opium of the people” history. In the Preface to The German Ideology is often merely interpreted as a statement of Marx and Engels basically take the piss out of atheism but it went much deeper and was the Young Hegelian’s idealistic method. also an expression of the materialist basis of . Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about The struggle against religion is therefore themselves, about what they are and what indirectly the struggle against that world they ought to be. They have arranged their whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious ideas about their relationships according to suffering is the expression of real suffering their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The and at the same time phantoms of their brains have got out of their heads They, the creators, have bowed the against real suffering. Religion down before their creations. Let us liberate is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, Ludwig Feuerbach heart of the heartless world, as it is the spirit imaginary beings under the yoke of which 1804 - 72 of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the they are pining away. Let us revolt against saw consciousness only as an individual people. .. The criticism of religion is thus in the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says phenomenon. embryo a criticism of the vale of tears whose one, to exchange these imaginations for halo is religion. thoughts which correspond to the essence soon began to diverge from them too, since of man: says the second, to take up the they accepted Hegel’s idealist conception Marx did not write much more on religion critical attitude to them, say the third, of the dominance of ideas over reality. after this (another job left for Engels). The to knock them out of their heads; and – When Ludwig Feuerbach, in his “Preliminary reason is clear. With the pronouncement in existing reality will collapse. Theses for the Reform of Philosophy” criticised the same work that, Hegel’s method as a “mystification” and put Just in case anyone is doubting this is irony, real flesh and blood human beings rather Religion is only the illusory sun that revolves Marx and Engels tell us that these are the than God at the centre of philosophy, Marx around man so long as he does not revolve innocent and child-like fancies of the Young enthusiastically greeted his work. about himself, Hegelians. They hammer the point about their idealism home with a further piece of However, even Feuerbach’s materialism did Marx could now concentrate on what was satire. not fully satisfy Marx’s own developing views. the real issue of how human beings achieve In 1843, Marx was not yet a communist and their emancipation. Marx could not fall into Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the was collaborating with Arnold Ruge on the the trap of the Young Hegelians by simply idea that men were drowned in water only Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbucher. insisting that the world would change because they were possessed of the idea because their idealism was more rational of gravity. If they were to knock this notion Marx’s second contribution to this was than Hegel’s. Marx criticised this view in yet out of their heads, say, by stating it to be a his “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s another letter to Ruge. superstition, a religious concept, they would Philosophy of Right”. He starts this article by be sublimely proof against any danger from announcing once again the debt of German We do not then set ourselves opposite the water His whole life long he fought against philosophers to Feuerbach world with a doctrinaire principle, saying the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful “here is the truth, kneel down here!” It is results all statistics brought him new and For Germany the criticism of religion has out of the world’s own principles that we manifold evidence. This honest fellow been essentially completed and criticism of develop for it new principles. We do not say was the type of the new revolutionary religion is the premise of all criticism. to her, “stop your battles, they are stupid philosophers in Germany.. . stuff. We want to preach the true slogans of The German Ideology in Karl Marx Selected But then he goes on to say that religion battle at you.” We merely show it what it is Writings ed D. McLellan pp 159-160 does not arise as a “false consciousness” as actually fighting about, and this realisation Feuerbach has it. Religion arises because is a thing it must make its own even though By now Marx had a problem. How could of the ways in which human beings have it may not wish to. Germany, which had a developed philosophy hitherto organised their social and political but a backward social structure, participate existence. The reform of consciousness consists in the emancipation of humanity? solely in letting the world perceive its own The basis of irreligious criticism is: man consciousness by awaking it from dreaming The weapon of criticism obviously cannot makes religion, religion does not make man. about itself, in explaining to it its own replace the criticism of weapons. Material But man is not an abstract being squatting actions. force must be overthrown by material force. outside the world. Man is the world of man, Correspondence (to Arnold Ruge), But theory also becomes material force the state, society. This state and this society September 1843, in D. McLellan (ed.), Karl when it grips the masses. produce religion, which is an inverted Marx: Selected Writings (OUP 1977), pp consciousness of the world because they are 37-8 But in an inverted world. In Germany, by contrast, where practical life 4 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

is as mindless as mental life is impractical, My dialectic method is not only different no class in civil society has any need or from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. capacity for general emancipation until it To Hegel, the life-process of the human is forced to by its immediate condition, by brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, material necessity, by its very chains. under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, It only needed Marx to link together his is the demiurgos of the real world, and the theoretical evolution with his experience real world is only the external, phenomenal in dealing with “material questions” on the form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, Rheinische Zeitung to discover that the class the ideal is nothing else than the material he was talking about was the working class, world reflected by the human mind, and the proletariat. The only possibility for real translated into forms of thought. emancipation lay [See https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm] in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of But long before this he had set out his civil society; a class that is the dissolution historical materialist ideas more positively. An 1843 cartoon in protest at Prussian of all classes, a sphere of society having censorship of the Neue Rheinische Zei- universal character because of its universal The German Ideology thus begins tung showing Marx as Prometheus bound, suffering... a sphere, in short, that is the not to a rock, but to a printing press. complete loss of humanity and can only The premises from which we begin are redeem itself through the total redemption not arbitrary ones, not dogmas but real means of subsistence depends first of of humanity. The dissolution of society as a premises from which abstraction can be all on the nature of the actual means of particular class is the proletariat. made only in the imagination. They are subsistence they find in existence and have the real individuals, their activity and the to reproduce. This It is no accident that Marx was to be the material conditions under which they live, must not be considered simply as being the theoretical leader of communism but he both those which they find already existing production of the physical existence of the became so not just from his own quest to and those produced by their activity. These individuals. Rather it is a definite form of the understand how human society had changed premises can thus be verified in a purely activity of these individuals, a definite form and would change over time. It was also due empirical way. of expressing their life, a definite mode of to the incipient rise of the proletariat at that Karl Marx: Selected Writings (ed. D. life on their part. time. Marx moved towards communism McLellan) p.160 (loc. cit. p.161) after he had gone to Paris and made contact with workers and the early French socialists This is why Marxism can never be compared And this is not all. In contrast to Feuerbach in October 1843. Marxism as a method to a religion. Religion requires only faith and and other bourgeois materialists, who thus arose as a reflection of the growth of its premises are unchallengeable. But every saw consciousness as an individual capitalism in Europe. The proletariat were statement of Marxism has to be verified in phenomenon resulting from the impact identified as the really revolutionary class the real world. of sense perception, physical and even not as a sentimental whim, and even less metabolic factors (e.g. diet)2 on the isolated because they were a simple Hegelian ideal And this real world is dominated by human human being, Marx saw that variations in antithesis, but because the proletariat above beings’ need to solve the basic problems of consciousness were due to their activity as all was the one class of flesh and blood existence. human beings collectively in a society. mortals which represented the very opposite of private property. And, in recognising the The first premise of all human history is, The production of life, both of one’s own potential of the working class, Marx also of course, the existence of living human in labour and of fresh life in procreation, gave to the proletariat the scientific basis for individuals ...(they) can be distinguished now appears as a double relationship: on its own emancipation. from animals by consciousness, by religion, the one hand as natural, on the other as a or anything else you like. They themselves social relationship. By social we understand begin to distinguish themselves from the co-operation of several individuals, animals as soon as they begin to produce no matter under what conditions, in what In the light of the above Marx made it their means of subsistence. manner and to what end. It follows from clear that their world-view was exactly the this that a certain mode of production, or opposite of the idealism of Hegelianism. In This and the famous passage in the Preface industrial stage, is always combined with an afterword to the second German edition to the Introduction to the Critique of Political a certain mode of co-operation or social of Capital in 1873 Marx explained that Economy are the basic statements of stage and this mode of co-operation is itself Hegel’s exposition of the dialectic was historical materialism. However they are only a “productive force”. “basic”. Marx carries on the discussion to The German Ideology in Marx: Selected standing on its head. It must be turned right point out that the reproduction of material Works (ed. McLellan) p.166 side up again, if you would discover the life is not just a mechanical process (as the rational kernel within the mystical shell Stalinists were to maintain in the 1930s). It Again this is one of the main criticisms of is also the real life of these individuals and is Feuerbach’s materialism He went on to explain how his materialism historically conditioned by time and place. was the direct opposite of Hegel’s idealism IX. The highest point attained by The way in which men produce their contemplative materialism, that is 5 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

materialism that does not understand it. Buchner’s Woyzeck. sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in “civil But changing the world is the key to the society”. issue. Marx’s critique of German philosophy Theses on Feuerbach in McLellan edition. as “ideology” (in this sense, just speculation about human history) was worthless unless Consciousness would not only vary he could explain how the process of change historically but also through social relations could come about. In order to distance and class position. Consciousness is thus himself from the idealists Marx made it clear not derived from the world individually as that Communism wasn’t just a sentimentally in bourgeois materialism but is a social and pleasant idea nor was it dreamed up in his collective product. head.

The sum total of these relations of Communism is for us not a state of affairs production constitute economic structure which is to be established to which reality of society, the real foundation... to which will have to adjust itself. We call communism correspond definite forms of social the real movement which abolishes the consciousness ... It is not the consciousness present state of things. The conditions of of men that determines their being but this movement result from the premises their social being which determines their now in existence. consciousness. The German Ideology loc cit p.l71 Preface to the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy in MESW Vol 1.p 363. However materialism seemed to have 0ur emphasis added. erected a barrier to its own conclusions. The premises might have existed but where was Finally, in establishing the differences the material movement? A few pages later between historical materialism and Marx seems to offer no hope of proletarian bourgeois materialism, Marxist materialism emancipation at all. is dialectical. Whereas bourgeois materialists The ideas of the ruling class are in every saw individual human beings as passively epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which receiving sensory imprints, which were is the ruling material force of society is at then physiologically translated into the same time its ruling intellectual force. consciousness, Marx argued that this was The class which has the means of material a “vulgar materialism”. In reality, the raw production at its disposal, has control at material of experience is actively restructured the same time over the means of mental by its recipients through thought (and since production so that thereby, generally thought has a historical dimension, it also speaking, the ideas of those who lack the acts as part of the process of the development means of mental production are subject to of consciousness), and they in turn react it. back on their experience. Consciousness is loc cit., p 176 not a direct product of experience but an indirect one. Consciousness is structured by The truth of this statement is all too obvious and mediated by already existing patterns in our own time where a handful of media of understanding and thought. This is magnates faithfully produce pap for the the meaning of the first of the Theses on defence of their class interests on a daily basis. Feuerbach But if this is the case how can communism become “the real movement” in any shape I. The chief defect of all previous materialism or form? The answer given by Marxism and (including that of Feuerbach) is that things the proletariat will be examined in the next (Gegenstand) reality, the sensible world, chapter. are conceived only in the form of the objects (Objeckt) of observation, but not as human Notes sense activity, not as practical activity.. . Theses on Feuerbach from the Bottomore 1 Hegel borrowed the method of the dialectic and Rubels edition [Original emphases]. from Socrates (as understood by Aristotle). Both believed that the method was based on revealing Consciousness, therefore, has to have a the inherent contradiction in existing ideas. Hegel social and an historical dimension. It was to saw this as a three-fold process in which the underline this inter-relation of thought and Abstract initial notion would be challenged by its practice at this point that Marx later adds the Negative and the final resolution would give rise famous thesis that to a final Concrete form. 2 Summed up on the famous aphorism of XI. The philosophers have only interpreted the Feuerbach “Man is what he eats” which was world in different ways, the point is to change translated into the plot of the stage play of 6 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

t the end of the first chapter we left bearer of the anti-feudal forces in the Third Areaders with an apparent contradiction Estate. 2 in Marxist views on consciousness. Whilst Marx, on the one hand, could declare in the The bourgeoisie didn’t say that their “liberty” Provisional Rules of the First International was only liberty for the property owner. They How Working Class that, didn’t say only those who actually owned a bit of the country’s wealth could be citizens. Consciousness Develops ...the emancipation of the working class Freedom for them meant freedom of trade, must be conquered by the working classes freedom to exploit labour unlimitedly themselves. 1 and freedom to control the press so that The is the ultimately once the bourgeoisie had fully got most radical rupture with traditional he had earlier seemed to offer no hope of its hands on the levers of state power it could property relations; no wonder that proletarian emancipation at all. even concede universal suffrage confident in its development involves the most the knowledge that it was no threat to their radical rupture with traditional ideas. The ideas of the ruling class are in every property interests. The proletariat which did The Communist Manifesto epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is its share of fighting and dying in the struggle the ruling material force of society is at the against was now told that freedom same time its ruling intellectual force. had been won and there was no need for any The German Ideology p.1762 further struggle.

It is generally true that in all class societies But what was “the end of history” for our the ideas of the ruling class dominate and bourgeoisie was only the beginning for yet society changes and the ruling classes the proletariat. Right up to the present day are overthrown. How does this occur? the material reality of capitalist society, however the bourgeoisie, consciously or The Development of Bourgeois not, attempt to hide it, conflicts with the Class Consciousness capitalist ideology they propound. While we are told of capitalism’s wonderful virtues, While the ideas of the ruling class are such as efficiency, justice, harmony with generally the ruling ideas in society it is human nature and so forth, the proletariat obvious that their domination can never be experiences , deprivation, total. The material reality of class society, exploitation and war. This creates the basis with its inherent conflicts and insoluble for ideas which begin to challenge capitalist contradictions, is continually generating the ideology. At first these ideas are only basis for ideas which oppose those of the concerned with the self-definition of the ruling class. It is not classes as such which proletariat as a class. As Marx put it in The challenge the received ideology but the Communist Manifesto, struggle between them that generates, at certain points in history, the ideas of both But with the development of industry the the exploited and the exploiting class. proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, Lets start with our current class enemy. its strength grows, and it feels that strength How did the bourgeoisie begin its rise more ... the collisions between individual to domination under feudalism? The workmen and individual bourgeois take bourgeoisie began life as mere supplicants more and more the character of collisions under feudalism. Monarchs and local between two classes. Thereupon the aristocrats gave them charters with rights to workers begin to form combinations set up markets and to produce outside the (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they system of serfdom because they provided club together in order to keep up the rate of goods and services which the feudal military wages; they found permanent associations system could not. They themselves accepted in order to make provision beforehand for restrictions on trade via the guilds in order these occasional revolts. Here and there the to protect their own wealth. But when that conflict breaks out into riots.3 wealth had reached such a proportion that it dwarfed the aristocracy’s landed From Class in Itself to wealth they began to demand more. They Class for Itself demanded an end to feudal restrictions on the growth of their wealth (internal customs But this is only workers defining themselves duties, tax immunity for the aristocracy as a social entity, as a class. This is what Marx etc.). When feudal society responded by called the class in itself (in The of refusing to honour their contribution to the Philosophy). It is not yet a class acting as fully state because of their “low birth”, then the conscious of how it can really achieve its own bourgeoisie unfurled the ideological banner emancipation. He made this clear in Wages, of “freedom” and became the standard Price and Profit written in 1865. Here he first 7 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation argued that workers had to fight to exist as a do to in order to replace capitalism with a against the feudal constraints on their class. If they didn’t they would be degraded society built in its own image. Here we should social advance. If, as in Great Britain, the to one level mass of broken wretches past pause a minute just to clarify our categories. aristocrats let the merchants enjoy a similar salvation.4 Obviously “class consciousness” can refer to social status and inter-married with them a whole range of attitudes and ideas. In real then the bourgeoisie took over the state via At the same time although he later told life these cannot be simply categorised into a long process (which was not without its German trades union leaders that “trades straightforward stages through which a class bloodshed - think only of the English Civil unions are schools of ”, he made it progressively passes in linear fashion. Real life War and the execution of Charles I). When, on clear that they were conservative in nature, is obviously a lot messier than any scientific the other hand, the aristocracy tried to keep and that it was in becoming socialists that attempt to make sense of it. However it or return the bourgeoisie to their former workers took on their real class viewpoint. is clear that there is world of difference subservient status then the bourgeoisie He went on to warn that; between a strike against an attempt to lower began to clothe themselves in the rationale wages and a mass struggle which calls for of the Enlightenment. “Liberty, fraternity, the working class ought not to exaggerate the overthrow of a ruling caste. They are equality” are fine phrases for mobilising to themselves the ultimate working of these two fundamentally different propositions. In society against the old order but once everyday struggles. They ought not to forget this chapter we have defined the everyday victory was won the proletariat and the other that they are fighting with effects, but not economic struggle as the expression of class dominated classes in capitalist society found with causes of those effects; that they are instinct. Without it there would be no class that these ideas had only limited application. retarding the downward movement, but consciousness of any kind. The struggle “Equality” meant only equality before the not changing its direction, that they are which articulates the proletariat’s path law which means that those who can afford applying palliatives but not curing the to emancipation however we have called it get more justice than those who cannot. malady. They ought, therefore, not to be class consciousness in its fullest sense, i.e. But this limited notion of freedom leads in exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable communist consciousness. part to the formation of the proletariat’s own guerrilla fights incessantly springing up alternative. from the never-ceasing encroachments However, as we argued in the first part of this of capital or changes in the market. They chapter the acquisition of this level of class The bourgeoisie therefore did not merely ought to understand that, with all the consciousness, which goes beyond mere arrive at social and political domination miseries it imposes upon them, the present recognition of class identity, is not something through following their class instincts. They system simultaneously engenders the that happens directly or automatically. If that also had to articulate their own programme material conditions and the social forms were the case the mystery would be why of the world they would like to build in their necessary for an economical reconstruction the revolution had not happened years ago own image. Nineteenth century of society. Instead of the conservative motto (and of course, the academic defenders of became the bourgeois ideology, the real “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” the capitalist order frequently resort to this expression of its full class consciousness. they ought to inscribe on their banner the argument when trying to scoff at the idea Little wonder those bourgeois today who revolutionary watchword “Abolition of the of the class struggle, the historic role of the hanker to recover that “lost world” have wages system!”.5 proletariat or historical materialism). adopted “neo-liberalism” as the decadent version of their old ideology! In other words they have to become a class This kind of class consciousness was not for itself. This means a class which is not only automatically acquired by the bourgeoisie For the proletariat the situation is different a social category resisting capitalism but either. They started out by simply defending and, in one sense, more difficult. The recognises programmatically what it has to the particular form of property they owned proletariat is not trying to defend a particular form of property. It is the negation of private property. This not only explains why it is the only class truly capable of emancipating all humanity but also why it arrives at its form of class consciousness in a radically different way. It cannot build up its power base in the old society through first creating economic forms of domination and then fighting for political power, as the bourgeoisie did. The proletariat

cannot free itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life.6

This means that the proletariat must fight for political power first. As it says in the Communist Manifesto

...the first step in the revolution by the working class must be to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.7 The execution of Charles 1 outside his own Banqueting Hall in 1649 was part of the Its class consciousness thus has ultimately process of the forging of a in England and Scotland. to take a political dimension. However this 8 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation political dimension can only arise from series of battles and partial defeats in which the actual experience of the proletarian the issues are ever more clearly posed. The movement in a struggle in which it forges practical struggle and comprehension of first its identity, then its purpose. that struggle is what can produce a changed consciousness. As Marx wrote, Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. The question is The coincidence of the changing of not what this or that proletarian, or even circumstances and of human activity the whole of the proletariat at the moment or self-changing can be conceived and considers as its aim. The question is what rationally understood only as revolutionary the proletariat is, and what, consequent on practice. 10 that being, it will be compelled to do. 8 The practical movement of revolution is the Party and Class Consciousness only force able to challenge the ideas of the bourgeoisie on a mass scale and produce In general, under normal conditions of wider communist, or class, consciousness. capitalist domination, the class struggle takes the form of the “guerrilla struggles” here or Both for the production on a mass scale of there against the effects of capitalism. This this communist consciousness, and for the The cover of the first German edition of often leads workers in one place to become success of the cause itself, the alteration of the Communist Manifesto (February more militant than workers in another and human beings on a ‘ mass scale is necessary, 1848). It carries the internationalist leads them to begin to question the existing an alteration which can only take place in slogan, ‘Proletarians of All Lands, Unite!’ order. This means that class consciousness a practical movement, a revolution; this (i.e. the idea that capitalism has to be revolution is necessary, therefore, not section of the nobility went over to the overthrown and replaced by communism) only because the ruling class cannot be bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the can only be achieved by a minority, and overthrown in any other way, but also bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat. one that is scattered throughout the class. because the class overthrowing it can only and in particular a portion of the bourgeois Here we must not get caught up in the in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of ideologists, who have raised themselves to post-Russian Revolution debate about who all the muck of ages and become fitted to the level of comprehending theoretically belongs to this minority (we will deal with found society anew...11 the historical movement as a whole. 13 that later) but Marx was clear that it was a political movement. In other words before revolution breaks This is, of course, before the negative out communist consciousness is only experience of the Bolshevik Party in the Just as the economists are the scientific attained by a minority of the class. It is the Russian Revolution had sullied the very idea representatives of the bourgeois class, so act of revolution which turns this into the of a proletarian party. Thus, to return to the the Socialists and Communists are the necessary mass consciousness of the class. quote at the top of this text, when Marx theoreticians of the proletarian class. Necessary because communism cannot be wrote that built by a minority. Because it is a totally new These theoreticians though are at system of production, it has to be the work “ . . . the emancipation of the working class first “utopians” who “go in search of a of the mass of the class since it is their self- must be conquered by the working classes regenerating science”. What transforms activity which distinguishes the communist themselves”, them into is the actual mode of production from all previous modes revolutionary movement of the working of production. he wasn’t lining up with future councilists class. against future “vanguardists”. This quotation However this still hasn’t fully answered the itself comes from the rules for the But in the measure that history moves question posed at the beginning, nor does establishment of the First International, the forward, and with it the struggle of the it explain how the scattered experience of first attempt at an international party of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they the working class can be drawn together to working class. What he was arguing here no longer need to seek science in their prepare for a time when revolution is on the was that the proletariat had to form their minds; they only have to take note of agenda. Marx did not shirk this one. For him own political party which was not under the what is happening before their eyes and influence of this or that bourgeois faction to become its mouthpiece... From this The organisation of the proletariat into (he was particularly aiming at English trades moment, science, which is the product of a class and consequently into a political unionists who still maintained support for the the historical movement, has associated party... 12 Liberal Party of Gladstone!). It was the task of itself consciously with it, has ceased to be this political party to continually make sense doctrinaire and has become revolutionary. 9 is entirely logical. How else would those who of the workers’ own struggles and to cast had already arrived at an understanding that them back into those struggles in the form of In other words socialist or communist ideas the whole thrust of the proletariat’s struggle a programme of total emancipation or, as we can only gain wider acceptance in periods led in the direction of communism organise would say, a communist programme. of acute social crisis when capitalism’s themselves and fight to extend those ideas to contradictions erupt in a direct way leading other workers? At this point too Marx has no As Marx had earlier argued, ideas themselves to massive struggles of the working class. hang-ups about class origins of Communists. became a material force when they were A significant minority will only achieve joined to the actual ongoing struggle communist consciousness through a whole Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a of the class. This is why Marx and Engels 9 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation made several attempts to form political organisations which raised the banner of communism. From the Communist League in 1848 to the First International in 1864 and the German Social Democratic party in 1875. That they encouraged all three but ultimately found them all unsatisfactory was not a testimony to their fickleness but to the undeveloped nature of the class movement in the nineteenth century. Whilst it was one thing to identify the general philosophical framework in which the changing of ideas and conditions can be brought about, the “real movement” had to be tested out in the crucible of working class experience. It is to this we turn in Chapter Three.

Notes

1 Taken from Karl Marx The First International and After [Pelican Classics, 1974] p. 82 2 Throughout this publication we use the version in D. McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings Oxford University Press, 1977] 3 McLellan op.cit. p.228 4 Wages, Prices and Profit in Marx/Engels Selected Works in One Volume, Lawrence and Wishart, 1980 p. 225 5 op.cit. pp.225-6. The emphases are by Marx. The “schools of socialism” quote can be found in the same work p.538. As McLellan rightly notes “its strictures on political parties were to some extent influenced by the situation prevailing in Germany at that time” where many workers were under the influence of Ferdinand Lassalle’s reformist dogmas. 6 The Holy Family in McLellan op. cit p.135 7 The Communist Manifesto in McLellan p.237 8 The Holy Family in McLellan op. cit p.135 9 The Poverty of Philosophy in McLellan op.cit p.212 10 Theses on Feuerbach in McLellan p.156 11 The German Ideology in McLellan p.179 12 The Communist Manifesto in McLellan p.228 13 loc. cit p.229

10 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

n the previous chapter we demonstrated that we have to look to understand some of Ithat the notion of a political organisation of the issues which confront us today. 3 the working class is not an artificial construct but arises from the very class nature of the However, before we get to this point we proletariat. The working class does not cannot ignore the actual experience of the have a property system to defend. It cannot working class in the lifetime of Marx and therefore extend its consciousness simply by Engels. It might seem useless to refer to defending its immediate material interests. them for an answer to the present day issues Marx, Engels and Its consciousness is formed in its struggle about how proletarian class consciousness and this, by the nature of the struggle, is achieves an organised form, but it is equally Proletarian Organisation often partial, fragmentary and episodic. It inaccurate to argue that they were indifferent rises in one area as it falls in another. The to the issue of a political organisation. This economic struggle against capital, though, is clear even before the famous Manifesto leads to some workers reflecting and acting of the of 1848. The year on their experience in different ways. before in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx laid Those who recognise that the struggle for out the basic path to class consciousness of wages is not the real outcome, but that the the modern proletariat. Taking the English struggle to end the wages system is, are proletariat as his material example he noted forced to systematically organise around a that: programme which contains the lessons of the proletariat’s experience up to that point. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, This poses the question of a political at first isolated, constitute themselves organisation and in the terms of the into groups as the capitalists unite for the nineteenth century this meant a political purposes of repression, and in the face of party. The term “party” had its origins in an always united capital, the maintenance of insult made by the rising bourgeoisie against the association becomes more necessary to those who supported one aristocratic gang them than that of wages ... In this struggle against another. A “man of party” was by — a veritable civil war — all the elements definition anti-patriotic. But the bourgeoisie necessary for a coming political battle unite were not averse to organising themselves and develop. Once it has reached this point into parties. association takes on a political character.

