Ernest Haberkern

Introduction to Hal Draper

(1998)

In the early years of this century, prior to World War I, there was in the United States a growing, vigorous, powerful socialist movement. In many respects it was further advanced than the British socialist movement of the time. The usual indicator you run across in the history books is the Presidential campaign of 1912 in which Eugene V. Debs gained some 6% of the vote as the candidate of the Socialist Party. But this statistic in fact underestimates the strength and significance of the movement. The socialist press, represented by dozens of newspapers and journals, had a wide circulation. Socialists were an open and well organized force in the AFL, winning almost a third of the vote for their candidate in 1912. At the local and state levels numerous socialists held office and the Party ran a number of municipalities. Despite the wide scale persecution that accompanied World War I, during the war and in the early 20s the American left experienced a new surge of growth and activity. While the Socialist Party split in the early 20s, the labor movement swung sharply to the left and a serious attempt to build a new party based on the unions arose. Members of the Socialist Party and the new parties affiliated with the Communist International played important and influential roles in this revived labor movement.

For a few years, during the late 20s, this revival appeared to falter. But the Depression and the collapse of confidence in the capitalist system even among its beneficiaries changed that. It was in 1932, in the midst of this widespread radicalization, that Hal Draper joined the socialist movement. Of course, as the son of immigrant garment workers, this formal act was not his real initiation into the world of the socialist and labor movements.

From 1932 until his death in 1990, Hal Draper was a prolific Marxist writer and a socialist activist. He is one of the few people from that era who maintained and expanded this American socialist tradition which has almost disappeared. World War II and the Cold War were a political space-time warp and very few individuals or political tendencies passed through it intact. This is true of the socialist movement worldwide of course but the damage was greatest in the United States. Draper is one of the few who, instead of abandoning the movement in despair and rejecting his own political past, analyzed what was happening with the combination of rigorous research and passionate outrage that is the stamp of the Marxist tradition. In the 50s, a time of general collapse and demoralization in the American left, Draper edited the weekly Labor Action, a political journal widely read in Europe as well as the United States because of its uncompromising rejection of the American consensus which did not depend on accepting that other form of despair – the slavish defense of “real existing socialism” as the only alternative.

It was not possible, of course, to remain in opposition to the “real existing crap” of both sides of the Cold War without rethinking the history of the movement. Draper’s 4-volume Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution is his principal achievement in this regard. The works collected here are manuscripts that were either not published or are hard to obtain and they emphasize sides of Draper’s career and writing that are not included in KMTR.

It is a truism that the aim of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was not to replace the capitalist system, but to save what could be saved from the wreckage of the Depression by making those concessions he had to and using them to disarm and demoralize a potentially revolutionary movement from below. He succeeded admirably. Even today, when liberals and conservatives alike are dedicated to dismantling the welfare state he created, even Republicans pay tribute to this “Great President” and rightly so from their class standpoint. More important, however, than the immediate impact of Roosevelt’s reforms in blunting popular discontent was the long term benefit. Roosevelt’s ersatz revolution destroyed the real socialist movement of opposition described above. Even historians and pundits who, usually approvingly, note Roosevelt’s role in saving capitalism pay little or no attention to the movement he was saving it from. Draper’s essay on the Student Movement of the 30s is a good short introduction to the real politics of this period and in fact a good introduction to what Draper represented.

E. Haberkern, 1998

The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism”

(1953/1954)

First published in New International, 1953/1954. [1]
© Center for Socialist History. Used with kind permission of the copyright holders.
Downloaded with thanks from the What Next? Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

Introduction
The Content of the Myth
What Does Defeatism Mean?
Lenin’s Combination

I. The Marx-Engels–Second International Tradition
Marx’s Criterion in the Pre-Imperialist Epoch
The “Special Position” on War Against Tsarism
How Zinoviev Makes a Defeatist Out of Engels
How Zinoviev Invents a “Defeatism” for Plekhanov
Summary

II. Defeatism in the Russo-Japanese War
The Peculiarity of Zinoviev’s History
Zinoviev’s Fake Examples
Anti-War Moods in Russia
Pro-Japan Defeatism
Lenin’s Pro-Japan Position
Guesde and Hyndman
The 2nd International
The Mensheviks’ Position
The “Special Russian” Character of Lenin’s Line

Part 2. “Defeatism” During the First World War

III. Lenin’s Defeat-Slogan 1914-16
Formulation No.1: The “Lesser Evil” Formula
Rejection of Defeatism in the Bolshevik Ranks
Whittling Down the “Lesser Evil” Formula
Formulation No.2: “Defeat Facilitates ...”
Formulation No.3: “Wish Defeat in Every Country”
The Baugy Group’s Attack
Formulation No.4: “Don’t Halt Before the Risk ...”
Summary: The 4 Formulas
Trotsky’s Attack on the Defeat-Slogan
Lenin’s Polemic Against Trotsky on Defeatism
The Rest of the Record: Aug. 1915 to Nov. 1916
When Defeatism Was Not Put Forward

IV. First World War: Zinoviev, Trotsky, Luxemburg
On the “Lesser Evil”
The “Methodology of Social-Patriotism”
Defeat and the Interests of the People
Pseudonym for Revolution
The Social-Patriotic Version of Defeatism
Trotsky on “Neither Victory nor Defeat”
Rosa Luxemburg on Victory and Defeat

V. The Abandonment of Defeatism in 1917
“We Were Not Defeatists”
Bath in Social-Patriotism
Political Freedom and “Conscientious Defensism”
A Non-Defensist Program for the Defense of the Nation
New Attitude to Defeat
Summary

VI. After Lenin: Revival and Reinterpretation
The First Five Years of the C.I. – No Defeatism
How Zinoviev Revived Defeatism in 1924
Trotsky Sidesteps
Trotsky’s Formula in 1934
How Trotsky Hung on to the Term Defeatism
Exegesis in the Trotskyist Movement
Shachtman’s New Line
How Shachtman Explains Lenin’s Defeatism
What Does Shachtman’s Position Mean?
On Lenin’s Motivation
“One-Way” Defeatism?

Note from What Next?

1. This study was first published in New International, theoretical journal of the US Independent Socialist League. It appeared as a 3-part series in Vol.XIX No.5 (September-October 1953), Vol.XIX No.6 (November-December 1953) and Vol.XX No.1 (January-February 1954). We are grateful to Barry Buitekant for providing us with copies.

The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism”

Introduction

“All of Marx is contained in the Communist Manifesto, in the foreword of his Critique and in Capital. Even if he had not been the founder of the First International, he would always have remained what he is. Lenin, on the contrary, lives entirely in revolutionary action. Had he not published a single book in the past, he would nonetheless appear in history as that which he is now, as the leader of the proletarian revolution, as the founder of the Third International.” Leon Trotsky

“When Vladimir Ilyitch once observed me glancing through a collection of his articles written in the year 1903, which had just been published, a sly smile crossed his face, and he remarked with a laugh: ‘It is very interesting to read what stupid fellows we were!’” [1]

Since the First World War, more than one generation in the Marxist movement has been brought up, in good part, on a close study of Lenin’s anti-war position.

Lenin was not the only Marxist of the time who reacted to the war with a policy of consistent and thorough opposition to all varieties of “social-patriotism” or “social-chauvinism”. But even in comparison with the other anti-war socialists, his writings on the war have a special force because of the exceptionally clear fashion in which he did one thing: he analyzed the political character of the war in the context of the new epoch of capitalism-imperialism.

Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg (to take these as the best examples of the non-Bolshevik socialist-internationalists) did so also; the difference is in degree, not in kind; but no one so successfully hammered this home as sharply as did Lenin, and on so well thought-out a theoretical basis. His study of imperialism as a stage of capitalism, together with the political approach to the war question which flowed from it, was Lenin’s chief theoretical contribution to the arsenal of Marxism.

In most other respects, as Lenin rightly saw it himself, his role was to revive and reanimate the revolutionary substance of Marxism that had been overlaid by the creeping reformism of the Second International. In this respect, however, he did not merely revive: he had to, and did, readapt Marxism and its ideas to a new epoch. From that time on, the Marxist analysis of war had a new starting point.

The old starting point, the starting point of Marx and Engels and the old Second International, was one that had befitted the previous epoch of capitalism, the pre-imperialist era when progressive wars by the young, rising bourgeoisies of Europe were not only possible but of great historic significance. In this epoch of struggles between bourgeoisies engaged in progressive tasks and outlived classes seeking to block the road of capitalist progress, Marx and Engels had asked themselves typically: The victory of which contender will be of the greatest advantage to the working class and the possibilities of socialist revolution? Which is more progressive and which more reactionary? Whose victory is the lesser evil? Whose victory will help to widen the road down which the working class can march to intervene in the name of its own interests? And conversely: whose defeat will help to eliminate an important force which blocks the road to progress?

By 1907 the anti-war resolutions of the Second International had already implicitly broken with this approach, but only implicitly. The world war that all saw looming ahead was imperialist on all sides. The 1907 Stuttgart and 1912 Basle resolutions of the Second International did not pose the question in the old way: namely, the victory or defeat of which war coalition will be best for us? Instead, the political attitude which they recommended was dictated by the facts of life, the reality of the imperialist era and its manifestations, pointed out in detail in the resolutions; but there was no consistent and conscious realization that a great change had occurred in theory. When the war broke out and the wave of chauvinism and patriotic hysteria swept over the belligerent nations, it was easy for the social-democratic parties, rotted from within by reformism, to snap back to the standpoint of the past, from which they had never consciously broken, and which afforded them the rationalizations they needed to justify their betrayal of their anti-war pledges.

In 1914, Lenin, like the other “orthodox Marxist” leaders of Second International parties, had not yet really worked out the foundations of the new standpoint on war. But unlike them he reacted to the war on the political bases already implied by the Basle and Stuttgart resolutions – and proceeded to go beyond them, to make explicit and theoretically founded the viewpoint there contained, and to Work out the political tactics that followed. The thinking of the Second International snapped back to the old bases as if on the end of a rubber band which had been stretched far beyond its normal scope-but only stretched; Lenin reacted by breaking the old bond.

But the old Marx-Engels-Second International tradition was strong, stronger than Lenin knew. It was deeply embedded in the thinking of all them, Lenin included, and had only been overlaid by the impress of events. Lenin too retained more of it than he was aware.

This was the fundamental reason why there remained with him an idea which constituted, in truth, an alien intrusion into the body of his politics – better still, a fossil remnant. It was this, we shall show, which gave rise to the notion which later came to be called “revolutionary defeatism”.

The Content of the Myth

At a certain time after Lenin’s death, and for reasons which we shall see, this “defeatism” became a fixed part of the Lenin-canon; to question it was to question a “fundamental principle” of Leninism. That it is any principle at all is part of a myth. The rest of the myth includes the following:

(1) During the war Lenin alone adopted a completely consistent and uncompromising policy of opposition to the war, all others among the anti-war socialists being guilty of some “centrist” deviation or other or of some unclarity tending in such direction.

(2) In this “defeatist” principle was contained the very heart of Lenin’s anti-war, position; or as it has sometimes been put, this “defeatism” of Lenin’s “summed up” his anti-war politics.

(3) Such “defeatism” is the necessary alternative to defensism – these being the only consistent choices. To reject “defeatism” means to make some degree of concession to social-patriotism.

(4) This “defeatism” had a whole historical tradition and was not merely invented by Lenin. Its historical precedent was particularly to be found in the “defeatism” which permeated all classes of Russian society in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, this experience being the reason why the Bolsheviks so readily came to the “defeatist” position in 1914.

So goes the myth. [1*]

When we look at Lenin’s writings themselves we will find a variety of shifting and inconsistent formulations on “defeatism” at various times, but the part which has entered into the canonical form of “defeatism” includes the following.

(1) In a reactionary war, you must wish for the defeat of “your own” government, desire defeat, be in favor of defeat, nothing less than defeat.

(2) It was not enough, then, merely to be against the war, against voting the war credits for example; it was not enough to organize or be in favor of organizing mass struggles against the war; it was not enough to organize or be in favor of organizing mass struggles against the war; it was not enough to denounce “defense of the fatherland” and its social-patriotic proponents; it was not enough, certainly, to denounce the consequences of military victory by “one’s own” government, since there were “centrist” positions which were “against both victory and defeat”. In fact, an anti-war position which fell short of avowed defeatism was either “left-centrist” or tinged with pacifism, or, at the very best, it was an “unconscious” defeatism which could not be carried out consistently and fearlessly in action until the “slogan of defeat” itself was embraced.

Lenin’s claims during the 1914-16 period, and he counterposed them in polemic to the anti-war views of Trotsky and Luxemburg. The latter two (to continue to use them as examples of the non-Bolshevik opposition to the war) held the same analysis of the war and of what-is-to-be-done as did Lenin, straight down the line on all essential questions which were moot among the socialist left, including the need for breaking with the Second International and forming a new revolutionary international. [2*] But Trotsky specifically attacked Lenin’s “slogan of defeat”, and Luxemburg (who possibly never even heard of it during the war) wrote along a line which precluded any sympathy for it. What exactly would have been added, supposedly, to their anti-war clarity or effectiveness if they had proclaimed “For defeat in the war”, in addition to the position they held?

In the later exegesis of the Trotskyist movement, Trotsky (for example) was retroactively admitted into the ranks of the wartime defeatists on the ground that this term is “really only a synonym” for an internationalist opponent of imperialist war. If it is only this synonym, as has been often stated, then most of what Lenin actually wrote on the subject, even abstracting the polemical heat, was a congeries of nonsense; whereas in truth it was merely a congeries of confusion. In any case we have to find out what Lenin meant by his “slogan of defeat”, as distinct from the later reinterpreters who confounded his confusion with their own.

For this purpose the test question is not what Lenin meant as against the pro-war defensists, but what he meant as against the other anti-war socialists who held the Third Camp point of view, like Trotsky and Luxemburg, but who were not “defeatists”.

What Does Defeatism Mean?

Our study of what Lenin meant by his “defeatism” will begin with the historical sources of his conception, rather than by trying directly to take hold of the tangled threads of his 1914-16 formulations and shifts. This means beginning some distance away, with the Marx-Engels-Second International period, and then with the period of the Russo-Japanese War.

In doing so, however, we shall have to refer often to the attempts which were made in 1914-16 by Zinoviev, as Lenin’s righthand collaborator on the editorial board of Sotsial-Demokrat, to invent an historical tradition for their “defeatism” in precisely these two periods. Part of Zinoviev’s stock-in-trade in this strenuous endeavor is a systematic confusion of their “defeatism” with entirely different political viewpoints which might be called defeatism too.

(1) The most obvious and, at first blush, painfully unnecessary point to make is that there is another word, also spelled “defeatism”, in various languages, which means a mood of pessimistic, despairing or hopeless resignation to admitting defeat. We think it can be shown that this other meaning enters into Zinoviev’s 1915-16 articles on “defeatist” moods among the Russian people during the Russo-Japanese War, and also into the writings of bourgeois historians on the same “defeatist” moods, the latter being under the doubled disadvantage of not understanding anything about political defeatism in the first place.

(2) Not less elementary but more important: Obviously not everyone who is for the defeat of some government in a war is a “defeatist”. Every pro-war patriot is for defeat – of the enemy government. In the First World War, it was the pro-war socialists who were most enthusiastically for defeat – of the enemy government. In a just war which we support, we are for defeat-of the enemy government. Is it really necessary to point this out? Well, we find Zinoviev making a point of the fact that even Engels was a “defeatist” – because he called for the defeat of tsarist Russia in a war with Germany which Engels was then ready to support as a German revolutionist! [2] If Engels thus becomes a proponent of “defeatism” and a predecessor of Lenin’s war line, then Scheidemann and Ebert have an equal right to be denominated “defeatists”, and it does not matter that Engels may have been correct in his time and the German social-patriots wrong in theirs.

This serves to give some example of the sort of thing of which Zinoviev’s “historical precedents” are full, reflecting on the fearful entanglement of thinking behind his articles, which were written under Lenin’s editorial eye.

In another case, Zinoviev cites as a predecessor in “defeatism” the views expressed by the French Marxist leader Jules Guesde, in 1885, about the looming conflict between England and Russia over Afghanistan. [3] Guesde explains that whichever of the two governments is defeated, it will be a good thing “for us”, for socialism, since both are “equally, oppressive although in different ways”. His words were merely an expression of refusal: to support either war camp. But in any case he was not talking about the defeat of “his own” government.

(3) Then defeatism means desiring defeat of one’s own government, as Lenin indeed often stressed [3*] (Zinoviev too, for that matter!). But there is still a very notable ambiguity which this phrase covers up.

To take an example from our own day first: In the Second World War many German liberals and radicals were violently pro-war – in favor of the Allies. They were for the defeat of “their own” government. Aside from the difference in national origin, their political position was identical with that of pro-war socialists and non-socialists in the Allied war camp.

