Abstract
This paper looks not at
workers’ struggles, which had their ups and downs over the last two hundred years, but
specifically at the revolutionary socialist movement, which aims to eliminate capitalism.
While there have been contributions to the vision of a classless, stateless society by
utopian socialists and anarchists, the paper concentrates on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and
their legacy. It identifies three bifurcation points in this particular revolutionary socialist
tradition where a substantial part of the movement abandoned democracy,
internationalism, or both, and argues that this has had a disastrous effect on the movement and needs to
be reversed.
A useful roadmap with a few misleading directions
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels stated that:
The Communists do not form a
separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate
and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian
principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished
from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the
national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point
out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat,
independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of
development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has
to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the
movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are
on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the
working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all
others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the
proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the
conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.[1]
It is evident, therefore, that when they talk of
the “conquest of political power by the proletariat,” they mean the whole
proletariat, not any particular party. Their commitment to democracy is
affirmed when they say “the first step in the revolution by the working class
is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle
of democracy”; as Engels confirmed, “The Communist Manifesto had
already proclaimed the winning of universal suffrage, of democracy, as one of
the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat.”[2]
Their commitment to internationalism (“the common interests of the entire
proletariat, independently of all nationality”) is also evident. What was meant
by these two values can be gleaned from accounts of the International Working
Men’s Association (IWMA, also called the First International), established in
1864, in which Marx and Engels were active participants. Its 1867 rules
reiterated that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by
the working classes themselves.” As an association of workers’ unions and
proto-unions, it stood for freedom of association, expression and peaceful
assembly, all of which are necessary for successful workers’ struggles. It also
worked for manhood suffrage and called for the abolition of war, in which workers
of different countries killed each other in the interests of their
bourgeoisies, and support for the Irish struggle for independence from England,
the Polish struggle for independence from Russia, and the 1865 Black uprising
in Jamaica.[3]
Clear principles to guide the movement, although
the implementation of some of them (like women’s equality, an element of
democracy) was less than perfect. But this roadmap also included a couple of
misleading directions. What were they thinking when they wrote “Let the ruling
classes tremble at a Communistic revolution”[4] at
a time when the proletariat was a small minority in Europe and an even more
minuscule minority worldwide? In 1850, Marx proposed that when the petty
bourgeoisie in alliance with the peasantry (the majority) attempted to end the
revolution by installing “a democratic form of government,” it was the task of
the armed workers “to make the revolution permanent” until the propertied
classes in all the leading countries of the world were “driven from their
ruling positions.”[5]
In 1859, he suggested that when “From forms of development of the productive
forces the relations [of production] turn into their fetters. Then begins an
era of social revolution”[6]:
somewhat more realistic, but still without any hint of how the revolution would
take place in the colonies or, indeed, whether they would be part of it at all.
The impression that the
revolution is imminent is strengthened by Marx’s references to the “dictatorship
of the proletariat.” Even if we concede that “dictatorship” at that time didn’t
have the authoritarian connotations it has now and simply meant “rule,” Sartre
has dismissed as “absurd” the idea that a whole class, with all its internal
divisions between active groups and passive serialities, can wield state
power,[7] although working people
are certainly capable of self-government, to use the helpful distinction
suggested by Engels.[8]
Both Marx and Engels suggested that the Paris Commune was an example of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. As
a government, the Paris Commune was a wonderful experiment, which we can even
see as prefiguring the administration of a classless socialist society. But as
a state, it was a failure: the “armed people,” as Marx called them, were no
match for the standing army of their enemies. The Commune was crushed, the
Communards slaughtered.
In
any case, what did it even mean? In his “Critique
of the Gotha Programme”, Marx says that “Between capitalist and
communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the
other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere
and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat;” but a few sentences on he says
that “vulgar democrats, who see the millennium in the democratic republic… have
no inkling that it is precisely in this final state form of bourgeois society
that the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion.”[9] So
on the one hand the transition to socialism takes place under the revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat, while on the other the class struggle is
fought out to a conclusion (socialism) in the (bourgeois) democratic republic.