Originally in the French Revolution all the Economic conditions had at first leading political elements joined the same transformed the mass of people of the club. But, as the question of what to replace country into workers. The combination of the Old Order with its different bourgeois capital has created for this mass a common interests, especially once the “vulgar mob”, situation, common interests. This mass is started to take part in proceedings then this already a class as against capital but not club (nicknamed the Jacobins) fractured and yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we the constitutional monarchists (Feuillants) have noted only a few phases. This mass and Republican rich (Girondins) split from becomes united, and constitutes itself as the more petty bourgeois, Parisian-based a class for itself. The interests it defends Jacobins. Even these were not parties in the become class interests. But the struggle of sense we would understand today since they class against class is a political struggle. had only a vague ideology, and the Jacobins The Poverty of Philosophy in D. McLellan, K. were split into factions like the Robespierrists Marx: Selected Writings p. 214. and the so-called Indulgents or Dantonists. But if class struggle ultimately was political It was only with the setting up of voting struggle what was the vehicle for this systems (originally with restricted franchises) struggle? Workers did not wait long for an that we get the bourgeois party as a vote answer. In the Manifesto of the Communist gathering machine proper which developed Party Marx announced to the world that in the period 1815-70. Does this mean that we have to agree with Otto Rühle that “all parties It is high time that Communists should are bourgeois”? His conclusion was based on openly, in the face of the whole world his experience not only of how the Bolshevik publish their views, their aims, their Party became the instrument of counter- tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the revolution in , but even more, on his spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of longer experience of the political conditions the party itself. inside German social democracy. It is the McLellan op. cit. p.222 problems which arise in the period of social democracy, the first arises when workers are It should be noted that the word “party” at really organised into political parties as such this point has no capital letter. Marx is talking 11 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation of a trend not an actual body. Although the this early stage, that anyone calling themself Communist League which sponsored the “socialist” was accepted as such. In a sense it Manifesto was real enough it did not have is a taste of the political debates ahead as the any exaggerated view that it was already a proletariat tries to define itself against capital real force. But in the Manifesto Marx makes and develops a materialist worldview which it quite clear that “class for itself” means went beyond paternalism and utopianism. the formation of a political party. When The Manifesto recognised quite clearly the discussing the class struggle between capital twin themes at the heart of the development and labour he states that: of working class consciousness. It recognised that communism was an entirely different The real fruit of their battle lies, not in the mode of production which could only come immediate result, but in the ever-expanding about when that communist consciousness union (here meaning “unification” not had spread to a majority of the workers. trades union) of the workers. All previous historical movements were Once again, however, “every class struggle is movements of minorities, or in the interests a political struggle” so the result is of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement The organisation of the proletariat into of the immense majority. a class and consequently into a political ibid. p.230 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon party... ibid p.228 1809-65 But it also underlined the role of the Of course, in 1848 no such party actually Communists as the only fully conscious attack people like Lassalle too strongly existed, and the statements about that party members of the proletariat. They were the despite his rejection of economic struggles and its relation to the working class have to be ones who understood the “line of march” of (thus turning the struggle for socialism into taken as propagandist rather than definitive. the whole proletariat. They represented the something religious rather than based on However, this did not stop Marx and Engels future that all proletarians would eventually what was really going on) despite his offers from trying to develop the Communist have to attain if capitalism were to be to do deals with the Prussian state. Thus until League from its semi-Jacobin origins into a overthrown. the foundation of the First International in real organisation of the working class. To this 1864 they virtually kept themselves silent end they sought the widest possible appeal. This, of course begged a few questions about during all the political infighting between Thus they wrote that precisely at what stage the consciousness of the various tendencies in the international communism would spread to the wider class proletarian movement. The Communists do not form a separate movement, but this was a question which was party opposed to other working class only clearly posed later, during the period of The First International parties ... the Communists ... are ... the most social democracy at the turn of the century. advanced and resolute sections of the In the and 1850s Marx and Engels The contacts Marx and Engels maintained working class parties of every country. were more interested in the development of were to be absolutely central to their rise to the class movement as a whole as it was still dominance over the First International after The fact that they had only the vaguest in its infancy. They had participated in, and 1864. However their involvement in this outlines of what a proletarian party would even led, the Communist League, but when body was initially almost an accident. have to look like at this early point in working they saw that the possibility of proletarian class history does not invalidate the view that revolution would have to be postponed to The International Working Men’s Association they saw the need for the most advanced the distant future, they had no hesitation arose out of the narrow desire of English proletarians to maintain a permanent in breaking with those in the League who trades unionists to prevent French workers political association. Otherwise why would it thought that the next revolution was near, breaking English strikes and the Emperor of be necessary to assert that the Communists, and would be proletarian. ’s desire to demonstrate his paternal regard for his workers by subsidising a have over the great mass of the proletariat However, although they split with the delegation to visit the London International that advantage of clearly understanding Willich-Schapper group in the Communist Exhibition in 1862. This delegation of French the line of march. League in 1850, they did not simply retire workers (mainly followers of Proudhon) op. cit. p. 231 to the study. Both maintained a continuous took part in a conference with the English correspondence with all the elements trades unionists and agreed to set up an Marx and Engels underlined the need in Germany, and elsewhere, who would International Working Men’s Association. for political clarity in the third part of one day contribute to a new proletarian Also invited to the first meeting were the Manifesto where they subject all the organisation. Even Schapper was reconciled delegations from foreign workers living in trends that had up until that time claimed to Marx within a few years when it was clear London including those who supported to represent the working class to critical that Marx’s perspective on revolution was bourgeois nationalists like the Mazzinians, as scrutiny. St Simon, Owen, Proudhon, Cabet, right. It is also a bit of a myth that Capital was well as French republicans. Fourier, etc. are all put under the magnifying written in isolation from the debates within class of withering criticism and dismissed. the working class during this period. What Marx was eventually invited to write its main The idea that the Communists do not Marx and Engels did try to avoid was the documents (the Inaugural Address and the set themselves up in opposition to other petty squabbles of the various small groups Provisional Rules) and realised he would working class parties did not mean, even at that did appear in this period. They did not have to be very skilful to keep this disparate 12 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation alliance together, especially as the English International and After (Pelican 1974), p.82 were hostile to the very idea of politics being brought into the organisation. This was an argument for a party and for political action. It was aimed at those who These documents are thus no ringing argued that the aim of the International declaration of the principles of scientific Working Men’s Association was just to communism like the Communist Manifesto defend workers’ living conditions and was. Marx himself wrote of the need for against those who looked to bourgeois a “gentle style”. Marx tried to direct the parties to help them. Proletarian autonomy participants away from trades union demand meant having their own political instrument issues to the greater political issues. This is that was based on their consciousness and why he includes the line their programme.

To conquer political power has therefore However, at the beginning Marx’s subtleties become the great duty of the working were too much for the English trades classes. unionists, who were satisfied with his Address and his rules, so Marx now had a base of This may be self-evident today but it was support within the International with which Mikhail Bakunin intended to set down a benchmark to to deal with the French Proudhonists. At this 1814-76 make the English trades unionists in the point Marx and Engels were highly optimistic International widen their perspectives. He about the future of the International. On and thought that equal labour exchanges also skilfully praised the internationalist September 11th 1867 Marx could write to were possible. He also argued that women actions of the English working class in the Engels did not enter into this concept of equal face of such issues as fighting slavery in the labour exchanges since their proper place U.S. Civil War (where they had come out ... At the next Congress I shall personally was the home — a view naturally accepted against the South despite the fact that the deliver a knock-out blow to these by the English trades unionists!). loss of cotton from its slave plantations cost Proudhonist jackasses. I have managed them jobs). Marx hoped that the aristocracy the whole thing diplomatically and did By 1868 the Proudhonists were all but of labour represented in the English New not want to come out personally until my defeated inside the General Council of the Model unions of the time would take on book (Capital - ed.) was published and our International but the looming threat then the task of organising the whole working Association had struck root... The scoundrels came from the anarchist Prince, Michael class but their particularist trade mentality among the English trades unionists who Bakunin. This is not the place to analyse disappointed him. After 1867 the Reform Act thought we went “too far” now come all the extraordinary acts of Bakunin but led many trades unionists to throw in their lot running to us ... Things are moving and in the struggle against his manoeuvres to with the Liberal Party (precisely what Marx the next revolution, which is perhaps nearer create an anarchist international within the hoped to avoid when he wrote the Draft than it appears, we (i.e., you and I) will have International also emphasised the tension Rules). William Cremer, general secretary this powerful engine in our hands... between the need to have the broadest of the International, eventually became Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence possible appeal to workers whilst at the a Liberal MP. In the previous chapter we (Progress Publishers 1955) p.181-2 same time having a sufficiency of agreement looked at how Marx and Engels theoretically on both a political and organisational level understood the limitations of trades union The End of the International to make an international proletarian party activity and the economic struggle. But which was capable of acting decisively. In during the course of the First International Although the prediction about the future the end the whole Bakuninist episode simply they came to recognise that revolution took the material form of the helped write the obituary of the International. Paris Commune in 1871, the optimism By the time the First International was in its The trade union movement, among all about how the International itself might act death throes it was recognised that there the big, strong and rich trade unions, has was unfounded. Whilst the Paris Commune was a need for an International which was become more an obstacle to the general was to further develop the working class much more programmatically coherent and movement than an instrument for its understanding of its revolutionary tasks (the organisationally centralised. In the course progress ... need to smash the old bourgeois state etc), of the history of the International therefore Letter of Engels to E. Cafiero (1871) the International had little organisational the proletariat learned one lesson which was quoted in Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of impact since Paris was the centre of the that those who professed adherence to the Revolution , Volume II p.107 Proudhon faction in the International. proletariat did not necessarily understand Although the Proudhonists were no longer how to fight capitalism. It was also against the English trades dominant in the International they still unionists, as well as the French Proudhonists, represented a considerable force in France The political organisation of the class was that Marx wrote the line that has been where artisanal and petty bourgeois beginning to take shape as the collective quoted out of context by the worshippers of production was still widespread. Thus memory of the working class. It alone spontaneity ever since Proudhonist mutualist schemes had a reflected on the class’ experience and certain resonance but in no way conflicted programmatically carried them forward into That the emancipation of the working with the basic operation of the capitalist the next period in history. Marx and Engels classes must be conquered by the working mode of production (Proudhon’s oft-quoted themselves had come a long way from the classes themselves. line “Property is theft” sounds good but he fairly vague statements of the Communist Provisional Rules in K.Marx, The First himself argued for petty bourgeois property Manifesto. Now they saw the need for an 13 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation organisation of the wider working class which understood revolutionary praxis. Towards the end of the life of the International, particularly after the Paris Commune, Marx had recognised that the International needed deeper roots inside the life of the working class of countries throughout the world in order to have real influence on events. This ushered in the phase which led up to the formation of Social Democracy and the Second International in 1889. This was to bring new problems and new insights on the development of revolutionary organisation. It is to these that we turn in the next chapter.

14 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Lessons of the First International resolution “Political Action of the Working Class”. This resolution, partly based on the 4 s we argued in the last chapter, lessons of the Paris Commune which had Athe struggle for proletarian self- been crushed the previous May, reminded emancipation pre-supposed the existence the International of the preamble to its own of a poitical organisation, a political party. Rules which Marx had drafted in l864. These The Era of Social This was something Marx and Engels had had spoken of the need to conquer political understood as early as The Communist power, and went on to define this in more Democracy and the Fight Manifesto. Even during the long period of concrete terms. It argued from the class quiet in the so-called “golden years” Against Revisionism of capitalism (1850-70) they maintained presence of an unbridled reaction which contact with other revolutionaries to prepare . . . pretends to maintain by brute force the time when a new organisation would the distinction of classes and the political once again be on the agenda. domination of the propertied classes resulting from it, Thus, in 1864, they had no hesitation in taking part in the formation of the First that, International, despite the trades union and Proudhonist prejudices of most The working class cannot act, as a class, of its founders. What the history of the except by constituting itself into a political First International showed was that the party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old proletariat could not reach freedom with just parties formed by the propertied classes, any old organisation. The debates and splits inside the First International proved that it and that, not only had to have a clearer programme (which excluded class collaborationist ideas The constitution of the working class into a inherited from Proudhon and the English political party is indispensable in order to trades unionists), but it also had to have ensure the triumph of the deeper roots inside the working class of and its ultimate end — the abolition of each country in order to be a real movement classes. with clear, functioning statutes which was https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ not subject to internal manipulation by the works/1871/09/politics-resolution.htm secret society kind of conspiracy favoured by Bakunin and his followers. But such a party isn’t the product of the By 1868, Marx already saw a new simple will of a few individuals, nor does revolutionary crisis on the horizon while it spring spontaneously from the daily the International was still a heterogeneous struggle of the class. Whilst Marx and Engels body of clashing interests rather than a both tried to take the IWMA from its initial revolutionary instrument. The remaining limited association on to the terrain of a condition for transforming the International genuine political force they also recognised into a more centralised and disciplined that the programme which the party would body was a greater degree of ideological carry could be refined only in the light of homogeneity. The Brussels Congress marked proletarian experience. a great victory for Marx in this regard, in that he succeeded in winning over a section of The Importance of the Proudhonists to his own positions and the Paris Commune defeating the Proudhonist diehards. The stage was now set for Marx’s organisational The Paris Commune of 1871 demonstrated plans: at the Basle Congress of 1869 held how, in the very act of defending their own before Bakunin’s operations became evident, interests, the working class is the antithesis Marx obtained the passage of a resolution of capital. The revolutionary actions of that considerably increased the powers of the class led literally to revolutionary the General Council, in particular giving it the developments in its consciousness and right to suspend, pending the decision of the therefore in the programme defended by its Congress, branches of the International that class organisations. One of the great legacies contravened its principles and decisions. of the First International is that it recognised the real significance of the Paris Commune Bakunin’s secret attempts to create an for the development of proletarian organisation within an organisation, the consciousness. By unanimously voting for so-called Alliance for Social Democracy, the publication of Marx’s The Civil War in multiplied over the next two years so that France on May 30th 1871, two days after by the time the London Conference met in the final military defeat of the Commune, September 1871, Marx was ready with his the General Council gave an internationalist 15 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

This is not the place to analyse in detail the enormous contribution the actions of 1 Commune made to the development of communist consciousness but Marx basically identified the following as new ideas on which a future proletarian political body would have to be judged. The Commune had abolished the standing army and replaced it with “the armed people”. It had introduced the idea of immediate recall of elected delegates and these delegates had no special pay or privileges. The Commune itself was not a parliament or a Ministry but a working body combining all the features of all the branches of government. On top of this the Commune established an organising principle for the whole of society from “even the smallest hamlet”. Perhaps most significantly it was what Marx considered the living embodiment of “the of May 1871 - The Communards final fight from the heights of Montmartre. the proletariat”. answer to the bourgeois calumnies spread superiors”, and, under circumstances of Whilst the anarchist Bakunin had derided the about the Commune and also made a major unexampled difficulty, performed their work idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” by contribution to the development of working modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently asking who was the class that the proletariat class consciousness. — performed it at salaries the highest of would be dictator over, Marx could reply that which barely amounted to one fifth of what, that the dictatorship was aimed at the old In The Civil War in France Marx once again according to high scientific authority, is the ruling classes (the “slaveholders” as he called speaks with the authentic voice of the minimum required for the secretary to a them) who would periodically threaten the communist revolutionary, untrammelled by certain metropolitan school board – the real task of the Commune which was the the need to accommodate trades unionists old world writhed in convulsions of rage at social and economic transformation of the and Proudhonists. The Civil War in France the sight of the red flag, the symbol of the condition of the exploited. Marx expected echoes many of the ideas on consciousness republic of labour, floating over the Hotel that every one of these “slaveholder revolts” put forward in The German Ideology but de Ville would actually help to speed up the process “now made flesh”. The Civil War in France in The First of transformation of society so that the International and After (Penguin Classics dictatorship of the proletariat would itself The working class did not expect miracles 1992, pp 213-14) wither away to become a mere coordinator from the Commune. They have no ready- of the “free movement of society”. Marx also made utopias to introduce par décret du What was different about the Commune was concluded that one reason for the weakness peuple [by decree of the people]. They know that it was the first time the working class of the Commune was its isolation to one that to work out their own emancipation, had acted independently to establish its own geographical area (in fact he had warned and along with it that higher form to which form of rule, the Communards of this danger even before present society is irresistibly tending by its March 18th). Finally, Marx concluded that own economical agencies, they will have displacing the state machinery, the the Commune had opened up a new phase to pass through long struggles, through a governmental machinery of the ruling in the struggle. After the Franco-Prussian series of historic processes, transforming classes by a governmental machinery of its War, the French ruling class had only been circumstances and men. They have no own able to crush the Commune with the aid of ideals to realise, but to set free the elements op.cit. p.262. their former German foes. Bismarck, the new of the new society with which old, collapsing Chancellor of a united Germany had allowed bourgeois society is pregnant. In the full Marx’s refusal to draw up blueprints of the Thiers, the monarchist French President, to consciousness of their historic mission, precise nature of a future have his army of 40,000 to crush the workers and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, was vindicated by the Commune. As Marx of Paris. Marx thus concluded that the working class can afford to smile at himself wrote the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s Class rule is no longer able to disguise gentlemen with the pen and inkhorn, and …it was a thoroughly expansive political itself in national uniform; the national at the didactic patronage of well-wishing form, while all previous forms of government governments are as one against the bourgeois doctrinaires, pouring forth their had been emphatically repressive. Its proletariat! ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets true secret was this. It was essentially a op. cit. p.232 in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility. working class government, the product of When the Paris Commune took the the struggle of the producing against the And to underline the impact that the management of the revolution in its appropriating class, the political form at Commune had on the development of own hands; when plain working men for last discovered under which to work out the communist ideas, Marx and Engels added an the first time dared to infringe upon the economical emancipation of labour. introduction to a new German edition of the governmental privilege of their “natural op.cit. p.212 Communist Manifesto which appeared in 16 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

1872. Whilst they did not feel they could alter The later debate about spontaneity and the slogan “Not a man, not a penny, for this the old text (since it was now itself a part of organisation in the development of class system”), Bismarck persecuted both parties proletarian history) they now stated that consciousness involving Kautsky, Plekhanov, equally. This was the basis for their unification Lenin and Luxemburg amongst others was to into the German Social Democratic Workers …no special stress is laid on the confuse the class origins of the theorists with Party at Gotha in 1875. revolutionary measures proposed at the the fact that the proletariat’s consciousness end of Section II …this programme has in is not acquired in a direct fashion but only The phase in the workers’ movement which some details become antiquated. by reflection on its own practice. This is one we call Social Democracy had opened up. It quoted from Marx/Engels: Selected of the central arguments which confirms was to be dominated until One Works, one volume edition, Moscow 1968, why the proletariat needs a permanent by the Second International, founded in p. 31-2. revolutionary organisation to carry its own 1889. This was to be another major turning collective historic memory. We will return to point in the history of the world working These “antiquated details” would now this issue later but we can begin by stating class as, for the first time in history, the include such issues as nationalisation of that the message of The Civil War in France proletariat, at least in Europe, now formed the which the march was unfortunately largely lost on a new mass movements which claimed to embody of history has shown can be carried out wave of proletarian leaders, in particular in a clear alternative to the prevailing capitalist to defend capitalist interests rather than Germany. societies. These new movements however advance proletarian expropriation. However did not come without their problems from this was not so apparent in 1872. The really The Critique of the the point of view of revolutionary Marxism. significant change comes when Marx and Gotha Programme Marx and Engels were scathing about Engels go on to deal with the question of the the lack of programmatic clarity of the revolutionary transformation of the state. The “Marx party” triumphed in the First Germans and were equally worried about International but it was a Pyrrhic victory. the developments in Britain and France One thing especially was proved by the Marx had hoped that the International (one need only remember Marx’s famous Commune, viz., that “the working class would become a force for unity amongst comment, reported by Engels to Lafargue, cannot simply lay hold of the ready made the proletariat and that national sections on the French Party that if they were his state machinery and wield it for its own would be formed which would affiliate to followers then “Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est purpose”. it. By 1876 both he and Engels had come to que moi, je ne suis pas marxiste”.[One thing’s realise that the process would have to be re- for sure, I’m not a Marxist]). The quote is from The Civil War in France. started, but from solid national parties which From now on it was clear that the working would then affiliate to the International, so However, it was the German party that class would have to smash the existing the First International was quietly buried in took up the bulk of their attention. When state in order to create a new social and Philadelphia. Marx and Engels discovered that the Gotha economic order. As our concern here is Programme for unity was full of Lassallean proletarian consciousness, this is also the The collapse of the International was “theoretical blunders” they tore it apart. For point to underline the fact this insight was followed by the rise of socialist parties them it was a step back from the Eisenachers’ provided by Marx himself. Whilst the Paris within each national territory. This was own programme. Their Marginal Notes to the workers themselves died fighting trying to particularly important in Germany where Programme of the German Workers’ Party has “storm heaven”, and whilst good histories the International had been weak and the ever since been known by its real purpose were written by participants, it was Marx proletariat had been divided between as The Critique of the Gotha Programme. who drew the conclusions from the struggle. the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle and Sending it to Wilhelm Bracke, Marx wrote This process came as no surprise to Marx Marx’s own, rather shaky, disciple, Wilhelm a covering letter which makes his opinion himself. In the first place his ideas were not Liebknecht. After Lassalle’s death (in a duel clear in a nutshell. based “on ideas or principles that have been (!) in 1864) his party, the ADAV (German invented” [The Communist Manifesto] but General Workers’ Union), continued to …it is my duty not to give recognition, even on the real movement going on before the support the idea that universal suffrage by diplomatic silence, to what in my opinion very eyes of humanity. Secondly, Marx wasn’t would bring the workers to power and if that is a thoroughly objectionable programme embarrassed by the idea that a “bourgeois failed the aristocratic clique at that demoralises the party. ideologist” like himself was articulating the top of the Prussian state would concede Selected Works op cit p.313 this message since in the conditions of the aid for workers’ cooperatives. Lassalle also nineteenth century the bulk of the working secretly courted Bismarck thinking that the But this is precisely what Marx and Engels class did not even get elementary eduction feudal parties were the common ally of the did. Their Critique was not published until (initially considered too dangerous by the proletariat against the industrial bourgeoisie! Engels issued it (when the SPD as again capitalist class). Although there were workes However it wasn’t until 1869 in Eisenach that sliding towards a confused programmatic who did manage to overcome this handicap Liebknecht, with the young worker, Auguste position in relation to capitalism) in January (such as, for example, Weitling and Dietzgen) Bebel, was able to found a rival party to the 1891. This was important, since it allowed it overwhelmingly fell to people like himself ADAV, the Social Democratic Workers Party the programmatic confusion of the SPD, (SDAP). Marx tried to treat both parties which Marx said was no better than a who have raised themselves to the level of equally in the hope of promoting their unity bourgeois party (“the internationalism of comprehending theoretically the historical but all his tact was useless in the face of the the programme stands infinitely below that movement as a whole. bone-headed refusal of the Lassalleans.. of the Free Trade Party” Marx, op. cit. p323), The Communist Manifesto in D. McLellan However both parties affiliated to the IWMA to continue without a clear public statement Karl Marx: Selected Writings p.229. and, when the Eisenachers bravely came of criticism. Marx, in the same letter went on out against the Franco-Prussian war (with to say: 17 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Every step of real movement is more of the democratic bourgeoisie to carry out Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. important than a dozen programmes. If, the national revolution (which was carried Oct 19th 1877 Selected Correspondence, therefore, it was not possible – and the out by the reactionary landowning clique op. cit. p290 conditions of the time did not permit it – of Bismarck in order to preserve their to go beyond the Eisenach programme, aristocratic privileges) meant that many Thus by 1878 Marx and Engels were forced one should simply have concluded an erstwhile liberals and democrats wandered into the open to deal with these threats. This agreement for action against the common into the Social Democratic Party. Marx underlines three things in the development enemy. himself had prevented a well-known lawyer of proletarian class consciousness. As it loc. cit. from entering the General Council of the First is indirect, it has to be fought for in open International because he recognised that he debate and discussion. It is also not enough The first sentence is often quoted in isolation was someone who was politically ambitious for someone to clothe themselves in the by those who think that Marx was arguing for a in the bourgeois sense and would bring alien label “socialism” to be taken at their word. spontaneist approach to class consciousness class positions to the International. Whilst but in actual fact what he is doing is he had no objections to non-proletarians Class consciousness demands class clarity. To expressing real dismay at the programme in general joining, he also was aware that some, the debates in the workers’ movement that was agreed on. This was not a step to flood the organisation with such figures can appear tiresome (and they often are) but forward in the “real movement” but a recipe before there was a solid proletarian base, without clarification about the nature and for confusion, and worse. The programme of was dangerous. course of socialist revolution there can be no the proletarian organisation is its basic point revolutionary movement. Marx and Engels of departure. If it is not carrying forward the The German Social Democrats had no such are sometimes treated as if they were Aaron gains made politically by the revolutionary inhibitions and soon were swamped by and Moses who it is simply enough to quote working class what is it doing? What Marx a series of reactionary ideas from the so- (usually out of their historical context) and was arguing for was to get the Lassalleans to called Katheder (professor) Socialists to that is enough. Nothing would have been work with the Eisenachers to demonstrate Eugen Dühring’s attempt to undermine the more horrifying to them. As their numerous in actual practice their confusions before materialist interpretation of history. At first letters at this period of German Social writing a new programme. Engels confirmed Marx and Engels tried to operate behind the Democracy make clear they bequeathed no this in a letter to Bebel in March 1875 where scenes in personal letters. Engels explained system (they left that to the Herr Dührings he repeated all the programmatic criticisms to Bebel that in fact the “bourgeois jackasses” and their intellectually lazy followers). Of of Marx. Most presciently he condemned the who commented on the Gotha Programme these types Marx later wrote fact that had not even read it therefore The Party can very well manage without the principle that the workers’ movement is So long as our opponents, as well as the such intellectuals whose first principle is to an international movement is to all intents workers, continue to read our views into teach what they have not learnt. and purposes completely disavowed for that programme, we are justified in saying The “Circular Letter” September 17th-18th the present day and that by people who nothing about it. 1879 in Selected Correspondence p.307 have upheld this principle most gloriously Engels to Bebel Oct 12th 1875 in Marx- for five whole years under the most difficult Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow, Engels (with assistance from Marx) published conditions. 1955) p.280 his Anti-Dühring in 1878 denouncing the op. cit. p.333 anti-materialist (and anti-semitic) Professor, The Fight for Revolutionary but it caused a furore in the Party. Johann Engels is here referring to the fight against Consciousness in the SPD Most, Dühring’s strongest supporter tried Bismarck’s war on France which Liebknecht to ban its publication. But this was not the and Bebel, and the Eisenach party, had so However such “tact” could not be maintained. last battle for revolutionary clarity that Marx ably led. It was the war issue which was to Engels had expected that the new party and Engels had to make in the German Party. reveal how rotten the SPD had become in would not last two years but in 1877 Marx In 1879 they issued a seminal document, 1914. Engels concluded his letter by telling was telling him that the Gotha Programme the so called “Circular Letter”, to the various Bebel that he and Marx might have to has “degraded the party both in theory and leaders of the German Party. The letter was condemn everything the new party stands practice”. To F.A.Sorge he wrote a response to the publication of the new for. He adds paper of the German Social Democratic …A rotten spirit is making itself felt in our Party, Die Sozialdemokrat. Due to Bismarck’s In general, the official programme of a Party in Germany, not so much among anti-Socialist laws this had to be published party is of less importance than what the the masses as among the leaders (upper in Zurich under an editorial board consisting party does. But a new programme is after class and “workers”). The compromise with of what Marx called a “social philanthropist”, all a banner publicly raised, and the outside the Lassalleans has led to a compromise Karl Hochberg “the only man to buy his world judges the party by it. with other halfway elements too: in Berlin way into the Party” and two followers of op.cit p.336 (via [Johann] Most) with Dühring and his Dühring, one of which was the young “admirers”, and moreover with a whole gang Eduard Bernstein. They had written an article And especially a proletarian party since this of half-mature students and super-wise purporting to be a history of the Party until is its function. More immediately significant Doctors of Philosophy who want to give that time, but which was really an argument was the problem that this banner was so socialism a “superior, idealistic” orientation, for abandoning revolutionary socialism multi-coloured that it did not even give that is to say, to replace its materialistic and cooperating with Bismarck by working a lead to the German Social Democratic basis (which demands serious objective within his anti-socialist laws, since it was the Party members. This was particularly study from anyone who tries to use it) by SPD’s own fault that they had been passed problematical in Germany where the failure modern mythology with its goddesses of because they had been too radical! Marx and 18 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Engels were mystified. votes, making them the largest single party Jugend (youth), a group of intellectuals who in Germany (and they were still illegal). wanted to abandon using the parliamentary How the party can tolerate the authors forum altogether, because this would have of this article in its midst any longer is The question now was “would parliamentary cut the party off from a tribune where it incomprehensible to us. methods allow the Socialist Party to take could make propaganda. Engels, though, power peacefully?”. Such a view stood never once said that socialists should or and then gave their own views: four square against the idea of the class could win a parliamentary majority. He struggle re-iterated by Marx in the Circular viewed parliamentary campaigns and even As for ourselves, in view of our whole past Letter of 1879. Even where Marx had made parliamentary successes as provoking the there is only one road open to us. For concessions to the idea of a peaceful road bourgeosie to repression and thus paving almost forty years we have emphasised to power (as in his speech in Amsterdam the way for the final struggle. Commenting that class struggle is the immediate driving in 1872) he had only limited this to certain on the Erfurt Programme in 1891 Engels power of history, and in particular that the countries like England, America and, wrote that the experience of Germany proves class struggle between bourgeoisie and possibly, Holland. Even here he had said proletariat is the great lever of the modern that this was dependent on the behaviour how totally mistaken is the belief that a … social revolution; we, therefore, cannot of the capitalist class. Everywhere else he communist society can be established in a possibly co-operate with people who wish insisted that “force must be the lever of our cosy peaceful way. 2 to expunge this class struggle from the revolutions” . Nowhere did Marx actually Quoted in A.H.Nimitz Marx and Engels: movement. When the International was state that parliamentary struggle could Their Contribution to the Democratic formed we expressly formulated the battle- bring the workers to power and he even Breakthrough (NY 2000) p.262 cry: The emancipation of the working classes denounced the SDP leaders for their support must be achieved by the working classes of Bismarck’s abandonment of free trade in Imagine, therefore, Engels’ horror when, themselves. We cannot therefore cooperate the Reichstag. having been asked to write a new with people who openly state that the introduction for a German version of The workers are too uneducated to emancipate they are so far affected by parliamentary Class Struggle in France in 1895, he became themselves and must be freed from above by cretinism that they think they are above a victim of Social Democratic opportunism philanthropic persons from the upper and criticism. and manoeuvring. Liebknecht published lower middle classes. If the new Party organ letter to Sorge Sept 19th 1879 in Selected it in Vorwärts but cut out all references to adopts a line that corresponds to the views Correspondence p.393 the need for violent overthrow of the state. of these gentlemen, that is middle class and Engels wrote to Paul Lafargue not proletarian, then nothing remains for On the contrary, he pointed out repeatedly us, much though we should regret it, but that the ruling class are unlikely to see …Liebknecht has just played me a nice publicly to declare our opposition to it … themselves legislated out of their property trick. He has taken from my Introduction Selected Correspondence, op. cit. p.307 without a fight. to Marx’s articles on France of 1848-50 everything that would serve him to support But once again Marx and Engels never An historical development can remain the tactics of peace at any price and carried through this threat. Indeed Bernstein “peaceful” only so long as its progress is of opposition to force and violence, had already read Anti-Dühring and claimed not forcibly obstructed by those wielding which it has pleased him for some time to be a Marxist. He came to London with social power at the time. If in England, for now to preach, especially at present when Bebel to pacify the two old men and was so instance,… the working class were to gain coercive laws are being prepared in Berlin. successful that he became the sole editor of a majority in parliament …they could But I am preaching these tactics only for Sozialdemokrat. From this base he became a by lawful means, rid themselves of such the Germany of today … and [they] may leading theorist of the Party and even went laws and institutions as impeded their become inapplicable tomorrow. on to become Engels’ literary executor. development … However the “peaceful” Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, op. movement might be transformed into a cit. p.461 [emphasis in original]. How was it that the father of revisionism “forcible” one by resistance on the part of should be nurtured under Engels eyes? those interested in restoring the former Engels attempted to have this corrected in Since Marx and Engels had always argued state of affairs. Kautsky’s paper Neue Zeit but even here a key tactically for using parliamentary means ibid paragraph which stated that “streetfighting” to propagandise for socialism, some had would be necessary but it would “have to be begun to confuse means and ends. It was a Marx is here speaking hypothetically. He undertaken with greater forces” was omitted. confusion that Marx and Engels contributed could not possibly have known that the And, as the edition of Neue Zeit came out to, because they began to see the growing very movements which were supposed after Engels’ death, he never knew how he mass movement of Social Democracy as to represent the workers would be the had been distorted. Indeed, the true text encompassing the whole of the working agents for carrying the bourgeois infection was not published until the revolutionary class. At that point in history, the working of parliamentarism into the working class. wave had already failed in 1924. Before this class was not so much under bourgeois Engels was to get a glimpse of it before happened, therefore, revolutionaries like ideological domination as today. There were he died. In the debate over the Erfurt had to portray themselves as yet few mass circulation papers aimed at Programme he had to publish the Critique of as disagreeing with Engels against the the working class except those printed by the Gotha Programme in order to see off the increasingly parliamentary-minded majority Social Democrats and, of course there was followers of George Vollmar, who wanted a who would eventually de-nature the no electronic mass media of any kind. In parliamentary road and who wanted also proletarian character of Social Democracy 1890, only seven years after Marx’s death the to make alliances with bourgeois parties. to the point where they voted war credits German SDP won nearly one and half million At the same, time Engels also rebuffed the for their own governments on August 4th, 19 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