As a matter of fact, there were such “defeatists” also in the First World War, and Lenin was well acquainted with them. There were Russian socialists who were for the defeat of Russian tsarism, “their own” government, and by the same token for the victory of Germany, this being the lesser evil for them, since they took their stand not as admirers of Prussian junkerdom but as enemies of tsarism. The political position of these Russian “defeatists” was the same as that of the German social-patriots, who also were for German victory as the lesser evil.

There were also analogous tendencies among the socialists of the nationalities in the Hapsburg Empire, who were for the defeat of “their own” government – i.e., the government which oppressed them – the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They were pro-Allied.

These were pro-war defeatists. They were defeatists because they were pro-war, “pro” the war of the imperialist camp aligned against their own rulers.

Lenin was, of course, well aware of these tendencies. He never looked upon them as defeatists, never called them defeatists, never thought of them as fellow defeatists. He classified them as social-patriots along with the other social-patriots of the Second International who ranged themselves with one or the other of the imperialist camps. In recognizing no political kinship with these defeatists, he was of course entirely correct: they were social-patriotic defeatists.

A terminological hassle ensues: according to the myth, defeatism and social-patriotism are opposites; a pro-war defeatist is something like a red blackbird. Very well then, we must re-define: a defeatist is not only one who desires the defeat of his own government but one who also does not wish the victory of the enemy camp. As a “definition” of defeatism, it is perfectly arbitrary and ad hoc, but if it is insisted on as a definition of Lenin’s special variety of defeatism, then we will find out some very peculiar things about the Lenin-myth.

Lenin’s Combination

To sum this up, then, we have the following:

(1) On the one hand, we have the leading anti-war internationalists like Trotsky and Luxemburg who were against both camps of imperialism in the war; against voting war credits; for irreconcilable class struggle during the war; for transforming the fight against the war into a fight for socialist power; for breaking with the International of the social-patriots of both camps. They counterposed, to the military victory of their own government’s imperialism, the victory of their own working-class struggle for socialism. To the military victory of their own government, they did not counterpose a desire for its military defeat. They counterposed their own socialist solution to any military outcome, victory or defeat, on the plane of the inter-imperialist conflict.

These anti-war socialists were not “defeatists”.

(2) On the other hand, we have tendencies which were for the defeat of their own government and at the same time pro-war on the basis of a position politically identical with that of their fellow social-patriots across the state lines.

But in the case of the position peculiar to Lenin, we have an attempt at a different kind of “defeatism” – one which sought to combine some variety of “defeat of your own government” with the anti-war policy of opposition to both war camps.

Lenin attempted to combine defeatism and an anti-war line.

Note that this is put in a manner precisely opposite that of the Lenin-myth, which has come to paint “defeatism” as the inescapable and necessary expression of anti-war line, which cannot see any problem at all in making such a combination.

We will get a good idea of how great indeed the problem is as we follow (a) Zinoviev’s efforts to find Marxist historical sanction for his “defeatism”, and (b) Lenin’s efforts to settle on a precise meaningful content for his anti-war “defeatism”.

Notes

1*. That is, the myth as it is accepted among those who consider themselves Leninists. Confusing as defeatism has been for the latter, we can imagine what it does to the bourgeois professorial “authorities” on Bolshevism. One such expert has recently published a book entitled A Century of Conflict: Communist Techniques of World Revolution with a whole section on The Theory of Revolutionary Defeatism. According to the erudite scholar Prof. Stefan T. Possony, “In July 1915, eleven months after the outbreak of World War I, Lenin outlined the doctrine of revolutionary defeatism for the first time”, whereas Zinoviev had written about it in February; therefore this savant finds it “interesting to note that Sinovyev [sic] rather than Lenin seems to have been the originator of revolutionary defeatism”. The trouble seems to be that this devotee of learning and truth did not even bother to check Lenin’s Collected Works before announcing his historical discovery; he is obviously going by the selected articles of Lenin and Zinoviev to be found in Gegen den Strom. The rest of his pages on the subject are just as illuminating as this pearl of academic profundity, up to and including his sole word of political analysis: “treason”.

2*. The outstanding qualification to this statement, if it is considered an “essential question”, was Trotsky and Luxemburg’s difference with Lenin on the question of raising the slogan of peace. Lenin was never very clear on whether he criticized any use of the peace-slogan or only its use without tying it up with the socialist class struggle and the aim of revolution (a pacifist deviation of which Trotsky and Luxemburg were not guilty in any case, in spite of the picture which might be gained from some of Lenin’s polemics especially against the former).

3*. Lenin made it explicit that he did not consider anything else defeatism in only one passage, an Incidental mention in 1918 in the course of his “Theses” on the Brest-Litovsk peace, in answer to an argument that the German left socialists do not want the Bolsheviks to sign the treaty with the kaiser’s government. He said in passing: “They say that the German Social-Democratic opponents of war have now become ‘defeatists’ and ask us not to give in to German imperialism. However, we have always considered defeatism as an attitude toward one’s own bourgeoisie.” CW22 (Russ. ed.), pp.195-6.

Reference Notes

CW stands for Lenin’s Collected Works and refers to the English edition unless otherwise noted: it is followed by the volume number, book number if any (in the case of Vol. 20 and 21), and the page number. References to the Russian edition are to the second or third edition. The French edition was used for Vol.7 only, and the German edition for Vol.6 only. Page references to Gegen den Strom (a collection of wartime articles by Lenin and Zinoviev) are of course to the German edition, but in point of fact all translations from the second half of this book were made from the French edition (Contre le Courant, v.2).

Emphasis within all quotations follows the original; no italics added.

Grateful acknowledgements are due to four comrades for translating and checking passages from Russian and German: Jack Maxwell, Elizabeth Frank, Max Shachtman, and Gordon Haskell.

1. From articles by Trotsky and Radek published in Current History magazine for March 1924, translated from Pravda, there noted as “written shortly before Lenin’s death”.

2. In Zinoviev’s article The Second International and the Problem of War – Are We Renouncing Our Heritage?, pub. in Sotsial-Demokrat, Oct. 1916, collected in Gegen den Strom.

3. In Zinoviev’s “Defeatism” Then and Now, Oct. 1916; in Gegen den Strom, p.440-1. For this aspect of Guesde’s views, see also Charles Rappoport, Jean Jaurès, l’Homme, le Penseur, le Socialiste, p.371.

I. The Marx-Engels–Second International Tradition

The Marxists of our day are accustomed to thinking of the “lesser evil” theory in war as being characteristic of the reformist social-patriots. This is historically conditioned. The question has to be thought of in the context of the difference between the progressive period of capitalism and the imperialist stage of capitalism.

1. Marx’s Criterion in the Pre-Imperialist Epoch

When Marx and Engels, in their time, asked “The victory of which nation (i.e., which national ruling class) would have the most advantageous consequences for the working-class movement?” and decided support or non-support on this ground, this also obviously based itself on a kind of lesser-evil choice, though they did not use the term. But this approach had two fundamental historical premises:

(1) The difference between the two belligerents was not basically one of “lesser” or “greater” evil, but of the difference between the historical roles which they played. Marx and Engels’ “lesser evil” was essentially an historical category, not at bottom a matter of eclectically reckoning up “consequences” on two pans of a balance-scale. This is why Lenin was still using their method when he made his great contribution in drawing a sharp dividing line between the progressive wars of the young bourgeoisie against feudal reaction and the modern wars among bourgeoisies all of whom were gripped in a world-wide imperialism which decisively conditioned the politics and consequences of these wars. But this replaced Marx and Engels’ “lesser evil” criterion.

(2) Throughout his world-war polemics against the social-patriots, Lenin always emphasized another accompanying difference between the two epochs: Today, he argued, unlike yesterday, the struggle for socialist power is on the order of the day in Europe. The socialist working class is on the scene as a contender for power itself. This means: There may still be “lesser” and “greater” evils (there always will be) but we do not have to choose between these evils, for we represent the alternative to both of them, an alternative which is historically ripe. Moreover, under conditions of imperialism, only this revolutionary alternative offers any really progressive way out, offers any possibility of an outcome which is no evil at all. Both war camps offer only reactionary consequences, to a “lesser” or “greater” degree.

In this context, any number of quotations can be found in Marx and Engels in which they come out for the defeat of one side in a given war on the ground of the progressive consequences which would thereby be facilitated. By the same token this meant for them: preferring or desiring the victory of the other side, on the ground of the same progressive, revolutionary consequences. Their “defeatism” in these situations was the pro-war defeatism which we have discussed.

It is therefore simply quotation-mongering to utilize such expressions by Marx and Engels to “prove” that they believed that “defeat facilitates revolution”. Of course they did, in given historical wars. In the same way it is just as possible to prove that “victory facilitates revolution”, and this proposition was just as true in the same historical contexts.

In 1915-16 Zinoviev, the only Bolshevik propagandist who stood at Lenin’s side in support of the “slogan of defeat”, specialized in such historical arguments. When we find him appealing to the authority of Marx and Engels in support of “defeatism”, what he is doing in linking up this policy with the methodology of pro-war defeatism. He does not give the slightest sign of being aware of what he is doing.

Thus Zinoviev [4] quotes Engels’ position on the threatened Austro-Prussian war (letter to Marx, April 2, 1866):

“Although every man who bears any part of the responsibility for this war if it breaks out deserves to be hanged, and with absolute impartiality I do not exclude the Austrians from that, yet I wish above all that the Prussians should get a monumental drubbing.” [5]

For, says Engels, then one of two things would happen: either (1) the Austrians would dictate peace in Berlin in two weeks, thus avoiding intervention by Bonaparte, and the Berlin regime’s position would become impossible and a movement against “Prussianism” would start; or else “(2) a change-over would take place in Berlin, before the arrival of the Austrians, and the movement would begin all the same”.

So in this case Engels was “for the defeat of his own government”, but what this meant for him was desiring or preferring the victory of the enemy government. For Zinoviev even to use this as a “Marxist” precedent for his brand of “defeatism” is a give-away.

2. The “Special Position” on War Against Tsarism

But this methodology of Marx and Engels was directed by them, most of all and most vigorously, against tsarist Russia. To them, Russia was the prop and inciter of all reaction on the Continent, the center and fortress of counter-revolution, the inspirer and supporter of every vestige of the old regime in Germany particularly. Behind every manifestation of reaction loomed the tsar and his diplomats and the threat of his armies. Once the Russian autocracy was destroyed, all the forces of democracy in Europe (in Germany first of all) would bound forward with seven-league boots, and the proletarian revolution would not be far behind. “Down with tsarism!” therefore, smash it by any means possible, revolutionary war against tsarism! [6]

Just as Marx and Engels saw a special role being played by Russia in the configuration of European politics, so they advocated a special position by revolutionaries against this threat, through demands which they did not direct against any other state.

This special position on Russia was bequeathed to the Second International at its foundation, and ingrained in it. It was an axiom of the Marxist movement for decades: “For the defeat of tsarism!”

It was this axiom which became the rationalization of the German Social-Democrats for its collapse before the war hysteria on August 4, 1914. True, in 1914 Russia was no longer the monolithic society of feudal barbarism that it had appeared in the days of Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung. A modern working-class and socialist movement had developed strongly. In 1905 this Russia had gone to the head of the European revolution. Tsarism could no longer hope to play the old role in Europe; now it had the revolution at its own back. The political bases of the “special position” had radically changed. But the “special position” and its tradition was still there, still ingrained. It was not the cause of the collapse of the German Social-Democracy but it was strong enough to act as its effective ideological cover.

Just before the black day of August 4 when the Reichstag group stood up to vote for the kaiser’s war credits, the Social-Democratic press snapped back into the groove:

“The German Social-Democracy has always hated tsardom as the bloody guardian of European reaction; from the time that Marx and Engels followed, with far-seeing eyes, every movement of this barbarous government, down to the present day, when its prisons are filled with political prisoners, and yet it trembles before every labor movement. The time has come when we must square accounts with these terrible scoundrels, under the German flag of war.” [7]

So wrote the Social-Democratic Frankfurter Volksstimme on July 31. The press filled with such evocations of the old outlived tradition (not unmixed with a new note of simple chauvinism): “fight first against the Russian knout” ... “Shall the Russian tsar ... who is the worst enemy of the Russian people themselves, rule over one man of German blood?” ... “War against tsarism ... worst enemy of all liberty and all democracy” ... “Poor devils, really creatures without a fatherland, these downtrodden subjects of bloody Nicholas. Even should they desire to do so, they could find nothing to defend but their chains” ...

Rosa Luxemburg commented: “Long-forgotten chords that were sounded by Marx in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung against the vassal state of Nicholas I, during the German March Revolution of 1848, suddenly reawakened in the ears of the German Social-Democracy in the year of our lord 1914, and called them to arms, arm in arm with Prussian Junkerdom against the Russia of the Great Revolution of 1905”. [8]

Or as Zinoviev himself wrote in 1916: “For 60 years the vanguard of the revolutionists of Germany preached justified hatred of tsarism to the German people. Since the time of Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the call to struggle ‘against tsarism’ has not ceased to resound in the ears of the German workers. And now, when the war of 1914 has broken out, the German social-chauvinists, who have passed over into the camp of imperialism, have consciously exploited this revolutionary hatred borne by the German workers against bloody tsarism. They have cynically utilized the old slogan ‘against tsarism’ in order to cover themselves and to force the German workers to spill their blood in the interest of German imperialism.” [9]

And not only at the beginning of the war. To the last the social-patriotic leaders insisted that by supporting the kaiser’s war they had been carrying out the behest of Marx and Engels, and when the March Revolution took place in Russia they pointed to it as their handiwork, their justification, their “progressive consequence”. Paul Lensch claimed: “as a matter of fact, the Russian Revolution is a child of the German victories!” – for does not defeat in war facilitate revolution, and did they not “facilitate” the defeat of tsarism? In October 1917 Dr David defended the party’s war record at the first wartime party congress where the leadership had to give an accounting of its policy, at Würzburg:

“The justification of our attitude has still another strong argument. A policy is best judged by its successes. What success has it had? The one immense fruit of this war, which we all greeted with jubilation, is the collapse of the tsarist system, is the Russian Revolution, the Russian democracy, and with it an of the perils which the tsarist system meant to Europe. But this event would not have occurred if we had acted as Haase and his friends wanted us to on August 4, 1914.” [10]

By 1914 the old “special position had been totally emptied of its political and historical content, but it still echoed hollowly in the thinking of the Second International. We will see its echoes in Lenin’s “defeatism”.

3. How Zinoviev Makes a Defeatist Out of Engels

In one of his most tortuous articles of 1916 [11], Zinoviev attempted to refute this “anti-tsarist” rationalization of the social-patriots and at the same time to wrap the authority of Engels around his own variety of “defeatism”. The result is revealing.

To pull off this tour de force, he goes back to Marx and Engels’ line of “revolutionary war against Russia” and seeks to prove that, in putting forth this position, they advocated first the overthrow of the German government and then the carrying out of the “revolutionary war” by a workers’ government. This is necessary for him since he wants to (a) rebut the social-patriots and (b) secure Engels’ authority for “defeatism”, but without admitting that this precedent requires equating such “defeatism” with support of the victory of enemy government.

How does he try to do it? In than one place (especially in the ’90s) Engels took up the question of what German socialists should do if Russia (or even Russia in alliance with France) attacked Germany. Zinoviev describes Engels’ reply as follows – but using his own words, not Engels’:

“What then should the German proletariat do, what should the German Social-Democracy do? defend the Prussian junkers, support its ‘own’ government? No, that is inadmissible ... Engels proposes an entirely different solution: the German proletariat should overthrow its own government and lead a revolutionary war against tsarism, uniting with the French workers for the common struggle.”

What authority has he for claiming that Engels considered it was “inadmissible” in this situation for socialists to support a non-socialist German government which was fighting against Russian attack? What authority has he for claiming that Engels proposed: first overthrow the government and then lead a revolutionary war against Russia?

He has a quotation, from Engels’ article of the ’90s, Socialism in Germany. Here, speaking of the same hypothetical situation, Engels wrote:

“In this struggle our country can save its national existence only by applying revolutionary measures ... We have a very strong party ... It is the Social-Democratic Party. And we have not forgotten the great example which France gave us in 1793 [the example, that is, of ‘Jacobin’ tactics] ...”

Zinoviev then challenges: “We will not insist on the fact that today’s war is not at all the one that Engels envisaged. [This is exactly the main thing he has to insist on, but he has other fish to fry in this article – H.D.] We ask only: Why then didn’t the German social-chauvinists overthrow their government? Why didn’t they have recourse ‘to the most revolutionary measures’?”

But all of this is a falsification of Engels’ viewpoint. Engels left no doubt whatsoever that he was thinking of supporting a defensive war under a government still led by the old class. His reference to “revolutionary measures” meant that the socialists should demand that this government take such measures – just as earlier Marx, during the American Civil War, had advocated that the Lincoln government of the North take “revolutionary measures” against the South, e.g., free the slaves. Engels also looked to the victory of this government as preparing the way for the socialists to come to power eventually, soon or late, possibly even during the war itself; but he did not advocate, “overthrow the government” as a precondition for supporting its defensive war against tsarism.