Trying to make sense of this fifteen years later, Engels comes to the logical
conclusion that “The working class can only come to power under the form of a
democratic republic. This is… the specific form for the dictatorship of the
proletariat”;[10] in which case, it makes
sense to see the democratic republic as the ground on which the battle to
abolish the bourgeois state as well as capitalist production relations must be
fought.
Marx
cannot be blamed for the fact that so many of his followers have treated every
tentative remark he made as the last word on the subject. But it would have
saved innumerable grievous setbacks to revolutionary socialism if it had been
made clear that the transition to a worldwide socialist society would take
centuries, and that establishing and defending democratic republics was a
necessary condition for such a transition. Even today, those lessons need to be
reiterated.
Internationalism
betrayed: the first bifurcation
The
Communist Manifesto states, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but
their chains”,[11] but thanks to successful
organizing and struggle by trade unions and Social-Democratic parties of the
Second International, workers in Europe had a great deal more to lose than
their chains by the early 20th century. The fact that these gains
were rooted in the nation-state resulted in the growth of nationalism,
especially among the leaders of these parties, leading to identification with
and support for the imperialist aims of their own bourgeoisies in World War I.
This catastrophic abandonment of internationalism led to a definitive split
between the nationalist-imperialist parties and revolutionary socialists who
continued to uphold the value of internationalism.
It
is worth inquiring how this could have happened, because it entailed a shift
far more serious than a simple craving for the high standard of living which
the “labour aristocracy” could expect in an imperialist state. Reinhart Kössler observes that in the early 20th
century, the German state made no attempt to conceal its genocidal policies in
German South West Africa (now Namibia) but in fact advertised them with pride,
and Social-Democratic leader August Bebel, who died in August 1913, strongly
condemned the slaughter of the indigenous people as barbaric and bestial.[12]
How is it possible that anyone who identified themselves as “socialist” could
support a state that was guilty of such horrific racist oppression? Other
European imperialist states committed similar atrocities in their colonies.
V.I.
Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg were among those who split away from the Second
International, seeing its support for the bourgeoisies of the imperialist
countries as a betrayal. Lenin goes beyond Marx and Engels in arguing that
socialists in imperialist countries must support struggles for national
liberation in their own colonies, seeing this as part of the struggle for
democracy:
The socialist
revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but
a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all
fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which
can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a
fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the
proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc.
On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces
complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory
over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary
struggle for democracy.
It would be no less mistaken to
delete any of the points of the democratic programme, for example, the point of
self-determination of nations, on the ground that it is “infeasible,” or that
it is “illusory” under imperialism…
The
domination of finance capital, as of capital in general, cannot be abolished by
any kind of reforms in the realm of political democracy, and self-determination
belongs wholly and exclusively to this realm. The domination of finance
capital, however, does not in the least destroy the significance of political
democracy as the freer, wider and more distinct form of class oppression and
class struggle…
Russian Socialists who fail to demand freedom of
secession for Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, etc., etc. – are behaving like
chauvinists, like lackeys of the blood-and-mud-stained imperialist monarchies
and the imperialist bourgeoisie.[13]
The second bifurcation:
democracy undermined
Lenin’s uncompromising
championship of internationalism helped to preserve the revolutionary
tradition, but his assaults on democracy, assisted by Leon Trotsky, completely
abandoned the principles he had proclaimed in 1916. There are plenty of
examples, but I will cite just three. One is the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly when it became clear that although it was overwhelmingly socialist,
the Bolsheviks were a minority of about 25 percent. Many Bolsheviks opposed the
hostility of their party leaders to the Assembly. Prior to the election, five
members of the Bolshevik Central Committee resigned in protest against plans to
cancel it, saying in a statement that “We cannot assume responsibility for this
ruinous policy of the Central Committee, carried out against the will of a
large part of the proletariat and soldiers.” Five Bolsheviks resigned their
commissariats, stating, “There is only one path: the preservation of a purely
Bolshevik government by means of political terror. We cannot and will not accept
this.”[14] Thanks to these protests,
the election was allowed to go through, but before the Constituent Assembly
opened on 18 January 1918, a peaceful demonstration in support of it was
dispersed by firing, and the following day, Lenin announced that the Constituent
Assembly had been dissolved. Socialist writer Maxim Gorky was appalled:
For
a hundred years the best people of Russia lived with the hope of a Constituent
Assembly. In the struggle for this idea thousands of the intelligentsia
perished and tens of thousands of workers and peasants.