1914. At the Founding Congress of the of having a clear programmatic basis for the cannot be overthrown in any other way, but German Communist Party (December 30th revolutionary working class. In this case, the also because the class overthrowing it can 1918 to January 1st 1919) Luxemburg made distortion of Engels’ real views (and those only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself a dramatic speech which summed up what that he and Marx had fought for all their lives) of the muck of ages and become fitted to had happened to Social Democracy became absolutely the fulcrum on which found society anew. German Socialism passed over to its support The German Ideology in McLellan, op. cit. Thenceforward the tactics expounded by for capitalism. Luxemburg sums up brilliantly p.179 Engels in 1895 guided the German social a whole process that went on inside the democrats in everything they did and in largest party of the Second International in Social democracy was thus something of an everything they left undone, down to the the passage above but it was in fact more illusion. Its Erfurt Programme of 1891 had appropriate finish of August 4th 1914… complicated than this. With Engels dead, his contained a division between the “maximum” The fourth of August did not come out of close associate Bernstein once again reared programme and the “minimum” programme. a clear blue sky: what happened on the his anti-Marxist head. However, he went too Whilst the former was revolutionary, fourth of August was not a chance turn of far for even the “parliamentary cretins” like calling for the overthrow of capitalism, affairs but was the logical outcome of all Liebknecht and Bebel when he asserted the latter was reformist, demanding only that the German socialists had been doing that all Marx’s major predictions about the improved conditions under capitalism. for many years [Hear, Hear]…after Engels’ emiseration of the working class and the Whilst its leadership could argue about the death in 1895 in the theoretical field the increased tendency to crisis of capitalism political tactics for opposing capitalism (the leadership of the party passed into the had been disproved. In 1898 Bebel opened maximum programme), its trades union hands of Kautsky. The upshot of this change the official debate against him which lasted movement, and its other bodies, could was that at every annual congress the until 1904. During that time Kautsky took simply get on with the business of finding energetic of the left-wing against up the fight against Bernstein and was thus out how to live under capitalism. a purely parliamentarist policy, its urgent able to stand alongside the revolutionary warnings against the sterility and the Marxists (like Rosa Luxemburg whose Reform Nor was the striving for the minimum danger of such a policy were stigmatised or Revolution remained the best reply to programme the worst aspect of the situation. as anarchism, anarchising socialism, or at “revisionism”, as Bernstein’s ideas were Social democracy, particularly at the trades least anti-Marxism. What officially passed known) as the guardian of orthodoxy. union level was riddled with racism and for Marxism became a cloak for all possible . The speeches of union leaders kinds of opportunism, for persistent shirking By 1904 Bernstein was defeated but the like David, Legien etc., all support the of the revolutionary class struggle, for battle against him had created an illusion idea that imperialism brings progress to every conceivable half measure. Thus the that Kautsky, one of the manipulators of “backward races”. And, of course, there is German social democracy, and the labour Engels’ last writings, was now the real heir only one thing worse than a class which is movement, the trade union movement to the Marxist heritage. In actual fact (as the confused in the face of imperialist war and as well, were condemned to pine away First World War was to prove) he actually that is one which has a trusted leadership within the framework of capitalist society. shared the Bernstein view that socialism was which has already accepted the premises of No longer did German socialists and trade possible without revolution (the two joined the class enemy. What the history of social unionists make any serious attempt to together in the Centrist USPD during the democracy proved is that it is not size, but overthrow capital’s institutions or to put the war). revolutionary consciousness, which is the capitalist machine out of gear. key issue in the overthrow of capitalism. From Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (Pathfinder It also further disguised another issue which This, however, only throws into debate what 1970) pp 410-1 Engels could not possibly have foreseen. the nature of a revolutionary party and its Engels assumed that every vote for the SPD relationship to the entire class is. This was Once again we see the seminal importance was another worker conquered for socialism. the debate that opened up on the left wing What he did not see was that the SPD, being of social democracy in the years before the not only ambiguous about what socialism First World War. This forms the focus of the was and how it was to be arrived at, was not next chapter. itself a revolutionary body (something only proved in 1914). The historical experience Notes of Social Democracy came to demonstrate that, under the conditions of capitalist 1 There is no substitute for reading Marx’s The Civil domination, it is unlikely that the majority of War in France or, for a participant account M H. workers will arrive at a vision of communism Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune. before the revolution. The mass of the class 2 See D. McLellan Karl Marx: Selected Writings will have to reject capitalism but it is only Oxford 1977 p595 in the process of forming a revolutionary 3 For more on Social Democracy in this period, see society that the majority of workers will Internationalist Communist 11 Social Democracy become fully aware of what that society and the Working Class in Britain, and Revolutionary involves. Marx puts it better Perspectives 6 The German Communist Left: Part One: Social Democracy the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only Engels in his final years found the German take place in a practical movement, a Social Democratic Party edited out his revolution; this revolution is necessary, most revolutionary ideas. therefore, not only because the ruling class 20 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

The Argument So Far camp. This was not obvious until the Great War of 1914 but in the years that led up 5 e have argued that the working class to that cataclysm the left amongst the Wis the only force which can overthrow social democrats carried out a lively and capitalism and replace it with a mode of serious debate about the nature of class production based on the satisfaction of consciousness and political organisation. It On the Eve of Revolution: needs rather than production for profit. We is to this that we now turn. have further argued that the working class The Debate between has this role in the process, not through any A New Generation of Revolutionaries innate moral superiority but because it is Luxemburg and Lenin the only class which has no form of property Twenty years after the death of Marx the to defend. As the ultimate exploited class very nature of Social Democracy came its interest in the abolition of its own under the scrutiny of a new generation exploitation also means the end of all human of revolutionaries. Rosa Luxemburg and exploitation. This lack of property however Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (who eventually took means that the proletariat is historically the pen name Lenin) were both born in the unique as a revolutionary class. It cannot Russian Empire in 1870. Both were to become abolish itself without first realising itself. in different ways icons of revolutionary Marxism (something they would have In other words it has to be aware of its goal both resented). However the mythology of and its own collective strength. This means revolutionaries lives on after them and they that what the proletariat also creates as part are impotent to correct it after they are dead. of the process of emancipation is its own Posterity has tended to demonise Lenin for consciousness. Although this arises from the his success and sanctify Luxemburg for her conditions of exploitation it does not arise failure. In fact they not only shared the same uniformly or at the same time (otherwise spirit of revolutionary Marxism but they were capitalism would have disappeared decades closer in their attitudes on the questions ago). It arises now here, then there. Local of class consciousness and political defeats snuff it out and limited victories organisation than bourgeois histories allow. give it oxygen. What this constant antithesis between workers and capital creates is a The Economic and the Political body of proletarians who retain the memory of struggle and understand that the greater Lenin has always been regarded as a cynical goal is the overthrow of the exploiting system manipulator in the eyes of his critics. This itself. These same proletarians, an advance largely stems from what he wrote in his guard of the whole class, if you like, seek famous early pamphlet What is to Be Done?. not only to generalise the memory of the For his detractors the original sin of Lenin last struggle but to define the programme dates from his famous statement on the for the future. The struggle for proletarian strikes in Russia in the 1890s. self-emancipation thus pre-supposes the existence of a political organisation, a These strikes were simply trades union political party. struggles, not yet Social Democratic struggles. They marked the awakening However, this stated there are more questions antagonism between workers and to be answered. What is the relationship of employers; but the workers were not, and the party to the rest of the class? What is the could not, be conscious of the irreconcilable process by which the mass of the class itself antagonism of their interests to the whole comes to communist consciousness? of the modern political and social system, i.e. theirs was not yet Social Democratic In the last chapter we looked at the consciousness… experience of the development of the mass Social Democratic movement which We have said that there could not have developed after the death of Marx, and in been Social Democratic consciousness the last years of Engels. We discussed how among the workers. It would have to the movement became seduced by the be brought to them from without. The possibility of arriving at power through whole history of all countries shows that bourgeois legality despite the fact that this the working class, exclusively by its own stood absolutely foursquare against the effort, is able to develop only trades union revolutionary heart of Marx’s thinking. We consciousness, i.e. the conviction that it also showed that the debate on revisionism is necessary to combine in unions, fight not only galvanised the left-wing of social the employers, and strive to compel the democracy but in some ways was a sidetrack government to pass necessary labour which obscured the gradual movement legislation etc. The theory of socialism, of social democracy into the capitalist however grew out of the philosophic, 21 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

historical and economic theories dictatorship after the Revolution of 1917, elaborated by the educated representatives and for them, you need to say no more. The of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By was thus all the product their social status, the founders of modern of the thinking of one man. Ignored is the , Marx and Engels fact that What is to be Done? was written in a themselves belonged to the bourgeois particular context of illegality in Tsarist Russia intelligentsia. before the 1905 Revolution. Lenin himself, as What is to be Done? Lenin Selected Works Lars Lih has pointed out (in the preface to his (3 Volumes) Vol. 1 pp. 114 2005 work Lenin Rediscovered, What Is to Be Done? in Context), referred to it last in 1907, From the point of view of historical and this was only to say that materialism we obviously have to reject Lenin’s formulation or at least correct it. Marx The basic mistake made by people who and Engels may have been educated but polemicise with What Is to Be Done? at the their scientific studies had led them away present time is that they tear this production from being the “educated representatives” completely out of a specific historical of any class but the proletariat. As we stated context, out of a specific and by now long in the earlier parts of this text, Marx did past period in the development of our party. not see himself as elaborating a theory but Collected Works Volume 13 p.85 addressing the reality that confronted the society he happened to live in. His premises What is to Be Done? plays no part in any were real and he was quite clear that he had Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) of the discussions around the time of the “gone over” to the proletariat as a result of The ‘Pope’ of Marxism thought that only Revolution. It was not referred to in The ABC understanding the reality of exploitation. intellectuals could be the bearers of of Communism produced by Bukharin and conscious socialist ideas. Preobrazhensky in 1919 and reference to Lenin was in fact erroneously recycling here it was only revived in the late 1920s when the arguments of Kautsky and Plekhanov here against those trends in the nascent the Russian Revolution had long lost its about the importance of intellectuals (who Russian Social Democratic movement that proletarian character. in the conditions of the time had to come argued that economic struggles were the from the privileged classes). However the only really important ones and that politics What is consistent in Lenin’s thinking right central core of truth in Lenin’s views was was irrelevant. This was particularly the case up to and even beyond 1917 is that he is the idea that communist (or, as he put it in with the new “younger” (Lenin and Martov, well aware of the real relationship between the terms of the time, Social Democratic) both in their early 30s, were now the “old”) the daily struggle and the historical struggle consciousness was not a direct reflection of leaders around papers like Rabochaya Mysl of the working class. In 1899 he had already the immediate struggle of the working class (Workers’ Thought), Raboche Dyelo (Workers’ written for survival under the capitalist system. The Cause) and the programmatic statement economic struggle could continue forever Credo. They had arisen when the early Social Every strike brings thoughts of socialism unless someone or somebody put forward Democratic organisations had been smashed very forcibly to the workers’ mind, thoughts the real explanation as to why the proletariat by the Tsar’s secret police and their leaders of the struggle of the entire working class was exploited. At the time only those who exiled or imprisoned. The new “leaders” were for emancipation from the oppression of had the leisure and the education (clearly intellectuals who glorified the spontaneity of capital… A strike, moreover, opens the eyes not workers who worked 12-14 hours a day) the everyday struggle but gave it no effective of the workers to the nature, not only of the could elaborate those theories. But they leadership. In fact Lenin was far from saying capitalists, but of the government and the did so on the basis of the real, existing class that workers could not take in theory. He laws as well. struggle. Lenin clearly explains this in the was arguing that these “amateurs” were not On Strikes in Lenin Collected Works Volume rest of his large pamphlet. Contrary to those giving any leadership and the workers were 4 pp. 315-6 who insist that Lenin was saying that workers losing confidence in socialism because they were thick he pointed to the scientific saw these people as a menace who brought Also ignored is the fact that Lenin himself, contributions of exceptional workers like police raids in their wake. Lenin excoriated after the had led the proletariat Wilhelm Weitling, and even Pierre-Joseph their “handicraft” methods and stated no to power, continually exhorted the workers Proudhon. But what Lenin stresses is that less than six times in What is to be Done? to take charge of their own destiny. Many they had had to escape from the shopfloor to that it was “the lag of leaders [behind] the examples can be found but one will suffice be in a position to make their contributions. spontaneous upsurge of the masses” which to illustrate the point here. This issue then is not who clarifies class was causing the real crisis in working class consciousness but how is that class politics in Russia. It is important for us to draw literally all consciousness to be carried forward. working people into the government of the This is a rebuttal of the myriad of lazy state. It is a task of tremendous difficulty. Here Lenin is at one with the founders of critics, whether anarchists, councilists or But socialism cannot be implemented scientific socialism. Class consciousness is anti-working class liberals who look for by a minority, by the Party. It can be not the direct reflection of the daily material any reason not to support the October implemented only by tens of millions when existence of the proletariat but is an indirect Revolution. They jump from the mistaken they have learned to do it for themselves. product based on reflection on the lessons conclusion that Lenin said the workers V.I. Lenin Collected Works Vol. 27 p.135 of the high points of proletarian struggle. were “thick” to the tragic way in which the Lenin, it has to be remembered, was arguing Party dictatorship replaced the proletarian At the same time Lenin’s arguments are no 22 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation mere historically limited, dated tirade. Some quote approvingly at length from Kautsky independence. Even leading members of of what he writes has validity for today. to support his idea that spontaneity in the the First International who came from this daily struggle was not enough to create background eventually became Liberal MPs. The spontaneous development of the revolutionary consciousness. This quote This is exactly what Lenin argued; not that the working class movement leads to its contained Kautsky’s unashamedly elitist “economic” struggle of the class must remain subordination to bourgeois ideology … for view that “the vehicle of science is not the non-political if communists abstain but that the spontaneous working class movement proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia” its politicisation will take a bourgeois form. is trade unionism and trades unionism (ibid. p.121). means the ideological enslavement of Since there can be no talk of an the workers by the bourgeoisie. But why, According to Kautsky, it was “in the minds independent ideology formulated by the the reader will ask, does the spontaneous of this stratum” that modern socialism working masses themselves in the course 3 movement, the movement along the line originated. This is, of course, fundamentally of their movement, the only choice is either of least resistance, lead to the domination wrong and anti-Marxist, as readers of the first bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is of bourgeois ideology? For the simple two chapters of this study will realise. It goes no middle course (for mankind has not reason that bourgeois ideology is far older directly against what Marx and Engels wrote created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in origin than socialist ideology, that it is in The German Ideology. This was a period in a society torn by class antagonisms more fully developed and that it has at its when bourgeois intellectuals, claiming to be there can never be a non-class or an above disposal immeasurably more means of socialist, thought they knew what was best class ideology). Hence to belittle socialist 1 dissemination. for the working class. ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen Hence our task, the task of Social Lenin was not particularly interested in that bourgeois ideology. Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to part of Kautsky’s thinking (as his subsequent What is to be Done? Lenin Selected Works divert the working class movement from writings make clear) and had not yet realised Vol. 1 p. 121-2 this spontaneous, trade unionist striving to that Kautsky was already a “renegade” to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and Marxism. Indeed it is quite clear that Lenin “Anti-capitalists” of today could reflect on to bring it under the wing of revolutionary rejects this view of Kautsky in that he thought these words. You cannot be anti-capitalist Social Democracy. that the best candidates for professional without being communist. Instead of glib talk What is to be Done? Lenin Selected Works revolutionaries were workers , the “average about “third ways” they should recognise that pp. 122-3 people of the masses” who “are capable no such beast exists. Historical experience (in fact are alone capable) of determining in Britain though once again confirms the 2 What Lenin was arguing, which remains true the outcome of the movement” . Today the validity of Lenin’s argument. In the General to today, is that the ideas, programme and problem is not who elaborates revolutionary Strike in Britain in 1926 the working class platform of the party are the outcome of the consciousness but what is to be the vehicle. under the influence of syndicalists paralysed total material process taking place in society, And that has to be a permanent political the bourgeoisie for nine days but these a process which is, above all, historical. The body - a political party. syndicalists had no political programme daily struggle of the class does not create and assumed that the movement would this whole view any more than the abstract The statement that the daily economic of itself bring down capitalism. Instead the thinking of the greatest theorists. When struggle does not create socialist/ more bourgeois of the labour leaders went the daily class struggle bursts out of the communist/revolutionary consciousness to 10 Downing Street and when Baldwin trade union struggle, out of the confines of itself is so obvious that it would never gave them the alternative of supporting the of capitalist legality into moments of have been contested if it had not been for British state or the British working class they insurrection, then the class movement and the experience of the degeneration of the chose the state. class consciousness take great leaps forward. Russian Revolution. We will look at this But when these movements die down the later but let us first round off the debate We could also quote the experience of the experience lives on only in the one historical in Russian Social Democracy in 1902-3. If US working class in the Twentieth century, body which can maintain that consciousness, what Lenin’s “Economist” opponents were which has mirrored the experience of the and this is the revolutionary political party. saying had been true (and subsequent anti- British in the Nineteenth. By raising the partyists still echo then there is no need for level of consciousness of the individual This party is not something that has no a revolutionary party). The class struggle worker, through collective struggle, to that relationship with the class movement. cannot be abolished the reasoning goes. It is of identification with the rest of the class It is not a deus ex machina, but a central inevitable, and so therefore is revolutionary the economic struggle opens the possibility element in the dialectical and contradictory consciousness. Unfortunately this is not true, for the development of revolutionary class process which leads towards the formation and the historical experience of the British consciousness, but only the possibility. of a communist consciousness within the working class has shown it time after time. Without the intervention of the party, working class which is directly derived from The British working class went through a translating the historical programme of the material reality. When Lenin was arguing that century of the fiercest economic battles in working class into the material struggle of consciousness would have to be brought the nineteenth century. It created massive today, the class consciousness of the workers to the working class from without, he trades unions, defined itself and was aware will decline or will even take a reactionary meant that this consciousness would have of itself as a class, yet failed to create for direction (as the bourgeoisie are fond of to be brought from outside the physical itself a socialist/revolutionary consciousness. pointing out). boundaries of the daily class struggle itself. Quite the contrary, the advanced sector He did not mean that it was outside the of the British proletariat, the unionised Indeed class identity alone can be compatible process taking place in society itself. As workers, functioned as a wing of the Liberal with reactionary ideology. Sometimes the we already noted, it is true that Lenin did bourgeoisie without maintaining its class most reactionary workers are amongst the 23 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation most conscious of belonging to the working the body which could transform the “sparks for driving the revolution ahead and class. In the great strikes in South after of consciousness” generated by the daily the courage to draw all the necessary World War One the mobilising slogan of the fight against capital into a political basis for conclusions from the situation. strikers in the Rand of 1922 was attacking the state. The Revolution of 1905 The Russian Revolution in Rosa Luxemburg “Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a changed this. After the Tsar conceded a Speaks (Pathfinder Press 1970) p.374 White South Africa”! constitution it was now possible to go for a mass enrolment of workers in the ambiguous She went on to say that only the Bolsheviks After What is to be Done? conditions of the period when elections to had grasped “the true dialectic of revolutions” the parliament or Duma before 1914 gave and to stand the The party as the bearer of the programme some scope for legal work. of the revolutionary achievements of wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: the working class is at the core of Lenin’s Rosa Luxemburg and the Party not through a majority to revolutionary arguments. He was fully aware that steps tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to in real movement were worth more than In terms of class consciousness and a majority – that is the way the road runs.. programmes but steps in real movement are organisation Rosa Luxemburg is often Only a party which knows how to lead, that often far apart in working class history. In the cited by bourgeois commentators as the is to advance things, wins support in stormy meantime the carrier of revolutionary class antithesis of Lenin, a Marxist who wasn’t times … What ever a party could offer of consciousness is the party. dictatorial and who was tolerant. Even courage, revolutionary far-sightedness would-be revolutionaries saturated with and in consistency in a historic hour, Lenin, It goes without saying that ‘every step of years of anti-Leninist propaganda look Trotsky and other comrades have given in real movement is more important than a to her as someone who formulated a good measure. dozen programmes,’ as Karl Marx said. But critique of Lenin’s mechanical tendencies ibid p.374-5 neither Marx nor any other or and therefore provides a more dialectical practical worker in the Social Democratic basis to understand the question of class So what is the difference between movement has ever denied the tremendous consciousness. For example, Franz Borkenau, Luxemburg and Lenin on class importance of a Programme for the an influential ex-communist, wrote a history consciousness? To explain this we have to consolidation and consistent activity of a of the in which he again understand the context in which the political party. insisted that two were writing. Whilst Lenin regarded Quoted in Paul Le Blanc Lenin and the …Lenin, instead of the belief in proletarian the Economists as the Russian version of Revolutionary Party Humanities Press, revolution, had put his hopes in a Bernstein’s revisionism, Luxemburg had 1990. p.161 centralised group under his leadership, come to see that German Social Democracy Rosa Luxemburg alone continued to believe was suffering from another disease. Whilst It is sometimes argued that Lenin revised the in the proletariat. Lenin was trying to get rid of amateurism ideas of What is to be Done? or even rejected Ann Arbor 1962 p. 45 in Russia the “professional revolutionaries” them altogether after the first Russian whom Luxemburg met every day in Germany Revolution of 1905. But let us be clear about This is a glorious bowdlerisation but one were far from the ideal of Lenin. In fact they what Lenin corrected. He never once varied which is frequently believed by those were careerists, trades union bureaucrats, from the idea that the party was the bearer unwilling to find out for themselves. It may the petty clerks of a bureaucratic party of revolutionary consciousness from the come as shock to some of them that far from machine, reformist parliamentarians. They fact that its programme was the distillation being a blind worshipper of spontaneity were the ones who, scared of losing their of the proletariat’s past experiences. Indeed against the party Luxemburg, even in her petty privileges would lead German Social What is to be Done? was aimed at a current 1904 critique of Lenin stressed Democracy into collusion with the German which was already in decline, “Economism”, military and support the imperialist war of which had been more influential than the the need for a proletarian vanguard 1914. The centralism of effort which Lenin followers of the Social Democratic paper conscious of its class interests and capable realised was essential to get all Russia’s Iskra in 1900, was already collapsing by of self-direction in political activity. scattered socialists together was already 1902. In a country like Russia where trades Organisational Questions of the Russian caricatured by the conduct of many socialists unions were illegal every economic strike Social Democracy in Rosa Luxemburg in the German party. Luxemburg poses became almost immediately a political Speaks (Pathfinder Press 1970) p.119 the central dilemma best in the following strike. Any organisation which was agnostic passage on this issue was doomed. What Lenin did and far from raising spontaneity above want to correct was the bits he had written organisation, she insisted that a party was On the one hand we have the mass: on the previously about the nature and structure of needed which “possesses the gift of political other hand its historic goal, located outside the party. Lenin was clear that the German mobility, complemented by unflinching existing society. On the one hand we have Social Democratic model of an open party loyalty to principles and concern for unity”. the day-today struggle; on the other, the was not possible under the autocratic police (ibid.). social revolution. Such are the terms of the state of the Tsar. This is why he called at dialectical contradiction through which this time for “a party of a new type”. A small After the Russian Revolution Luxemburg the socialist movement makes its way. secret party consisting only of professional only reinforced this view It follows that this movement can best revolutionaries (preferably of workers rather advance by tacking betwixt and between than the disorganised Russian intellectual Thus it is clear that in every revolution the two dangers by which it is constantly type) had to be taken on who could stay only that party is capable of seizing the being threatened. One is the loss of its mass out of the clutches of the police whilst they leadership and power which has the character; the other the abandonment of its spread propaganda and agitation. This was courage to issue the appropriate slogans goal. One is the danger of sinking back to 24 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