In a letter to Bebel (October 24, 1891), Engels wrote on exactly the same theme: “... If Russia is victorious we shall be crushed. Therefore if Russia begins war – go for her! go for the Russians and their allies, whoever they may be. [Engels has France in mind – H.D.] Then we have to see to it that the war is conducted by every revolutionary method and that things are made impossible for any government which refuses to adopt such methods ...” [12]

The same day Engels wrote to Sorge: “If Germany is crushed, then we shall be too, while in the most favorable case the struggle will be such a violent one that Germany will only be able to maintain herself by revolutionary means, so that very possibly we shall be forced to come into power and play the part of 1793.” [13]

It is clear that Engels is not thinking of the war as being conducted by a socialist government, necessarily. This was part and parcel of his and Marx’s mode of approach in this pre-imperialist epoch. The social-patriots tried to utilize such quotations for their own purposes. But in this case, once Zinoviev has announced that he will not argue against this sleight-of-hand of the social-patriots on the only ground where their fundamental mistake showed up, he has taken up the gage with them on their own ground.

He then argues himself onto thin ice, because he himself is trying to preserve a remnant of the same tradition on which the social-patriots based themselves. He is led to distort Engels because he is trying to retain the old methodology (only in connection with defeatism!) without accepting the conclusions. He is trying to claim Engels as a “defeatist” without revealing that Engels’ call for the defeat of Russia meant support of “his own” government.

4. How Zinoviev Invents a “Defeatism” for Plekhanov

From the “defeatist” Engels, Zinoviev goes on to the “defeatist” Plekhanov. He approvingly quotes the position taken by Plekhanov at the 1893 congress of the International in Zurich. There, reporting for the Russian socialists, Plekhanov had said:

“When the German army crosses our border, for us it will be a liberator, as the French in the time of the Convention, a hundred years ago, were liberators when they came into Germany to bring liberty to the people after having vanquished the kings.”

Zinoviev actually quotes this as an “authority” in the year 1916, when the German social-patriotic theoreticians are reveling in like quotations. Though he himself does not make this point, he could not have hit on a clearer example of how the “special position” on Russia was involved, in Marx’s view, with a different period of capitalism, typified by the French Revolution, the progressive days of a young rising bourgeoisie fighting against feudalism. Why does Zinoviev do this? He is quoting Plekhanov enthusiastically because, in this context, Plekhanov naturally came out for the defeat of tsarism:

“The more our German friends attack Russian tsarism [the quotation from Plekhanov continues], the more grateful we are to them. Bravo, my friends, beat tsarism, drag it onto the judgment dock as often as possible, strike at it by every means at your command!”

Plekhanov was for “defeatism” against Russia, you see – Q.E.D. So are we Bolsheviks in this war. We have precedent on our side ... And Zinoviev apparently does not suspect that he is giving the show away as to the political methodology of this “defeatism”.

“We have cited the declarations by Plekhanov at the Zurich congress which are ‘defeatist’ in their way” [winds up Zinoviev triumphantly].

But to cover the traces, here again as in the case of Engels he falsely claims that Plekhanov Was thinking only of a “revolutionary war” led by a workers’ government. With that ambivalence which his double-barreled aim imposes on him, he hastens to add that, of course, it would be improper to make those same declarations today in 1916 that Plekhanov did in 18931 No Russian socialist today, he says, would issue such an invitation to the Germans, the situation is different, etc. But then, what remains of the point of citing Plekhanov as a “defeatist in a way”? Of course Plekhanov was then a “defeatist in a way”, but it was precisely the “way” which was used by the German social-chauvinists to justify their betrayal in 1914.

The same methodological shuttle sticks out in a couple of quotations which Zinoviev fishes out of Marx. For example, in the Russo-Turkish war, Marx, wrote (September 27, 1877) that the “gallant Turks have hastened the explosion [in Russia] by years with the thrashing they have inflicted” on the autocracy. He does not mention that Marx was not simply commenting on the frequently revolutionary consequences of defeat in war. Marx was in favor of a Turkish victory in that war. [14]

Summary

To sum up:

(1) We will see the echoes, in Lenin’s position on “defeatism” in 1914/16, of the Marx-Engels-Second International “special position” on the defeat of Russian tsarism, as the “lesser evil” in a certain sense.

(2) In going back to this tradition, Lenin’s specialist in historical precedents. in the course of specific polemics in defense of “defeatism” during the World War itself, Zinoviev betrays at all points the reliance of the defeat-slogan on the methodology of the old tradition, and most particularly –

(3) Zinoviev implicitly identifies the political viewpoint of his “defeatism” with the political approach of pro-war defeatism. He has found no precedent in Marx and Engels for any combination of “defeatism” with an anti-war policy against both war camps. He cannot even see the difference between a “defeatism” which is for the victory of the enemy government, and his attempt to invent a “defeatism” which is not.

Before going any further, we could be quite sure at this point that we are dealing with a political viewpoint which is rife with confusion about its own ideas, even if those ideas were after all correct.

Reference Notes

4. In his article Russian Social-Democracy and Russian Social-Chauvinism, pub. in Kommunist, Nos.1-2, 1915; in Gegen den Strom, p.243. Zinoviev quotes the passage from Engels very incompletely.

5. Here translated from the French edition of the Marx-Engels Correspondance, tome IX, p.39.

6. For Marx and Engels’ position on war against tsarism, see the collection The Russian Menace to Europe by Marx and Engels, ed. by Blackstock and Hoselitz, Free Press, 1952.

7. Quoted by Rosa Luxemburg in her “Junius”, pamphlet, The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy, 1915.

8. In The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy.

9. Op. cit. (note 2*).

10. Quoted by Shachtman in New International, June 1939, p.181.

11. Op. cit. (note 2*).

12. Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence (International Pub.), p.492. See also letter to Bebel of Sept. 29, 1891, pp.489-90.

13. Ibid., p.494.

14. Ibid., p.357.

II. Defeatism in the Russo-Japanese War

According to the myth, the most solid historical precedent for “defeatism” is supposed to be Lenin’s “defeatism” in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Lenin’s “defeatism” of 1914-16 was only the continuation of the line he developed for the earlier war, and indeed, we have been told, in 1904-5, not only Lenin but even the Mensheviks and large sections of the liberal bourgeoisie were pervaded with “defeatism”. Lenin’s line for the First World War grew out of this experience. In 1916 Zinoviev wrote [15] along these lines: “Germany today does not possess the tradition of 1905; it could not have any clear ‘defeatist’ tradition” – whereas we Bolsheviks, happily in possession of the 1905 tradition, were ready to come to the “defeatist” position easily in 1914.

This is not true. Lenin’s position on the Russo-Japanese war was fundamentally different from his position on the First World War, and precisely with respect to defeatism.

The true story of Lenin’s real war policy in 1904-5 has never been told in any literature familiar to our movement [4*] – indeed, as far as we know, it has not been told anywhere. It has to be exhumed from his writings of the period, where it is plain enough.

One might have expected that in 1914-16, when Lenin was hotly arguing for his defeat-slogan of that time, he would have referred (if only in passing) to the phenomenon of defeatism in the previous war and his position on it. He never does, not even in passing. Zinoviev, however, was a horse of a different color. The latter deliberately concealed and falsified the truth, and it was his account which served to miseducate the movement.

1. The Peculiarity of Zinoviev’s History

Let us start, again, with Zinoviev’s version of the history of “defeatism” – rather, his attempt to invent a history for Lenin’s brand of “defeatism”.

The work by Zinoviev which was the main source of this miseducation was his History of the Russian Communist Party (1925) [16], which in turn on this question was in good part based on an article he published in 1916, entitled “Defeatism” – Then and Now [17], in which he dealt in detail with the “defeatism” of the Russo-Japanese War.

In both his History and the 1916 article, Zinoviev correctly relates that defeatist sentiment was common in Russia not only among socialists but also among bourgeois liberals. (As a matter of fact, defeatism had also appeared earlier in Russia in the Crimean war.) This is a solid fact. The peculiarity of Zinoviev’s version of history is this: that in not one line of his extensive discussion does he permit himself to use any of the plentiful evidence which proves this fact; we will have to do that ourselves later, and the reason why Zinoviev does not will be all too clear.

None of the examples of “defeatism” which Zinoviev selects is an example of the real defeatism which existed.

To be sure, even his examples show the widespread scope of anti-war feeling in the country; but by this time we should be aware of the gap between being merely against a war and being for defeat of one’s own country in that war. In fact, when Zinoviev wrote his 1916 article he was vociferously insisting on the difference.

He certainly does show that the Russo-Japanese War was unpopular; that the people were against it; that there were “defeatist” moods (in the other sense) which expected defeat, and linked this expectation of (or in some cases, resignation to) defeat up with coming revolutionary changes. He does show that large sections did not look to victory in the war, and even were afraid of the prospect of victory for tsarism. But we have already made clear that a point of view which says “Against victory” does not yet add up to a “desire for defeat”, though it can go over to it. Lenin and Zinoviev were well aware of this, since in the First World War they polemized against the viewpoint which they called “Neither victory nor defeat” as “centrist”. In 1904-5 a point of view which rejected both the desire for victory and defeat was even more of a definite tendency. We have already stated that real defeatism existed, but a good deal of the anti-war opinion of the time deliberately stopped short of defeatism. This tendency did so either (a) in uncertainty or ambivalence, (b) where more thought-out, in a wish for a war of exhaustion and stalemate, which was a not-infrequent perspective also. [5*]

2. Zinoviev’s Fake Examples

Keeping this in mind, let us look at Zinoviev’s examples, before raising the question of the motive for his peculiar omissions.

(1) Boris Chicherin:

This is Zinoviev’s prize example, in both writings mentioned. In his 1925 History, he tells us that Chicherin, who was a prominent liberal though a monarchist, wrote as follows: [18]

“The consequences of this war will, finally, help to solve the internal crisis. It is difficult to say what outcome of this war is more to he desired to this end.”

That is all! It does not seem to express a desire for defeat. But Zinoviev immediately adds:

“These words, which declare with little ambiguity the defeat of tsarist Russia to be more desirable than its victory, were written under the Russian censor.”

Well, that puts a new face on it. Zinoviev is telling us that Chicherin was using Aesopian language to get by the censor, and that what he really meant to convey was that he desired defeat.

But this is untrue. The witness against Zinoviev is himself, namely, his 1916 article, in which he had detailed the case of Chicherin a little more fully. [19] There we learn, still from the same Zinoviev, that Chicherin’s statement was not “written under the Russian censor” at all. In fact, it was not written. It was a remark made by Chicherin a few days before his death, and was quoted by another man (who vouched for it as coming from a reliable source) in Struve’s organ Ozvobozhdeniye. But perhaps this other man, M. Zemetz, was writing “under the Russian censor”? No, he was not; Struve’s organ was published in emigration.

In other words, this prize example, Chicherin’s statement, meant exactly what it said: this liberal-monarchist did not know what outcome of the war to desire. Nothing strange about that! It was a common state of mind among bourgeois liberals who did not like the war at all.

This quite understandable frame of mind was also very prevalent during the world war, but we would like to see Zinoviev citing such indecisive, soul-torn characters as fellow defeatists in 1914-16! Elements in Chicherin’s frame of mind were then a good deal to the right of the “centrists” that Zinoviev was attacking because they rejected “defeatism”! But for the purposes of historical precedent, Chicherin became a “defeatist”!

It seems amazing: why on earth does Zinoviev have to drag this ringer in, and falsify it to boot, when there were real defeatists to be cited?

(2) The S-R leader Gershuni:

In the 1925 History Zinoviev makes a long and garrulous to-do about this. Gershuni is in prison. His lawyer informs him that the war has broken out, tells of its unpopularity, and the defeats that have taken place. And Gershuni remarks: “A second Crimean campaign? And Port Arthur = Sebastopol [where tsarism had suffered a heavy defeat]?” Then Gershuni relates in his memoirs:

“... everything suddenly seemed to become clear. I felt that something infinitely terrible, infinitely menacing, and infinitely sorrowful was rushing upon us, which would hit the state like a thunderbolt, arousing the sleepers, and rending asunder the veil which conceals from the majority of the people the true essence of the autocratic system.” [20]

The thing that was “infinitely terrible”, etc., was, of course – defeat. If Gershuni desired defeat, he neglected to mention it in his memoirs so that Zinoviev could quote it. Later in his memoirs, when Gershuni writes after the fall of Port Arthur, “We trembled. Port Arthur had fallen – the autocracy would fall too”. Zinoviev quotes this and comments, “Clearly a defeatist state of mind”.

Clearly, indeed! The one thing certain about this “Gershuni” example is its ambiguity. It becomes twice as suspect when we add the information that the S-R Party’s organ came out against the viewpoint which desired the defeat of Russia by Japan!

(3) The above are Zinoviev’s two first and longest examples. Next he cites a novel, The Pale Horse by Savinkov, whose fictitious hero, a terrorist, hears of the Russian naval disaster at Tsushima and “is seized by the most contradictory feelings”. In his 1916 article Zinoviev adduced other examples: Struve, etc. Without exception, they are even less likely examples of “defeatism” than the above; he proves that liberals were anti-war, and then tags them with the “defeatist” label, gratis, with an appropriate assertion.

(4) Plekhanov:

Finished with examples of bourgeois defeatism, Zinoviev claims that “The Mensheviks, albeit not without some hesitation, had also adopted the defeatist position”. His example is Plekhanov. At the Amsterdam congress of the Second International, held during the war in 1904, opening addresses were given by both Plekhanov for the Russian delegation and Sen Katayama for the Japanese socialist delegation. On the stage they embraced amid the enthusiastic applause of the assemblage. They were vigorously anti-war. But Zinoviev says that Plekhanov’s speech was “defeatist”. In point of fact, he quotes Plekhanov as going so far, in a peroration, as denouncing the prospect of Russian victory. It is this that Zinoviev automatically equates with “defeatism”, entirely without justification. (We will see later that the Menshevik party was not for defeatism.)

3. Anti-War Moods in Russia

So we still do not have from Zinoviev a single clear example of anyone who came out as desiring defeat. If one judged only by Zinoviev, a critical reader might be led to the conclusion that this alleged “defeatism” that was supposed to have existed in 1904-5 was only another myth created by this fertile writer.

And that would be quite wrong. It existed. It even obtrudes into Zinoviev’s own History in the form of a couple of real examples – when Zinoviev attacks Martov for giving these examples!

Here he goes from concealment to falsification. Zinoviev, having ceased to drum up examples, has turned his attention to the position of the Mensheviks on the war. He writes: [21] “But today, Martov, reviewing the past in his History of the Russian Social-Democracy, endeavors to disown the defeatist position of the Mensheviks during the war.”

He gives the following quotation from Martov’s history: “As soon as, following the failures of the Russian army [Martov wrote], a typically defeatist attitude developed among liberal society and in revolutionary circles, and the hope grew stronger that continued military disaster would deal a mortal blow to tsarism almost without any new effort upon the part of the Russian people; as soon as there commenced to be manifested a certain ‘Japanophilism’ and idealization of the role that Japanese imperialism was playing in the war – Iskra [Menshevik organ] came out against defeatism, and in defense of the position that it was to the interest of the people and of the revolution that the war should not end by imposing heavy sacrifices upon Russia, and that freedom would not be brought to the Russian people on the bayonets of the Japanese.”

And Zinoviev complains:

“Martov is obviously beclouding the issue ... attempting to exculpate his revolutionary sins in the eyes of the bourgeoisie ... The pro-Japanese position had absolutely nothing in common with defeatism.”

Let us see who is beclouding the issue. What Martov referred to is a fact. The real defeatists of 1904-5, the elements who really did come out with a “desire for defeat”, tended to merge this sentiment into its obvious consequence: a wish for the victory of Japan, pro-Japanism.

Naturally this was not true of those anti-war elements who were for neither-victory-nor-defeat, who were either ambivalent on that score or who consciously held the view that the favorable outcome would be a stalemate of mutual exhaustion. But for those, especially bourgeois-liberal, elements who were indeed for defeat, the obvious corollary was also to be for Japan’s victory as progressive. This was a widespread feeling not only in Russia but throughout the world, where, particularly in England and America, Japan was looked on as a civilizing agent as compared with Russian barbarism. (The “Yellow Peril” had not yet overwhelmed the US.)

The strength of the Russian liberal bourgeoisie’s feeling on the war was not hard to explain. The rising bourgeoisie wanted political reforms and concessions; the tsarist government froze them out of all participation in the state power. They knew that a victory in the war would only consolidate the autocracy’s attitude, make it feel its oats, and strengthen its obstinacy. The bourgeoisie wanted a division of power with tsarism, and knew that it would be aided insofar as tsarism was weakened and had to yield. Many felt further that the aims of this war were dynastic, and did not bear upon the “national interest”, i.e., their own class interests. Many considered it merely a tsarist adventure. There were also divergences on whether Russia’s imperialist drive should turn face to the Far East or to the west.