On
5th [18th] January, the unarmed revolutionary democracy of
Petersburg – workers, officials – were peacefully demonstrating in favour of
the Constituent Assembly. Pravda lies when it writes that the
demonstration was organized by the bourgeoisie and by the bankers. Pravda
lies; it knows that the bourgeoisie has nothing to rejoice in the opening of
the Constituent Assembly, for they are of no consequence among the 246
socialists and 140 Bolsheviks. Pravda knows that the workers of the
Obukhavo, Patronnyi and other factories were taking part in the demonstrations.
And these workers were fired upon. And Pravda may lie as much as it
wants, but it cannot hide the shameful facts.[15]
The second example is the crushing of the
Kronstadt uprising. The demands of the
Kronstadt rebels were clearly
democratic, including new elections to the soviets by secret ballot with
freedom to campaign among workers and peasants; freedom of speech and press for
workers, peasants, anarchists, and left socialists; and freedom of assembly for
labour unions and peasant organizations. Yet their rebellion was crushed by the
Red Army in a bloody battle, after which thousands of prisoners were shot or
sent to forced labour camps. The slaughter of comrades who were guilty only of
adhering to the original aims of the revolution disgusted Emma Goldman so much
that she decided she would have nothing to do with the Bolsheviks in future.[16]
The third example is Lenin’s and Trotsky’s
merciless disparagement of trade union leaders Mikhail Tomsky and Alexander
Shlyapnikov for their attempts to prevent unions from being subordinated to the
one-party state. Shlyapnikov wanted unions to take charge of economic planning
and production, while Tomsky had the less ambitious aim of ensuring a degree of
workers’ control over management that would ensure health, safety, and decent
working conditions. Trotsky, especially, was egregiously insulting to them, insisting
that trade unions should abandon fighting for better conditions for workers and
focus exclusively on raising productivity.[17]
This is clearly a second bifurcation
point, where things could have been different if the Bolshevik leaders had
safeguarded democracy instead of forcibly suppressing dissidents. But it is not
a simple bifurcation. Luxemburg was very critical of these actions, and
consistently spoke up for democracy. Yet on the issue of what was to happen to
the Tsarist colonies, she vociferously opposed granting them the right to
national liberation (a democratic right), whereas Lenin, having started out
with a position very similar to hers, was persuaded by Marxists from those
colonies that they should have a right to independence from Russia if
that is what they wanted.[18] Shlyapnikov participated
in shutting down the Constituent Assembly[19], and Tomsky, packed off
to Tashkent as a disciplinary measure, was more sympathetic to ethnic Russian
settler-colonists than to indigenous Muslims evicted from their land.[20] All of them, in their
different ways, fell short of a whole-hearted defence of democracy.
The third bifurcation: Stalin’s
counter-revolution
The undermining of democracy under Lenin
and Trotsky created the conditions for Stalin’s counter-revolution, but it
would be a mistake to see this as simple continuity rather than a qualitative
break. While Lenin was alive, the situation was still fluid, it was possible to
fight against authoritarianism and sometimes even to win. Tomsky and
Shlyapnikov might have been derided and subjected to disciplinary procedures,
yet they could also be reinstated in positions from which they could continue
to fight for workers’ rights. Among the anti-colonial influences on Lenin was
Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, the pioneering Bolshevik theorist of imperialism,
national liberation and socialism, who saw national liberation and the
modernization and democratization of Western and Tsarist colonies as necessary
steps in the socialist revolution.[21] Above all, Lenin himself
began to understand that far from accelerating the transition to socialism, his
insistence on a minority Bolshevik government bolstered by the persecution of
dissidents and use of the police against them had allowed the most authoritarian,
backward elements in the party to take control of it as well as the state
apparatus; but he died before he could fully analyze what had happened and
reverse this trend.[22] In his book From Lenin
to Stalin, Victor Serge – who was by no means an uncritical acolyte of
Lenin or Trotsky – writes, ‘Everything has changed, everything is changing.’[23]
From the February Revolution in 1917 to
the aftermath of Lenin’s death in 1924, the struggle for democracy was never
coherent, nor seen as a priority by the majority of Russian socialists. People
who opposed one authoritarian measure would often support another. And hovering
in the background was submissiveness to “the party” as well as the idea that
defending what were seen as “bourgeois” democratic rights, freedoms and
institutions was unnecessary – even reactionary – at a time when what they
believed was a socialist revolution was in progress. It is possible to envisage
a different outcome if there had been a united force mounting a principled
defence of democracy.