the condition of a sect, the other the danger and the economic and political struggles of becoming a movement of bourgeois would be fought to a conclusion without social reform. them. Organisational Questions of the Russian Selected Works Volume 1 pp. 235-6 Social Democracy in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (Pathfinder Press 1970) pp. 128-9 How they would be pushed aside Luxemburg does not say but she does not offer us the Rosa Luxemburg and logical step of a split in Social Democracy Social Democracy leading to a new party. Luxemburg went further than this in her last speech to the Given the stark alternative of ‘sectarianism’ Founding Congress of the Communist or ‘reformism’ that Luxemburg posed it is Party of Germany. Having finally broken little wonder that she concluded that Social with Social Democracy only a few months Democracy was the only class movement. earlier Luxemburg again missed the point. Criticising her former colleagues she said; The fact is that the social democracy is not Rosa Luxemburg joined to the organisation of the proletariat. They think that to educate the proletarian 1871-1919 It is itself the proletariat. masses in the socialist spirit means the op cit. in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks p.119 following; to lecture them, distribute leaflets the class correcting Kautsky’s errors! And and pamphlets amongst them. But no! The in every way her critique of Lenin’s One Little wonder that she found it hard to break socialist proletarian school does not need Step Forward, Two Steps Back text is really from the German Social Democratic Party all this. Activity itself educates the masses. not aimed at the Russian party at all. In fact even after the betrayal of 1914 (“Better the Lenin complained that Luxemburg “does worst working class party than none at all” This was dangerously wrong. In the first not acquaint the reader with my book but was her initial reaction). Luxemburg has a place the Social Democrats had no interest in with something else...”. Lenin actually rebuts tendency here to see Social Democracy as the revolution so any discussion of their methods every charge made by Luxemburg against class movement even when she can see that was now irrelevant and in the second place him but we will give just one example. it is riddled with opportunism. Her faith in such stress on activity as the only educator Luxemburg had accused Lenin of following the mass strike after 1904 is like an antithesis of the working class leads, and in the case the neo-Jacobin activist, Auguste Blanqui in to the opportunism and capitulationist of the KPD (German Communist Party) did thinking that a small elite (in this case the tendencies of the Social Democratic majority. lead to, voluntarism. Whilst Luxemburg Party ) could make the So when talking about the party Lenin and herself condemned Liebknecht’s declaration revolution. Lenin was forced to reply; she are talking about two different beasts. of the Spartakist Revolt of January, 1919 For Lenin, the small revolutionary party she had partially prepared for “activity” like Actually this is not so. I have never advocated fights within the class for a revolutionary this in her view of the development of class any such view … Our controversy has consciousness whilst Luxemburg looks to consciousness. principally been over whether the Central the spontaneous movement of the class Committee and Central Organ should to shake Social Democracy from its decline The Debate on Centralism represent the trend of the majority of the into reformism and opportunism. Thus her Party Congress, or whether they should conclusion against Lenin, One of the main reasons for the differences not. About this “ultracentralist” and “purely between Lenin and Luxemburg is that Blanquist” demand the comrade says not Historically the errors committed by a truly Lenin was one of the first Russian Marxists a word, she prefers to declaim against the revolutionary movement are infinitely more created by the conditions of class struggle mechanical subordination of the part to fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest in Russia in the 1890s. Luxemburg came the whole, against slavish submission, Central Committee. from to join what she considered to blind obedience and other such bogeys. I (ibid p. 130) be the greatest socialist party in the world. am very grateful to Comrade Luxemburg Her misfortune was that she was never so for explaining the profound idea that was really (like the whole of her pamphlet) involved in party issues as Lenin. He was slavish submission is very harmful to the aimed at her own party and had little to do actually in at the foundation of the Russian Party, but I should like to know: does the with what Lenin was arguing (as he himself Social Democratic Labour Party. He had seen comrade consider it normal for supposed noted). It is, in any case nonsense, since what would happen to it if it did not have a party central institutions to be dominated it is both a false dichotomy and seems to clear organisational framework. Hence he by the minority of the Party Congress? worship failure against success. Luxemburg emphasises the need for centralism. Lenin Collected Works Volume 7 pp. 473-4 had an incredible belief that new struggles in Germany would of themselves correct Luxemburg, on the other hand was on The Mass Strike the course of Social Democracy. friendly terms with all the reformists in Social Democracy and frequently expressed herself This leads us logically to The Mass Strike. Rosa If, at any time and under any circumstances in private letters to people like Clara Zetkin as Luxemburg actually wrote this when she Germany were to experience big political quite dismayed at the way the party leaders was in Finland staying with Lenin and other struggles, an era of tremendous economic were going. But instead of developing a Bolshevik leaders in 1906. She had recently struggle would open up at the same time public critique against them, as Lenin did been released from a Polish prison after … If they stood aside from the movement against people he respected and even loved three months imprisonment, having been or opposed it … the union or party leaders (like Vera Zasulich and George Plekhanov), arrested for entering Poland illegally in order would be swept away by the wave of events Luxemburg put her faith in the activity of to take part in the 1905 Revolution which 25 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation was then in action throughout the Russian Provisional Government). It was only with Empire. As a leader of the Socialist Party of the Bolsheviks’ injection of class politics into the Kingdom of Poland and she the soviets based on the lessons of 1905 that took part in the discussions which then led the problem was overcome. Luxemburg in to its unification with the Bolsheviks at this The Mass Strike consistently fails to analyse time. This alone should convince anyone the content of the struggle and this in the that whatever the political differences she end appears to leave her as a worshipper of had with the Bolsheviks she shared their spontaneity. Or at least it would do if she did revolutionary conceptions. not also write such passages as the following

It was to promote her idea of revolution that The social democrats are the most she wrote The Mass Strike. Her target, as enlightened, most class conscious always, was the German Social Democratic vanguard of the whole proletariat. They Party, particularly the trades union leaders. cannot and dare not wait, in fatalist Luxemburg had been trying to get the fashion, with folded arms for the advent of In the body of the ‘soviet’ the Russian German Party to adopt a resolution in favour the “revolutionary situation”, to wait for that workers made the historical discovery of the mass strike before her imprisonment. which in every spontaneous movement falls of how mass society could be run by the At the Jena Conference of the Party in 1906 workers themselves. from the clouds. On the contrary they must however the best that could be agreed was now, as always, hasten the development of that the Socialists would call a mass strike the argument. It is quite true that economic things and endeavour to accelerate events. in the event of the curtailing of voting by struggles of the class, or more precisely This they cannot do however, by suddenly the Kaiser. Even this was too much for the the mass moments of such struggles, raise issuing the “slogan” for a mass strike at trades’ union leaders, who, for the first time, political demands which show that the class random at any odd moment, but first and openly went against Social Democratic defines itself, creates its class identity, and foremost, by making clear to the proletariat policies. Luxemburg’s pamphlet was aimed advances its interests, both political and the inevitable advent of this revolutionary at convincing the party to overturn the economic in struggle. But the consciousness period … decisions of these trades’ union leaders. which emerges from those struggles is The Mass Strike in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks based on the political advances made by p. 200 Once again Luxemburg’s revolutionary the proletariat and formulated by their class intent was not matched by revolutionary political organs. Sometimes the class is However this is what Luxemburg inside Social arguments. In the first place she misjudges ahead of the party here, as in 1905 in Russia Democracy failed to do and her tragedy is the nature of trades unions by insisting where the Menshevik attempt to find a way that she did not break with social democracy that they “are fighting organisations of of unifying strikes and strike committee, led sooner. Naturally however we are looking the proletariat” (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks to the formation of the Petrograd Soviet. back with the benefit of hindsight. Whilst p.196). In the early days of unions when This arose spontaneously out of the struggle the betrayal of 1914 sticks in our brains, and there were no permanent officials this may in 1905 but its successful reestablishment now seems inevitable, it was a blow which have been partially true. However unions as an organ of workers’ power 12 years later shocked both Lenin and Luxemburg. There have never been anything other than was because the Russian Social Democrats was no single event before 1914 which made defensive organisations of the class. They had learned from that experience, and it easy to split with the movement (even if were certainly not the bodies which would recognised the of that organ, for small groups like the Lichtstrahlen and the lead the assault on capital and by 1904 the establishing workers’ autonomy. Luxemburg, International Socialists already had done) as bureaucratised unions of German Social in fact fetishises the forms of struggle which we noted she considered it to be not just the Democracy were four square against any she thinks will automatically lead to the organisation of the workers but the working . From here comes a formation of class consciousness. In this she class itself. second error where she argues that in the sometimes sounds religious mass strike the economic and the political Belief in spontaneity alone as the regenerator are of equal importance. The most precious thing, because it is the of the party was at times Luxemburg’s most enduring in the sharp ebb and flow of only consolation. The best we can do is to In a word, the economic struggle is the the revolutionary wave is the proletariat’s learn from that experience. Luxemburg factor that advances the movement from spiritual growth. The advance by leaps contemplated suicide when she heard that one political focal point to another. The and bounds of the proletariat affords an the SPD’s Parliamentary fraction had voted political struggle periodically fertilises the inviolable guarantee of its further progress war credits for the Kaiser. She was arrested ground for the economic struggle. Cause in the inevitable political and economic for opposing the war, as was Karl Liebknecht, and effect exchange each second. Thus struggles ahead. the first MP to vote against war credits (the we find the two elements, the economic second was Otto Ruhle). In clandestine and political, do not incline to separate But this is a myth. Once the period of open conditions they formed the Spartakus themselves … during the mass strike in class struggle is over the consciousness of League. But typically even this was part Russia, not to speak of negating each other the proletariat retreats, the class is once of the USPD, the pacifist socialists led by as pedantic schemes would suggest. again atomised and divided. The workers Kautsky and Bernstein! Thus even during the The Mass Strike in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks who created the soviets in 1905 marched imperialist war Luxemburg did not plant a p.208 off to war in 1914 and when they re-created banner around which revolutionaries could the Soviets in 1917 they still did not have unambiguously rally. But as with so many of her arguments the an authentically proletarian content to start elegance of the prose masks the weakness of with (given that they voted to support the After the November Revolution the SPD held 26 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation the majority in the soviets and few workers had heard of the Spartakists. The formation of the German Communist Party took place over New Year 1919. By the end of that January both Luxemburg and Liebknecht had died at the hands of the SPD’s hired thugs. This tragedy only underlines the need to establish a revolutionary party well in advance of the spontaneous outbreak of the class. This also makes for a conclusion to the theoretical differences between Luxemburg and Lenin, differences which, as we have shown are more to do with their real experiences than with any difference in revolutionary temperament. Whilst Luxemburg thought the party was the class and that the spontaneous movement would make the party revolutionary, Lenin fully understood that only a minority would be communist in advance of the revolution. It was necessary for this minority to fight within the spontaneous upsurge for it to become a communist revolution. Once begun that revolution would alter the working class on a mass scale and make it ready, as “an immense majority”, “to found society anew”[Marx]. In our next chapter we will look at the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917 on the issue of class consciousness and revolutionary organisation.

27 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

e have arrived at the point where all Russia of Lenin consciously paved the way Wprevious ideas about what was and was for the Russia of Stalin. However a reading of 6 not “revolutionary class consciousness” reach the text shows that all this is publisher’s froth. their greatest test. Here we should perhaps The archives have revealed little to alter what begin with a warning on methodology. We we know (at least so far). All Volkogonov did Spontaneity and don’t look at the experience of the Russian was to give an interpretation that would sell Organisation in the Revolution as something to be learned books to Western readers (no point writing by rote so we can mechanically repeat it for a Russian readership since, apart from Russian Revolution of in the future. The history of all previous the new emerging revolutionary minorities, February 1917 class struggles tells us that no two events the whole issue is a yawn for them today). ever follow the same trajectory for the Volkogonov and his ilk have had an enormous very obvious reason that they take place in influence on recent academic writing on the different historical circumstances. Equally, Russian Revolution in the West. You can see the contending classes have before them this by comparing the works of Neil Harding the experience of that previous struggle, and Robert Service both before and after the and alter their actions accordingly. In this fall of the . Both have written respect we can be certain of only one thing extensively (two volumes in Harding’s case – the next proletarian revolution will be very and three in Service’s case) about Lenin’s different in its origins and development from role in the Revolution. These are serious the Russian revolution a century or so ago. works widely researched and meticulously evidenced. However in the 1990s both have This does not mean there is nothing to written smaller books to make sure that we 1 understand from that experience in terms know that they totally disapprove of Lenin. of the development of class consciousness and class political organisation. Just as the But not content with denying that the Russian working class of 1917 had before October Revolution was anything other it the experiences of the Paris Commune of than a coup, our bourgeois historians have 1871 and the first Russian Revolution of 1905, now expanded into denigrating the very we have the experience of 1917 as part of our appearance of soviets in the February historic legacy. The key issue is to understand Revolution. This is the aim of Orlando Figes what that legacy actually means for us today. who, in attempting to imitate the gossipy The big questions revolve around how the style of Simon Schama in his book on the working class moved from accepting the French Revolution only gives us a good existing order to a full-scale overthrow of the insight into what bourgeois consciousness political system as well as three governments is. What links the two books is their anti- in the course of ten months. What role did marxism. The French Revolution, was the previously politically aware workers “good” because it made us all “Citizens” play in the course of that development (the title of Schama’s work) but the Russian of a mass class consciousness? How did Revolution was “A People’s Tragedy” because the working class establish class-wide it wanted to make us all “comrades”. For organisations which were at total odds with these public schoolboy scribblers there can the old ruling class state? But first we will be no higher human progress beyond the deal with the question of the bourgeoisie’s current capitalist society. For them “freedom” denial that there was any development of a means continuing to enjoy the comfortable revolutionary class consciousness at all. life of the Cambridge college preserving its exclusiveness from the untutored masses. A Bourgeois Tragedy So bourgeois revisionism has only heaped After the collapse of the USSR in 1991 you more on its own mountain of distortions would expect that the bourgeois ideological since 1990. The fact is that the bourgeois offensive against the revolution of 1917 version of the Russian Revolution insists would have eased up. Not a bit. In fact the that there was no revolutionary or class reverse was the case. No sooner was the consciousness amongst the Russian working military threat of the Soviet Union consigned class, but that the weaknesses of both the to the dustbin of history than a whole new Russian liberal bourgeoisie and the existing series of revisionist histories by bourgeois power structures in Russia (which had writers of all backgrounds were trying to not established a solid Westminster-style deny any working class character to the Parliament) had allowed any old band of events of 1917. All were intent on denying ruthless adventurers like the Bolsheviks the real proletarian character of the October to turn up and pick up the power which Revolution. Doyen of them all was the ex-KGB lay abandoned in the streets. This is a very general Dmitri Volkogonov (now deceased) ruling class conception. If our masters don’t who published two works which claimed control power then it must be an orphan. Or to have racy new revelations about how the as Trotsky put it 28 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Those who lose by a revolution are rarely …society does not change its institutions party of the class. Although they were not 2 inclined to call it by its real name. as need arises, the way a mechanic changes yet that party they had also laid down the his instruments. On the contrary, society ground work in the shorter term. The fact that the “spontaneous” uprising of actually takes the institutions which the Russian working class in February 1917 hang upon it as a given once and for all. They key issue here was the war. No other had very sound material reasons seems only For decades the oppositional criticism is party in the world had come out so clearly peripheral to their analysis. nothing more than a safety valve for mass against the war as the Bolsheviks. It is their dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability greatest claim to revolutionary leadership February 1917: of the social structure. Such, in principle, in their entire history. Trotsky (who was not Beyond Spontaneity for example was the significance acquired then a Bolshevik) points out that on the eve by the social-democratic criticism. Entirely of the First World War Bolshevik influence Here we use the term “spontaneous” exceptional conditions, independent of the amongst the working class was at its height. carefully. The Tsarina Alexandra wrote to will of persons or parties are necessary in Indeed strike figures for 1913-14 show that her husband that this was a “hooligan order to tear off from discontent the fetters Tsarism was facing a wave of strikes like that 4 movement” which would die down if only of conservatism and bring the masses to which preceded the 1905 revolution. The “the Duma would behave itself”! But the insurrection. Bolsheviks had been growing in influence. movement was anything but hooligan. Even op.cit. pp.17-18 Once war was declared the St Petersburg if no organisation planned the revolution Committee of the Party issued a leaflet it had clear goals which developed from In other words, changing circumstances against it. It read demands for bread into a call for the create changed human beings. Here Trotsky overthrow of the and an end to is demonstrating his grasp of Marxism. It Comrades, the government and bourgeoisie the war. Spontaneous in this sense does not echoes, in a real historical context, what have sown the wind; they will reap the mean disorganised but means that it has no Marx wrote in The German Ideology that whirlwind! Nicholas the Bloody … will be single organisational centre. Lenin was quite “the alteration of human beings on a mass the last Russian Tsar… Revolution is coming. 5 happy (in his famous January 1917 lecture to scale … can only take place in a practical Lets do all we can to make it victorious. 3 Swiss socialist youth) to state that the 1905 movement, a revolution…” . The “entirely revolution was “spontaneous” but as Trotsky exceptional conditions” he speaks of link This brought to the factories of St Petersburg noted in his wide-ranging analysis, The the Bolshevik party and the revolutionary the message that Lenin was already fighting History of the Russian Revolution, working class in 1917. for on the international stage, of turning “the imperialist war into a civil war”. Of course this The mystic doctrine of spontaneousness In the long term the Bolsheviks had held the was not a way to instant popularity but it did explains nothing. In order correctly to view after 1906 that whatever the nature lay down a class position, a banner which appraise the situation and determine the of the coming revolution the working class would later become a rallying point for moment for a blow at the enemy, it was would have to fight for “a revolutionary the working class. Once war was declared necessary that the masses or their guiding democratic dictatorship of the proletariat a wave of patriotic fervour had engulfed layers should make their examination of and peasantry” from the start. They were not Russia, like all the other belligerent states. historical events and have their criteria hamstrung by the mechanistic theory of the The Bolsheviks declined numerically as the for estimating them. In other words it was Mensheviks that the proletariat would have more conservative elements in the working necessary that there should not be masses to lend its support to the bourgeoisie to class began to dominate (not least because in the abstract but masses of Petrograd establish a democracy. This meant that the the war gave the excuse for mass arrests 6 workers, and Russian workers in general, actions of individual Bolsheviks inside the of worker activists). However this was a who had passed through the Revolution of class were always towards pushing forward situation which only lasted until the end of 1905… the struggle of the working class as an 1915. As the Russian war effort ground to a op.cit. p.169 independent class. halt and as the economic impact of the war led to appalling shortages, the discontent What Trotsky correctly emphasises is that Mensheviks, on the other hand, tended of the masses rose and the Bolsheviks, the “dress rehearsal” of 1905 is absolutely to look to their leaders to see what persecuted, (their most experienced leaders central to the formation of working class compromises they were making with the in exile in Siberia or abroad, and short of consciousness in February 1917. It explains “democratic” parties. This comes over in the resources), were still able to exert a political why the actions of the masses in 1917 were “personal record” of Sukhanov. Although an influence beyond their real organisational so collectively coherent (and, as Lenin noted, Internationalist Menshevik (i.e. a supporter of strength. This was because they had taken went well beyond the hesitant attitudes of Martov on the “left” of the Party”) he records a coherent programmatic stand against the the political parties). In a general sense the that he found the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg war. Thus when Trotsky answers his own revolution is only spontaneous in that; in the February Revolution rather dreary and question “Who led the February Revolution?” “narrow”. He arrives at this verdict because his lapidary statement, the history of a revolution is first of all they were not willing to go to Gorky’s house to a history of the forcible entrance of the coordinate with the other intellectual Social Conscious and tempered workers educated masses into the realm of rulership over their Democrats and “progressive” bourgeois for the most part by the party of Lenin. own destiny. politicians. Sukhanov complains that they did not understand “the bigger picture”. All doesn’t appear quite so metaphysical. He This revolution however starts off from they did was look around for printing presses cites various examples of unsung Bolshevik relatively limited perspectives. It only moves to get out propaganda to the workers. This members like the soldier Muralov or the forward because a new situation has arisen. is significant because it tells us how the worker Kaiurov who carry out decisive Bolsheviks were already embryonically the actions at the level of the street in the early 29 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation days of the February Revolution. Nor do we also a sense that the war had created a new need to take only Trotsky’s word. Orlando situation different from 1905. Figes, no friend of the proletariat, even concedes that “socialist agitation amongst In 1905 the Army was still largely the the working class” was significant in the early professional Army of the Tsar. The sense of hours of the February Revolution in getting futility of the war had not been so deep in striking workers out onto the street. This 1905 either. Now (and various eyewitnesses had begun on International Women’s Day testify to this), as the demonstrators realised (February 23rd according to the old calendar) that the largely peasant conscript reservists, when the annual demonstration was which made up the bulk of the Petrograd transformed by women strikers marching garrison, were unlikely to shoot, they grew from the working class Vyborg quarter to more confident. The final key to it was the the bourgeois Nevsky Prospekt to add their Cossacks, who had never hesitated in the past protest against the bread shortages. On this to gun down any anti-tsarist demonstrators, day the bread ration had been cut for the but the workers were already attempting to The Petrograd Soviet meeting in the third time so the shouts for “khleba” (bread) fraternise with them on the very first day of Smolny Institute in 1917. were accompanied with the first cries of the uprising. Emboldened individuals, often “Doloi tsarskoi monarkhii” (Down with women but also men would go up to soldiers, (since they were workers overthrowing a Tsarism). Working class agitation continued seize the barrel of their gun and beg them supposed “workers’ state”) they succumbed on February 24th 1917 when hundreds of to turn it the other way. There is no record to the leadership of reactionary Catholicism 9 thousands joined the strikes. of any of these appeals failing. Once the in the shape of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Cossacks made it clear that they were only movement, itself maintained by CIA finance. Workers held factory meetings throughout standing in line and not really attacking the This illustrates the limits of a movement the city and urged on by socialist agitators, demonstrators the regime’s last bastion was which can, with practical steps, demolish resolved to march against the centre. Many the police. Although some soldiers in some a hated regime but which without its armed themselves with knives, spanner, regiments had shot down strikers early in the own programmatic perspective cannot 7 hammers… revolution, it was the fighting between the create a new society. This programmatic police and the other soldiers that led to most perspective has to be posed in advance This is also significant because for all the of the casualties. Once the Cossacks (at the within the working class by those workers streetfighting and fraternisation with troops request of the Bolshevik worker Katyurov) who understand that a change of leadership that was to take place over the next five days, killed Constable Krylov, a top police officer is not enough to make a revolution. In Russia, what gave it substance was the collective in the act of ordering his forces to shoot on the Social Democratic movement had been consciousness which had brought at least a crowd in Znamenskaia Square10 the last doing this, making this vital contribution to half (one police report gave 90%) of the St hesitation of the mass movement ended. the February Revolution. Petersburg working class on strike. It gave life The revolution was in full swing. Although to what Lenin had written after the Moscow some regiments were still slow to come over But once the Tsar has gone the acid test Uprising of December 1905 that to the workers, and there were exchanges would be in the nature of what followed. It of gunfire within and between regiments, was a testimony to the strength of the class … unless the revolution assumes a mass the numbers on the streets increased. Red movement in Petrograd that the bourgeoisie character and affects the troops, there can flags began to appear everywhere. What for did not get things all their own way. When 8 be no question of a serious struggle. years had been mere ideas put forward by Kerensky and his pals in the Socialist revolutionary minorities were now taking on Revolutionary Party were prepared to sit with Once on strike they met every day at the a practical dimension. conservative Duma members like Shingarev factory and in these mass assemblies and Milyukov to create a Provisional decided to go down to the city centre to Nowhere was this clearer than the question of Government, the workers and soldiers who demonstrate. No wonder the Tsar’s State what was to replace Tsarism. The bourgeoisie had done the fighting also demanded their Council ordered the factories to be locked had watched with horror as the working class own organisations. As Trotsky said, this was to deny the workers this collective meeting and the peasant army reservists had wiped not just any old proletariat. This was the place. It was also noted by eyewitnesses of away centuries of whilst they same Russian proletariat who had recently all shades of opinion that, whereas the early themselves had done nothing. However the experienced the 1905 Revolution. In some demonstrations had been “good-humoured”, more energetic amongst them (especially respects, they did not need to wait for and accompanied by people “dressed those in labour organisations like Kerensky) their political minorities to remind them of respectably”, this gradually changed on the realised some response was needed if the 1905, as it was still relatively fresh in their afternoon of the 23rd as the mass movement “underclass” were to be prevented from collective consciousness. That is why when became more proletarian in character. taking over. This is the key point in any the Bolsheviks put out a leaflet on February However, even now, when some Bolsheviks revolution. Workers can do the fighting and 27th calling for elections to the Soviets they tried to unfurl a banner inscribed with the the dying on the streets but unless they know were already echoing calls by cooperative words “Doloi voiny” (Down with the War) they what they want they are likely to be stitched organisations’, and newly-formed factory were set upon and the banner disappeared. up by one or other capitalist faction. This organisations, for Soviet power. Two days later the crowds, faced by armed was clearly illustrated in more recent times troops, were chanting the very same in Poland when the shipyard workers of Soviets without Communism slogan in Znamenskaia Square. It wasn’t Gdansk started the movement to overthrow just desperation then that had transformed the Stalinist apparatus in Poland. Lacking an The actual decision to revive the 1905 Soviet the consciousness of the working class but independent class perspective of their own seems to have arisen when the crowds on 30 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation the Vyborg side (the working class district you … Long live the revolution!... party can be left behind by events. Lenin around the Finland Station) decided to free It was there and then proposed, and had no qualms about telling the world that the prisoners in the Kresty (Crosses) Prison. approved with storms of applause – to the working class as a whole were infinitely Amongst these was the Menshevik first fuse together the revolutionary army and more revolutionary than any political party President of the 1905 Soviet, Khrustalev- the proletariat of the capital and create a (including the Bolsheviks). However this is Nosar. The Mensheviks led the way in forming united organisation to be called from then not the end of the story. The real issue is how the new Soviet and linked it with the Tsarist on the “Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ does that party respond to the new situation. War Industries Committees which were led Deputies… by Gvozdev, another Menshevik (as they All the evidence is that the working class were designed to improve war production Many factories already had elected delegates members of the Bolshevik party acquitted the Bolsheviks had led a successful to the Soviet. At the same time, unlike in themselves well in the turmoil of February. campaign against them). 1905, the soviet movement spread rapidly to Less impressive were the so-called leaders. 12 the provinces. Within a fortnight there were If Shlyapnikov and company vacillated At this point many histories make the point 77 other soviets in cities and towns around in late February they at least stuck to that the Bolsheviks had seemingly played Russia. There is much to comment on here. In the revolutionary defeatist policy which little overt part in the Revolution. There the first place the soviet or workers’ council characterised the Bolsheviks throughout were several reasons for this. Like all other represents the historically discovered form the war. But when they were replaced by parties they had not expected the revolution of the proletarian transformation of society. “Old” Bolsheviks like Stalin, Muranov and and were even cautioning women strikers If proletarian revolution can only be carried Kamenev, newly released from Siberian exile, not to get isolated on February 24th. The out “by the immense majority” it has to the picture became blurred. first Bolshevik leaflet calling for a general have a totally different form of organisation strike only hit the streets on the 26th (by to bourgeois society. In bourgeois society The new threesome took over Pravda and which time hundreds of thousands were parliamentarism represents the class form of began writing about the need to support already out!). The Bolshevik leadership in St their rule. It creates the illusion of mass rule, the Provisional Government. Kamenev Petersburg was undoubtedly weak (the St of democracy, but in actual fact depends even wrote that the war must go on until Petersburg Committee was so decimated by on the passivity of the citizens. They get the Germans had been pushed out of arrests that the Vyborg committee was given to vote once every four or five years for Russia. Lenin’s irritation and anger about its role). However the Bolsheviks were not representatives who then have the total this is well-known. Less well-known is the idle. As we have seen, individual Bolsheviks freedom to do as they like with their so- perplexed reaction of the rank and file who were with the workers on the streets and called “democratic mandate”. The citizens had defended the revolutionary defeatist often took the initiative in giving an informal cannot object, and indeed any strike or other position throughout the war. Whilst Lenin’s lead when it was required. The Bolsheviks did form of direct action to object to a policy April Theses were a bombshell to some of the not go to the Tauride Palace to be present at comes up against the argument that the Bolshevik leadership, they were welcomed the setting up of the Provisional Government democratically elected representatives have as a restatement of Bolshevik clarity in the and the Soviet because they regarded this as the only legitimate authority. factories. All the indications are that this all in the realm of the bourgeoisie and were confusion was too short to be critical but thus caught out by the re-establishment of Note the difference with the soviet. The it also illustrates that the Bolshevik Party the Petrograd Soviet). soldiers’ delegates repeatedly state “we have was not the rigidly disciplined organisation been told to say” or “our general meeting which Stalinist legend has made it out to be. Figes scoffs at the revival of the Soviet stated”. These are delegates. They have a pointing out accurately enough that direct mandate. They don’t vote how they What we have tried to show here is that its original executive was made up of like but how they were told to vote by their its strengths were that it had a clear intellectuals who represented the political workers’ or regimental assembly. If they don’t revolutionary political orientation and that parties (even the Bolsheviks were allocated they can be instantly recalled and replaced. it was a distinct part of working class life two seats on it). What he does not explain Bourgeois theorists constantly tell us that this in advance of the revolution. These were (because it undermines his basic argument sort of direct democracy is impractical but to be critical factors in the development that this was an illegitimate power) is that the whole experience of 1917 demonstrates of a revolutionary party in 1917. And this this was only the beginning of the process. the opposite. This democracy is not subject forms the next focus of our study. It is one Very soon every regiment would be electing to bribery of individuals and controlled thing for the working class to create class its own delegates. These delegates were only by the electors – but then that’s why wide organs which actually carry out the not the articulate intellectuals who formed the bourgeoisie hate it and why they get transformation of society but these organs the provisional executive but people whose their hack writers to denigrate it. Up until cannot do this as long as they are dominated voice had rarely ever been heard in history. now there has been nothing more effective by political programmes which call for class Sukhanov gives a vivid picture of their in allowing the mass of the population to collaboration with the dominant class. 11 “artless” entry onto the stage of history. directly participate in “government” than the soviet movement. Soviets with Communists? We had a meeting.. We have been told to say … The officers hid… To join the Soviet of What does this tell us about class From the beginning of May the distinction Workers’ Deputies… They told us to say that consciousness and political organisation? between the Bolsheviks and the other we refuse to serve against the people any First, that in a practical movement like a political parties became sharper. This was more, we’re going to join with out brother- revolution, the working class will re-create critical to the future development of the workers, all united to defend the people’s (even in slightly amended form) organs that revolution. It is one thing for the working cause… We would lay down our lives for they have already experimented with in the class to overthrow a regime, even to establish that …Our general meeting told us to greet past. Second, that even the best proletarian class wide organisations, but it is another 31 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation to make these organs of revolutionary Notes transformation. 1 Harding’s Lenin’s Political Thought was reviewed As we saw in the last part of this text, the in Revolutionary Perspectives 23, Second Series. soviets in the German revolution were always His later work was reviewed in RP4 (this dominated by the Social Democrats who series). Service wrote Lenin: A Political Life [3 Vols, simply got them to vote for the bourgeois 1985-95] and then Lenin: A Biography in 2000. The option of a parliamentary regime. In Russia former is hardly sympathetic to Lenin but the latter history took a different course largely (as we introduces us to his subject by listing the evils of argued in the previous issue) because there , but does not mention Stalin once, and was a preparation of the working class for the claims the whole history of the USSR is Lenin’s next and decisive step. The Bolshevik refusal legacy! to accept the compromise of , 2 The History of the Russian Revolution, Pluto Press their refusal to accept that the Revolution [1977] p.155. was now over as a parliamentary regime had 3 For the full discussion on this see Chapter 2. been established, meant that they set out 4 See S.A. Smith Red Petrograd (Cambridge 1990). an alternative for the working class. As the 5 Quoted in E.N.Burdzhalov Russia’s Second material situation shifted, as the hopes for Revolution, Indiana University Press, [1987] p. 15. a “democratic peace” faded, the Bolsheviks 6 The History of the Russian Revolution, Pluto Press were the only party who constantly called [1977] p.165. for “All Power to the Soviets”. 7 A People’s Tragedy (Pimlico 1997) p.308. 8 Lessons of the Moscow Uprising in V.I.Lenin In 1917 the class struggle did not reach a Selected Works Vol 1[Moscow 1977] p.530 peak in February – in February it had barely 9 E.N.Burdzhalov Russia’s Second Revolution, started. Once the Tsar was out of the way, the Indiana University Press, [1987] p. 131. bourgeois Provisional Government was face 10 See Black Night, White Snow, Harrison Salisbury, to face with Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets. Cassell, [1977] p.343. The only party which was not compromised 11 N.N. Sukhanov (Himmer) The Russian Revolution by being represented in the Provisional 1917: A Personal Record, Princeton, [1984] The Government as well as in the Soviets was the description and quotation which follows are from Bolsheviks. The Soviets under Menshevik and p.61 SR leadership straddled the two and these 12 Before anyone objects that the first actual parties got the Soviet to agree to support soviet in 1905 was in the textile town of Ivanovo- the Provisional Government. In practice Vossnessensk. We mean here that the soviet the workers and soldiers were supporting movement was confined to 4 or 5 places in 1905. In decrees of the Soviet which undermined 1917 it began to spread from the very beginning. bourgeois rule (such as the orders on military discipline where officers were no longer allowed to address soldiers as “ty” a disrespectful form of “you”, or more seriously, officers had to listen to elected committees). Dual Power then was always an uneasy compromise. Real power always lay with the Soviet but the Soviet did not use it. However once it was clear that the Kadet Foreign Minister (and strong man of the bourgeois regime) Milyukov wanted to follow the Tsar’s policy of annexation of territory the Soviet demanded his resignation. This was followed by the disastrous June Offensive which confirmed that a war to victory was a distant chimera. This was the pivotal point at which the 1917 Revolution turned. The Bolsheviks’ continued principled opposition to the war was now to make its programme, which had itself evolved during the course of the war and the crisis of 1917, into the only alternative for the Russian working class. The relationship between party and class in the later part of 1917 is what we will turn to in the next chapter.