For example, Struve’s organ Ozvobozhdeniye wrote on the outbreak of the war:

“The occupation of Manchuria and the outlet to the sea were economically nonsensical for Russia ... The loss of Manchuria and the Kwantung Peninsula [to Japan] will be no loss at all but will be to our advantage, for, in the pursuit of our own interests, we should long ago have abandoned this awkward adventure. And our enemies will ask no more than that from us.” [22]

The last sentence is important from the point of view of the going-over of liberal sentiment from anti-war feeling to outright defeatism. For the bourgeois liberals felt that defeat by Japan would be no skin off their back, since there was not the remotest possibility that Japan would carry the war to attack Russia at home, but that a Japanese victory would only mean the loss of Far Eastern outposts that were a white elephant anyway and not of interest to their own class, while a definitive tsarist defeat would weaken the autocracy and make it amenable to internal compromise. “The Japanese”, said a Russian liberal, “will not enter the Kremlin, but the Russians will.” [23]

Moreover, the bourgeoisie knew that one reason why the autocracy had gotten into the war was to use pro-war enthusiasm against revolutionary stirrings. Prime Minister Plehve had said, “We need a small victorious war to stem the tide of revolution”, [24] and Prince Urussoff wrote in his memoirs that “the members of the government expressed a hope, after the first battle, that the war would evoke a wave of patriotism, and that it would thus arrest the anti-governmental propaganda, and render it easier for the local authorities to preserve order and public tranquillity”. [25]

4. Pro-Japan Defeatism

But reasons aside, the fact is the evidence shows that the existence of a real “desire for defeat” was in association with a wish for the victory of Japan. Zinoviev is forced to cite some cases in polemizing against Martov [26]:

During the war, when the Japanese were battling with the troops of the Russian tsar, certain circles of liberal society (the students in particular) went so far, it was rumored, as to send a telegram to the Mikado of Japan.

(A.G. Mazour’s history Russia Past and Present states this as a fact. The students “wired the Mikado their best wishes for victory”.)

But, continues Zinoviev, we revolutionaries came out against Japanophilism.

“And from this point of view [Zinoviev writes], we condemned every excess [!] on the part of the liberal bourgeoisie and the superficial student revolutionaries, who, if they did not actually send, doubtless intended to send, the telegram to the emperor of Japan. In this sense Martov was correct: yes, we were against ‘Japanophilism’, but we did stand for the defeat of the tsarist armies ...”

Zinoviev is then asserting (in 1925) that the Bolshevik position was for defeat of tsarism but not for the victory of Japan. If that were true, we would finally have here an anti-war defeatism. (We will see that it was not true.)

Zinoviev continues with another involuntary example of the real defeatism of 1904-5, in the same peculiar form of an attack on Martov for bringing up the subject:

“... Martov is deliberately mixing up the cards when he writes as follows: ‘The leader of the Finnish “Activists” [nationalist group], who later headed the Finnish government in 1905 – Konni Zilliacus – openly proposed to Plekhanov as well as to the foreign representatives of the Bund, that they enter into negotiations with the agents of the Japanese government in regard to aid for the Russian revolution in the form of money and arms.’”

Very interesting – we have defeatists here. Boris Souvarine, in his Staline, recounts that

“The Japanese government ... offered money and arms to all the subversive parties; the only ones that accepted were the Finnish Activists, the Georgian Socialist-Federalists and the most nationalistic faction of the Polish Socialist Party whose leader Pilsudski even went to Japan to discuss terms with the enemies of the oppressor Russia.” [27]

But why is Martov “mixing up the cards” when he brings out this not irrelevant fact? Zinoviev says:

“Martov adds that this proposal was rejected. This is true. When the Russian revolutionaries, and even a section of the Russian bourgeoisie, came out definitely as defeatists, the Japanese and some of their agents tried to hook us with the following bait: Since you are in favor of the defeat of the tsar, we will be glad to support you with money and arms. It goes without saying that a proposal of this nature met with indignant refusal on the part of our organization and of all honest revolutionaries, as well as on the part of Plekhanov and the Mensheviks.”

This does not tell us why Martov was “mixing up the cards”. Zinoviev merely asserts that “The pro-Japanese position had absolutely nothing in common with defeatism”. It would be more convincing, even at this point, if he himself had been able to trot out one real defeatist who was not for the victory of Japan.

A contemporary magazine article (in the London Fortnightly Review for February 1, 1906) described the state of affairs in Russia:

“No sooner did the news of the Japanese war spread through the country than, with the one exception of the peasants, the Empire unanimously declared that should the Russian aims succeed, Russia herself would be ruined. From the first, the Russians prayed for Japanese victories ...

“When the first batch of Japanese prisoners reached Kalouga, everyone turned out to witness their arrival, flowers were showered on them, and at a dinner given at the best club in town, members and also officials of the provincial council were present, and the speeches were of a very liberal, not to say revolutionary character. It was at that dinner that the memorable phrase, ‘They are fighting for Russia’s freedom’, was uttered for the first time. In consequence of these proceedings, the club was shut up ...” [28]

Souvarine writes: “Defeatism, which had already appeared in the Crimean war, showed itself this time very widely in the liberal bourgeoisie, the oppressed nationalities, and among the workers and peasants. As against imperial Russia, which was undergoing defeat after defeat, the young Japanese imperialism took on almost the aspect of a champion of civilization.” [29]

This was the real face of the defeatism of 1904-5. It can come as a surprise only to those who have been nurtured on the Lenin-myth of the First World War. What else in fact could have been expected? It took a couple of highly skilled political theoreticians even to make an attempt, in 1914, to develop a “defeatism” which did not mean desire for the victory of the enemy’s government – and they did not succeed. For liberals, workers or oppressed nationalities whose hatred of tsarism led them from “mere” anti-war sentiment to a desire for defeat of tsarism, this automatically meant (in their case) defeat by Japan.

If Zinoviev denies this, it is simply out of ex-post-facto embarrassment, embarrassment which he takes out on Martov in the form of round abuse. This is why, in 1916 and 1925, Zinoviev casts around vainly – for “examples” of defeatism in 1904-5 which do not reveal the truth that defeatism in the Russo-Japanese War meant pro-Japanism – and more often than not, not merely pro-Japanism in the sense of desiring the victory of Japanese imperialism but also in the sense of “idealizing” Japan as a progressive force.

Perhaps the above is only true of the politically unsophisticated elements who were against tsarism and the war – raw workers, raw students, raw liberals, etc.?

No. Among those who most enthusiastically carried their anti-war anti-tsarism to the point of pro-Japanism were:

(1) Some of the most outstanding leaders of the Second International, and (2) Lenin.

5. Lenin’s Pro-Japan Position

The picture painted by Zinoviev’s “history” is a fairy tale from beginning to end. By the same token, so is the picture held by the Marxist movement of Lenin’s position in the Russo-Japanese War, specifically the meaning of his defeatism.

Lenin was for the victory of Japan in the war, as the standard-bearer of progress versus tsarist reaction.

We have to turn to Lenin’s writings of 1904-5 for this.

First of all, all during the year 1904, Lenin scarcely even mentions the fact that there is a war on. The party is in the after-throes of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split at the 1903 congress, and Lenin’s absorption in the internal situation is virtually complete.

All through 1904 there are only two references to the war in his collected works. [29a] First mention comes in April: it is not an article, thesis or resolution discussing the war but simply a May Day manifesto which Lenin wrote for distribution as a leaflet, signed by the Central Committee and editorial board of the party - three months after the war broke out in February. Its content: against the war, overthrow tsarism, demand peace, etc. There is no mention of defeat, defeatism, or any related idea.

Second mention of the war comes in a document addressed To the Party, on the split crisis (July-August), which refers to the war in order to make the point that revolutionary ferment is growing with its continuation. There is nothing on defeat or defeatism.

As the year 1905 began, the big military debacle, the fall of Port Arthur, was in plain sight, but had not yet occurred. An article by Lenin in Vperiod, January 4, made the point that

“The development of the political crisis in Russia depends ... on the course of the war with Japan ... Absolutist Russia is henceforth defeated by constitutional Japan ... The military fiasco is inevitable, and with it a redoubling of the discontent, ferment and indignation.” [30]

There is as yet, however, no more explicit statement than this on the desirability or necessity of defeat, which comes 10 days later, with the news of the military disaster at Port Arthur.

Now (January 14) for the first time Lenin writes a full-scale discussion of the war and the defeat, and of his line on the war – The Fall of Port Arthur.

This, and subsequent articles, are full of political characterizations of Japan as the progressive side of the war. We have already seen his remark, in the previous issue of Vperiod, that “Absolutist Russia is henceforth defeated by constitutional Japan”. The idea which is already implicit in this political counterposition is developed explicitly: [31]

“Progressive, advanced Asia has struck an irreparable blow against reactionary and backward Europe ... The criticism of the autocracy formulated by all advanced Russians, by the Russian Social-Democracy, by the Russian proletariat, is now confirmed by the criticism of Japanese arms ...”

He refers to Russia’s war as a “conflict with a progressive people”.

“The war of an advanced country with a backward country has once again played a great revolutionary role, as has happened many times in history. And the class-conscious proletariat, resolute enemy of war, which is the inevitable result of all class rule, cannot conceal from itself this revolutionary work that has been accomplished by the Japanese bourgeoisie in its victory over the autocracy. The proletariat is hostile to every bourgeoisie ... but this hostility does not relieve it of the necessity of distinguishing between the representatives of a bourgeoisie that is playing a progressive role or a reactionary role in history.”

Japan, he writes, is playing an “historically progressive role”.

But while fighting free competition, we cannot forget that it represents progress with relation to semi-serfdom. While fighting: all war and every bourgeoisie, we must in our agitation distinguish with care between the progressive bourgeoisie and the feudal autocracy; we must stress in all circumstances the great revolutionary role of the historic war in which the Russian worker is taking part despite himself.

What we see is that in this, the first big inter-imperialist war of the 20th century, Lenin is continuing to apply the Marx-Engels-Second International criterion of “progressive bourgeoisie” versus “reactionary regime” which was the old approach with respect to the earlier epoch of progressive, rising capitalism. He is asking the question: In this given war, the victory of which nation, which national ruling class, carries with it the progressive consequences for social and revolutionary development?

Theoretically speaking, what we find in Lenin’s position on the Russo-Japanese War is the analysis which, on August 4, 1914, became the theoretical rationale of the German social-patriots. Lenin puts this theoretical approach forward most clearly in an article written later on April 5:

“... it is necessary, when a war sets exploiting nations against each other, to distinguish between the progressive and the reactionary role of the bourgeoisie of each given nation. The Russian Social-Democracy has had to apply these general principles of Marxism to the war with Japan.” [In the same context, Lenin immediately refers back to the article The Fall of Port Arthur.] [32]

Nothing could be clearer as to the methodology, which underlay his defeatism in this war.

In line with this view of the role of Japan and in line with his sympathy for its victory, his articles are full of sympathetic, even enthusiastic, references to Japan’s armed might, etc. Thus, in The Fall of Port Arthur: [33]

“And along comes little Japan, up to now despised by all, and in eight months it seizes this citadel [Port Arthur] while France and England allied together took a whole year to take Sebastopol [in the Crimean war]. “

He catalogs Japan’s military strength, crowing with delight at the statistics, as if glorying in its military and naval power. He exults over “the Japanese fleet, magnificently armed and equipped with the most modern means of defense ... the growing power of young, new Japan”.

In The Fall of Port Arthur, he even seems to defend Japan’s imperialist expansion and gains as progressive. In the Sino-Japanese war, Japan had defeated China, but when the treaty of Simonoseki came in April 1895, Russia, supported by France and Germany, ganged up on Japan to force her to give up all annexations in China, though she did get the whole Liao-Tung peninsula. Here is Lenin’s reference to this fact that Japan’s burgeoning imperialism had been done out of its “rightful” spoils:

“Progressive, advanced Asia has struck an irreparable blow against reactionary and backward Europe. Ten years before, this reactionary Europe, headed by Russia, was worrying about the defeat inflicted on China by young Japan, and it combined to snatch the finest fruits of its victory away from the victor ... The return of Port Arthur to Japan is a blow struck against all of reactionary Europe. “

But this is not all: he dots the i’s and crosses the t’s, in a passage defending the views expressed on the Russo-Japanese war by Jules Guesde and H.M. Hyndman.

6. Guesde and Hyndman

A French socialist monthly Le Mouvement Socialiste, had, in its March 1904 issue, carried a symposium on the war by a gallery of the most prominent Second International leaders of various countries. The general line expressed was that of support of Japan in the war in order to defeat Russia, especially by Guesde, the leader of the “orthodox-Marxist” wing (God save them!) of the French Socialist Party, and by H.M. Hyndman, leader of the Social-Democratic Federation in England.

The Russian S-R organ, Revolutsionnaya Rossiya, in its May 18 issue, had attacked these two. The S-R organ was, of course, strenuously against Russia’s war, but it criticized Guesde and Hyndman for being for Japan. It rejected Guesde’s injunction to be “against Russia and for Japan”. It noted, quite truly, that “Hyndman’s answer [in the symposium] is nothing but a dithyrambic eulogy of Japan”. And it said:

“We think the question ... is posed in a radically false way. We are of the opinion that all socialists must and can be only for the working-class and people’s Japan against the imperialist Japan.” [34]

Lenin comes to the defense of Guesde and Hyndman’s pro-Japan position, and attacks the S-R criticism as “confused”. After one of his formulations about distinguishing between a progressive and a reactionary bourgeoisie, he goes after the S-Rs [35]:

“... One understands therefore why the most determined and intransigent representatives of the international revolutionary social-democracy, Jules Guesde in France and Hyndman in England, have expressed without any circumlocution their sympathy for Japan, which is battering the Russian autocracy. Naturally there has been found among us, in Russia, socialists who show that they are confused in their ideas on these questions. The Revolutsionnaya Rossiya has censured Jules Guesde and Hyndman, declaring that socialists could sympathize only with the Japan of the workers and people, not with bourgeois Japan. This censure is as absurd as if one censured a socialist for recognizing the progressive character of the free-trade bourgeoisie as compared with the conservative bourgeoisie. Guesde and Hyndman did not defend the Japanese bourgeoisie and its imperialism but, dealing with the conflict between the two bourgeois countries, they correctly noted the historically progressive role of one of them. The confusion in the ideas of the Socialist-Revolutionaries is naturally the inevitable result among our radical intellectuals of a lack of comprehension of the class point of view and of historical materialism.”

This passage continues with an attack upon the Mensheviks, to be discussed later. In this passage Lenin, labeling the Mensheviks confused also, attacks their “platitudes about the impropriety of ‘speculating’ (!!?) about the victory of the Japanese bourgeoisie and about the war which is a calamity ‘whatever may be’ the result – victory or defeat – for the autocracy”.

In his later article of April 5, he calls this “only sentimental phrases alien to the class point of view and to an analysis of the existing social forces”. [36] The class point of view, it would seem, was represented by the policy of being for the victory of imperialist Japan, not by a policy which fought tsarism and its war but refused to become an advocate of Japan’s military victory.

To get a close-up of the views which Lenin was defending, let us see what Guesde and Hyndman had actually written. In fact, the entire symposium in Le Mouvement Socialiste [37] gives a valuable insight into (1) the thinking of the Second International on the war question, in which the full-blown social-patriotism of 1914 can be seen in the bud, and (2) specifically, the meaning of defeatism in the RussoJapanese war from the point of view not only of socialists but of the most prominent leaders of the socialist movement.

In the preceding issue of this magazine, M. Beer had painted the historical background as follows: “... in the course of the last 30 years, Japan has undergone a development diametrically opposite that of Russia. In 1868 Japan abolished feudalism and founded the national state; the absolute monarchy was abolished in 1889, to give way to a constitutional government, which opened the way to a liberal development. During the same period, Russia set aside all the liberal measures taken around 1860, and about 1880 returned to the old Russian policy, to become, in 1890, an Asiatic cultural and political force.” [38]

In the symposium in the following issue, [39] Jules Guesde wrote: “In order to see which side, in the conflict which is reddening the Far East with blood, should receive the sympathies and best wishes not only of socialists but even of the most vulgar democrats, it is enough to examine the consequences (1) of the defeat, and (2) of the triumph of those who are improperly called ‘our allies’ [i.e., France’s allies – Russia] ...”

If Russia is beaten, he argues, the Russian people would suffer no organic damage in losing Manchuria and Korea. As a necessary first step toward the social revolution, the backbone of European reaction must be broken.

“So no hesitation is possible. In the interests of and for the peace of France and the world; in the interests of and for the liberation of Russia itself, it is necessary to be against Russia and for Japan. Long live Japan!”

“Long live Japan!” cries this “intransigent representative of the international revolutionary social-democracy”, but it is nothing compared with Hyndman’s contribution. Hyndman does exactly what Lenin denies he does: whitewash Japanese imperialism. Wrote Hyndman:

“What Japan is demanding is nothing less than reasonable. It is demanding, in effect, that Manchuria, which Russia seized without any scruples, be recognized as belonging again to the Chinese empire ... [Geography shows] the importance, for the future of Japan, of not leaving Manchuria any longer in Muscovite hands.