The lack of such a force helped Stalin to
consolidate his own repressive state apparatus and use it to devastating effect
as the opposition floundered. In December 1928, the Politbureau appointed five
Stalin supporters to the trade union presidium, and when trade union delegates
objected, threatened them with arrest. Realising he had lost control, Tomsky
resigned from his post. A campaign of vilification against him intensified
while hard-liner Kaganovich oversaw a massive purge of trade union bodies from
top to bottom. Wages dropped by half, and working conditions plummeted. In
August 1936, learning that he was going to be arrested, Tomsky committed
suicide to avoid being coerced into implicating himself and others in
fictitious crimes at a show trial.[24] Shlyapnikov was purged
from the party in 1933 and executed in September 1937.[25] Not just in Russia but
throughout the Soviet Union, workers lost the right to form or join a union of
their choice and elect their own trade union leaders.
In May 1923, while Lenin was incapacitated
by a stroke, Stalin arrested and expelled Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid
Sultan-Galiev, and from 9 to 12 June subjected him to a show-trial – the first
show-trial of a Bolshevik – based on fabricated evidence. Other Muslim
delegates were too afraid of being arrested or shot to defend him. But
Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky were still in a position to speak up for him, yet
failed to do so; Sultan-Galiev was forced to recant in order to stay alive,
creating a precedent for other socialists to be treated the same way in the
Great Purges.[26]
He was rearrested in 1928 and sentenced to ten years of hard labour, sentenced
to death in 1939, and shot in 1940. Equally important in this case was Stalin’s
drive to reverse Lenin’s progressive policies in the former colonies of Tsarist
Russia, stripping them of equality and autonomy and Russifying them ruthlessly.[27] Raphael Lemkin, the
Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide,” argued that in some cases,
including Ukraine and Muslim-majority republics like Crimea, this treatment
amounted to genocide.[28]
The final blow was Stalin’s doctrine of
“socialism in one country,” first put forward in December 1924.[29] Defining an increasingly
brutal totalitarian, imperialist state as “socialist” and “communist” made
these terms appear to be the opposite of democracy, something that had not
happened under Lenin. The corollary of this argument – that henceforth the primary
task of communists around the world was to defend Russia and carry out the
commands of its “communist” state – redefined internationalism as Russian
nationalism. In a perceptive essay, George Orwell says that among other things,
“nationalism” in the rather unorthodox sense in which he uses the term means “the
habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it
beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its
interests.” He continues that in Britain, “Among the intelligentsia, it hardly
needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism – using this
word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members but
‘fellow-travellers’ and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose
here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his
duty to justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs.”[30]
In other words, “Communism” here means
Russian nationalism. While “Communists” who advanced Russian interests at all
costs declined in number and the Sino-Soviet split complicated allegiances, sympathy
for Russia still infects an astonishing range of people around the world. That
a substantial portion of the self-professed left can echo the propaganda of
Putin, who openly expresses nostalgia for Tsarism and a desire to reverse the
Russian revolution, shows how pervasive this hangover from Stalinism remains today.
What made “socialism in one country” so
persuasive was the prevailing confusion about the character of the Russian
revolution, shared by most of those who opposed Stalin. In his panoramic survey
of Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, Marcel van der Linden presents
a plethora of theories and observations. Most participants in the debate agree
that pre-revolutionary Russia had a nascent or backward capitalist economy and
absolute monarchist state, but disagree about what came after Stalin rose to
power. Of the three possibilities discussed – state capitalism, a degenerated
workers’ state and bureaucratic collectivism or some other hitherto-unknown
mode of production – arguments for the first are strongest.