32 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

he experience of the Russian Revolution Tis the single most important event in 7 any discussion of the nature of working class consciousness, the emergence of a proletarian party and the nature of class decision-making. In the last part we Party and Class in the showed how the Bolsheviks had emerged Revolutionary Wave of as a class party in 1917. In this part we wish to begin confronting the issue which has 1917-21 hung around the neck of the revolutionary proletariat since the early 1920’s. How is it that a revolution which began with such promise of liberation for the proletariat and therefore for the whole of humanity ended in the mire of one of the worst tyrannies in world history? This is significant because there has been a long tradition of rejecting Anton Pannekoek the role of the party which has made many 1873-1960 would be revolutionaries (for example, in the current “anti-capitalist” movement) fear any anywhere else since after 1919 a river of form of organisation. Given what we have blood (that included the cold blooded already argued on this question earlier in this murder of hundreds of communist workers series such a fear represents a real danger for as well as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl the working class. If we cannot overcome it Liebknecht) separated the revolutionary our capacity to act together as a class will not proletariat from Social Democracy. This just be severely impeded but the prospect of made it all the more detestable that the revolution will vanish. The roots of this anti- German Communist Party under Paul organisational tendency lie in the reaction Levi not only expelled those who were to to the Russian Revolution, particularly in the become the KAPD, for their opposition to the writings of the so-called “councilists” who tactical use of parliamentarism and trades are still influential amongst today’s anti- unionism, but was also to go along with capitalists. the Comintern’s policy (when faced with a declining revolutionary situation) of forming Councilism and Revolution united fronts with the Social Democrats who, in secret alliance with the Kaiser’s former Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch communist generals, were now the backbone of the new once wrote that the working class only bourgeois Weimar Republic. has two weapons, its organisation and its consciousness. However, Pannekoek, For some of Pannekoek’s comrades in the founder member of the German Communist Berlin section of the KAPD a renewed, Workers’ Party (KAPD), and later prophet German, form of Bolshevism was not the of council communism, gave different solution. Led by Otto Rühle (who had the answers at different times as to the precise distinction of being the first Social Democrat relationship between these two factors. As M.P. to vote against war credits after Karl a member of the KAPD he put the original Liebknecht) they now began to condemn emphasis on the fact that the proletarian the party form itself as being a bourgeois party, as the organisation of the most class creation and thus alien to the process conscious workers, had to have a programme of proletarian emancipation. The Berlin which was “hard as steel, clear as glass” in Tendency had some immediate experience order to carry out its historic tasks. This was to back up Rühle’s claim. Not only had Rühle what Pannekoek at that time realised was been initially forced to obey the Social the real legacy of the Bolshevik Party in Democratic parliamentary party discipline 1917. He correctly contrasted this with the and vote for the Kaiser’s war in August opportunism and betrayal of the parties 1914, but he had also seen how the once of the Third International (including the impeccably revolutionary Bolshevik Party, Bolsheviks) which by 1921 were retreating the only significant party to fight against the back to making alliances with the same Social war, had degenerated under the extremely Democrats who had betrayed the workers arduous pressure of a so-called “civil war” in supporting imperialist war in 1914, and which was in fact an international war then became organisations dedicated to the fought on Russian soil. The consequences preservation of the capitalist system after the of this civil war were materially disastrous First World War. for the Russian revolutionary proletariat. Not only were more than 2 million wiped In Germany this betrayal was clearer than out but the mobilisation of the most class 33 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

here to the conclusion that all parties are was solely an instrument for representing bourgeois. What mattered was no longer economic interests within the system the the organisation which encapsulated the proletarian party only came into existence consciousness of those who had always been as the bearer of the historic programme for communist but only the class-wide bodies the emancipation of the class. This means which gave voice to the whole class. This that not only was it a different type of body was the origin of the theory of councilism, altogether it also had a fundamentally of which Rühle has a strong claim to be the different relationship to the majority of its father. class.

Councilism and Marxism The bourgeois party demanded that voters vote for it in order to leave it to rule but the But councilism is predicated on a rejection proletarian party is a guide, a leadership to of the very principles of how class direct mass proletarian action towards the consciousness arises as laid out by Marx in overthrow of the old order. Whilst the party Class consciousness organised. The German Ideology. If class consciousness has an important guiding role in the actual Russian conscripts carry a banner for uniformly arises inside the working class process of insurrection, and will have to lead ‘KOMMUNISM’ in 1917. then the question of party versus soviet in that insurrection, in the last resort it has to becomes fairly academic, and the party be this mass of the class not the party which conscious workers into a new Red Army would be irrelevant, but in fact this is not the finally overthrows the old order by drawing undermined the operation of the Soviet case. an even greater mass into the process which system. The Soviets were in decline by 1919 begins to build a new one. The precise and even though Soviet Congresses were Class consciousness exists in fragmented relationship between class party and mass still convened by 1920 these were empty form amongst different groups of workers of the class cannot be decided in advance shells rather than the vibrant bodies they according to relatively recent class since it is only in the process of revolution had once been. experience. Such experiences may be that the working class shakes off “the muck fleeting (a strike in one industry), they may of ages” (Marx, The German Ideology) but Rühle however avoided any material analysis be spaced out over years so that workers historical logic cannot be turned on its head. of this decline. For Rühle the problem was only have dim recollections of what has First class consciousness takes a minority that the Bolsheviks had failed ideologically happened previously or they may be form and then this minority points the way to carry out the communist programme. particularly violent outbursts of struggle forward to the whole class in a revolutionary He was the among the first to point out which no-one forgets but which separate situation. Only once the capitalist order has that what had been created in Russia groups experience differently. What draws been overthrown does the working class set was not a communist society but a state these episodes together is not the direct up the required new material conditions for capitalist one. This however does him no experience of the actual struggle (the the development of a mass communist/class credit. Lenin himself said that the Soviet spontaneist/ councilist hypothesis) but the consciousness. Republic was a mixed economy (and the reflection of those workers and activists who state capitalist parts were for him amongst recognise that this or that struggle is only a The Russian Experience of its better achievements). However no-one part of a greater whole and is the product of October 1917 was really talking at this point of a socialist the class antagonisms of capitalist society as society since the young Soviet Republic was a whole. Outside of the immediate struggle This introduction on the theoretical roots still living in the hand-to-mouth existence how can these groups of workers develop of councilism takes us back to where we of the realm of necessity. If economically their experience and the consciousness had finished Chapter Six in Russia in the the proletariat had inherited a situation in which has been aroused by that experience. middle of 1917. The Bolsheviks themselves late 1917 akin to the economic collapse of A permanent political organisation that were not a deus ex machina. They were the Black Death in the 14th Century (the takes the acquisitions of the past into the part of the revolutionary development of description is by Edward Acton, Professor future struggles is not simply desirable - its the Russian working class. As a party the of History at East Anglia University in his appearance as part of the process of ever Bolshevik Party did not start and finish 1917 book “Rethinking the Russian Revolution”), widening class consciousness is inevitable. as the same organisation. In the course of imagine the situation after three more years This is the organisation that we call the party. that momentous year, although it had the and 8 million more deaths due to this war right raw material Bolshevism, was forged foisted on the proletariat by the intervention Rühle rejected this. Ultimately he argued into a tool of the revolutionary proletariat. of international imperialism. that only economic organisations of the class As we made clear in the last part of this were necessary (although he was opposed series this was neither a mystical process Only a world-wide shift in the balance of to all trades unions his view was finally a nor was the outcome pre-ordained. First class power could have posed the question sort of anarcho-syndicalist idea. Like other of all the Bolsheviks in 1914 remained true of socialism but Rühle, after years in the members of the German Left who went to a proletarian programme when the vast ranks of Social Democracy, saw revolution on to become councilists he never saw the majority of the Social Democratic parties only in idealist terms. The hesitations of contradiction in this view). For Rühle the very abandoned all that they claimed to stand for. the Bolshevik Party and the Communist idea of “party” was a bourgeois construct. International were not, according to him, What he did not see was that the bourgeois In second place the Bolsheviks were a due to adverse historical circumstances but party (with its machinery designed to win grass roots organisation which, despite the to the inherent conservatism of all ex-social votes) was a totally different beast from the arrest and exile of their leaders, worked in democratic parties. It was a short step from party of the proletariat. Whilst the former the factories and in the garrisons to take 34 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation their anti-war message into the daily class sufficient strength for a showdown with the struggle. The very fact that successive Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks thus leaderships of the party were arrested or managed to tone down the demonstration exiled meant that worker activists displayed a little without ever openly abandoning it a lot more initiative wherever they found to its fate. The Bolsheviks remained with the themselves. Local activists did not have to class. wait for the leaders to tell them what to do. In some places like Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, For this reasons the Bolsheviks were today Volgograd) the October Revolution proscribed, their press smashed up, their actually started before that in Petrograd. leaders imprisoned or forced to flee (like Lenin) and subjected to a massive lie By the middle of 1917 the Bolsheviks were, campaign that they acted for Germany. But in a certain sense, almost too successful. despite the Provisional Government’s assault Once Lenin had convinced the party leaders on the Bolsheviks, the working class hardly in May to accept what the rank and file had wavered in its support and the Bolshevik known all along, i.e. that the Provisional Party after an initial fortnight of decline re- Government had to be overthrown and an emerged from the crisis stronger than ever. V. I. Lenin attempt to create socialism started, then the 1870-1924 proletariat had a clear banner around which October – Coup d’état or Revolution? to rally. As the war effort of the Provisional the city. Lenin was horrified and even said Government ground to a halt in June the to Podvoisky, the leader of the Bolshevik The Bolshevik revival was due to their steadfast anti-war position of Bolshevism Military Organisation which was supposed depth of support in the class but the speed became the only hope for a working class to argue for their line within the barracks of their recovery was largely due to the facing starvation and a further mobilisation that he ought to be “thrashed” for not having infighting between the various strands of for yet one more suicidal offensive. warned the sailors earlier that what they were the bourgeoisie. When Kornilov, the man trying was premature. When called upon Kerensky had named as his new Army The July Days to greet the demonstrators Lenin basically Commander, decided to lead an assault on told them to enjoy the demonstration but Petrograd it was the Bolsheviks, because Here though a further test of a proletarian to peacefully return home as the Provisional they were so deeply rooted in the working party was to take place. Inevitably, given Government might use it as a provocation class who were the only force to organise what we have already understood about the to attack them. The sailors were mystified at resistance. The persuasion of Bolshevik uneven development of class consciousness, this address. They did not see that, though activists undermined the purpose of some workers are more impatient to make the they represented Bolshevik thinking the rest Kornilov’s troops (even the Savage Division – revolution than others and this was the case of the class would need more time to get to the former elite support for Tsarism) and the of the sailors based in Kronstadt, the naval where they were. revolt simply faded away. The activity of the fortress near Petrograd. In July 1917 they Bolsheviks made them the most significant decided to follow up the June demonstration The decision of the Bolsheviks in the factor in the consciousness of the urban which had been called by those Soviet parties July Days not to support the sailors nor working class in Russia and it was no surprise who supported the Provisional Government that they won 80% of the delegate places in to show the Bolsheviks that they were an elections to the two main soviets (Petrograd absolute minority. In the event it turned into “Neither the party nor the soviets and Moscow). This was on the basis of the a pro-Bolshevik demonstration against the are in themselves insurance against unambiguous slogans of “all Power to the Provisional Government with banners calling counter-revolution. The only Soviets” and “Down with the Provisional for immediate peace and the overthrow of guarantee is the class consciousness Government”. the Provisional Government. of the working masses themselves.” Platform of the Internationalist This was now the very concrete advance The sailors decided that an armed Communist Tenedency in consciousness that Lenin (still in exile) demonstration in favour of soviet power was waiting for. It indicated that the anti- would now topple the Provisional capitalist, anti-Provisional Government Government. However the rest of the class to criticise them, undermines once and sentiment of the workers was now so was not yet ready. The consequences of for all the bourgeois idea that they were developed that the overthrow of the the failure of the June Offensive had not simply a gang of putschists. The Bolshevik Provisional Government could now be yet sunk in to a wider layer of the class. leadership as a whole knew that no action undertaken. The actual planning of the This the Bolsheviks, present in the factories, was possible without wider class support. insurrection was formally given to the understood so the sailors action left them On the contrary it was the Kronstadters Military Revolutionary Committee (headed in a terrible dilemma. Here demonstrating (many of them anarchists) who were the by Trotsky) of the Petrograd Soviet which below the balcony of the Kseshinskaia putschists since they thought that all that was virtually a Bolshevik body since they Palace, where the Bolsheviks had their was needed was for them to give a lead and dominated it and the Mensheviks and SRs headquarters, were thousands of armed the rest of the class would follow. As the best (except the Left SRs who were about to split sailors demanding that the Bolsheviks put elements of the revolutionary proletariat from their bourgeois colleagues) did not themselves at the head of the demonstration were already moving into the Bolshevik attend it. However in the end it was not any (which, after all, only repeated the Bolshevik Party, the Bolsheviks themselves knew that detailed plan in advance which guaranteed slogans of June) and march across the the tide of class opinion was still flowing victory, it was the general class consciousness Liteiny Bridge straight towards the centre of in their direction but had not yet reached inside the working class that the Provisional 35 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Government was their class enemy. himself, whilst in exile in Finland recognised guide. In the circumstances of 1918-21 this at this time in State and Revolution that was not understood. It was assumed that, When Kerensky decided to forestall any more until the world revolution the party could armed demonstrations coming from the … the anarchists were justified in saying act as a sort of regent for the proletariat workers’ districts to the north of the city by about such Social-Democrats that they until it revived its conscious activity, but the closing the bridges over the Neva his troops were failing in their task of giving the history of proletarian class consciousness were stopped and arrested by the workers’ workers a revolutionary education. shows that this artificial way of looking at militias who spotted that the bridges were in Selected Works Vol 2 p. 283-4 consciousness cannot work. Once the class about to be raised. This was the signal for the in any generation begins to lose its conscious Military Revolutionary Committee to act and This confluence of anarchism and Bolshevism will to create a new society no artificial the city was taken over. Despite Eisenstein’s in the Russian Revolution obviously should expedient can revive it. propaganda film October this was done not be exaggerated but it is further evidence without bloodshed. Kerensky simply could to show that the experience of 1917 was Lenin knew this. It was the main reason not find loyal troops to defend a regime which transforming the political landscape and why Lenin insisted that the Provisional had long before lost the confidence of the forging a revolutionary instrument in the Government had to be overthrown in masses. Indeed it is important to state that it Bolshevik Party. October whilst the proletariat were prepared was only when the proletariat removed from for it. However Lenin was making his the Soviet Executive the parties which had Councilists also cannot fault the Bolsheviks arguments with the perspective that class been shielding the Provisional Government as the quintessential Soviet party. No consciousness was international and that (the Mensheviks and the SRs) that the other party stood so consistently for soviet whatever the weakness of the situation in total bankruptcy of the Kerensky regime power. Indeed one of the reasons why the Russia the world revolution would help to was revealed. The October Revolution was revolution degenerated so quickly is that transform the material situation. As we now neither the simple coup d’état of bourgeois the other parties represented in the soviet know history did not work out that way, propaganda, nor the great military triumph did not maintain the same principles. On the Russian revolution was isolated and that the Soviet regime later portrayed, but some occasions between 1918 and 1920 the the question of how an isolated proletarian the culmination of months of growing class Mensheviks, for example, were divided into bastion could survive was put on the agenda awareness of the alternatives posed in 1917. three factions. One (usually around Martov) for the only time in our history. It is to the was in the soviets, another was neutral whilst issue of how the Russian Revolution declined For Lenin the month of October had been a third negotiated with the Whites to get rid and its significance for us that we turn in the very frustrating. The overwhelming support of soviet power. It was the same with the next chapter. of the working class for Bolshevik delegates Left SRs who were not only in the Soviet but only underscored that the overthrow of the part of the Council of People’s Commissars Provisional Government was on the agenda (i.e. the Soviet Government) until peace was and he had been bombarding the Bolshevik signed with Germany. They then not only leadership in Petrograd with the request abandoned their government positions but that they seize state power. The rest of the also the soviet and returned to by Bolshevik leadership prevaricated and it was assassinating the German ambassador and only Kerensky’s actions which galvanised several Bolsheviks. them into action. They would have been lost if they had not been working in a situation in But that is not the only evidence that the which the mass of the class was with them. Bolsheviks were the only party committed This is the key to the issue. This chapter is not to workers councils. Under the Bolsheviks about the events of 1917 but we have had to many more soviets were set up across Russia look at 1917 in detail because this is the only and in the first few months of the revolution raw experience we have of the relationship Bolshevik leaders toured factories urging of party, class and consciousness in a real workers to recognise that the new system revolution. 1917 gives us the only direct was based on participation not passivity. evidence of how the proletariat can come to power. Our councilists, with whom we Even the great debate between councilists started this part of the article, often accept and left communists that the factory the bourgeois argument that October was committees were deliberately undermined a coup d’etat; or if they don’t, they have an by the Bolsheviks ignores the fact that it illogical and unrealistic formula which says was the factory committees themselves that that the October Revolution was proletarian called for greater centralisation in order to but the Bolsheviks who led it were bourgeois! function less chaotically. In some ways the What we have briefly tried to show here is factory committees issue is a bit of a sideshow that the distinction between party and class as the real issue is the decline of soviet power will blur in a situation where the party, by all and the growth of the role of the party in measurable criteria, has the overwhelming every avenue of life. This underlines the most support of the mass of the class. In the important lesson of the Russian revolution. few months before October even many Whilst the party may represent the vanguard anarchists recognised that Bolshevism had of the class it cannot take on the role of the gone beyond the old statist, reformist Social mass of the class in transforming society. Democracy and they joined the party. Lenin The party is not a government but a political 36 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

espite taking place a century ago Dthe Russian Revolution remains the 8 single most important event for shaping our understanding of the question of class consciousness in this epoch. As the only time in history when a self-consciously The Decline of the Russian working class movement actually arrived at the head of state power it hands down to Revolution and the Cult of us a rich heritage of experience which we cannot ignore. In fact, so important is this the Party event for our epoch that we have to return to it yet again.