“For Russia, the possession of this part of Chinese territory is assuredly one more step in its long career of annexation and expansion.

“For Japan, it is nothing more nor less than a question of life or death.

“All who, like us, recognize the Asians’ right to work out their own destiny ... all who, like us, consider that the extension of the infamies of the Russian regime in China ... would be ... harmful to humanity, all such must necessarily wish the triumph of the Japanese.”

Forty years ago, Hyndman goes on to say, Japan was considered barbarous but today it combats “the black beast of Europe”. One must “admire its progress and its policies” though they have great defects. In Japan “we have seen a display of patriotism in its most noble aspect”. The assault by Japan on China was merely “the result of bad judgment”, but now Japan is not only fighting for its own existence but also for the independence of China! “I hope it will be victorious, not only for our own cause, but for the consequences which will flow therefrom”.

All socialists must aspire to see the exhaustion of Russia. If the Muscovite despotism is weakened either by a defeat or by a costly victory, we will see a new era open up for this great country and its neighbors.

He also hopes that the war will wake up China, and that China, “encouraged and enlightened by the example of the Japanese”, will clean out the Russians, Germans, French and English.

Thus, Hyndman. One is tempted simply to assume that Lenin must have read this very important symposium (Le Mouvement Socialiste was an outstanding journal of the international socialist movement and Lenin was in Switzerland) and that he was not merely going by the S-R organ’s quotations. Perhaps he did not actually get a full dose of it. In any case, if the S-Rs erred, it was only in the direction of mildness.

7. The 2nd International

Let us continue with the articles in the symposium in order to get a fuller cross-section of social-democratic thinking on the Russo-Japanese War. Lenin was not alone; he was, alas, in the deep current.

The contributions by Kautsky and Franz Mehring were more circumspect. Kautsky says:

“Never, in my opinion, has the problem been posed in terms so simple, and never has there been greater unanimity in international socialism, than on this question. The struggle against tsarismthat is the central point of the foreign policy of the socialist parties of all countries ...”

But Kautsky does not take up an attitude on Japan’s side of the war. [6*]

Mehring’s article is one of the vaguest. He makes the cloudy distinction that the revolutionary party can never have an interest for war, but it can have an interest in certain wars. The nearest he gets to the moot point is in the statement that the working class is not indifferent to the question whether Russia or Japan will win; if Japan wills, tsarist despotism gets a mortal blow; if Russia triumphs, tsarism will be consolidated; etc.

Vandervelde wrote: “One can state that, on this question, the socialist democracy is unanimous. It is with the Russian socialists and with the Japanese socialists when they denounce the capitalist influences which have unleashed the war; it has no more sympathy for the imperialism of the Mikado than for the imperialism of the tsar; but, in view of the inevitable repercussions of the conflict on the international and external politics of Europe, it cannot fail to take sides and wish for the defeat of the more dangerous of the two adversaries, whose victory would constitute the most fearful menace for the militant proletariat. And so from this point of view, hesitation is not possible: tsarism, that is the enemy!”

Note that more than any of the others, more than Lenin too, Vandervelde “criticizes” the imperialism of Japan as well as the imperialism of the tsar; but only to introduce the plainest formulation of a “lesser evil” policy: we “wish for the defeat of the more dangerous of the two adversaries”, i.e., we support the less dangerous imperialism against the more dangerous imperialism.

The editor of Le Mouvement Socialiste, André Morizet, sums up the symposium in the same vein, equally delighted in the “unanimity” of socialist opinion. The unanimity was an illusion; all were opposed to tsarism’s war, but other political questions were glossed over. The International Socialist Bureau of the Second International limited itself to urging all socialist parties “to struggle with all their strength and combined efforts to prevent any extension of the war, so that their countries, far from participating in it, will seek to re-establish and maintain peace”. [40]

How much was glossed over we see when we get to the position taken by the socialist party which forthrightly came out against Japan in the war. This was the young Socialist Party of Japan itself, led by Sen Katayama. But before we quote Katayama, let us hear from one later contributor to the symposium, the leading figure among the Russian socialists, Plekhanov.

Plekhanov is very cautious. Writing in a later issue of Le Mouvement Socialiste [41], he says that he has little to add after the articles in the March issue. He does not ascribe the war to imperialism: war came, he explains, because tsarism wanted war for internal reasons, to counter revolutionary sentiment; that is all. He spends much space on the incompetence and stupidity of the Russian military leaders. He predicts more defeats for the autocracy, which will thereby be weakened; if tsarism falls or gets very much weaker, socialists would rejoice ...

There are two passing references to Japan:

“... whereas in Japan the government and the nation are one, the socialist movement being only at its beginning, with us an abyss already exists between the rulers and all the best elements among the ruled ...”

Who told him that in Japan “the government and the nation are one”? When he wrote this, he had already read a first article by Katayama on the anti-war position of the Japanese socialists, not to speak of Katayama’s attacks on the anti-working-class policies of the Mikado’s regime generally. We can recall that Hyndman had seen in the Japanese people a “display of patriotism in its most noble aspect”. No doubt this English Japanophile would have denounced the Japanese socialists as “unpatriotic”.

The second reference to Japan by Plekhanov is not due to him, but is very interesting. Plekhanov quotes at length two resolutions which had been adopted by social-democratic workers’ groups in two Russian towns. Both express solidarity with the anti-war stand taken by the Japanese socialists against their own government; indeed the first says further that the war is “of benefit only to our governments and harmful to the working class without distinction of language or nationality”. This occurs in the course of the quotation but Plekhanov does not comment on it or point to it.

The position taken by Sen Katayama was apparently partly based on pacifism and partly on a general feeling of class hostility to the Mikado regime, not on any reasoned-out analysis of the war question. Indeed, in an article [42] of his written just before the war broke out but when it was clearly on the way, he seems to whitewash the Japanese regime’s policy even though he is opposed to war against Russia. The Japanese people (he says in this article) are indignant at the arrogant and unfriendly attitude of Russia, especially because Russia and its allies deprived Japan “of the fruits of our victories in the Sino-Japanese War”. The attitude of the people is hostile to Russia. “Japan’s policy with regard to Korea and China has always aimed at opening these countries to civilization and developing them along the lines of modern culture. Russia has always blocked these beneficent efforts of Japan.” The principal cause of the way crisis is the fact that Russia has ignored its pledges to withdraw its troops from Manchuria. Among the people there is a peace-faction and a war-faction, but “The attitude of the government is rather ambiguous; but it does not seem to want war ...”

Then, after all this, Katayama sets forth the anti-war views of the Japanese socialists. They are “opposed to war against Russia”. The war would only be a war in the interests of capitalists, for whose profit thousands would die. “If Japan is beaten, we would have to pay a heavy war indemnity to Russia – we, that is ... the proletarian class. If we are victorious, the result does not seem bright for the workers.” The workers got no benefits from the victory over China; they just had to pay new taxes to maintain the armed forces, and militarism intensified. “I myself do not believe that the occupation of Manchuria by Russia is a question of life or death for Japan. Very far from it: the Japanese workers have no vital interest in it.”

He goes on to describe the oppressive character of the Japanese regime: conscription; militarism; police state; no laws to protect the working class; meetings broken up by police; the workers have no right to vote. He says he is sure that the great majority of the Japanese people are opposed to war with Russia, and the working class certainly is.

In a subsequent article [43] after the outbreak of war, he says more or less the same thing:

“The position taken by the Japanese socialists in the present conflict with Russia has been very clear and very frank from the very beginning. They were and remain hostile to war, not only to the war with Russia but to all war in general – ... the protest of the Japanese socialists against the war has been courageous and energetic.”

The Japanese party organized many anti-war meetings, very successful ones too. The government harassed them, and also suspended socialist publications.

8. The Mensheviks’ Position

Was the Japanese Socialist Party alone in the Second International in specifically opposing the war by Japan? We have already mentioned the position taken by the S-R organ Revolutsionnaya Rossiya, which was the central organ of the S-R Party itself. In addition, the Menshevik party too rejected the pro-Japanese defeatist line.

The position of the Mensheviks leads us back to the views expressed by Lenin. We have already seen, quoted by Zinoviev, what the Menshevik leader Martov said about it in his later History of the Russian Social-Democracy. Zinoviev pretended that this was an ex-post-facto revision by Martov of the “defeatist” line which the Mensheviks too held during the war itself. He accused Martov of “obviously beclouding the issue ... attempting to exculpate his revolutionary sins in the eyes of the bourgeoisie”.

Were the Mensheviks really for defeatism during the war, and was Martov concealing this in his later History? It appears not. It seems to be a case of literary “Zinovievism” again.

We have already seen that Lenin not only criticized the S-Rs as “confused” on pro-Japanism but he linked this with an attack on the Mensheviks for the same sin. The reason is that the Menshevik organ had polemized against Lenin’s article on The Fall of Port Arthur, the article in which Lenin’s pro-Japanese defeatism had blossomed. The Mensheviks had inveighed against “speculating on the victory of the Japanese bourgeoisie”, and Lenin had ridiculed this caution as a “sentimental phrase”.

A very interesting example of the Mensheviks’ views on the war is afforded by a document which the editors of Lenin’s Collected Works quote, in a footnote, to explain Lenin’s attack on them. This was a Menshevik statement, distributed as a leaflet and signed by the editors of Iskra (undated):

“If Russia is victorious in the present war, the tsar and his accomplices will have won a victory over all of Russia, over the working class and likewise over the bourgeoisie. If Japan inflicts defeat on Russia, the bourgeoisie will have won over the imperial government, after which it will unite with it and both will turn their combined forces against the working class. Complete victory of Russia or defeat of Russia will have only disadvantages for the working class, although in truth no defeat can do more evil in Russia than is daily done to it by the existence of the autocracy. But the working class does not have to choose between the victory of democracy and the defeat of Russia. Although defeat is the lesser evil, it would, we have seen, bring enough calamities. What does the working class need, what result would be of advantage to it? First of all, it needs the end of the war. It needs peace at any price.” [44]

It is clear that this is a pronouncement “against both victory and defeat”. The Mensheviks are trying to work out an anti-war position which will eschew the error of supporting Japan’s victory. They are trying to get away from the alternatives of victory-or-defeat. We will later see how Trotsky and Luxemburg did this in the First World War, in a revolutionary, Marxist fashion. But the Mensheviks are Mensheviks: they are not capable of doing so. (The anti-war Mensheviks of the First World War were to fall into the same pattern.)

In attempting to avoid the dilemma of victory-or-defeat, they fall into the slogan of “peace at any price”. And Lenin tears them apart on this. He shows how a socialist cannot possibly be for “peace at any price” – peace, yes, but not peace at any price, as Lenin emphasizes at one point.

In Lenin’s article [45] of April 5, his polemic against this slogan is especially vigorous. He notes with justified glee that the Menshevik Iskra had started backwatering in an editorial on March 16 which modified the position. “One cannot limit oneself”, said the new Menshevik editorial, “to demanding peace because peace combined with the maintenance of the autocracy would mean the ruin of the country.” That is very good, comments Lenin; one cannot in truth speak of peace at any price but only at the price of the overthrow of the autocracy. [7*]

In other words: fight for peace, yes, but this fight for peace must be indissolubly linked with the continuation of the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the autocracy.

Furthermore (and here we are not paraphrasing Lenin): it is an error to call for the defeat of Russia by Japan; but it is an opposite error to make an entirely false estimate of the objective effect of military defeat on the tsarist regime and internal politics. The Menshevik analysis denied that the weakening of the autocracy by the war debacle would open up revolutionary opportunities for the working class and other enemies of tsarism. They drew no revolutionary perspective from the war.

The Menshevik conception of “neither victory nor defeat”, then, was one of a return to the status quo ante bellum. They did not know how to avoid the dilemma of victory-or-defeat without falling into this centrist and pacifist pattern, which flowed from their fundamental politics, not from their rejection of support to Japan.

But in polemizing against the Mensheviks on “peace at any price”, Lenin writes as if a refutation of their position on this slogan was also, and automatically, a refutation of their position on pro-Japanism. And this is not true.

We note another interesting thing in the Menshevik statement quoted above. To anticipate a discussion which will arise when we get to the First World War period, we note that it contains a kind of “lesser evil” formulation: “Defeat is the lesser evil” as compared with tsarist victory, says the statement, though it refuses to choose the “lesser evil” by advocating the defeat of Russia by Japanese imperialism.

Let us grant that, in the tsarist despotism, and under the conditions of this tsarist despotism, defeat of tsarism is the lesser evil as compared with its victory. But the whole point is that a recognition of the existence of a greater and lesser evil does not necessarily obligate socialists to support the lesser against the greater. We do not remain within the confines of the choice between lesser and greater evil, as if these unequal evils were the only alternatives. We propose our own socialist alternative to the victory or defeat of either government by the other.

In this political sense, it is entirely possible to speak of defeat in a given war as being a lesser evil” as compared with one’s own government’s victory without thereby becoming “defeatists”, since one puts forward a third road to take. But when we come to meet the “lesser evil” formulation in Lenin in September 1914, it will not be this approach that will be embodied in it. The 1905 Menshevik use of the phrase “defeat is the lesser evil” is, therefore, by no means an anticipation or precursor of the same phrase in Lenin-1914, as might appear on the surface or out of context. The political idea is quite different. It is useful to have this example of the formulation that “defeat is the lesser evil” in the course of a position which dissociates it from defeatism.

9. The “Special Russian” Character of Lenin’s Line

The key idea is that the socialist approach in such imperialist wars does not base itself on the perspective of a military decision between the imperialist contestants. But in the Russo-Japanese War, Lenin explicitly, looked to an end of the war by the military power of one or the other government. Thus, writing on June 9, 1905 after the destruction of the tsar’s fleet at Tsushima, Lenin, rejoicing over this crushing defeat, points out the significance of the event by writing: “Everybody understood that the definitive outcome of the war depended on the naval victory of one of the belligerents.” [46]

Lenin here writes “naval victory” because he wants to show that with the debacle of the fleet, the tsar is done for; but in passing, his methodological approach is made crystal-clear. The outcome of the war to which he looked was the “victory of one of the belligerents”.

Finally, it is important to take note of another over-all aspect of Lenin’s position on the Russo-Japanese War. At no time did Lenin generalize it into a “defeatism” as a matter of general socialist policy. It was a policy for this war, between these contenders, in this concrete situation. He never gave the idea of defeat the “principled” character which he and Zinoviev were to give it later in 1914-16. It obviously could not be “internationalized”. In no way could this defeat-concept be applied to any other country, except Russia or some other backward, semi-feudal reactionary despotism at war With a “progressive” capitalist state.

While this is obvious from the position itself, Lenin’s argumentation brought it out from still another angle. This was his reiterated analysis that Russia’s defeat was due to, and necessitated by, not merely the reactionary, character of its war aims (imperialism, etc.), but by its rotten, outlived, un-modern, backward social structure as compared with “progressive” Japan – which, we must remember, may or may not have been “progressive” as compared with Russia but was hardly so in comparison with Western Europe.

Thus in his June 9 article, he wrote: “The autocracy ... now faces the end it deserves. The war has revealed all its running sores, brought to light its whole rottenness showed how it is divorced from the people ... The war has been an implacable judgment.” [47]

This he does at even greater length in The Fall of Port Arthur:

“[The autocracy’s collapse in war is] a symptom of the collapse of our whole political system ... War is now made by peoples, and that is why one sees an essential characteristic of the war brought out in particularly bold relief: the manifestation in action ... of the incompatibility of the people and the government ...

“The fall of Port Arthur draws one of the greatest historic balance-sheets on the crimes of tsarism ... The military and civil bureaucracy has been revealed as being fully as venal and parasitic as in the days of serfdom ... The ignorance, lack of culture, illiteracy and extremely oppressed state of the peasant masses were manifested with terrible clarity in the conflict with a progressive people, in the course of a modern war which requires human material of high quality as imperiously as does contemporary technology ... Tsarism is revealed as an obstacle to modern organization, an obstacle to attaining the high level of present needs ... The connection between the military organization of the country and its whole economic and cultural structure has never been as close as at the present time. Therefore the collapse could not fail to be the beginning of a deep political crisis.” [48]

Lenin connected defeat with revolution, to be sure, but even more basically he connected defeat with the un-modern, pre-capitalist social structure of tsarism, the social divorcement between the despotism and the people – in comparison with which Japan was “modern”, “young”, “fresh”, and “progressive”. The historical basis of his defeatism was, therefore, the type of situation which belonged to the youthful epoch of capitalism, which could not be carried over into the new imperialist era which had already begun. His position on the war was a case of “political lag” (on the analogy of the famous “cultural lag”): socialist theory had not yet caught up with political reality. More than anyone else, Lenin caught up with it in the First World War, but without throwing off all the remnants of the past which weighed on the socialist movement.