In 1917, capitalists were dispossessed and
workers’ councils formed, but the workers couldn’t run production as a whole. A
minority in society, further decimated by the war, and without much experience
of democratic discussion and debate due to the repressive tsarist state, how
could they? The state had to step in and take over, with a degree of
centralisation that varied over time. In 1932, Friedrich Adler suggested a form
of state capitalism had developed to carry out primitive accumulation, and this
accounted for the subordination of workers and imposition of sacrifices on
them.[31] Indeed, the dispossession
of the peasantry and their conversion into wage-labourers – achieved in the
Soviet Union by collectivisation – was also a characteristic of primitive
accumulation. None of the Western Marxists mentioned the imperialist character
of Soviet Russia prior to World War II, but this was emphasised by Mirsaid
Sultan-Galiev, whose writings in many ways recalled Marx’s descriptions of
Western capitalism’s depredations in Asia, Africa and the Americas during its
period of primitive accumulation.[32]
In the 1940s, Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R.
James characterised Russia as state capitalist on the grounds that production
relations were essentially capitalist, since workers were exploited by having
surplus value extracted from them and accumulated through the expansion of
production without improving their standard of living.[33] They quoted Marx – who had stated that if the capital of a whole
country was centralised in the hands of a single capitalist or corporation it
would not cease to be capital[34] – to argue that capital
was still capital if centralised in the hands of the state. In 1948 Tony Cliff,
a Palestinian Trotskyist originally called Ygael Gluckstein, began arguing that
Stalinist Russia was state capitalist, and dealt with the objection that there
was no competition either within Russia or on the world market with the
argument that international competition took place in the production of
armaments.[35]
However, the most powerful argument that
what existed in Russia was state capitalism comes from Lenin. In 1918 he argued
for progress to state capitalism in his polemic against the Left Communists:
Yesterday,
the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalise,
confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today,
only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated,
beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The
difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation
can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate
and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about
without this ability…
[S]tate
capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state
of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state
capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success
and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a
permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in our country…
No
one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has
denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that
the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to
achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is
recognised as a socialist order…
At
present, petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and
the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state
capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary
station called “national accounting and control of production and
distribution”.[36]
Lenin clearly detaches the
capitalist economy from “Soviet power,” which is attempting to bring about a
transition to socialism, stating that the economy never ceased to be
capitalist, and the only guarantee that it would move towards socialism
lies in the character of the state, which at this point he seems confident is
working-class. However, by December 1922 he admits that “the [state] apparatus
we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and
tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in
the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and
because we have been ‘busy’ most of the time with military engagements and the
fight against famine.”[37]
The elephant in the room throughout most
of this debate is the issue of substitutionism. If a dictatorship is exercised
by a party substituting itself for the proletariat, what is there to
prevent it from becoming a dictatorship over the proletariat? The
Bolsheviks were certainly supported by a section of the working class in 1917,
but only a minority, which constituted an even smaller minority of working
people in the country. In 1919, the Menshevik internationalist Julius Martov described
the paradoxical way in which the Bolsheviks, instead of seeking the atrophy of
the repressive functions of the bourgeois state, now sought the hypertrophy and
resurrection of state institutions typical of the bourgeois era:
The
shrewd people continue to repudiate democratic parliamentarism. But they no
longer repudiate, at the same time, those instruments of State power to
which parliamentarism is a counterweight within bourgeois society: bureaucracy,
police, a permanent army with commanding cadres that are independent of the soldiers,
courts that are above control by the community, etc. In contrast to the
bourgeois State, the State of the transitional revolutionary period ought to be
an apparatus for the “repression of the minority by the majority.” Theoretically,
it should be a governmental apparatus resting in the hands of the majority. In
reality, the Soviet State continues to be, as the State of the past, a
government apparatus resting in the hands of a minority.[38]
This model of revolution diverges sharply
from the model envisaged in Engels’ interpretation of Marx: “The working class can only come to power under
the form of a democratic republic.”[39] Lenin
never lost his affection for Martov and admiration for his clarity and
integrity; one of his last wishes (never fulfilled) was that Stalin, the party
secretary, should forward funds to Martov, who was dying of tuberculosis in
Berlin, so that he could get better medical care.[40] His own last writings
indicate a growing recognition that Martov might have been right in his
criticisms of repressive Bolshevik rule.