In the last part we tackled the ideas of councilism which sprang up as the In 1917 the Bolsheviks inherited a food revolutionary period which followed the crisis of medieval proportions. Three fur- First World War came to a shuddering ther years of war led to the of 1921 defeat. We consider that councilism is some of whose victims are pictured here. itself a distorted product of that counter- revolution because it actually theorises the than revolutionary transformation. As we idea that spontaneity alone will be enough have said many times in the past there was to spark the revolutionary movement nothing in Marxist theory which prepared an which will transform society. In doing so it isolated proletarian bastion to deal with this actually does violence to the way in which question. class consciousness amongst a propertyless working class arises. Councilism blamed the Bolshevik Errors and the Bolshevik Party as the agent of proletarian Rise of the Party Dictatorship defeat, and councilists have gone on to argue that this was because the Bolsheviks Bolshevism was an instrument of the were either insufficiently clear politically revolution forged in the class struggle but and programmatically or were even, in some a revolutionary party is a fighting party. It is versions, always counter-revolutionary in not an instrument of government. Fighting their ideas. This is both historically inaccurate for the communist programme in the soviets and methodologically untenable. is one thing, but becoming the government and the state is another. Whilst we can The Bolsheviks, for good or ill, were the agree with the councilists that, despite its best elements in political terms that existed revolutionary origins, the Bolshevik Party within the old Second International. Their was also the agent of the counter-revolution position on the war alone made them the when the class movement was defeated, we vanguard of, not just the Russian proletariat, have to differentiate ourselves from them in but the international proletariat as well. We that we see this as a result of an objective should also remember that, as we show in process of defeat and not due to the pre- our pamphlet 1917, Bolshevism wasn’t just determined weaknesses of the Bolshevik a movement which sprang from the head Party. As we have shown in this series the of one man, it was a political representation Bolsheviks were the least hidebound, the of the revolutionary working class and most open to change of all the parties of the which was forged as a revolutionary party Second International. in the struggles of 1917 by responding to the actual class movement. As a result of This makes it all the more important for us that experience revolutionaries from many to learn from the way in which the Russian countries looked to them to lead the world Revolution collapsed into a bureaucratic revolution. However, this was a task which counter-revolution, which ultimately was actually beyond Bolshevism (or anyone spawned Stalinism. The first lesson is that else for that matter). no amount of revolutionary exhortation can turn around a material process. In the winter The Russian proletariat was a minority in of 1917-18 even hostile observers concede a backward capitalist country. As all the that the Bolsheviks went around trying to Bolshevik leaders repeatedly stated in 1917- get more workers to run their own system. 18 “without a German Revolution we are In this period real grassroots soviet power doomed”. Or as Rosa Luxemburg put it, the expanded. Lenin’s own exhortations in the question of socialism could only be posed factories were all along the lines of what in Russia. It would have to be answered he said at the Third Congress of Soviets in further West. As that answer never came January 1918, the question became one of survival rather 37 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

… socialism cannot be implemented power within the party had already begun. declared to the congress of local economic by a minority, by the Party. It can be And with it came the domination of the Party councils held in May 1918: “The apparatus implemented only by tens of millions when over the organs of the state. of the old state is doomed to die; but the they have learned to do it for themselves.1 apparatus of the type of our Supreme The same men, sharing the same traditions Economic Council is destined to grow, However, harsh reality was soon to and the same purpose, directed the affairs develop, and become strong, fulfilling al the undermine this early aspiration. In the first of party and state; the same incessant most important functions of an organised place during the course of the revolution of crisis and the same uninterrupted pressure society”4 1917 the Bolshevik Party had welded itself of events weighed equally between 1917 into a disciplined whole to lead the assault and 1921 on party and Soviet institutions. This though was at the end of what the on bourgeois power. It was the largest and The outstanding developments of these Bolshevik economist L. Kritsman called later most all-Russian organisation in Russia years in the machinery of the state – the “The Heroic Period of the Revolution”. It was a by October 1917. However, proletarian concentration of central authority in the period which ended when the civil war broke revolutionary parties are not governmental hands of Sovnarkom at the expense of out after the signing of the Treaty of Brest- parties. Whilst they lead the revolutionary the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and of Litovsk with Germany in March 1918. From assault they do not form the government as VTsIK, and the concentration of authority at now on the constant drain on the already such (even if party members take important the centre at the expense of the local soviets shattered Russian working class was to roles in the post-revolutionary society). As and congresses of Soviets and their organs further undermine the soviet principle. Lenin said repeatedly, in the winter of 1917- – had actually preceded the corresponding 18 the proletariat as a whole have to build developments in the party organisation. Party and Class socialism. For some time the lines of development in party and state ran parallel. Then, by and Again we have to repeat that the Bolshevik practice however soon began inevitable process they began to converge degeneration of the revolution was not the to undermine this. To start with the and finally, to coincide. This process had result of any preconceived idea about the Bolsheviks set up a cabinet of the Council been virtually completed by the time of Party. At the Eighth Party Congress in March of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) to Lenin’s death.3 1919 there was no babbling about the Party run the Departments of State. Calling the being the same as the class. On the contrary leaders of these Departments “People’s This is the schematic overview and takes the relationship of Party and class was seen Commissars” (Trotsky’s brainwave) did not in the whole period 1917-24. However the quite clearly hide the fact that they were Ministers in pattern is the same in every area. Even on the old sense. Instead of relying on the the issue of the factory committees whose The Communist Party sets as its goal the class-wide bodies of the soviets to elect an “suppression” the councilists make so much achievement of decisive influence and executive which ran the government, the of , the truth is rather more complicated. It complete leadership in all organisations Bolsheviks had already begun the process was clear to all that the factory committees of the workers; in trades unions, in of supplanting soviet rule. This was not a were at best patchy in their performance. cooperatives, agricultural communes etc. conscious process but followed a recurrent Workers on the railways who took to housing The Communist Party especially tries to pattern in every area of life in the RSFSR. themselves in rolling stock rather than using it carry out its programme and its complete In the early days Sovnarkom always made for running the railways for society is perhaps domination in the state organisations of sure that the Soviet Executive (VTsIK) got one of the more extreme examples but the the present time, the Soviets. The Party the chance to discuss and reject Sovnarkom factory committees were also dominated by attempts to guide the activities of the plans but in practice this happened less and Bolshevik workers who demanded greater Soviets but not to less often as the revolution was faced with coordination and centralisation. It was they, replace them. 6 international invasion. The Soviets met less supported by the Left Communists who and less often, and the Congress of Soviets were the main opposition group inside the This last line sums it up. The class wide which began as quarterly affairs had ceased Party, who insisted on the setting up of the organs represent the whole class whilst the to be such by 1920. In some ways, even Supreme Economic Council or VESENKha. Party represents only the vanguard. The if the form of soviet rule had been more Even a liberal critic of the Revolution could most advanced workers alone cannot make firmly adhered to it would have made little write that: the revolution since the revolution means difference. The need to send the most class the total social and economic transformation conscious workers to fight in the Red Army The Council of People’s Commissars took of the whole mode of production. It cannot in the period 1918-20 tore the heart out a step in the direction of the Leftist plan, be done by the minority. It is not that of properly functioning soviets. The Party apparently at the behest of the factory- soviets (or any other class-wide body) are was quite rapidly transformed into the real committee leadership, with the creation of just a “nice idea”. They are indispensable governmental organisation in Russia. Again the Supreme Economic Council (and the for the actual transformation of society this was not planned in advance nor was it authorisation for similar local councils) in and to return to the classical statement of an immediate reality. The victory of October December 1917. the council was initially Marx in The German Ideology it is this very had led to dominated by Leftists – the first chairman process of the revolutionary movement was Osinsky, and the governing bureau which also transforms the consciousness of an outburst of unfettered discussion and included Bukharin, Lomov and Vladimir human beings.7 Soviets are the historically controversy unprecedented in the annals Smirnov. Despite the dubious success discovered solution to the problem of how of the Bolshevik Party, and perhaps rare in of the central and local councils in the to make the mass of the population the those of any other.2 ensuing months, they represented enough master of its own destiny. This brings us to doctrinal momentum to evoke from Lenin a the crux of the issue. However, the process of concentration of final expression of his 1917 anarchism. He 38 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

It is a result of the way class consciousness bread that had been so lacking for the last In Bolshevik eyes it was the working class, develops within the working class that the two years. This took its toll on the enthusiasm led by their most advanced members in actual overthrow of capitalist rule will be of the working class who had supported the the Bolshevik Party that was going to build carried out by a large minority led by a small Bolshevik drive for Soviet power in 1917. socialism. If the Petrograd workers should minority. The party will be at the head of a As Mary McAuley so graphically portrays it turn against or not follow the party, then larger movement. But overthrowing capitalist in her work on the Russian Revolution the the socialist endeavour would fail. The political domination and establishing a workers were becoming apathetic as early Bolsheviks needed the workers’ support socialist society are two different things. as the spring of 1918. By the end of the year to justify their claim to rule. But what kind The first can be achieved by a movement in in some factories there were even some of support? From a bourgeois perspective which communists play the overwhelming (admittedly a small minority) who called for all that could be expected was passive role. However the question of constructing the return of the Tsar. acquiescence but from the workers far socialism is of an altogether different order. It more was called for. Without their active requires that the majority of workers in every Sickness and starvation stalked the city. By participation, initiative, and sacrifice, area of society are drawn into the creation of March with calorie consumption down to socialism was unachievable. For thousands a new mode of production, a new political little more than 1,500 a day, there was a rash of working-class activists who had become order and ultimately a totally different type of strikes in the factories. It was a desperate socialists under Tsarism it meant self- of society which has lost all trace of the time. The Bolsheviks had to muster all their education, self-discipline and a willingness “muck of ages” (Marx). In the course of this resources to calm the angry workers, some to sacrifice personal comfort and safety for the vast bulk of humanity will have their of whom were spreading the slogan ‘Down the cause. At a minimum the Bolshevik ideas transformed. with Lenin and horsemeat, Give us the Party needed the factory workers to vote Tsar and pork’. Lenin came from Moscow for them rather than for the Mensheviks The problem thrown up by the Russian to address the question directly before a or SRs, and to pass factory resolutions in experience is that the best intentions are no huge meeting at the People’s House, and support of Bolshevik policies – and at times use if the material situation works against the a new rationing system was worked out. they had to be content with that – but if proletariat. An example of this is the issue of It was never quite so bad again but the that was all they could count on was limited Party membership. In order to try to stop three-quarters of a million inhabitants to these gestures from the followers, the careerism the party only recruited at those who survived the civil war were emaciated socialist enterprise was doomed. Only if the times when the Civil War against the Whites and sick by the end of 1920. Years of workers were committed to a new way of was going badly so the consequences of near subsistence diet had taken their toll working and living (particularly difficult in joining the Party might be fatal for any given physically and psychologically.9 presentconditions) would socialism be built. individual. This was supposed to ensure that The Bolsheviks could not do it for them.10 the Party would maintain its revolutionary This passage seems to pose the question as and proletarian purity – its revolutionary to how the Bolsheviks remained in power at The Bolsheviks may have had some class consciousness. Laudable though all. One factor was the undoubted loyalty hangovers from the Social Democracy about this was (and it is difficult to see how the of the vast majority of workers to the soviet the nature of socialism but their proletarian Bolsheviks could have acted better) the fact form even if this was not working in its opposition to the war revealed that they remained that less than 5% of the population original fashion. And there was the usual had broken with many Social Democratic of the old Russian Empire were working problem following a revolution of what ideas and were the best representatives of class. As many of these were already in the constituted legitimate criticism and what the working class at that time. The notion Party or fighting in the Red Army the scope was deemed to be subversive of the whole developed since the defeat of the Russian for finding new recruits was limited. Despite system. Here the problem was compounded Revolution by latter-day councilists (but not this as the Party took on more and more of by the splits in the oppositions. The Left SRs by earlier councilists like Pannekoek11), or by the functions of operating the system more started off in the Soviet Government but left anarchists like Voline12 that the Bolsheviks and more were recruited. Party membership it via an act of terrorism. The Mensheviks had a preconceived plan to create a party rose from tens of thousands in mid-1917 split into at least three factions some of state simply does not stand up to closer to 3 millions by 1921, but “bureaucratism” whom accepted working in the soviets (like examination.. A critical analysis of Bolshevik continued to be denounced at Soviet and Martov’s Internationalists) whilst others errors finds that the debates inside the Party Congresses. And all the way through went off to work with the opposition in the Bolsheviks about the future of the revolution the Civil War the soviets were dying as the civil war but would then change their mind at that time raised precisely the issues we most class conscious workers were fighting and return to work in the soviet. In the face are talking about today. It wasn’t the lack of at the front. of this the Bolsheviks themselves were split, consciousness within the Russian working with some insisting on the need to repress class movement that led to the disastrous The experience of the Russian Revolution all opposition groups, and others trying to outcome of the USSR, but the objective also highlights how fragile working class create a new soviet legality. conditions in which the revolutionaries of consciousness could be. The Soviets had the time operated. come to power after four years of slaughter However this debate also shows that and economic disaster. Professor Edward the Bolsheviks were themselves already As the isolation of the Russian proletariat Acton8, who we have already quoted (see becoming identified with the state, a process continued the decline of the revolution page 35) on the extremely dire economic which only intensified as the civil war made set in. We can see this in the reports of situation in Russia at the end of 1917, all opposition appear as potentially aiding contemporaries. In 1919 Arthur Ransome describes it as akin to the Black Death in the White enemy. But the whole thing posed still found life in the grassroots functioning Medieval Europe. The Bolsheviks might get a question for the Bolsheviks which they did of provincial soviets but returning in 1920 out of the war and they might redistribute not really resolve. Mary McAuley again poses he found that this had all but vanished.13 The the land but they could not magic up the the problem well. increasing bureaucratism and the decline 39 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation of real soviet life led to the setting up of the This was later to become the Rabkrin we have Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin) already criticised. which was supposed to involve ordinary workers to act as a check on the bureaucracy. This fact only confirms what we have been Its members were supposed to be elected arguing. There are no solutions to problems by other workers in the same way as soviet which don’t take into account the material delegates, and membership was supposed reality of the situation. Contrary to the myth to rotate to give as many proletarians, men of the Bolshevik monolith later maintained and women, as much experience as possible. by Stalinist and liberal commentators This was, in reality, a perfect recognition alike, the opposition to the decline of the of the decline of the hopes for the soviet revolution within the Bolshevik Party was democracy of 1917-18. As with all artificial stubborn and continuous throughout the solutions to a real problem it achieved Civil War period and even after it. There is nothing, except to give Stalin a further power hardly a Party Congress between the Eighth base from which to interfere in every aspect in 1918 and the death of Lenin, where an of soviet life. Despite criticism from all sides, opposition of one sort or another is not able Lenin still held out the prospect that it could to speak (even after the formal banning be reformed as late as 1922. By 1923, partially of factions at the Tenth Congress in 1921 because he had dimly seen the danger of they continued to exist). This opposition, Stalin, he was stating that it did not “enjoy a though, remained fairly weak. This is not Timofei Sapronov: leader of the vestige of authority” and had joined those, because of the enormous prestige of Lenin, ‘Democratic Centralists’ attempted to like Trotsky and Preobrazhensky, who were nor of the lack of talent of the opposition restore internal debate in the party. calling for its overthrow. leaders. Bukharin, Radek, Preobrazhensky, Sapronov, Lomov, Ossinsky, Piatakov, and indeed the other oppositions, could The Russian Communist Left Kollontai, Shlyapnikov and Smirnov were all not resist the tide of counterrevolution that involved, at one time or another, in trying was sweeping not just Russia but the entire Equally disastrous was the decline of the to hold back the tide of counterrevolution. world. Some of them (like Ossinsky) did way in which the party and state institutions Some of these, like the Left Communists however argue that it would be better to functioned internally. To some, even amongst of 1918, the Democratic Centralists, the separate party and state in order to preserve the communist left, the term “democratic Workers’ Truth group and the Communist the clarity of the communist programme. centralism” has today been discredited. This Workers’ Group were politically the indirect The Theses of the Left Communists in 1918 is only because it has become distorted ancestors of much of the thinking of today’s clearly understood that the party itself through the experience of the Communist communist left. In one definition these were could become the manager of the counter- Party of the Soviet Union (as it later became). distinguished by a characterisation of Social revolution and this to them would be the Democracy and the Second International worst outcome because that would mean Originally, meant a as capitalist organisations, the left wing of that the revolutionary programme would be dual process where policy was decided by the bourgeoisie, and therefore counter- lost. lf there is no revolutionary programme the party from the bottom up and then it revolutionary worldwide (i.e. not only in there is no revolutionary party and a whole became incumbent on all members to carry Russia). This was the basis of their opposition generation is lost to the revolution. This it out. The members still had the right to to the . This represents a prescience was actually too optimistic since criticise the policy internally but it remained rejection of the notion of “bourgeois the nightmare that today’s communists have the policy until a subsequent decision of workers” parties which Lenin and others saw to live with is the legacy of the degeneration the whole party rejected it. The long-drawn as the right-wing of the workers’ movement; of the revolution. out debates over the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk show that the principle • insistence on the Soviets and soviet Even before Stalin’s time, and despite all was still alive and well in 1918. At the Ninth democracy as the basis of the dictatorship the sound theoretical and organisational Party Congress in March 1920 an opposition of the proletariat; instincts of the Bolsheviks, the Party around Sapronov developed taking the title • opposition to and the gradually absorbed the state, the soviets “Democratic Centralists” (or Dekists for short) fusion of the party with the state apparatus; were reduced to rubber stamps and then, calling for an end to the growing adoption of • opposition to the notion of after the fact, came the rationalisation of the one-man management in all spheres of life. being a progressive and necessary stage in “dictatorship of the party” as the “dictatorship Sapronov stated that the supposed basis of the struggle for of the proletariat“. Even here there was a the party and soviet organs was democratic communism; gradual process of shifting the meaning of centralism but this had been replaced by • opposition to the right of nations to self- the phrase. When Lenin first defended the “vertical centralism”.14 determination and national liberation wars idea of the “dictatorship of the party” in 1919 as reactionary; he also said that the party’s ideas can only He pointed to the shower of complaints from • support for all the defensive and economic be carried out in reality by the new body, local bodies of encroaching interference struggles of the workers; the soviets, but by December 1920 (the very from the centre. But, to illustrate the • opposition to parliamentarism and month in which the civil war against the problems facing the Russian working class, participation in elections; Whites and Allied imperialism was won) he the opposition agreed to the unhappy • opposition to trades unionism in all its was stating, solution of a “control commission” where forms 15 ordinary workers could denounce party ...the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot members, however high up in the system. But, for all their clarity, the communist left, be exercised through an organisation 40 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

embracing the whole of that class, because Russian Revolution was primarily because in all capitalist countries(and not only over of the a priori attitudes of the Bolsheviks but here, in one of the most backward) the what we today suffer from is the fact that proletariat is still so divided, so degraded the vanguard did not remain a vanguard of and so corrupted … that an organisation the class. It merged with the state apparatus taking in the whole of the proletariat cannot of a single territory. It thus ceased to be directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It able to maintain a communist programme can be exercised only by a vanguard that for the international stage. This has to be has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the role of the communist vanguard of the class.16 the future. It has to be international and centralised and to stick to the task of holding This is mysticism not materialism. It has up the revolutionary programme on an more in common with the fascist myth that The tragic suppresiion of Kronstadt international stage. It is to this aspect of class the Fuehrer/Duce is the real expression of signalled the beginning of the counter- consciousness and political organisation the will of the nation than with the Marxist revolution in earnest. that we turn in our next chapter. materialist Lenin of l9l7-18. Nor was Lenin consistent in his declining years. At the The end of the civil war posed a new situation Notes Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922 he for the Bolsheviks but, as they were working seems to have realised that it had all gone out a response, the Kronstadt Commune 1 The course of how Lenin’s thinking on the terribly wrong. rose to demand a change of policy. Obsessed role of the Party degenerated as the revolution with the idea that Kronstadt would fall into declined can be found in condensed form in the …and if we take that huge bureaucratic White or Allied hands the RCP (B) did not documents in J. Daborn Russia: Revolution and machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask negotiate seriously and went in for military Counterrevolution 1917-24 (Cambridge University who is directing whom? I doubt very much repression. Bolsheviks in Kronstadt divided Press, 1991) pp. 80-2 whether it can be truthfully said that that and some fought their own party comrades. 2 The abandonment of the Red Guard militias for Communists are directing that heap. To Thousands went into exile and thousands the building of a Red Army wasone of the vital tell the truth they are not directing they are more were arrested and some were shot. steps in the construction of a new state. Lenin being directed. 17 theorised in The State and Revolution that the state The tragedy was compounded by the fact was built on two pillars – a standing army and a Those were virtually Lenin‘s last words on that within a few days the RCP (B) 10th bureaucracy. Despite this, with the formation of the condition of the revolution and naturally Party Congress adopted the New Economic the Red Army the Bolsheviks were abandoning they were brushed aside. Indeed, now Policy or NEP (which followed the lines of the the notion of the armed soviets (which as a semi- that the party dictatorship was accepted, Kronstadters’ main economic demands). The state would later “wither away”) for the first step it remained only for Lenin’s successors to introduction of NEP was basically a restoration in building a new state. The material situation of pronounce their own dictatorship. Zinoviev, of the capitalist market but it was a “success” an isolated RSFSR under attack from international at the Twelfth Party Congress, went on to if judged in terms of its effects. The fact that imperialism may have made this step necessary argue that not only was it a good thing to there were no more Kronstadts was not just but it only underlines how a revolution in one area have “the dictatorship of the party” but, in due to the increase of Cheka repression can only succeed ultimately if the rest of the world Lenin’s absence, went one stage further. but also to a decline of revolutionary proletariat is in a position to at least halt the plans activity throughout the working class. The of the other imperialist powers. We need a single strong, powerful central improved material conditions under NEP 3 E.H.Carr The Bolshevik Revolution Volume 1 p.194 committee which is leader of everything led workers to gradually abandon demands 4 Carr op. cit. p.220 …the central committee is the central for more revolutionary policies and 5 R.V. Daniels The Conscience of the Revolution committee because it the same central properly functioning soviets. Increasingly Simon and Schuster 1960 p.84 committee for the Soviets, and for the trades the state was able to mobilise the masses 6 Quote in W.H.Chamberlin The Russian Revolution union and for the cooperatives, and for the of workers behind its campaigns. This was Vol. II (Macmillan 1965 p.363 provincial executive committees, and for the anti-revolutionary trade-off.19 In return 7 See Chapters One and Two. the whole working class. In this consists its for improved living standards workers’ 8 “In the aftermath of October, the country suffered role of leadership, in this is expressed the revolutionary consciousness was gradually an economic collapse on the scale of a modern dictatorship of the party. 18 abandoned. The road to Stalinism gradually Black Death” in Rethinking the Russian Revolution opened up. All the oppositions’ attempts to (Arnold 1990) p.204 And by 1928, of course, the General reassert communist ideas foundered in the 9 From Mary McAuley Bread and Justice: State and Secretary would express the dictatorship of face of a working class which had faced 7 Society in Petrograd 1917-22 (Oxford 1991) p.280 the proletariat. The idea that communism years of imperialist war, disease and famine, 10 op. cit. p.240 was about the withering away of the state and which now wanted nothing more than 11 See his pamphlet Workers Councils (1940) had itself long since withered away. The a better standard of living. Revolutionary 12 See Six Weeks in Russia 1919 and The Crisis in Communist Left had issued a siren call to consciousness, as we have shown, is a fragile Russia 1920 both published in 1992 by Redwords. warn of the process but in the dangerous thing which can disappear as rapidly as it 13 In his Nineteen Seventeen (Freedom Press 1954). situation of 1918-21 they had been ignored. arrives. The fact that Russian workers had Volin should be credited with being the first to With no world revolution to reverse the sustained their “revolutionary dreams”20 for criticise the formation of Sovnarkom as a body situation, a purely Russian solution could not so long is a testimony to both their tenacity which replicated the Provisional Government and be socialist (and Lenin had never pretended and their class consciousness. stood above (and thus potentially outside) the that socialism had even been minimally Soviets. established in Russia). We reject the idea that the failure of the 14 Carr, op. cit. pp.223 41 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

15 I.R. Hebbes The Communist Left in Russia (originally an unpublished dissertation which the author gave to us before his untimely death). It has since been published by the International Communist Current in their book, The Russian Communist Left. 16 Quoted in Daborn op. cit. p.82 17 Lenin Collected Works (Moscow 1966) Vol. 33 18 Carr, op. cit. pp.236-7 19 See Simon Pirani’s The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1921-4 (Routledge 2009) 20 Title of a work by Richard Stites (Oxford 1989) which examines all the “utopian” experiments carried out in the period 1917- 28. Although well aware of the increasing authoritarian nature of the regime in 1920s Russia Stites makes clear that there was a greater degree of social freedom in the first ten years after 1917 than after Stalin came to the top denouncing any notions of equality as cretinous.

42 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

o far we have been arguing that for the class in its totality and endeavours, at every Sworking class, a class without a form bend in this road, to defend the interests 9 of property to develop, or defend, the only not of separate groups or trades, but of the permanent way it can unite is in the form working class as a whole. of an organisation with a programme that expresses its revolutionary consciousness. The Theses also went on to underline the Thus a political organisation like a party is significance of the role of the Communist The Idealism of Bordigism an inevitable product of a revolutionary Party in relation to the class-wide organs like working class. However significant this party the workers’ councils or soviets. becomes numerically, it will always remain a minority, since we hold to Marx’s view that The rise of the soviets as the historically- it is only in the process of revolution itself discovered basic form of the dictatorship that the majority of the class will have their of the proletariat does not in any way view of the world transformed. diminish the leading role of the Communist Party in the proletarian revolution. When The actual preparation for, and leading the German “Left” communists say [see of, the overthrow of the capitalist state their appeal to the German proletariat of worldwide, therefore, are tasks for which 14 April 1920 signed Communist Workers the class struggle creates an international Party of Germany (KAPD – ed.)] that “the party. However, as we saw earlier, the nature party too must adapt itself more and of that party and its relationship to the class more to the soviet idea and assume a was not clearly understood by most Social proletarian character” [Kommunistische Democrats. It was still an issue in both the Arbeiterzeitung No.54] this is a confused Communist International and in the debates expression of the idea that the Communist in the Italian Left trying to get to grips with Party should merge in the soviets, and that an unprecedented counter-revolution. It is to the soviets should replace the Communist this we now turn. Party. This idea is basically wrong and reactionary. The Communist International There was a period in the history of the The most revolutionary international political Russian revolution when the soviets were organisation created in the revolutionary opposed to the proletarian party and wave after the First World War was the supported the policy of the agents of the Communist International. The Communist bourgeoisie. The same was true of Germany. or Third International was set up in Moscow The same is possible in other countries too. in 1919. It had originally been planned to hold the founding Congress in Germany but In order that the soviets may be able to the premature revolt of the Spartakists and achieve their historical tasks, a strong their subsequent massacre led to that option Communist Party is essential, a party which being ruled out. does not simply “adapt” itself to the soviets but is able to ensure that soviets do not The life of the International really began with “adapt” themselves to the bourgeoisie and the Second Congress in 1920. The Theses to white-guard social democracy, a party on the Role of the Communist Party in the which through its fractions in the soviets is Proletarian Revolution reaffirmed the basic able to make them follow it. Marxist position on the relation of the Party Thesis 8 to the development of the class struggle (although the Darwinian reference to “the And how could it be otherwise, unless process of natural selection” might have we think that communist consciousness been omitted). is generated by anyone other than those parts of the working class which are 1. The Communist Party is a part of already fighting to change the system? the working class, namely, the most The Theses though remain silent on the advanced, most class-conscious, and precise relationship between the party and hence revolutionary part. By a process of the soviet and this would turn out to be natural selection, the Communist Party is a significant omission. What the Russian formed of the best, most class conscious, Revolution taught us, was that the building most devoted and far-sighted workers. of socialism, the actual changing of the The Communist Party has no interests mode of production, can only be achieved by other than the interests of the working the majority of the working class themselves, class as a whole. The Communist Party is through their class-wide organs (in the differentiated from the working class as a Russian case, the Soviets). If the soviets fail whole by the fact that it has a clear view to adopt and carry out communist measures of the entire historical path of the working then the revolutionary situation has passed. 43 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