Notes

4*. Qualification [added by author to later article in series]: In Bertram Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution, the author includes a quotation from Lenin’s article on The Fall of Port Arthur which would itself be enough to convey to the informed reader that Lenin’s position was one of support to Japan’s side of the war, or at least that Lenin considered Japan to be fighting a “progressive” war.

However Wolfe’s own text does not indicate that he understood what he was quoting. In fact he states that “[Lenin’s] words are worth pondering ... because they contain within them the germ of his future ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in World War I ...”. This is precisely what is not true as I have tried to make clear. Lenin’s position was merely a continuation of the then-orthodox approach to the war question and particularly to Russia’s participation therein, and was the near-unanimous line of the whole International.

Wolfe also comments that Lenin “expected Japan to win, and thought that this would be an aid to the progressive forces in Russia ...” Again, this formulation quite misses the point, which is that Lenin desired Japan to win. Wolfe comes closest with the remark that Lenin’s article was “a scarce-concealed cry of exultation that ‘progressive Japan’ had defeated ‘backward and reactionary Europe’ ...”.

However, all in all, Wolfe’s passage on this point (pages 27-9) is better informed than any other I have yet seen.

5*. For this tendency, see remarks by S.A. Korff in Autocracy and Revolution in Russia (1923), pp.67-9.

6*. But in 1907 at the Essen congress of the German Social-Democratic Party, August Bebel said in passing: “The Japanese were the aggressors beyond doubt; we rejoiced over that; we wished victory for them ...” His point at the moment was that socialists do not base their attitude on who is the aggressor; when he refers to socialist support of Japan’s side of the war, he is obviously assuming it as being well known and beyond the need of discussion.

7*. The same notes by the editors of Lenin’s Collected Works state that the slogan “peace at any price” was also at that time put forward by Trotsky in his pamphlet Our Political Tasks. They quote him as writing: “It is necessary to cover Russia with proclamations which are as clear, simple and short as possible, all of which must aim, in the present period of agitation, at the same goal: peace at any price.” Without an independent check, it is impossible to take this at face value, given the falsifications of Trotsky’s views that fill the Stalinist notes. The position of the Mensheviks is attested by Lenin’s articles, not only by the notes.

Reference Notes

15. Op. cit. (note 3); in Gegen den Strom, pp.441-2.

16. Translated into English serially in The Workers Monthly, Sept. and Oct. 1925 and following issues; but the whole book was not published here, the series ending before it got to 1914. Considering the great space which Zinoviev devotes to defeatism in the Russo-Japanese war, it is strange that his section on the World War does not mention the defeat-slogan at all (cf. the French edition, Histoire du Parti Communiste Russe, Paris, 1926).

17. Op. cit. (note 3) ; in Gegen den Strom, pp.427-442.

18. Workers Monthly, Sept. 1925, p.518.

19. Op. cit. (note 3); Gegen den Strom, p.432.

20. Workers Monthly, Sept. 1925, p.519.

21. Ibid., Oct. 1925, p.569-70.

22. Quoted in Dallin, The Rise of Russia in Asia.

23. Quoted in Pares, A History of Russia, p.428.

24. Op. cit. (note 22), p.79.

25. Quoted in G. Alexinsky, Modern Russia.

26. Workers Monthly, Oct. 1925, p.570.

27. Staline (Leiden, 1935), p.70.

28. Article, The Revolutionary Movement in Russia, by Alinar and Jayare.

29. Op. cit. (note 27), p.69.

29a. CW6 (German ed.) pp.449-53 for first, and pp.461-2 (final draft p.472) for second.

30. CW7 (French ed.), pp.45-6, The Autocracy and the Proletariat.

31. CW7, pp.58-66. The Fall of Port Arthur, from Vperiod, No.2, Jan. 14, 1905.

32. CW7, 205, European Capital and the Autocracy, from Vperiod, No.13, April 5, 1905.

33. Op. cit. (note 31).

34. Quoted in editors’ note to CW7, p.63.

35. Op. cit. (note 31).

36. Op. cit. (note 32).

37. The main body of the symposium was carried in the March 1904 issue of Le Mouvement Socialiste (Paris). A second article by Sen Katayama followed in the April issue, and Plekhanov’s contribution in the May issue.

38. Ibid., February issue, p.180.

39. Ibid., March issue.

40. Quoted in the contribution by André Morizet, March issue.

41. May issue.

42. Included in the March issue; originally published in L’Aurore of Jan. 11, 1904, i.e., before the war started.

43. April issue.

44. Quoted in editors’ note to CW7, p.64; statement titled Who Must Win?.

45. Op. cit. (note 32).

46. CW7, p.389, The Debacle, from Proletarii, No. 3, June 9, 1905.

47. Ibid., p.392.

48. 0p. cit. (note 31), p.61.

Part 2. “Defeatism” During the First World War

In the first two chapters (Part I) of this article, we discussed two myths: (1) that some kind of precedent for Lenin’s world-war defeat-slogan can be found in Marx, Engels or the tradition of the Second International; and (2) that Lenin’s world-war defeat slogan was first applied in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. We have seen that there is no precedent whatsoever for a slogan of “defeat” combined with opposition to both sides in a war.

III. Lenin’s Defeat-Slogan 1914-16

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, defeatism had a real past history, and the idea of defeat had a definite meaning in the socialist tradition; but this history and this meaning were quite different from what it later became in the Lenin-myth. First of all, it meant defeat by the enemy government (“pro-war defeatism” we have called it). Secondly, it was not a formula for international application, but the given policy on one side of a given war between a despotic, backward state and a “progressive” capitalist state.

As we raise the curtain on Lenin in August 1914 preparing a document to state the position of the Bolshevik party on the imperialist war, it is this tradition and this meaning which is in his consciousness. Shocked and appalled by the collapse of the whole Second International all around him, he sees the line of blood which has been drawn between the leaders who are whipping the working class into capitulation to the imperialist chauvinism of their own ruling class, under the slogan of “civil peace” and “defense of the fatherland”, and the socialists who maintain the class struggle against the war and for the overthrow of this murderous capitalism which is setting worker against worker to cut each other’s throats.

He reacts in the fashion which is characteristic of Lenin the man, and not merely Lenin the Marxist.

For example, over a decade before, he had had to raise a great hue and cry in order to bring together the atomized Russian social-democratic groups and circles into a modern centralized party with a central organ; that at the time was the great next step which had to be taken, it was “what is to be done”. It was the key; it had to be pounded home into the consciousness of every militant; everything had to be subordinated to emphasizing it. How do you emphasize it? By repeating it a thousand times, in every conceivable way? Yes. By explaining it patiently over and over? Yes. By piling up argument after argument, seizing every fact, every problem, and converting it into, turning it toward, a lesson on centralization? Yes. But that is not all. The problem is greater centralization, as compared with the present looseness. Then put “Centralization!” on a banner, on a pedestal, emphasize it by raising it to a principle. But the opponents of this elementary need cover their political objections demagogically by yelling “Bureaucratism!” “Lenin wants more bureaucratism, while we are for democracy!” – How does Lenin react? Yes, he replies: “Bureaucratism versus democracy” [49] – that is what we need now. He makes perfectly clear what he means, but that is how he seeks to underline, with heavy, thick strokes, the task of the day, by exaggerating in every way that side of the problem which points in the direction it is necessary to move now. Tomorrow he will recapture the balance, but today that is the way he puts the weight on the side which needs it. [8*]

In 1914 the traitors to international socialism are yelling “Civil peace!” No, says Lenin, civil war!

In 1914, the traitors are yelling “Defense of the fatherland!” No, says Lenin, defeat of your own fatherland!

Defeat? The concept has lain fallow since 1905. Not once in the interval has Lenin recalled it in his writings. What was it we said about it then? It was our policy against tsarism, against tsarism only ...

1. Formulation No.1: The “Lesser Evil” Formula

In early September 1914 Lenin presents his draft thesis to his comrades in Berne. In it – in a subordinate place, to be sure, but still included – is the statement:

“From the point of view of the working class and the laboring masses of all the peoples of Russia, by far the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsar’s armies and the tsar’s monarchy, which oppresses Poland, the Ukraine, and a number of other peoples of Russia, and which inflames national hatred in order to increase the pressure of Great-Russia over the other nationalities and in order to strengthen the reaction of the barbarous government of the tsar’s monarchy.” [50]

What role does this statement play in the thesis? It is not in the point (No.7) which presents the line and slogans on the war. It is in the section (No.6) which relates the war to the national question in the tsarist prison of the peoples, which argues that Russian socialists must “conduct a merciless and ruthless struggle against Great-Russian and tsarist-monarchist chauvinism”. In this connection, Lenin argues, for the oppressed nationalities under Moscow “the lesser evil is defeat”.

Lenin has remembered the idea and stuck it in at this point. It is the starting point of a development which we will now have to follow step by step, as it evolves, changes and shifts. It can be done only step by step because, as we have indicated, we are not dealing with a clear political idea which can be easily discussed pro and con, through “examples” and “illustrative quotations”, but with a theoretical snarl which has to be disentangled.

We get a hint of what was working in Lenin’s thinking, as he remembers the concept of defeat, by his rough notes for an unfinished article which he jotted down later the same month (perhaps, as we shall see, after already getting objections to the formulation).

“If everywhere [on both sides, there are] the bourgeoisie and the imperialists, everywhere the infamous preparation for war, if Russian tsarism [is] especially infamous and barbarous (more reactionary than any), then [it is likewise true that] German imperialism is also monarchist – feudal-dynastic aims – big bourgeoisie less free than in France. The Russian Social-Democrats were correct in saying that for them the lesser evil [is] the defeat of tsarism, that their immediate enemy [is] more than anything Great-Russian chauvinism; but the socialists (not the opportunists) of all countries should see their main enemy in ‘their’ (own ‘fatherland’s’) chauvinism.” [51]

It is clear how he is trying to think it through. Note the criteria with which he is comparing Russian tsarism and German kaiserism. Tsarism is the most reactionary regime. But – a shadow of the “progressive” Mikado crosses the page – is not the enemy government, Germany, also dominated by precapitalist reaction? It is “monarchist”, it is dominated by “feudal-dynastic aims”. In this comparison, it is not the imperialist role of Germany, capitalist Germany, which is the criterion. “The big bourgeoisie in Germany is less free than in France” – why is this brought up in this context? It is no mystery because we can understand that in these notes he is not thinking as the Lenin who wrote Imperialism but as the Lenin who wrote The Fall of Port Arthur.

The emphasis limiting the concept to the Russian socialists is brought out very sharply in Lenin’s next mention of defeat, in his letter to Shlyapnikov of October 17:

“In order that the struggle may proceed along a definite and clear line, one must have a slogan that summarizes it. This slogan is: For us Russians, from the point of view of the interests of the laboring masses and the working class of Russia, there cannot be the slightest doubt, absolutely no doubt whatever, that the lesser evil would be, here and now, the defeat of tsarism in the present war. For tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism. We do not sabotage the war, but we struggle against chauvinism ... It would also be erroneous both to appeal for individual acts of firing at officers, and to allow arguments like the one which says: We do not want to help kaiserism.” [52]

It is now a slogan. And when Lenin writes that “there cannot be the slightest doubt, absolutely no doubt whatever” about it, it is his way of reacting vigorously to the fact that it has already been attacked in the Bolshevik tanks.

But mainly what the letter makes clear is that by “defeat” Lenin plainly means defeat by the enemy government, by the German armies. It is this that is the “lesser evil”. (Later reinterpretations sometimes pretended that it meant defeat by the workers’ revolution; but in the first place, this is no “evil”, at all, and in the second place the whole business about defeat would be totally incomprehensible if that was all it intended to say.)

When Lenin writes “here and now” ... “in the present war”, there can be no doubt about it, even if we did not know that, at this stage, defeatism has no other meaning than military defeat by the enemy camp. In this connection, when Lenin reverted to this same formulation in November 1916 (quotation given below), it is again perfectly clear.

This is what gives the “lesser evil” formulation the sense it has: defeat by Germany would be an evil, yes, but the greater evil would be the victory of the tsar’s army; and we choose between these two evils.

This is what makes sense of the reason given here for the slogan: “For tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism.” This slogan of defeat depends for its rationalization not merely on opposition to both camps, but on a “lesser evil” distinction between the two camps. Tsarism is the worst. It obviously could not apply in Germany, where kaiserism is a hundred times better than tsarism. It can apply only for “us Russians”.

Moreover, Lenin never did apply this “lesser evil” formulation of the defeat-slogan to any other country. When he tried to “internationalize” the concept, it became something else.

The slogan of defeat begins, therefore, as a special Russian position on the war. Like the motivation for it, it has its roots only in the “special Russian policy” of the Marx-Engels-Second International period of development. Without this background, the very idea of a “special Russian position” on the war would be strange. Here is a general world war, where in every other respect Lenin is driven to emphasize the inextricable entangling of all the threads of world imperialism, and yet he proposes that the socialists of one of the belligerents must adopt a position which he does not even propose for the others.

But the question leaps to the eye: If the slogan of defeat means defeat by Germany (whose victory is the lesser evil), doesn’t this mean preferring the victory of Germany? Naturally, this conclusion has already been excluded by Lenin – after all, the bulk of his writing at this time is devoted precisely to marshaling the arguments against the social-patriots, the German social-patriots above all – but then this means that the slogan of defeat cannot have the simple, clear meaning that it did in 1904-5. How shall this contradiction be resolved?

Out of the attempt to resolve this contradiction came the wavy course of Lenin’s defeatism in 1914-16.

2. Rejection of Defeatism in the Bolshevik Ranks

For the defeat-slogan was the one aspect of Lenin’s war position which immediately met with the widest opposition in the ranks of the Bolshevik party itself. In his letter to Shlyapnikov, Lenin had asked him to send “more details of Russian voices and reactions”. Others reported also.

Shlyapnikov recounted, in his memoirs, that the defeat-slogan provoked “perplexity” in Russia. He was apparently being mild. Baevsky’s memoirs relate that it raised objections in Russia and that there was a tendency to eliminate the word defeat “as a very odious one”. The Moscow organization adopted the later theses of November 1 (quoted below) with the exception of the paragraph on defeat. [53] The Moscow Bolsheviks wrote, via Stockholm for transmission to Lenin, that “notwithstanding all respect to him, his advice to sell the house [code-word for the defeat-slogan] has not struck a responsive chord”. [54] Later on in 1915, at the trial of the Bolshevik members of the Duma, the Bolshevik deputies refused to take responsibility for the defeat-slogan although generally they defended an and-war view. Bukharin and Piatakov criticized it in the emigration. [9*] In fact – outside of Lenin’s immediate co-workers on the Central Organ in Berne, particularly Zinoviev in his own peculiar way – we cannot cite any known Bolshevik who defended it, or any section of the party which came to its defense against its critics; though there must have been such, to various degrees, since at different times different formulations of the idea were approved or compromised on.

The Geneva section of the Bolshevik émigrés wrote in their objection. A letter to Lenin by Karpinsky (September 27) criticized the draft thesis as follows, putting the finger on the bedeviling contradiction:

“The text of paragraph 6 should be changed in order not to give rise to a misinterpretation of this passage: that the Russian Social-Democrats wish for the victory of the Germans and the defeat of the Russians. Note here the possible connection: the German Social-Democrats struggle against Russian tsarism and the Russian Social-Democrats greet the victory of German arms. This idea should he formulated so as to explain what would be the meaning of the victory of the Russian troops and what would be the meaning of their defeat objectively.” [55]

The passage had meant to the Geneva Bolsheviks exactly what it had meant in the whole past of the socialist movement: wish for the victory of the enemy government. But if we Russian Bolsheviks see reason to wish this, why attack the German social democrats for wishing the very same thing? ... So they propose that the only statement that should be made is about the objective consequences of defeat. What they have in mind is merely the idea that “defeat facilitates revolution”. They want to strip the passage down to this.

3. Whittling Down the “Lesser Evil” Formula

But when the Bolshevik Central Committee adopts its thesis on the war for publication as the position of the party on November 1, this change is not made. The “lesser evil” formulation goes in. Only now it is not merely tied up with the nationalities problem but directed more generally. And it is preceded by a sentence (whose idea had already been somewhat indicated in the rough notes of September) which doubly underlines that this is a notion for Russian socialists only, which warns that it can not be applied for the internationalist socialist movement as a whole:

“Under given conditions, it is impossible to determine from the standpoint of the international proletariat which is the lesser evil for socialism: the defeat of one or the defeat of the other group of belligerent nations ...”

And it continues more or less along the lines of the letter to Shlyapnikov which we have seen: “... For us Russian Social-Democrats, however, there cannot exist the least doubt that from the standpoint of the working class and of the laboring masses of all the peoples of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy, the most reactionary and barbarous government oppressing the greatest number of nations and the greatest mass of the populations of Europe and Asia.” [56]

This “special Russian position” now becomes the public and open position of the party. Once again there is repicated the tell-tale emphasis that Russia is “the most reactionary and barbarous government” in order to justify this, special Russian policy as such, echoing the thought that “tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism”.