Implications for the twenty-first century
Revolutions
claiming to abolish capitalism are almost unheard-of in recent decades, but if
we shift our attention to struggles for democracy, then the 21st
century has seen many. Contrary to dire predictions about declining unionism
and the end of strikes, there have been numerous unionization drives as well as
strikes. There have been democracy uprisings against authoritarian states in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria and Sri Lanka,
multiple uprisings against the militarised theocracy in Iran including the
amazing one led by women and girls, the farmers’ uprising in India, and
resistance by Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians to Putin’s genocidal war on
Ukraine. Working people exploited by capital – a broader category than the
“proletariat” as defined by Marx and Engels – participated in all of them, and
they can be seen as “the first step in the revolution by the
working class.” Of course, these
uprisings have encountered murderous violence from the state and far right, but
that also highlights my other point: the urgent need for socialist
internationalist solidarity with all struggles for democracy, everywhere in the
world.
Is the notion of “bifurcations”
theoretically justified?
The assumption underlying the notion of
“bifurcations” is that events in a particular conjuncture could have taken a
different direction. This opens it up to the charge of being a counterfactual
account of history: “This is how it happened, but this is how it could
have happened.” How do we know? Obviously, we can’t. On the other hand, to say
“This is how it happened and this is how it had to happen” is a
deterministic view, depriving the human beings involved in the situation of the
agency to act in any other way.
Marx tackled this problem in “The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” when he said that “Men make their own
history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under
self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given
and transmitted from the past.”[41] In 1917, Lenin and the
Bolsheviks could do nothing about the fact that Russia had a backward
capitalist economy, an absolutist state, and a working class which had never
enjoyed democratic rights; these were “circumstances existing already, given
and transmitted from the past.” However, the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly and firing on unarmed “workers and employees” who came out with “red
banners” to support it was not a circumstance inherited from the past but an
instance of a violent and repressive history being made.[42] The Bolshevik Party was
not a monolithic machine – as we have seen, there were plenty of disagreements
within it – and it would have been possible for it to participate in the
Constituent Assembly. We cannot know exactly what would have happened if they
did, only that a violent and repressive incident would have been avoided and
democracy would have been upheld.
We cannot change what happened in
the past, but unless we learn from it, our capacity to move towards a
socialist society in the present and future is severely constrained. I believe
we are at another bifurcation point today. People who could shut their eyes to
Russia’s history of racist, genocidal imperialism during the Tsarist and
Stalinist periods[43]
as well as its imperialist exploitation and oppression of various African
countries in the 21st century[44] found it somewhat harder
to justify its naked aggression against Ukraine in 2022. It therefore becomes
easier to convince revolutionary socialists that principled opposition to the
heinous crimes committed by Western imperialists and their barbaric, authoritarian
allies is compatible with – indeed demands – equal opposition to the
heinous crimes committed by anti-Western imperialists and their barbaric,
authoritarian allies. Self-professed socialists who fail to do so undermine
their own moral authority and credibility when they condemn Western
imperialism.[45]
If a thorough critique of neo-Stalinism is
made, it would be possible to reverse the current decline of the left. This
would include going all the way back to the Communist Manifesto and making it
clear that a socialist society was nowhere on the horizon at that point
and will even now remain elusive unless there is a concerted effort to fight
for democracy and human rights in all countries. Failing that, a section of the
left will continue to converge with the far right, the largest part of it will
take inconsistent positions, and only a small section will consistently support
struggles for democracy around the world, knowing that their success is a
necessary condition for a socialist transition.
(This paper was published in the International
Labor and Working-Class History journal, Volume 106, October 2024, pp.365–377,
and is available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547924000279 )
[3] Wilhelm Eichoff,
“The International Working Men’s Association: Its Establishment, Organisation,
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