There is no way that the party can take on suppression of the last exploiting class in The Italian Left this role itself. What the Party is not is a history. But this was written in 1917 and the government in waiting (in the sense that reality was that from 1918 on the proletarian If the error of those who today look for bourgeois parties are) nor does it take on the experience in Russia was already in retreat. inspiration to the councilist currents that pay role and functions of the state. And by 1920 the confusion between party homage to the German Left (see Chapter 6) and state was already undermining the is to deny the need for an any organisation When the Bolsheviks initially came to power idea that the international extension of which gives expression to our revolutionary they had some understanding of this. Lenin the revolution was the main task of the class consciousness, the error of those who constantly exhorted workers in the first few Communist Party. emerged from the Italian Left, whom we months after October 1917 to build socialism today call Bordigists, is to see the Party as themselves because “no-one can do it for Whilst its members can “inspire and lead the not only the instrument of revolutionary y o u ”. 1 The clearest sign that the counter- majority of the working class in the soviets” leadership but also as the organ of rule after revolution was on the march came when the the Party as a body is not an institution of any the revolution. Bolsheviks, faced with the need to create a existing territory conquered by the working standing army (the Red Army) to fight the class. Its task is to spread the international They arrive at this position by a very neat Whites and international imperialism in the revolution. In this sense it was tragic that piece of logic which is undialectical in that civil war of 1918-21 embarked on the path of the Comintern’s founding congress was it just happens to leave out the context in state building. not held in Germany as had originally which communism will have to be built. been planned. This would have underlined Whilst capitalist democracy depends for Accompanying this was the creation of a that the Communist International was an its functioning on the passivity of the vast bureaucracy which, in time, became instrument of world revolution and not workers, the future communist “semi-state” part of a new ruling class, with even (after an arm of the Russian state as it inevitably will be totally different from anything seen the Second World War) the right to pass on became once the revolutionary wave had previously. It can only succeed via the active hereditary privileges. After Kronstadt many retreated. involvement of the majority of the working Bolsheviks concluded that the Party was the class. Its only justification for existence is the state and began to theoretically justify Party As it was, the Communist International did continuing existence of hostile social classes. rule as in the best interests of the working become part of the apparatus of a new state Once these are no more, and a classless class. Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” and increasingly became an instrument society emerges, the state will wither away was interpreted as “dictatorship of the party”. of its foreign policy in the struggle with and the organs of political rule will become This was not fully understood at the time the imperialist states (into whose orbit the organs of rational economic decision-making and this partial understanding is reflected new state was forced to gradually operate). – the society of “freely associated producers” in the Theses on the Role of the Communist And this is precisely where the distinction foreseen in the Communist Manifesto. Party in the Proletarian Revolution. Whilst between party and state has to be made. Theses 9 and 11 are correct in seeing the If the soviets in any given proletarian However this is to anticipate our argument. need for the Communist Party to continue bastion need to create Red Armies, or other In the 1920s our ancestors in the Communist in existence until the final abolition of class institutions which are part of a new state, Party of Italy, a party founded by the Left society, Thesis 10 is more a description of the that is a temporary step backward that they under the leadership of the redoubtable existing state of affairs in the RSFSR rather might be forced to take. Even if its own figure of Amadeo Bordiga, shared a common than a theoretical analysis of the path to members are involved in the debates in those critique of the degeneration of the Third international proletarian emancipation. It soviets the Party, as a body, remains outside International. For them the adoption at ends that process. In Russia the civil war and the the Third Congress of the Comintern in decimation of the original revolutionary class 1921 of the slogan “To the masses” was not In the organisation of a new proletarian meant that, as we saw in previous chapters, necessarily an error since it depended on Red Army, in the real destruction of the party took on more and more state roles. what going to the masses meant. If it meant the bourgeois state apparatus and its uniting all workers in common struggles that replacement by the beginnings of a new Worse still, the identification of the Party was fine, but if it meant united fronts with proletarian State apparatus, in the fight with the state, and not with the international the leaders of the very Socialist Parties which against narrow craft tendencies among proletarian struggle, also undermined the had already refused to join the Communist groups of workers, in the struggle against prospects for defending communism on International, for the very good reason that local and regional “patriotism”, in clearing a global scale. The consequences of this they were against revolution, then that was the way for the creation of a new labour failure live with us today. And it was in the not only opportunism but even a dereliction discipline – in all these fields the Communist international sphere that the ancestors of of class duty. Party has the decisive word. By their own today’s Communist Left (and therefore of example the members must inspire and the Internationalist Communist Tendency) The Italian Left did not however split over this lead the majority of the working class. first emerged as a distinct tendency. There but continued to fight to keep the Comintern is a lot of confusion surrounding this both in on the path of international revolution. They Sure, the Communist Party members must theoretical and historical terms so we need persisted in seeing themselves as a section of inspire the rest of the working class but to look at this here. At the same time the an internationally centralised party. Indeed it the references to the “proletarian state debates in the internationalist communist could be argued that they took this principle apparatus” are already pointing in the wrong left also highlights the need to look at the to extremes since they accepted that as they direction. In The State and Revolution Lenin nature of the class party itself. were in a minority within the International in had understood that the working class fighting the united front policies adopted at would produce at most a “semi-state” which the Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922 then would lose its oppressive character with the it was logical for the Comintern leadership 44 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

consciousness of individual workers into the masses move towards revolution with the revolutionary class consciousness necessary maximum revolutionary efficiency. for overthrowing the capitalist order. In that Party and Class 1921 same revolutionary process, led by the party, ever greater layers of the proletariat would, It is correct to say that the daily class struggle in the course of a practical movement, raise does not produce communist understanding their consciousness to that of its advanced automatically in the whole class; it does not guard. The results of the great class battles even produce it automatically in any single of the Italian workers of 1919-20 confirmed proletarian. Even those proletarians, such as this analysis. Weitling and Dietzgen, who contributed to socialist thinking, did so by scientific study Whilst Gramsci was lauding the factory of working class history, and the restoration occupations of the Biennio Rosso (Red Two of its lessons to the class by political action. Years) as “soviets” Bordiga correctly pointed The conditions of proletarian existence out that these were more like factory enable only a minority to be receptive to committees rather than soviets or class wide such doctrines under capitalist exploitation. organs of workers’ rule. Bordiga also argued This leads to the formation of a party, and the against the idea that the factory committees transformation of the workers’ experience could manage production and make into consciousness and will. Amadeo Bordiga capitalism irrelevant without challenging the 1889-1970 capitalist political system. The class originates from an immediate (which was naturally dominated by the homogeneity of economic interests which Russian Party) to replace Bordiga and the We would not like the working masses to get appear as the primary motive force of the Left as the leaders of the Italian Party even the idea that all they need to do to take over tendency to destroy and go beyond the though there was an overwhelming majority the factories and get rid of the capitalists is present mode of production. But in order for both Bordiga and the positions of the Left set up councils… to assume this task, the class must have its in the Italian Party. Even the entry of Serrati’s own thought, its own critical method, its Socialist Party centrists into the party did not These futile and continual outbursts which own will bent on precise ends by research undermine the popularity of the Left and are daily exhausting the masses must be and criticism, and its own organisation Gramsci (chosen by the Comintern to lead merged together, organised into one great of struggle channelling and utilising with the PCd’Int when Bordiga was imprisoned comprehensive effort which aims directly a the utmost efficiency its collective efforts by the fascists) had to resort to methods the heart of the enemy bourgeoisie. andsacrifices. All this constitutes the Party. Stalin would have been proud of in 1926 Party and Class 1921 at the Lyons Congress to ensure that the This function can and must only be Comintern’s line was accepted.2 exercised by the communist party which, at The Errors of Bordigism the present moment, has not, and must not The Red Two Years 1919-20 have, any other task than that of directing There were however some distortions in its activity to making the working masses Bordiga’s view of class consciousness. In the It was the tradition of the Italian Left more conscious of the necessity for this years of counter-revolution during which Communists around Bordiga which political step. This is the only direct way they Bordiga avoided all contact with his comrades gave the most coherent support to the will gain possession of the factory, while in the Italian Left, these errors hardened into revolutionary ideas of Marx on class and class to proceed otherwise will be to struggle in political positions which eventually turned consciousness. At the time of the factory vain. out to be a step backwards. Bordiga was occupations in Turin in 1919-20 Bordiga had Bordiga in Il Soviet 22.2.1920, reprinted quite right to insist that one cannot speak of already argued against the Ordinovisti led by in Antonio Gramsci: Selected Political communist consciousness in the proletariat, Gramsci, that the economic struggle of the Writings 1910-20 ed. Quintin Hoare, p.235 or of the independence of the class until, class, even if it was for control of the means of production, was quite compatible with These turned out to be prophetic words we can recognise a social tendency, or a the bourgeois order, and did not generate its when the massive spontaneous struggles movement oriented towards a given end, own independent socialist consciousness. 3 of the class failed to challenge the state, then we can recognise the existence of a failed to generate socialist consciousness, class in the true sense of the word. But then Further Bordiga re-stated the Marxist axiom, and instead, trapped in the ideology of self- the party exists in a material if not yet in a that the dominant ideas are those of the management, were led to defeat. Bordiga formal way. ruling class, and that under conditions of now criticised the idea of consciousness Party and Class 1921 capitalist exploitation, a majority of the emerging from “forms” of economic struggle. proletariat can not become conscious But it is quite wrong to move from this point, communists. Only by forming a political A totally wrong interpretation of Marxist and to assert that if the class party does not party, of necessity grouping a minority of determinism and a limited conception of exist, then the class itself does not exist. Or, the class, could the proletariat begin to the part played by consciousness and will in as he put it, assert its ideological independence from the formation, under the original influence the ruling-class. The party, by distilling of economic factors, of the revolutionary One cannot even speak of a class unless a and restoring to the class its own historical forces, led a great many people to look for minority of this class tending to organise experience, and the lessons thereof, could a mechanical system of organisation which itself into a political party has come into bring about the transformation of sparks of by itself would be enough to make the existence. 45 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

From this it is but a logical short step Communist Party was founded by Onorato Once again we return to the essential to seeing the class in itself, struggling Damen, Luciano Stefanini (“Mauro”), and point of communist doctrine according to economically at the level of class identity, others, in clandestinity in 1943. which there is a great difference between as being simply a class for capital, and its “class instinct” and “class consciousness”. experience as worthless. In the conception of It soon attracted most of those members The first is born and develops within the Bordiga’s heirs, the International Communist of the Italian Left who had survived the workers struggles as a patrimony of the Party (I.C.P.), the programme becomes a set attacks of Stalinism, Nazism and , workers themselves; it comes from the of commandments, divorced from class either inside or outside Italy. Bordiga, who antagonism of material interests and is experience, or at best merely confirmed had said nothing political since 1927, at first nourished by the growing economic, social by it, rather than, as in the living Marxist did not support it. He initially counselled and political conditions brought about by conception, being enriched by it. his supporters to enter the Stalinist Italian this antagonism. The second consciousness Communist Party (PCI) of Togliatti but is born out of the scientific examination Marxist theory is one invariant bloc from eventually the success of the new party of class contradictions, it grows with its origins to its final victory. The only thing attracted his support. However his ideas the growth of knowledge of these it expects from history is to find itself more had by now fossilised and he soon began contradictions; it lives and is nourished by and more strictly applied, and consequently, to argue against the founding tenets of the the examination and elaboration of facts more and more deeply engraved with its PCInt. There were many issues over which coming from the historic experiences of the invariant features. he split the party in 1951 but the issue of the class ... Socialist consciousness is scientific Communist Progamme 2 p.7 nature and role of the Party was one of the reflection on the experiences of the class most significant. Whilst the “Bordigists” (as and on the problems it poses, developed Apart from sounding like a piece of Hegelian they are known henceforth) argued that by those who have the means to undertake teleology this insistence on “invariance” this reflection, and who identify themselves appears to ignore, not only the theoretical The proletarian state can only be animated politically with the class. advances and changes Marx made in his by a single party … the communist party (Prometeo, First Semester 1978) views in the course of his reflection on the will rule alone and will never give up power development of the class struggle, but also without a physical struggle… This discussion takes us back to the issues the contribution of the class’ action towards Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party posed in the first two chapters. The apparent the enriching of the communist programme. (from Battaglia Comunista 3, 4 contradiction between Marx’s ideas that For example, Marx’s position on the state, and 5, 1951 – translated in Communist “the dominant ideas are everywhere those from that of taking it over, to that of smashing Program (March 1976) p.49 of the ruling class” yet “the emancipation it, came directly from the experience of the of the working class must be the task of Paris Commune of 1871. It is quite true to say the Internationalist Communist Party argued the workers themselves” is resolved only that, though it was the Parisian workers who in their Political Platform of 1952 that, by recognising proletarian organisation is “stormed heaven” (Marx) in that year, it was two-fold. It first needs a political instrument Marx, on the basis of the experience of the There is no possibility of working class which unites and elaborates its collective, Commune, who developed the theory of the emancipation, nor of the construction of anti-capitalist, consciousness. This body proletarian dictatorship, and not the Paris a new social order, if this does not emerge transforms the abstract lessons of proletarian workers, either individually or collectively. from the class struggle... past experience into a concrete programme Nevertheless, it was the concrete class At no time and for no reason does the of class action. Second it needs class-wide experience which furnished the basis for the proletariat abandon its combative bodies which, when they take on the development of Marxist theory – in this case role. It does not delegate to others its communist programme, are the real means as in others. historical mission, and it does not give of transformation of society. power away to anyone, not even to its Party and Class political party. (p.5-6, our emphases). The very existence of these organisations is not a guarantee of proletarian victory However, the misformulations in Bordiga’s Bordigism seems ossified around the but without both of them (or other as yet positions, which later flourished as Theses of the Comintern in 1920 which undiscovered organisations like them) we caricatures in the various Bordigist were already, as we have seen affected by cannot even talk of a real possibility of International Communist Parties, have not the transformation of the Russian Party success. remained unchallenged in the tradition into a new ruling class. Indeed Bordigism’s of the Italian left. The recognition that it is “invariant” communist programme seems The Nature of a Class Party necessary for the working class to struggle to suffer from a selective kind of invariance. and create a class party which encapsulates The idea that the workers need a one party One other issue which arises naturally from its revolutionary class consciousness, has state is added to their dogma but the the Bordigist split from the PCInt is the nature always been defended by our comrades possibility that soviets offer in creating a of the class party. Most people who support of the Internationalist Communist Party semi-state which will wither away once the the idea of proletarian emancipation but who (PCInt.). They strongly argued that this party bourgeoisie are suppressed is a dangerous reject the idea of the Party also base their cannot be “the product of the last minute” novelty! However criticising Bordigist errors view on the negative experiences of the past. but has to exist to defend communist is relatively easy. It is more difficult to go on This is particularly true of the evolution of positions within the working class before any from this and elaborate a coherent Marxist the Bolshevik Party into the Stalinist monster revolutionary outbreak, however small and position on class consciousness. Since we it became in the 1930s. This evolution began unpopular its appeal under normal capitalist feel our comrades have done so, we can before the death of Lenin and, as we have conditions of exploitation. It was with this do no better than allow them to speak for seen, was intimately connected with the understanding that the Internationalist themselves. Party becoming the state itself. 46 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