What follows politically from this statement of the “lesser evil”? Surely,it cannot remain simply an interesting thought in a thesis. Obviously, though the thesis does not yet say so in so many words, what follows is that we wish for this “lesser evil”. Otherwise, why bring up the subject in this way?

We find Lenin putting this down in black and white in his next mention of the defeat-concept, December 12: “... it is impossible for the Great-Russians to ‘defend the fatherland’ otherwise than by wishing defeat for tsarism in every war, this being the lesser evil for nine-tenths of the population of Great-Russia ...”

So we now “wish defeat”; and this certainly follows from the formula; for if it is so important to emphasize that it is the lesser evil, how can we avoid the conclusion? But the “lesser evil” notion has depended for its political motivation on nothing else than the idea that tsarism is worst, “most reactionary”, “most barbarous”. This motivation is really inseparable from the formula. But when Lenin now states the reason (to continue the quotation where we broke it off) it is watered down to a statement which could apply to any of the imperialist powers and not only Russian tsarism:

“... since tsarism not only oppresses these nine-tenths of the population economically and politically, but also demoralizes, degrades, defiles and prostitutes them by developing in them the habit of oppressing other peoples, by teaching them to cover up their shame with hypocritical quasi-patriotic phrases.” [57]

But this is agitation; it is no longer a motivation for the special position; the motivation has disappeared (it will shortly be specifically repudiated, We shall see), leaving only the formula, which will soon be changed too.

4. Formulation No.2: “Defeat Facilitates ...”

The big contradiction remains: If the Russian socialists can wish the military defeat of tsarism (everybody understands: by German arms), what is so terrible about the German socialists wishing for the same outcome?

No doubt Lenin confronted this abundantly in the objections that arose within his own ranks, as from Karpinsky and the Geneva section. But we do not find him taking note of it until February 1915, in a polemic against – the Menshevik Axelrod, whom he accuses of being an apologist for the German social-chauvinists. And, as his critics had tried to warn him, he finds this apologist utilizing his own methodology:

“Axelrod’s assertion [writes Lenin] that ‘the defeat of Russia, while unable to hamper the organic development of the country, would help liquidate the old regime’, is true when taken by itself, but when used to justify the German chauvinists it is nothing but an attempt to curry favor with the Südekums. [Südekum was an especially crude representative of German Social-Democratic pro-war fervor – H.D.] To recognize the usefulness of Russian defeat without openly accusing the German and Austrian Social-Democrats of betraying socialism means in reality to help them whitewash themselves, extricate themselves from a difficult situation, betray the workers. Axelrod’s article is a double bow, one before the German social-chauvinists, another before the French.” [58]

No doubt Axelrod is in effect whitewashing the Germans with his arguments, but what is wrong with this argument which can be used so? Lenin replies in effect: “No sir, Axelrod, you can’t get away with it, because when the Germans say what we say, it’s because they merely want to find a pretext for their betrayal of socialism.”

No doubt. But is it a cogent pretext? Is the “pretext” justified politically? Has not Lenin lent color and strength to this pretext with his insistence, as an important political concept governing policy on the war, that “tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism – or at any rate “most reactionary” – and with his formula of the lesser evil? He cannot and does not reply to this.

Faced with the other side of his formula as it looks from the German angle, he does not repeat it against Axelrod. Instead, he runs for defense to precisely the line which the Geneva Bolsheviks had recommended in its stead, which he had refused to accept: he writes as if all he had said was that Russian defeat had its “usefulness”. (“Objectively”, as Karpinsky had written.)

And so we get the first mention of what we may call Formula No.2 – the idea that “defeat facilitates revolution” (objectively). As will, typically happen again on this question, it is a shifting of ground in the face of the insoluble contradiction.

Now there is a positive element in this Formula No.2 which will necessitate discussion and analysis in another article, not under the head of “defeatism”, but for our present purposes we must note the following:

(1) At the very least, this new formula, of which we will see several other examples in Lenin’s writings of the period, is different from the defeat-slogan with which he started out. Different political arguments and concepts would be marshaled in defending the two. They do not enforce the same conclusions.

(2) The tremendous difference between them is shown by a simple consideration. The “lesser-evil” formula (No.1), we have seen, was sharply, emphatically and repeatedly limited by Lenin to Russian socialists only. The thesis had gone out of its way to proclaim that it did not hold “from the standpoint of the international proletariat.” It was not capable of “internationalization”. But the notion about the “usefulness” of defeat, its objective effect in “facilitating revolution”, came not from any special Russian consideration or experience but from the experience of all history. It obviously can be applied as much or as little to any and all countries as to Russia. And from this point on, Lenin drops all the previous talk about the special Russian applicability of defeatism and does try to arrive at “international” formulas.

If all the defeatist-talk amounts to is an objective recognition of a connection between defeat and revolution, then it is certainly not a slogan, not even a “slogan” in quotation marks. There is also a connection between economic crisis and revolution – let us say that economic crisis facilitates revolution – but that will lead no educated Marxist into expressing a “wish” for depressions (“the worse the better”). Wage cuts and massacres have been known to facilitate revolutions too ...

As mentioned, an analysis of the relation between defeat and revolution has to be made under another head, but we must point out that even at best, when Lenin tears down “defeatism” to Formula No.2, which is no kind of “defeatism” by itself, he is emphasizing only one side of the relation. When later [59] we find him making this connection absolute, with the statement that revolution is impossible without defeat, we must understand that he is driven to this historical absurdity by the polemical, need to find a content for something called “the slogan of defeat” or “defeatism”, not by any course of political reasoning.

(4) With these things in mind, it is plain that if the idea “defeat facilitates” had been all there was in Lenin’s thinking, he could never have launched such a thing as a “slogan of defeat”, nor would the polemics on the question have taken the course they did.

5. Formulation No.3: “Wish Defeat in Every Country”

As we have seen, Lenin’s formula No.2 is, in fact, internationally applicable and not special to Russia. So it is that at this same time. (February, 1915) Lenin, for the first time, explicitly launches his “defeatism” as an international policy.

Modern democracy [i.e., socialism] will remain faithful to itself only if it does not join one or the other imperialist bourgeoisie, if it says that “both are worst”, Tit wishes the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie in every country. Every other decision will in reality be national-liberal and entirely foreign to true internationalism. [60]

This is the end of the road for the politics which gave birth to Lenin’s defeatism. Lenin is specifically repudiating in so many words the whole motivation which had brought it on in the first place: “Both are worst.” Only a few months before, the basic thought had been that “tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism”, he had had to emphasize that tsarism is “the most reactionary barbarous government”, “more reactionary than any”, etc. [10*] Not only has the original motivation been abandoned, but now the formula itself is changed. The “slogan of defeat” remains as the smile without the Cheshire cat. What remains is a running polemic but not a political line.

The formula that we now have is “wish the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie in every country”. Superficially it sounds as if he had said it before, and he had indeed used the phrase “wish defeat”. But that was only as part of the “special Russian policy”, as a conclusion from the lesser-evil formula; it was only Russian socialists who were supposed to “wish defeat” because of the uniquely reactionary character of their own government.

The phrase is the same but the political content is now entirely different. “Wish defeat” was a consistent conclusion from the lesser-evil formula. But what does it now mean once it is internationalized? Again, something different at any rate, and it is, in fact, a new Formula No.3.

Let us now see how the insoluble problem of what it means gave rise to the fourth and last switch in the formulas of defeatism.

“Wish defeat” is, as a matter of fact, the historical and necessary kernel of any defeatism which is properly so called. It was the working meaning of defeatism which we used in the previous historical sections. One may say anything one wants about “defeat”, but not every statement about defeat is a “defeatism”. Defeatism means favoring defeat, desiring defeat, calling for defeat, working for defeat, or something akin, or else one is simply inventing misleading and useless terminology.

Now before 1914 there was no difficulty at all in understanding the meaning of “wish defeat.” Nobody could misunderstand it either. With Marx and Engels, in the Second International, with Lenin in the Russo-Japanese War, it meant defeat by the enemy government, whose victory we support. And when it was reborn in Lenin’s thinking in 1914, it still meant defeat by the enemy government. This is what we called (redundantly, it is true) pro-war defeatism.

Entirely unawares of what he is getting into, Lenin is now trying to work out a way of preserving the sharp anti-war flavor of the term defeatism on the basis of a political position which leaves no room for this meaning. A new one has to be invented from scratch.

6. The Baugy Group’s Attack

This – at precisely this point – was raised by a section of the Bolshevik emigration led by Bukharin.

On February 27-March 4, 1915, the Bolsheviks convened a Conference of the Foreign Sections of the party in Berne. The Bolshevik group from Baugy (Switzerland) presented a document with a number of criticisms of the war thesis. Point II of the Baugy resolution dealt with the slogan of defeat. Although stating opposition to any form of the slogan, it balks particularly at the formulation “wish defeat”, more than at the “lesser evil” formula:

“II. The group denounces positively any advancing of the so-called slogan ‘the defeat of Russia’, particularly in the manner in which it has been advanced in No.38 of the Central Organ.

“In the manifesto of the Central Committee as well as in the reply to Vandervelde, the defeat of Russia is described as being the ‘lesser evil’, after an objective evaluation of the other issues of the war. The editorial of No.38, on the other hand, says that every revolutionary is obliged to desire ‘the defeat of Russia’.

“Such a consideration of the question, in the judgment of the group, is not only devoid of practical sense but also introduces into the question an undesirable confusion. If a revolutionary is obliged merely to ‘desire’ the defeat, then there is no use in writing leading articles about it in the Central Organ of the political party; but if he is obliged to do more than merely ‘to desire’, then this would be not simply an objective evaluation but the preaching of an active participation [i.e., taking of sides – H.D.] in the war, which participation would hardly be approved by the editorial board of the Central Organ.

“Still more unsatisfactory, according to the opinion of the group, is the consideration of the same question in the third and concluding paragraph of the article, when the desirability of the defeat is explained by the revolutionary uprisings which may follow. The absolute impossibility of practical agitation in this sense compels the rejection à limite of such agitation for the defeat. We record that in the article referred to, the boundary line between the objective, fully admissible, and correct evaluation of the situation and the agitation for the defeat has not been traced at all; the group believes that it is an urgent necessity to have all confusion and obscurity in this question removed in a most decisive manner.” [61]

The challenge is plain: If you really “desire” it, then you work for it. (Especially if it is so important to “desire” it that you write resolutions about it, articles and editorials about it, and polemize about it!)

But what does “work for defeat” mean?

It must be borne in mind that, in spite of the tentative “internationalization” of the defeat-slogan in one passing article so far, “wish defeat” still carries the meaning of “wish military defeat by the enemy government”. More than once Lenin will have to stress that he does not mean “blowing up bridges”, helping the enemy, etc. The reason he has to insist that he does not mean this is simply because the slogan he is using does mean this to the movement.

His comrades know what it means to “work for revolutionary action”, but “work for defeat” in this war in which we do not support either camp – what is that? True, say Bukharin and the Baugy comrades, revolutionary action may objectively be related to defeat, but what we work for is not “defeat” but the socialist aim.

There is no recorded answer by Lenin. Not in connection with this Berne party conference, and not at any other time – not in his collected works for this period and not in any of the manuscripts (down to rough notes) published supplementary to it at a later time. He simply never faced up to it.

7. Formulation No.4: “Don’t Halt Before the Risk ...”

Even more important: in the face of the Baugy criticism, he dropped the formulation which they had attacked. The resolution adopted says absolutely nothing about “wish defeat”. Instead -

For the second time, confronting a difficulty with the formulation of the defeat-slogan, Lenin abandons the formulation which is criticized and invents a new one. The Berne resolution, which he wrote, reads on this point:

“The struggle against the government that conducts the imperialist war must not halt in any country before the possibility of that country’s defeat in consequence of revolutionary propaganda. The defeat of the governmental army weakens the government, aids the liberation of the nationalities oppressed by it, and makes civil war against the ruling classes easier.

“This proposition is especially true in relation to Russia. The victory of Russia will bring with it a strengthening of world reaction, a strengthening of the reaction inside of the country, and will be accompanied by a complete enslavement of the peoples in the regions already seized. In view of this, the defeat of Russia appears to be the lesser evil under all conditions.” [62]

It seems to be a compromise. A kind of “lesser evil” formula is still in. To be sure, its “special” motivation is still dead and will never be disinterred; to be sure, it is rather peculiar to read that defeat of Russia “appears to be” the lesser evil, and one wonders how that note of uncertainty got in. But this formula No.1 is there.

No.2 is there also: “defeat facilitates.”

But instead of No.3, precisely the one which had been vigorously attacked, we have a totally new formulation of the “internationalized” defeat-slogan: the class struggle must not halt before the possibility of defeat in consequence of revolutionary propaganda. Or, as it will read when we meet it again: do not halt before the risk of defeat. (Formula No.4.)

It is one of the most curious features of the history of the defeat-slogan that this last formula has been so widely accepted as simply the equivalent of, a restatement of, or a variant of, the “wish for defeat” or even of the “special Russian formula”, of the lesser evil. Not only is it completely different but its implication is precisely the reverse of a “wish for defeat.”

“Do not halt before the risk” implies that we do not wish defeat itself, but that what we wish is a continuation of the class struggle to socialist victory, and that we pursue this in spite of the fact that it may have an objective effect on the military plane.

This is especially clear when the word “risk” is actually used, as Lenin does more than once. Then it specifically repudiates Formula No.3. Otherwise the thought is only implied, and the repudiation is by implication. Yet it is possible to find in the movement, in one and the same “educational” article, that both are quoted indiscriminately as equally “illustrative” of Lenin’s defeatism, plus – more often than not – the special Russian formula of the lesser evil thrown in for good measure.

There is surely no other question in Marxist literature where quite such a tangle of confusion reigns. The source of the confusion, however, is in Lenin, not in his confused exegetes.

In this formula too (which is not of itself a form of defeatism) there is a positive element which we shall discuss in another article as already mentioned. But let us apply the comparative test again, taking the formula at face value:

We do not wish to halt the socialist struggle before the risk or possibility of defeat: Very well. But we also will not halt the struggle before the risk or possibility of-say, personal injury or loss; or before the risk or possibility that an intensified class struggle will stimulate fascist elements to organize, or before the risk or possibility that the socialist struggle will lead to persecution by the government; or before a number of other contingencies which we certainly seek to take into account, but which we do not “wish”, which we do not turn into a slogan or an “ism” or a new political “principle”.

Nor would Lenin ever have done this except for the specific impasse into which he had pushed himself, and from which he refused to extricate himself by dropping the whole business. He was in any case seeking the sharpest ways to demarcate the sheep from the goats, and “defeatism” became a point d’honneur of the Bolshevik war line. Some time afterward it became a shibboleth.

8. Summary: The 4 Formulas

By this time, March 1915, we have the four formulas of “defeatism” created out of the attempt to meet the insoluble contradictions without solving them. Before going ahead, let us summarize them:

No.1: The special Russian position: defeat of Russia by Germany is the “lesser evil”.

No.2: The objective statement that “defeat facilitates revolution”.

No.3: The slogan: wish defeat in every country.

No.4: Do not halt before the risk of defeat.

These are four different political ideas. Only three of them are meaningful for the international movement. Only two of them involve any wish for defeat (1 and 3). Only one of them can actually be put forward in the form of a “slogan” (3).

Which is the meaning of Lenin’s position, even assuming that all of them have some self-consistent meaning of their own? The truth is that from this point on, Lenin juggles all four depending on polemical aim and convenience. Let us see what new aspects are introduced up to the very last gasp of Lenin’s defeatism in November 1916.

9. Trotsky’s Attack on the Defeat-Slogan

We now come to the only article written by Lenin solely in exposition of his defeat-slogan (all his other references to it are in passing paragraphs). This article, Defeat of ‘Our’ Government in the Imperialist War [63] is itself the biggest muddle of all, compared with which the previous passages were models of clarity. Because it is a whole article discussing “defeatism” and therefore appears to be the authoritative statement on the subject for handy reference, it has undoubtedly played a major role in disorienting more than one student of Lenin. It must be said, without the slightest exaggeration, that in it Lenin simply goes hog-wild, throwing clear thinking to the winds.

To understand the reason for that, and to understand the article itself, it is necessary to present the immediate background of the article, which fortunately is known. The background is the clash between Lenin and Trotsky on issues which did not involve defeatism.

Trotsky was at this time the leading spirit of Nashe Slovo, published in Paris as a Russian daily for the revolutionary emigration. On the paper collaborated also a number of dissident Bolsheviks, a number of internationalist-Mensheviks (including Martov, up to almost the Zimmerwald Conference), and a number of non-affiliated Social-Democrats (this includes Trotsky himself). Its technical spark-plug was Antonov-Ovseyenko; a partial list of its collaborators and contributors would be in part an honor roll of later leaders of the Russian Revolution. It was the leading anti-war organ of the Russian movement.