once been a fighting force for revolution into the Bolshevik traditions, disagreements The banning of factions at the Tenth Party a new ruling class. Democratic centralism have been resolved in ways which cannot Congress of 1921 has enormous significance understood only as Stalinist centralism still be considered as a priori the best ones. in this respect because it also represented makes the term obnoxious to many people But neither does the solution lie in the the Bolshevik abandonment of one of its today. The key issue is not what you call it but systematic application of the principles of previous greatest strengths which was the the recognition that there not only has to be formal democracy, which for marxism have existence of a multiplicity of opinions within some mechanism for the party members no other function than as organisational it. It was the Bolsheviks’ lack of monolithism to decide on the policy and direction of practices which can be occasionally which was the source of their dynamism their own party. The toleration of factions, convenient. within the working class. The Bolsheviks’ and even tendencies, and a mechanism pre-revolutionary orientation to the working for ensuring internal democracy are basic The communist parties must achieve an class, and its almost isolated stance on to ensuring the vitality of a revolutionary organic centralism which, whilst including turning imperialist war into civil war, were organisation. maximum possible consultation with the the bedrocks for its transformation into real base, ensures a spontaneous elimination instrument of the class in 1917. Faced with its own struggle against the of any grouping which aims to differentiate degeneration of the Comintern the Italian itself. This cannot be achieved with, as Bolshevism did not spring from the pages of Left also gave some attention to this issue. Lenin put it, the formal and mechanical What is to be Done? but from its direct appeal As democratic centralism was being turned prescriptions of a hierarchy, but through to the rising level of class consciousness as into its opposite through the process of correct revolutionary politics. 5 the war progressed.4 The significant point “Bolshevisation” (i.e. Stalinism) they put from this episode is that the party, however forward the idea that something more was This search for a new organisational formula small (and the Bolsheviks had only 8,000 needed. In the Communist Left’s Theses to is entirely understandable given the members in February 1917) has to exist the Lyons Congress of the Communist Party of degeneration of both the Communist Party prior to a general revolutionary event. By Italy they wrote; of the Soviet Union and the Comintern. maintaining the revolutionary programme Thus the Italian Left came up with the idea (produced by the historic experience of Another aspect of the call for that something more than mere democratic the working class) within the working class “Bolshevisation” is that complete centralism was needed to give new (however unpopular this can appear in centralisation of discipline and the strict revolutionary life to the decaying bodies the short term), it can become the vehicle prohibition of fractions are considered of the October Revolution. Since Stalin had around which the working class can rally in the secure guarantee of the party’s stitched up the voting in the Russian Party its initial assault on capitalism. effectiveness. The final court of appeal for and in most other parties “democratic” all controversial questions is the central (which by this time was no longer any such Inside the Bolshevik Party the guiding international organ, within which at least thing) centralism just played into the hands principle was that of “democratic centralism”. political (if not hierarchical) hegemony, is of the executive bodies. The idea of “organic This meant that the Party leadership was attributed to the Russian Communist Party. centralism” was supposed to ensure that elected by its members and that key policy there would be more discussion and more issues were decided by Congresses of the Actually this guarantee is non-existent, debate inside the Comintern and its parties. entire membership. In the years before 1917 and the whole approach to the problem and right up until 1921 the Bolshevik Party is inadequate. In fact, rather than However, the real problem was a historical was characterised by sharp disagreements preventing the spread of fractions within one. The counter-revolution had brought and serious but lively debates at all levels. It the International, it has been encouraged the proletarian revolutionary wave of 1917- was this capacity for rank and file initiative to assume masked and hypocritical forms 21 to a halt and the forces of conservatism which helped to make Bolshevism such a instead. From a historical point of view, the had overtaken not only the capitalists but dynamic force within the working class. overcoming of fractions in the Russian party also a Comintern which had become the This rank and file activity was actually a wasn’t an expedient, nor a magical recipe, mere foreign office of the USSR. Needless to better guarantee of a healthy internal life applied on statutory grounds, but was both say the Theses of the Left were rejected by than democratic centralism since with the the result and the expression of a faithful the Gramscian leadership (who managed falling off of local initiative during the civil delineation of the problems of doctrine and to stitch up the vote by threatening to war the party began to degenerate. Under political action. remove the income of the professional Stalin the final touches to this degeneration revolutionaries who made up part of the meant distorting the party’s own history. Disciplinary sanctions are one of the delegations – see footnote 2). The Left Monolithism and “discipline” came to be elements that ensure against degeneration, were then expelled from the Party they had identified and praised as the sources of the but only on condition that their application founded. party’s success in 1917. This rewriting of the remains within the limits of exceptional real history of Bolshevism was central to the cases, and doesn’t become the norm and The idea of organic centralism was thus Stalinist myth of the omniscient Party (and virtually the ideal of the party’s functioning. buried for the next 25 years. It re-emerged in Great Leader). the post-war world only when the Bordigist The solution doesn’t reside in a useless current, formed inside the Internationalist The democratic element in “democratic increase in hierarchical , Communist Party (the real historic heir of the centralism” was first undermined by Stalin’s whose initial investiture is lacking both Italian Left), revived it as part of the process control over appointments of local party because of the incompleteness of the of their split from the PCInt. However this secretaries (who rigged elections), and historical experiences in Russia, impressive revival of “organic centralism” was in a more then by the system of patronage which though they are, and because even authoritarian direction than the original completed the transformation of what had within the Old Guard, the custodian of thesis. This came out in the exchange 47 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation between Onorato Damen (principal founder “Communist Programme” where the of the PCInt) and Bordiga. Damen argued that dynamics of democratic centralism work “organic centralism” as defined by Bordiga more deeply, as seen in the explosive cycle was a recipe for dictatorship within the party. of its internal contradictions. 6 In fact Bordiga had taken the concept a stage further than the Lyons Theses (which called He also argued that this mechanism is for voting or “formal democracy” when such essential within the party to ensure that things became necessary). Now Bordiga was its members are properly prepared for the arguing that the Party revolutionary struggle. This advocacy of democratic centralism has nothing to do pursues the aim of re-establishing an with Stalinism, which hid behind the term always wider contact with the exploited to maintain pure centralism with nothing masses, and it eliminates from its structure democratic about it. As the quotation above one of the starting errors of the Moscow shows, he argued that Bordiga’s contempt International, by getting rid of democratic for democracy within the party was not centralism and of any voting mechanism, only closer to Stalinism but had already as well as every last member eliminating had serious consequences for his followers Onorato Damen from his ideology any concession to after the original split in 1952. The Bordigist 1893-1979 democratoid, pacifist, autonomist or current has split several times in its history libertarian trends. [Our emphasis] (partly, as Damen maintains above, because constant dialogue between its members. This of the consequences of attempting to is just one of the many lessons we have to Damen does not totally reject the “organic” maintain an artificial organic centralism), take from the period of counter-revolution. aspect of centralism but restates the case each split claiming to be the one true The history of Bordigism demonstrates that although democratic centralism is not embodiment of the proletarian vanguard. that, tragically, it has “learned nothing and perfect it is the only healthy way in which Just as “there is no royal road to science”, as forgotten nothing” as Napoleon once said of the relationship between the membership Marx remarked in his introduction to Capital, the Bourbon Monarchy. of a world proletarian party and its so too there is no short cut to communism. elected leadership, “between freedom and Its establishment will only come once the Notes authority”, can be maintained. In other proletariat has fully digested and understood words, at some points when discussion the lessons of its previous struggles and 1 See our pamphlet 1917. A new history does not arrive at a consensus, issues defeats. In the meantime this leaves scope in of revolution and counter-revolution in inevitably have to be settled by votes of the its revolutionary vanguards for debate and Russia is currently in preparation but the old membership. Bordiga justified his rejection discussion on the road to our emancipation pamphlet can be found online at http://www. of democratic centralism on the grounds as a class. leftcom.org/en/articles/2007-11-01/1917 that it was only employed by the parties of 2 Local Party secretaries were paid by the the Third International because they were This is why it is not only important to agree Party. Gramsci informed them that they had “impure” but as Damen pointed out no such that discussion and debate within the to vote for the Comintern theses or lose “pure” communist parties will ever exist as party are needed; it also has to be actively their livelihoods. This is one reason why the even in the most advanced workers lurk all encouraged. Obviously this does not mean Italian Left has always considered a party kinds of capitalist hangovers which will only that there are no limits to discussion but of professional revolutionaries which takes be expunged under a different mode of at each stage in the historic struggle of the workers away from their comrades to be a production. working class the lessons of its past fight dangerous development and only relevant prepare a series of parameters in which in situations where clandestine activity Lenin’s International certainly had its such a debate can take place. Within these is necessary). See the introduction to our weaknesses, due to the immaturity of parameters (whether enshrined in a platform pamphlet Platform of the Committee of Intesa the historical period that followed the or programme) the maximum degree of 1925 for more details. collapse of the Second International and freedom has to be maintained in order that 3 For more on the real debate between the crisis then afflicting the capitalist a real fighting organ of the working class Bordiga and Gramsci see Antonio Gramsci: world. Every proletarian organisation can develop. Factions and tendencies (which Pre-Prison Writings in Internationalist reproduces, though in a more advanced will inevitably rise and fall in the course of Communist Review 13 (£3 from CWO way, and on an inversely proportional the struggle against capitalism) have not address) or see http://www.leftcom.org/en/ scale, the characteristics of the historical merely to be tolerated but given full rights of articles/2013-08-30/antonio-gramsci-pre- period in which it was formed. And it is debate. As Damen argued in the text already prison-writings-review-article certain that the negative aspects present quoted it is 4 For more on this see our pamphlet 1917 or in the Third International will be present, read A. Rabinowitch The Bolsheviks Come to although differently articulated in future In this constant dialectical relationship Power ( Books 1979) international organisations, as amply between the membership and leadership 5 These can be found at http://www. proved by the objective conditions in which of the party, in this necessary integration of marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1926/ the various Left Communist groupings, who freedom and authority, lies the solution to lyonstheses.htm. today claim the right to make a contribution the problem … 6 For the full argument see Damen’s to the reconstruction of the international Centralised Party, Yes Centralism over the proletarian party, are operating. Amongst A party has to have a centralised unity Party, No! at http://www.leftcom.org/en/ these groups, the one that suffers most in action to defeat the class enemy but a articles/2010-03-17/centralised-party-yes- from intolerance and crises is the Bordigist meaningful unity is not arrived at without centralism-over-the-party-no 48 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Introduction As we demonstrated in Chapters Seven and Eight, this was overwhelmingly due 10 n understanding of the nature of to the material situation of isolation of the Aworking class consciousness, the revolution. Counter-revolution did not manner in which it arises and the way in occur overnight but was a gradual process which that consciousness becomes a material which contemporaries were concerned By Way of Conclusion: force in history, is the most important issue about but they could not at the time foresee for defining the nature of revolutionary exactly how each expedient measure to Towards World Proletarian action. In this pamphlet we have tried to hold the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet relate the theoretical acquisitions gained Republic (RSFSR) together was actually Revolution by revolutionaries to the practical, material, one more nail in the coffin of international movement of the working class itself. proletarian revolution. In the RSFSR itself the so-called civil war, which lasted three Whilst the very existence of the working years following the signing of the Treaty of class and its struggles in the early nineteenth Brest-Litovsk, decimated the revolutionary century in Europe provided Marx and Engels class. The most class conscious workers with the raw material for the basic theory went into the Red Army, or the Party-cum- of how working class consciousness arises, state apparatus, and the abandonment of The German Ideology and the Communist the main cities by millions searching for Manifesto were only the beginning of the survival, took the heart out of Soviet power. definition of the question. “The word was The Soviets became empty shells by 1920. made flesh” by the subsequent actions of Many Russian Communists tried to get the working class in the Paris Commune, round this by insisting that the dictatorship in the mass strikes of 1905, and in the 1917 of the proletarian party was the same thing Russian Revolution itself. This is why it is as the dictatorship of the proletariat but such not good enough to quote what Marx and a position undermines the revolutionary Engels wrote in the past as though they core of Marxism. Such illusions were the were a set of commandments handed down building bricks on which Stalinism would be by some deity. Whilst the basic method constructed. and framework of Marx and Engels remain eminently defensible even today, the By way of conclusion to this pamphlet we problems which they raised have turned would like to link the proletarian position out to be infinitely more complex than on the question of consciousness (i.e. how the two great thinkers could possibly have the revolution can come about) to the anticipated. Although they had begun to consequences of the Russian Revolution and sense that the Social Democratic Parties that its aftermath in order to arrive at a workable claimed the title “Marxist” [see Chapter Four] and meaningful position for today. were increasingly anti-revolutionary, they could not have remotely foreseen the extent The Revolutionary Position to which Social Democracy, and the trades Re-Stated unions, would become a force for capitalist preservation. Let’s start with the problem posed by the decline of the revolution in Russia. Marx was And despite Engels insight in Anti-Duhring always clear that the communist revolution, that unlike all previous historical movements was the “self-conscious, independent movement the transformation, either into joint-stock of the immense majority” [see Chapter Three]. companies, or into state ownership, does At the same time Marx was also clear that not do away with the capitalistic nature of this movement could only constitute itself as the productive forces1, a class movement through a political party. For Marx this was axiomatic. The problem neither of them could have anticipated the of class consciousness for the working class extent to which capitalist states at the heart is that it has no property form to defend of the system would respond to the threat therefore, unlike the bourgeoisie, it’s class of working class struggle by mitigating consciousness cannot arise automatically the worst aspects of exploitation through from the extension of its form of property. state intervention. Nor could anyone have predicted that the first attempt by The economic struggle of the working the proletariat to launch an international class poses the question of the nature of revolution in 1917 would be isolated to a exploitation but does not of itself provide the single geographical entity and that the party answer to the question of how to end that created by the proletariat in that revolution exploitation. The fractured nature of the way would be the same force that would carry in which different groups and individuals out the counter-revolution. came to class consciousness at different 49 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation times means that only through the creation part of the working class and have roots and of some permanent political body can that connections throughout it which go beyond consciousness be consolidated and spread. the actual party membership. At a certain The political party of those workers who (early) point in the movement they assume understand the historical nature of the class organisational tasks which help to lead struggle – that it is more than just a struggle the working class as a whole from existing for a fair day’s wage but for an entirely new capitalist organisational structures towards way of life – is the only way in which the the revolutionary establishment of elected ruling ideas can be challenged. By putting class-wide bodies which begin to replace the together all “the sparks of consciousness” bourgeois state. It is within these class-wide produced by the daily struggle against bodies that the political debate and struggle capitalist exploitation the party can make the for communism has to take place. ideas of the proletariat “a material force” in the political fight to overthrow the capitalist Poland 1980 It is at this point that the movement assumes state. It cannot come spontaneously from The form without the content. Mass as- the character of a majority movement but it the daily struggle of the class alone. What semblies controlled the struggle but the may not yet be a fully communist movement was less clear in Marx’s time was what the movement ultimately came to be domi- As Marx explained, once workers are actually nature of this party was to be, as well as what nated by Catholic reaction. engaged in this new social and political its relationship to the mass of the class was. activity they begin to experience the the word “process”. world differently. The experience of Social Democracy [including that of the Bolsheviks] showed Revolutions (and indeed all great social Both for the production on a mass scale of that the proletarian party should be movements) always begin somewhere with a this communist consciousness and for the programmatically clear rather than limited cast. Gradually more and more people success of the cause itself, the alteration of numerically large in advance of the are drawn into this process as the movement human beings on a mass scale is necessary, revolution. Whilst German Social Democracy extends both geographically and politically. an alteration that can only take place in became the largest political party of its The first event of any revolution will be a practical movement, a revolution; this epoch it did this at a cost. Although Rosa some spontaneous development, which revolution is necessary therefore because Luxemburg and others had carried on a flows from an economic and social crisis of the ruling class cannot be overthrown in struggle against reformists and revisionists capitalism. It is likely that it may not even be any other way, but also because the class like Bernstein (because as a former protégé apparent to the participants that what they overthrowing it can only succeed in ridding of Engels he seemed more dangerous as are launching is a revolution. All they will itself of the muck of ages and become fitted an opponent of revolution), the German know is that they cannot go on living in the to found society anew. Social Democratic Party, and its trades old way. The unconscious comes before the “The German Ideology” unions, actually had much worse figures conscious. However whilst spontaneity can [quoted in Chapter 2] who were saturated with imperialist, racist launch a movement, the key to a successful and even downright pro-capitalist attitudes revolution is that the movement goes Parliamentarism Fragments [see Chapter Four]. The SPD Right were beyond mere anti-capitalism to acquire a Class Consciousness to be the final murderers of Luxemburg programmatic alternative goal. even if the so-called “Marxists” like Kautsky This is the most important passage for had helped prepare the way by failing to As we have argued throughout this pamphlet explaining how we can get from a situation carry out all the anti-war resolutions of the only those workers who have embraced of ideological domination by the ruling class Second International. Indeed it was the very an organised conscious alternative to to an entirely new view of society. It gives the “narrowness” of the Bolsheviks (and it is no capitalism are in a position to move the answer to all those who state that capitalist accident that their Bulgarian allies were revolt on towards a new society. It cannot values are “human nature”. Our nature called the Tesnyaki or Narrow Ones) which be otherwise. If there is no communist changes with our circumstances and our was to ensure that they maintained class programme for the new movement to seize actions – not with the preaching of socialists positions (and even this was not without it will eventually take on some or other or communists. sharp ideological differences. Kamenev, for capitalist banner (as in Poland in the 1980s example, thought that the overthrow of the when the alternative to fighting Stalinism This latter error can be found in the Tsar in March 1917 meant that the Bolsheviks was the Catholic Church as there was no real tendency of the World Socialist Movement, could now support the war!). communist party present, and there was the represented by the Socialist Party (formerly additional mystification that the system was the Socialist Party of Great Britain) in Britain. Asserting that the proletarian party should already seen to be “communist”). This organisation has existed since the early be programmatically clear rather than years of the last century, and has a clear numerically large on the eve of revolution However we are not arguing that the Marxist conception of the communist mode obviously requires some explanation. If the revolutionary minority should be numerically of production (correctly criticising the state proletarian revolution is the movement of insignificant when the revolutionary process capitalist distortions of the statists, which the “immense majority” how can it be led begins, since in any given territory there has include not only Stalinists and Maoists, but by a minority? The answer obviously has to to be a “critical mass” of communists who can also the Trotskyists). However they share be a bit schematic since in real life historical take part and influence a wider movement. the same view as the bourgeoisie that the processes never unfold as paradigmatically A class party however does not bring this October Revolution was a coup of a tiny as the attempts we make to understand programme down from a Mount Olympus or minority rather than part of a wider class them. Broadly speaking the key to it lies in a Mount Sinai. The members of the party are movement. Instead, they argue that socialism 50 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation can only come about if workers vote for it different circumstances and under different The first is that the proletarian party is via the rules of the bourgeois parliamentary conditions than the last one. However, not only internationalist in outlook but system. As we have demonstrated this is not the October Revolution was the only time internationally centralised in character only unmarxist, but is also utopian, and it when the working class anywhere actually [see “Towards the New International” in plays into the hands of capitalist ideologues. overthrew the existing political order. To Internationalist Communist 19 or at http:// simply state that his was a Bolshevik coup www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2000-10-01/ The Socialist Party has existed for over a is not only untrue italso deals a blow to the towards-the-new-international]. If the century and not achieved one parliamentary whole idea that the working class is capable workers have no country, neither does their seat. This lack of success at the democratic of making revolution succeed. party. With the collapse of the Second game is grist to the mill of the capitalist International any pretensions that there was class. Their record demonstrates that under The Bolsheviks themselves resisted any an international party before the First World the conditions of capitalist domination only voluntarist taking of power (as can be seen in War also vanished. Instead we were left with a handful of people, in capitalist elections, the July Days when they tried to head off an a series of national parties. will vote for anything other than immediate, armed demonstration by Kronstadt sailors and capitalist “solutions”. This should not who wanted to seize power straightaway). Thus when the Russian socialists (Bolsheviks) be surprising since, in the act of voting, The Bolsheviks only actively discussed the triumphed on the territory of the Tsarist workers are isolated from fellow workers in overthrow of the Provisional Government Empire, then that party became inextricably the polling booths, subject to the pressure once they had a majority in both the main bound up with the government of that area. of immediate daily problems and only two Soviets and in the Second All-Russian To be in a government in an area of brutal asked to choose between two or three “real” Congress of Soviets. The whole world international class war foisted on the Russian candidates of various capitalist persuasions. knew that the overthrow of the Provisional workers by international imperialism was It is no real choice. However every electoral Government (which had never been elected hardly the best circumstance for developing failure by the Socialist Party, or any other but was simply a committee of the old Tsarist socialist policies. Indeed, the opposite electoral formation of the left in any country, Duma) was going to take place and yet it process took place, as the war demanded a only gives the capitalist ruling class the lie passed off relatively peacefully because the restoration of a standing army (the Red Army for use in propaganda that no-one wants Bolsheviks had such overwhelming support. absorbed the proletarian militia, the Red socialism. Guards), the use of former Tsarist officials in Nor did the Bolsheviks think that they the bureaucracy and, as a response to the It is only under revolutionary conditions could establish socialism in Russia alone terror which the old order waged on the that this spell can be broken and a whole but expressly stated that the October proletariat from the first days of October, the new mindset adopted. Instead of passively Revolution was the first step in a organisation of a secret police (the Cheka). accepting the will of the bourgeois worldwide socialist revolution. This was not If all of the latter had still been directly parliamentary leaders we now become unreasonable (although the Socialist Party under the control of the soviets, this would active participants in the debates of the assert otherwise). The First World War had not have been so serious but, as we have day. Immediate recall of delegates allows us created an international wave of unrest already mentioned above, the war also tore to directly influence what is debated in the which was only equalled in extent by the the revolutionary heart out of the soviets. class-wide bodies. However, at this point in [largely bourgeois] . By By 1920 they were empty shells, as the any revolutionary movement, the question 1917, there had been riots in Italy, strikes Kronstadt Rebellion revealed in March 1921 of communism has only been posed, and in Germany and Britain and mutinies in [see Chapters Seven and Eight]. perhaps only implicitly at that. Now it needs the French and British armies. And, in fact, to be fought for in the debates in the class- revolution did break out in many European The Bolsheviks, as an isolated organisation wide bodies. cities within a year of the Russian October. in a hostile world, had no previous working The Bolshevik Revolution inspired these class experience to turn to. Having become And here again the most active fighters for revolts and, for some years after 1917 there the government, they ended up by this new society are by any logic those who was a real threat that the capitalist order constructing a state apparatus which was are already communist. Only by winning would be faced by a greater challenge. not based on soviets and which was anti- over a majority of the delegates in the main working class. On the way, despite internal class bodies does the revolution become the The Bolsheviks initially also extended soviet opposition from the likes of the Democratic movement of the immense majority. power throughout Russia after October, and, Centralists, the RCP (B) erroneously decided in its early days, the Executive Committee of that the party was the class and thus “the The Russian Revolution: the Soviets did act independently of the Party dictatorship of the proletariat” could be A Lesson not a Model on several occasions. These are some of the exercised through the party. They tried for positive points we take from that experience. a while to keep the party proletarian and The Socialist Party and others have always However the failure of the Russian Revolution communist by occasionally “purging” it of the thrown back at us the undeniable fact that (which must be seen ultimately as the failure careerists and opportunists who entered its the Russian Revolution failed and that any of the world revolution) to usher in a new era ranks for their personal advancement after attempt to use any part of the revolution of proletarian emancipation has given us a 1918 [it should be noted that this only meant as an example to be followed will only lead whole new set of experiences upon which expelling them from the party – not taking to the same state capitalist tyranny. This we must draw. Whilst the ultimate cause any form of punitive action against them. issue cannot be brushed aside and we have of the adoption of many polices which ran This was the meaning Stalin’s massacres later tried to address it in the last few parts of counter to socialism was the civil war and gave to the word] but the consequence of this pamphlet. Let us summarise here. The Allied intervention in Russia, we must also the party becoming the state was to render Russian October Revolution is not a model. emphasise some lessons from that period. such a move futile. The next revolutionary wave will take place in 51 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Only an international revolution could have has been so since 1943. This was repeated minority. reversed this course (as all the Bolsheviks in the 1952 Platform of the Internationalist originally accepted), but the adoption of Communist Party This stems from the degenerating Comintern “” signaled the end which one week would be calling the Social of even this faint hope. The Bolsheviks set There is no possibility of working class Democrats “social fascists”, whilst the next up a new and communist Third nternational emancipation, nor of the construction of they would be seeking united fronts with in 1919. Originally it was planned to be a new social order, if this does not emerge their leaders. Trotsky’s own aim to revive based in Germany, but the failure of the from the class struggle ...At no time and a kind of mass movement along the lines Spartakist Revolt in January 1919 meant for no reason does the proletariat abandon of the old Social Democracy of the Second that Moscow was the only place it could be its combative role. It does not delegate to International led to the entryism of its French based. This was another source of weakness others its historical mission, and it does not section and, ultimately, most of the Fourth for the international working class since the give power away to anyone, not even to its International. By hiding their revolutionary degeneration of the revolution inside the political party. programme the Trotskyists hoped to be part RSFSR meant the adoption of ever more (pp. 5-6). of a wider movement. All they did was to desperate opportunist policies to try to fail in the basic task of defending as openly safeguard the USSR (as the RSFSR became in Trotskyist Twists and Turns as possible the communist programme, at 1923). In the process it was transformed into the same time as giving the impression to an agent for safeguarding Russian national At such points in speculation about any the wider world that all “revolutionaries” are capital, an arm of the Russian state. future proletarian revolutionary process dishonest. there enters a whole raft of “what if?” The adoption of the “united front” with questions. Many of these are based on Nor can Trotskyists stand back and criticise social democracy was not a brilliant tactic the premise that a successful proletarian the Stalinist view that the Party (and to link the communists to the masses movement will once again be isolated to a not the class) is the vehicle of socialist but a transparent manoeuvre which only single area. The simple answer to all these transformation, since they not only shared discredited the International in the eyes is that, if a revolution is again isolated, it this view in the 1920s, but even gave rise to of workers. It ultimately strengthened a means that we are in for a further defeat. If some of its most absurd expressions. At one now openly capitalist Social Democratic the consciousness of the class is not there on point in their debates, Stalin even lectured movement. The more the Communist Party a sufficiently wide (i.e. global) scale, it cannot Trotsky, after the latter had said, “no-one can became the sole apparatus for running be manufactured. This is one of the cardinal be right against the Party”, that Lenin had the USSR the more it ceased to be the points which identify the Left Communist always acknowledged that the Party would vanguard of the international proletariat. It tradition. As our comrades in the Committee make mistakes! Trotsky’s assumption that a was the Italian Communist Left headed by of Intesa in their 1925 Platform stated mass party could be built in the 1930s led him Bordiga who, at the 6th Enlarged Executive to reject all the many other small communist Committee of the Comintern, openly asked It is a mistake to think that in every situation organisations which existed in opposition Stalin why the Comintern did not discuss expedients and tactical manoeuvres to Stalinism in the 1930s (including our developments inside the USSR. 2 can widen the Party base since relations own political ancestors). He did not accept between the party and the masses depend that, after a defeat of the magnitude of Bordiga was underlining a real problem. in large part on the objective situation. the 1920s, the road to rebuilding a class The party has to be a world party with op. cit. [CWO Pamphlet, 1995] p.18 movement would be a long one, nor that the a centralised international leadership in most important basis for a new proletarian advance of the next revolution. It is unlikely The same holds true for the process of organisation was a new programme which that the world revolution will be instantly revolution. Either the mass of the class is took into account both the negative and successful everywhere at the same time. The drawn more and more into the process so positive lessons of the Russian Revolution. Party’s role is not to rule over nor administer that the revolution keeps moving forward Too much bound up with the creation of any proletarian outpost but, because it is an to deny the imperialists the power base the state apparatus of the USSR in th Civil international body, its entire work is to do to regroup and destroy us, or we will find War, and early 1920s, this was a task he left with the extension of the revolution. Whilst ourselves isolated to this or that area once to others. Today, the same failure to actually party members will be in significant, if not again, and the capitalist order will survive defend a communist programme is still dominant, positions in any positive move once more (whilst plunging us into further to be seen in the Trotskyist movement, as towards communism in the “soviets” they misery and barbarism). the various groupings of this tendency hail are responsible to the workers who delegate every mass movement, however reformist or them (and they won’t accept delegation All this is in stark contrast to the Trotskyist reactionary, as a model of the united front. except for a clear communist mandate). The tradition. We have already produced a task of administering any area belongs only pamphlet explaining how a highly gifted The Communist Left to the class-wide organs. Party members revolutionary could ultimately bequeath us in any given territory obviously take part a tendency which has spawned more and The historical cul de sac of the Soviet in such work but the leading bodies of the more manipulative organisations which Union has left us a bitter legacy. It hangs party are international and do not identify actually take us back to the worst practices like a millstone around the neck of any with any state or semi-state. of nineteenth century Social Democracy.3 revolutionary trying to frame the question In brief, most of the errors of on of how society, and thus humanity, is to The world party of the proletariat is an class consciousness and organisation are escape the exploitation and degradation instrument of revolution, it is not equipped to based on the view that if class conscious of the capitalist system. There is an be an instrument of government. This is part activity is not there it can be manufactured understandable, but mistaken, tendency of the basic tenets of our organisation and on a voluntarist basis by a “revolutionary” on the part of those who want to see the 52 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation emancipation of the working class to throw At the present, talk of revolution seems to the Trotskyist tradition. As the latter have the revolutionary baby out with the party be far distant. Although the legacy of the abandoned the defence of the revolutionary bathwater. The way in which the Bolshevik counter-revolution that saved capitalism programme for spurious short-term Party first took upon itself the tasks which in the 1920s still dominates working class numerical gains, they are the equivalent can only be carried out by the entire class, conscious, there have been moments when of modern-day Bernsteins for whom “the and then became the godfather to a new it might have been punctured. At the end movement is everything and the goal regime of administrated state capitalism, has of the Second World War, a massive strike nothing”. As a result, they have brought made even the mere mention of the party wave in Northern Italy gave rise to our own discredit on the very notion of revolution a taboo for some. Many assume that those comrades organisation, the Internationalist inside the working class. who see that only a minority of workers will Communist Party (PCInt), which challenged become communist before the revolution all sides in the imperialist war. Other strikes Only the tradition of the “Communist Left”, are repeating the elitist mistakes of the in Britain and France at this time gave the tradition to which we adhere, has past. This may be understandable given the rise to some hope that new independent consistently attempted to come to terms depth of the defeat suffered after the Russian movements could develop. The PCInt with our past defeats as a class to provide Revolution, but to deny the fact that the class became an organisation of thousands, with the long term programmatic basis for the moving towards revolution will produce a newspapers in many towns across Italy. revolutionary revival of the working class. minority organisation robs us of one of the However, the beginning of the post-war tools which are necessary (but not sufficient) boom and the start of welfare measures in Currently, the fragmentation of the class is condition for its emancipation. the victor states soon brought this wave of reflected in the dispersal of revolutionary militancy to an end. energies. Some have been discouraged by It is time to go beyond the superficial and to the divisions amongst revolutionaries, but recognise that the only vehicle for regrouping It was to revive in the period 1968-74 when the road back to a revolutionary revival of and organising the revolutionary sparks of the same post war boom came to an end and the working class is a long one. This should consciousness produced under capitalist workers responded to the initial attempts of not be seen as a negative factor, but as part conditions is via some political body, i.e. a the capitalist class to make them pay for the of the process of the development of class world party of the proletariat. There is no crisis. For a time, this revitalised revolutionary consciousness. Along the way, important other possibility apart from the pious hopes politics within the working class, but by the debates have been, are, and will doubtlessly of those who insist that spontaneity can end of the 70s this was also coming to an end. continue to be necessary. Without sharp settle everything. Currently (2018), the crisis of capitalism has debate to clarify issues, the proletariat created a new period of rising revolutionary will never be in a position to have a solid History does not offer much comfort to awareness on a global level. However, this programme on which to fight the next big spontaneists. Whilst every revolutionary has not been on anything like the scale that onslaught on capitalism. movement begins with spontaneous acts some revolutionaries have expected. But these only pose the question of revolutionary then, consciousness is not a reflex reaction. At the same time, the tenuous links between transformation. The question is to what does As we have argued, it involves both material revolutionaries and the mass of the class the working class turn once it has embarked causes and reflection on those material have to be deepened and strengthened. on the revolutionary road. In the famous circumstances. After more than forty years of The political organisation has to adopt Red Two Years in Italy (1919-20) the massive capitalist stagnation, the capitalist class has means to maintain its contact with wider spontaneous struggles of the class failed globally succeeded, so far, in restructuring layers of workers who may not yet consider to challenge the state, failed to generate the workforce at the heart of the system, themselves revolutionary but do know socialist consciousness and instead, trapped whilst at the same time creating island that they want to fight capitalism. In the in the ideology of self-management, were led fortresses of high exploitation within the post-war boom, the strategy put forward to defeat. Unless there exists a material force periphery (like the so-called maquiladoras in by the Internationalist Communist Party which has a revolutionary programme based or Special Economic Zones in was that of factory groups which included on the lessons of working class experience, Asia). Such divisions within the class make members of the party and non-members the course of any spontaneous movement it more difficult for it to reconstitute itself in several workplaces (including FIAT). will always head back towards something as a global revolutionary antagonist to the However, with the decline of the huge safe for capitalism. capitalist system. factory concentrations of workers, these are no longer the only way for organising in the The Party, as the body of the most class But the class has been equally divided and class, as they are not always appropriate. conscious workers, helps to lead and consequently written off as a revolutionary Instead, “territorial groups” regrouping organise the seizure of political power class by so-called socialists before. From workers across workplaces or fighting on to establish a regime in which class-wide Bernstein in the 1890s to Cardan, Gorz other issues (e.g. war, housing and jobs) have organisations can begin the process of and Marcuse in the 1960s, there have been adopted. The key here is that the party revolutionary transformation. The members been no shortage of gravediggers of the must be more deeply rooted in the places of the party will be actively involved in this working class as the subject of revolution. where the mass of the class itself is present. (and in positions of leadership), but the party But the contradictions of capitalism and as a body can only remain a class vanguard the class struggles they engender have The party is not an entity which can be by remaining outside of any territorial always confounded their pessimism by formed at the last minute, and it is not organs, and instead acting as the centralised launching new, potentially revolutionary something that only turns up when a international motor of world revolution. The onslaughts. However, for both careerists struggle takes place. It has to be part of the Party is for making world revolution; it is not and opportunists, this wait is too long. life of the class. At the present, this is very a state machine, not even in the proletarian They either personally abandon communist embryonic, but as the crisis deepens, as semi-state. work entirely, or they join tendencies in more workers come to realise that capitalist 53 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation solutions to their problems are not solutions to actively cooperate where possible and, for them, then the possibility to work more ultimately, to unite as a real class movement widely will present itself to revolutionaries. develops. As we wrote in Internationalist Once workers begin to move, then the Communist 23 (2006), practical movement will tend to take on board that programme which most meets its The party-class relationship is not an real needs. However, this does not mean that academic question. On the contrary the revolutionaries wait around with folded arms clarity and fundamental agreement on until the great day. There will be no great day this fundamental of communist theory and unless those who are already communists practice is an indispensable precondition fight for that perspective as widely as for the process of coming together of all possible within the class. revolutionary forces – something which we passionately desire. The World Proletarian Party (or at least a large nucleus of it) has to be in existence in Notes advance of the outbreak of the revolutionary crisis. By its very nature, that party has to 1The full quote is; be international as well as internationalist. But the transformation, either into joint- It is “narrow” in the sense that its Platform stock companies, or into state ownership, and programme are based only on the does not do away with the capitalistic nature revolutionary lessons of the class struggle of the . In the joint-stock so far. Within that framework, all debate is companies this is obvious. And the modern possible and the party is organised along state, again, is only the organisation that democratic centralist lines (i.e. ultimately all bourgeois society takes on in order to issues are voted on by the members). support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against At the same time, the party will also allow the encroachments as well of the workers as for the existence of factions and tendencies of individual capitalists. which have the full right of debate and publication of minority opinion since there The modern state, no matter what its form, will be no linear road to revolution and is essentially a capitalist machine, the state there are still many issues which history of the capitalists, the ideal personification has not yet answered for us. The health of of the total national capital. The more it the organisation depends on debate and proceeds to the taking over of productive exchange of opinions. Ultimately, this is forces, the more does it actually become the also the only healthy way in which the party national capitalist, the more citizens does it can develop if it is to act as a centralised exploit. The workers remain wage-workers force when required to by the situation — proletarians. The capitalist relation is of the world revolution. Without a shared not done away with. It is rather brought to understanding of the general lines of march a head. But, brought to a head, it topples (even if there is not totality of agreement,) no over. State ownership of the productive meaningful policy will be carried out. forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical Such discussion and debate also prepares conditions that form the elements of that each individual party member to act solution. autonomously to act as a revolutionary Seehttp://www.marxists.org/archive/ should when required by the immediate marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm local situation. There is no mechanism for 2 See Bordiga’s Last Fight in the Communist ensuring this. It lies in the preparation and International in Internationalist Communist 14 consciousness of individual members, and 3 Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists [£2/€4/$4] this can only come about through a political from the CWO address. organisation which has an internal life based 4 For the ICT’s views on the emergence of the on education and discussion. World Party see Internationalist Communist 19 and 20 as well as our more recent Although we have adopted these principles in document The Future International. our statutes, the Internationalist Communist Tendency, as we have repeated many times, is not the party, since the conditions for it do not yet exist4. However, we have raised the banner of the Party so that those new forces who do come to a consciousness of the need to overthrow the system have something to rally around. In this process we also hope to engage with those forces which already exist 54 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

Our Pamphlets About Us

The Platform of the Internationalist Communist Tendency 70p (formerly the International Bureau for the The Communist Workers’ Organisation is part of the Internationalist Revolutionary Party) Communist Tendency which was inspired by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista). Formed during the Second World War in 1943, the PCInt. condemned both sides as imperialist. For Communism £3 Its roots go back to the Italian Communist Left which had fought the An Introduction to the Politics of the CWO degeneration of the Communist International and the Stalinisation imposed on all its member parties. Today there are ICT affiliates in Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation several countries. £3 We are internationalists. We believe that the interests of the exploited The issue of “consciousness” is one of the most important are the same all over the world, and that communism cannot be achieved in one country, a myth peddled by Stalinism. Stalinism was for the working class and for revolutionaries. Our approach never communism but a particular form of capitalism, state capitalism. is unashamedly historical and attempts to draw out the real After 1917 the economic blockade of the Soviet Union and the failure experience of the working class in its struggles of the last two of the world revolution in the West meant that the revolution was centuries. 56pp transformed into its opposite, eventually becoming an imperialist bloc that would collapse after only seventy years. We are opposed to all (Trotskyists, Maoists) claims that state capitalism in whatever form is Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists £3 socialism.

How Trotsky, who made such an enormous contribution We aim to be a political reference point for the working class, first of all for those who are tired of the unions, all unions. This does not mean to revolutionary practice, ended up giving his name to a giving up on the fight to defend immediate interests (wages, hours, work movement which returned to the counter-revolutionary rates, etc.). But the unions are now a tool to control the class struggle and errors of Social Democracy. manage the labour force on behalf of capital. Today, any ‘self-organised struggle’, has to go outside of and against the unions. However, rank Stalin and Stalinism £1 and file unions are a blunt instrument for workers. Even when they win a particular battle if they settle into a permanent existence they must The lie that the former USSR was “really existing socialism” accept the legal and economic framework imposed by the state. Any remains a potent weapon against the working class. This attempt to maintain a permanent body to defend workers’ immediate pamphlet not only examines the origins of the regime that economic interests will fail. emerged from the defeat of the October Revolution but also The only permanent body the working class can establish today is the explains the motivations of Stalinism. political organisation, which is not only possible but essential. The starting point for this must be recognising that the general interest of Holocaust and Hiroshima 50p the class lies in getting rid of capitalism. This is only possible through a revolution, i.e. the overthrow of the existing state and establishment of a new form of political power by the proletariat. The road to revolution Examines how the nature of imperialist warfare comes to does not mean the futile attempt to win control of the existing state via inflict mass murder on the world through an examination of elections to parliaments or local governments which are means for the these seminal events. capitalist class to exercise its rule. History has shown us that the forum of our “democracy”, the bodies of power of the revolution, will be the Capitalism and the Environment (by Mauro Stefanini) £1 workers’ councils, (or soviets) – mass meetings in which delegates will be entrusted with specific mandates and will be recallable at any time.

But these potentially revolutionary organisations will be undermined Translated from Prometeo these articles were written some by capitalist forces from within if they do not have a clear programme time ago but show that our late comrade was ahead of his aimed at the abolition of exploitation and, therefore, the elimination of time in analysing the unsustainability of capitalist production. classes, for a society of “freely associated producers” who work together to directly meet human needs. Spain 1934-39: From Working Class Struggle to Imperialist The programme is not the creation of any single theorist or one War £3 organisation. It is the outcome of the key lessons learned from past Reprint of key CWO articles long out of print and translations and present struggles and as such defines the practical way forward for the working class as a whole. Without a clear political compass the of contemporary documents from the Italian Left in exile. working class movement will be prey to all kinds of capitalist tricks and New introduction. illusions. Thus political clarification and reorganisation today are vital for a revolutionary party to come into being which is in a position to Platform of the Committee of Intesa 1925 (new edition) win over the working class to the revolutionary programme. This is not £3 a party of government that would replace the class and its class-wide organs of power, but a party of agitation and political guidance on the The start of the Italian Left’s fight against Stalinism as Fascism basis of that programme. increased its grip. We are for the party, but we are not that party or its only embryo. Our task is to participate in its construction, trying to link immediate South Africa’s New Turmoil £2 demands to the historical programme; communism.

An analysis of class relations in the period after the fall of Join us! Support the Internationalist Communist Tendency apartheid thrown into relief by the strike wave which followed the Marikana massacres.

55 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation

56 Aurora is the broadsheet of the ICT Bordiga Beyond the Myth by for the interventions amongst the Onorato Damen is now available working class. It is published and in English translation (it already distributed in several countries exists in Italian, French and and languages. So far it has been Spanish). It contains 168 pages distributed in UK, France, Italy, and includes 114 footnotes to Canada, USA, Colombia. guide English readers plus 4 appendices, one of which is the first full translation in English of Bordiga's famous letter to Karl Korsch. The price of £7.25 includes postage and packaging in the UK.

Journal of the Communist Workers’ Organisation -- Why not subscribe to get the articles whilst For Communism - an introduction they are still current and help the to the politics of the ICT. struggle for a society free from exploitation, war and misery?