At the beginning of 1915 there were tentative efforts made between the Nashe Slovo group and Lenin to collaborate in anti-war propaganda. One such opportunity seemed to arise with the announcement of the London Conference of Inter-Allied Socialists (i.e., the social-patriots in the Allied war camp). Since Russia was an ally too, the anti-war Russian socialists thought to seize the opportunity for a bit of education. Nashe Slovo sent invitations to both the Bolsheviks and the centrist Menshevik “Organization Committee” to get together to prepare a joint statement against the war, for presentation in London. Lenin agreed, and drew up a draft statement. The joint action never took place, with some accompanying hard feeling, but we can note here that it was not because of the question of defeatism for the good and sufficient reason that Lenin’s draft did not include a wisp of the idea, not in any of its protean forms. [64]

Yet Nashe Slovo had been taking pot-shots at the Bolsheviks’ defeat-slogan ever since it had been launched. As Alfred Rosmer writes: “The polemic [on defeatism] developed between Lenin and Nashe Slovo, most particularly Trotsky.” [65] (Rosmer was himself a Nashe Slovo contributor at the time and a collaborator of Trotsky’s.)

The rock on which the joint project had foundered was mainly the question of the participation of the Menshevik O.C., but Trotsky himself was more or less recognized as the left wing of the Nashe Slovo group. His position on the war was a thoroughgoing internationalism, and the Nashe Slovo group as a whole took the attitude that their two main differences on war line with the Bolsheviks – the peace slogan and defeatism – were subordinate questions. The big difference that divided Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, at this time as before, was not on political line at all but on the “organizational question”, in which regard Trotsky acted as a “conciliator” for Bolshevik-Menshevik unity.

At the Berne conference, the Bolsheviks had decided to launch a new magazine to be called Kommunist. Showing a faith in Trotsky’s internationalism which should be kept in mind, Lenin invited Trotsky to become a collaboratoron the magazine.

And Trotsky rejected the invitation with an Open Letter to the Editorial Board of Kommunist, printed in Nashe Slovo of June 4, 1915, which was a slap in the face.

Trotsky declined, not on grounds of any political differences whatsoever, but on his “organizational” grounds: the Bolsheviks’ “factional” methods, etc. His Open Letter emphasizes very carefully that whatever political differences exist are not any bar to collaboration. In the course of doing so, he mentions these differences and comments on them. The following was his comment in passing on the defeat-slogan, in this context:

“... under no conditions can I agree with your opinion, which is emphasized by a resolution, that Russia’s defeat would be a ‘lesser evil’. This opinion represents a fundamental concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, a concession for which there is no reason or justification, and which substitutes an orientation (extremely arbitrary under present conditions) along the lines of a ‘lesser evil’ for the revolutionary struggle against war and the conditions which generate this war.” [66]

Trotsky hits the nail on the head. He points to the fundamental identity in methodology between the “lesser evil” formulation of defeatism and that of the social-patriots. Nashe Slovo had pointed out that this defeatist concept was simply defensism turned inside-out (in somewhat the same sense that in our time we have called the Stalinist line on the Negro question “Jim Crow in reverse”). He pointed precisely to the social-patriotic potential which resides in the defeat-slogan, and of which we shall see more evidence later.

Lenin’s only public notice of this rebuff was his article in which he assailed, with unparalleled venom and bitterness, the passing comment in the Open Letter on defeatism. But it is not defeatism that he is exercised about! Trotsky has preferred to collaborate with suspect left-Mensheviks and dissident Bolsheviks and not with him. As usual with Lenin’s fiercest attacks on Trotsky, it is the “organizational question” which provides the steam. But the broadside which he fires is a political one, on a peripheral political difference. And alas, he fires this broadside with damp powder.

10. Lenin’s Polemic Against Trotsky on Defeatism

Following are the most important things to be noted about the article, Defeat of ‘Our’ Government in the Imperialist War.

(1) Toward the very beginning, Lenin quotes the criticism of defeatism made by Trotsky in the Open Letter as the butt of his attack. But his quotation is not complete, and a very important part is left out. This is how Lenin put it:

“To wish Russia defeat, Trotsky says, is ‘an uncalled-for and unjustifiable political concession to the methodology of social patriotism ...’ [and so on with the rest of the quotation from Trotsky, which is here given in a different translation].” [67]

Now the fact is that Trotsky’s criticism had been specifically directed at the “lesser evil” formula. Lenin does not show this in beginning the quotation where he does. Without quote marks, he substitutes “to wish Russian defeat” as the formula which Trotsky is presumably attacking.

And this is important because, although it is the “lesser evil” formula which has been attacked, nowhere in the whole article does Lenin even mention the existence of this formula, let alone defend it.

Perhaps because he is through with it himself? This would not excuse such a gambit in his polemic, but as a matter of fact he is going, to recur to it in other writings. But not in this one, where he is replying to a criticism that was made against it and it alone!

(2) Instead of the “lesser evil” formula (No.1), the version which Lenin uses for the most part in this article is “wish defeat” (No.3). This is precisely the one formulation of the defeat-slogan that was not in the Berne Conference resolution of the Bolsheviks, which had just been held! Of course, the Berne Conference resolution was not the product of a congress, with binding power on the Central Committee, but of a consultative conference; still, as we have seen, the “wish defeat” formulation had not been pressed by Lenin in the face of the opposition of the Baugy group. If it had been dropped at the conference as a compromise, the compromise did not mean very much.

In any case, what is interesting is the pattern: for the third time, Lenin meets an attack on the defeat-slogan not by defending the formulation which has been attacked but by substituting one of the other formulations. We saw that, against Axelrod, he resorted to inventing a new formula, (the objective “usefulness” of defeat, or “defeat facilitates”), without discussing the difficulty raised by Axelrod’s remarks; we saw, secondly, that against Bukharin and Baugy, he again inserted a new formula (No.4), dropping the one that was under fire; and now again, against Trotsky, he does not meet the criticism that is made but resorts to the very formulation which had been dropped in Berne when it was under attack from Baugy.

This is not the picture of a Lenin who knows what he believes and is ready to stand up and slug for it; this is the picture of a Lenin who is confused and muddled on this question and cannot really defend it – although he “feels” that there is something terribly fundamental about it as a shield against defensism, as a sharp way of separating the sheep from the goats.

(3) In spite of this fact, we find Lenin appealing to the Berne Conference resolution! This he does as a substitute for taking up the question which, he has avoided – the meaning of the “lesser evil” formulation with regard to Germany’s victory. This is what he actually writes:

“In using phrases to avoid the issue, Trotsky has lost his way amidst very simple surroundings. It seems to him that to wish Russia’s defeat means to wish Germany’s victory ... In this Trotsky also repeats the ‘methodology of social-patriotism’! To help people that do not know how to think, the Berne resolution (Sotsial-Demokrat, No.40) made it clear that in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now wish the defeat of its government.” [68]

This is precisely, what the Berne resolution did not “make clear”; in fact, this is the formulation which the resolution abandoned!

Besides: suppose the Berne resolution had included it: this is no answer to Trotsky’s criticism. Lenin writes that “it seems to him [Trotsky]” that to wish defeat for Russia means defeat by German arms, as if this were a deviation or misunderstanding of Trotsky’s. But we have seen that this is what it had always meant to the whole movement. This is what it had meant to Lenin himself in 1904-5, and this is what it had meant to Lenin only a few months before in September. Moreover this is what it had meant to his own closest comrades who criticized it within the ranks of the Bolshevik party (like Karpinsky). And Bukharin-Baugy too, only a couple of months before, had based their objection to “wish defeat” on the ground that it meant taking sides in the war. Because of this very objection, the formula had not been included in the Berne resolution.

When Lenin merely replies that he applies the defeat-slogan to all warring countries, he is only asserting that he refuses to apply the “lesser evil” formula in its consistent and established sense. Surely Trotsky knew that Lenin did not actually “wish Germany’s victory”. He had shown that the methodology of the defeat-slogan pointed in that direction. Lenin’s feeble “you too” retort is peculiarly out of place.

(4) In this unhappy article, Lenin does not even limit himself to the formulation “wish defeat”. At Berne, the Baugy group had indeed raised the question whether the “wish” could remain a mere wish. In this article – and only in this wild article – Lenin writes down “working toward military defeat” as a variant on the formula. His slogan, he says, is one “calling for” defeat. He exults that “the tsarist government was perfectly right in asserting” that the propaganda of the Bolshevik Duma deputies “aided its defeat”. To deal blows against one’s own war government, he writes, “means helping to defeat one’s own country”. Helping whom? What wide-open writing, at the best! (Note also that on this occasion Lenin slips into “defeat one’s own country”, instead of “government”.)

Three times he repeats that we cannot fight the war “without contributing to the defeat” of the government. And at, one point even the word “defeat” is not sharp enough, not “hard” enough, for him: a worker, he says, cannot unite with the proletarians on the other side of the lines “without contributing to the defeat, the dismemberment of ‘his’ imperialist ‘great’ power”. We are now for dismemberment? No doubt Lenin used the word with the idea in mind of the breaking up of a colonial empire, or the liberation of Russia’s oppressed nationalities, but it is written down in no such context.

And he writes: “We indisputably mean not only the wish for its defeat, but practical actions leading toward such defeat.” Practical actions toward defeat? What does this mean? It is at this point that Lenin adds in parentheses:

“For the ‘penetrating reader’: This does not at all mean to ‘blow up bridges’, organize unsuccessful military strikes, and, in general, to help the government to defeat the revolutionaries.”

So we are assured of what the phrase does not mean. What does it mean? The Baugy group and other comrades had asked the same question. We can understand “practical actions” leading toward an anti-war fight and revolution, which may or may not entail military defeat on the front, as a by-product, but even this idea (Formula No.4, more or less) does not appear in this wild polemic.

Fortunately the slogan “work for defeat through practical actions”, or something of the sort, never took root even in the later myth, and we can understand why.

(5) On none of the questions that we have raised, or that his critics have raised, does Lenin’s article present any reasoned political discussion. Instead hollow categorical assertions substitute , for arguments. The first three sentences are, for example:

“A revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot but ‘wish the defeat of its own government’. This is an axiom. It is disputed only by the conscious partisans or the helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists.”

This is simple bluster. Even if the defeat-slogan were correct, the last thing in the world it was, was an “axiom” of the socialist movement or anybody else, at any other time or place. And in view of the widespread rejection of the slogan by Bolsheviks, including leading Bolsheviks, the third sentence merely registers uncontrolled fury.

The article is full of such assertive bluster: “we indisputably mean ...” when the point is far from indisputable and, in fact, it is precisely disputation that is called for; “this slogan alone means a consistent appeal to revolutionary action ...” where the italicization of alone carries the burden that should have been shouldered by a political demonstration; and it is here that we are virtually told that revolution is “impossible” without defeat.

Under this head should also come the “amalgam” that Lenin makes throughout this article between Trotsky’s views and those of everyone else in the political spectrum down to the rabid social-chauvinists of the German Social-Democracy (like David). By the time the article gets through in a crescendo of rage, Trotsky and others are “in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, since they ‘do not believe’ in the possibility of international revolutionary action of the working class against its governments, and since they do not wish to help the development of such actions ...”

It is in this article, also, that we get the most extreme statements about the role of the defeat-slogan in an anti-war position. For example: “To repudiate the defeat slogan means to reduce one’s revolutionary actions to an empty phrase or sheer hypocrisy.”

(6) The only passage which even sounds as if Lenin is trying to present an argument is the following:

“He who wishes earnestly to dispute the ‘slogan’ calling for the defeat of one’s own government in the imperialist war would have to prove one of three things: either (1) that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary; or (2) that a revolution in connection with it is impossible, or (3) that coordination and mutual aid of the revolutionary movement in all belligerent countries is. impossible.”

He then proceeds to argue that the war is reactionary, that a revolution is possible, and that international action is possible also. But this is a begging of the question. The three conditions. add up to revolutionary anti-war opposition, to be sure, but (to not even begin to bear upon the objections to the defeat-slogan which have been so abundantly made within the framework of revolutionary anti-war policy. He makes the connection after a while only with a final assertion: “It is impossible, however”, unless ... “Such growth is impossible without ...”

His comment on the third of the three conditions is interesting: “The last reason is particularly important for Russia, because this is the most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible. This is why the Russian Social-Democrats had to be the first to advance the theory and the practice of the defeat ‘slogan’.”

This is a weak echo of the political motivation which had led Lenin to introduce the defeat slogan in 1914 in the first place – as a special policy limited to Russia. Now he is using it gingerly only to explain why the Russian Bolshevik group alone has seen fit to raise it, among all the anti-war internationalists.

(7) In this article we also get Lenin’s polemic against the slogan “Neither victory nor defeat”. We will later take up the views of Trotsky and Luxemburg on this question. At this point it is enough to note the following:

No such slogan was raised by Trotsky (or by Luxemburg). Although Lenin never quite says that Trotsky did so, there are perhaps few readers who have not gotten the contrary impression from his polemic. [11*] As a matter of fact, it is the Menshevik Semkovsky who alone is actually quoted to this effect by Lenin. The Menshevik leadership did in fact raise this as a slogan, at least in the form “Neither victory nor vanquished!” as recorded by T. Dan. [69] It is against them, dragged into this amalgam, that Lenin is right in pointing out that such a conception presupposes a return to the status quo ante bellum as against a revolutionary outcome of the imperialist war. We saw the same thing happen in the Russo-Japanese War with the Mensheviks: they did not avoid, but merely straddled, the dilemma of victory-or-defeat within the framework of the existing governments. This had nothing in common with Trotsky’s approach to the question of victory-or-defeat.

11. The Rest of the Record: Aug. 1915 to Nov. 1916

From this point on, let us complete the record by noting Lenin’s subsequent references to the defeat-slogan, pausing only at new points of special interest. All four formulations are used indiscriminately, now one, now another.

(1) In the pamphlet Socialism and War (written August 1915) by Lenin and Zinoviev, Lenin wrote the passage on defeatism [70]: we must “wish defeat” of our government, we must “see the’ connection between the government’s military reverses and the increased opportunity for overthrowing it ... the socialists of all the belligerent countries should express their wish that all ‘their’ governments be defeated.”

This would “coincide with the hidden thoughts of every class-conscious worker”, he says. The last remark should be kept in mind when we come to see Lenin in 1917, on his return to Russia, finding out what were the “hidden thoughts” of the class-conscious workers.

(2) In the long article The Collapse of the Second International written about the same time (summer 1915), there is a passing reference to “wishing defeat”. [71]

(3) In a private letter to Shlyapnikov of August 23, 1915, Lenin writes:

“The events in Russia have completely confirmed our position which the blockheads, social-patriots (from Alexinsky to Chkheidze) have christened defeatism. Facts have proved that we were right!! Military failures are helping to shake tsarism and are facilitating the union of revolutionary workers of Russia and the other countries. They say, what will ‘you’ do, if ‘you’ revolutionaries defeat tsarism? I reply: (1) our victory will cause the movement of the ‘Lefts’ in Germany to flare up a hundred times more strongly; (2) should we overcome tsarism completely, then we would propose a peace on democratic conditions to all the belligerents, and in case of a refusal would wage a revolutionary war.” [72]

The most interesting thing about this is the shift that takes place between one sentence and the next. At the beginning of the paragraph, the position that has been “completely confirmed” is the easy Formulation No.2, “defeat facilitates ...”. Naturally this means, and can only mean, defeats inflicted by Germany. Without transition, Lenin swings into the question of the defeat of tsarism by the revolutionaries, that is, the victory of the revolution. Naturally there is a connection between the two, but in the defeat-slogan itself, the “wish for defeat” refers to defeat by the enemy government, which in turn is necessary to facilitate the victory of the revolution. (It was only in the post-Lenin period of reinterpretation that the slogan of “wishing defeat” was made out to mean only “wishing for defeat by the revolution alone” and not by victories of the enemy camp.)

Also: it seems that only blockheads and social-patriots have “christened” the position defeatism. This will not prevent Lenin (and even more often Zinoviev) from subsequently calling it “defeatism” himself, usually in quotation marks but not always. In the later Comintern, the term defeatism became standard in spite of this passage.

(4) In October 1915, Lenin wrote an article (which was not published and remained among his papers) entitled The Defeat of Russia and the Revolutionary Crisis. [73] In it he notes that the defeats being suffered by the tsar’s armies are leading to revolutionary ferment. Here we get his only reference in this connection to the Russo-Japanese War, but not to his position on it. He merely notes that “Again there is military defeat and the acceleration of the revolutionary crisis caused by it”. In fact, there is the following curious passage referring to the present war (1915):

“Equally clear is the position of the liberal bourgeoisie: to take advantage of the defeat and the growing revolution in order to wrest compromises from a frightened monarchy and to compel it to share power with the bourgeoisie. Equally clear, too, is the position of the revolutionary proletariat, which is striving to consummate the revolution by taking advantage of the vacillations and embarrassments of the government and the bourgeoisie.”

Here it is the liberal bourgeoisie (in 1915!) which is painted as recognizing the principle that “defeat facilitates” – which would make them “defeatists” if we took seriously some of Lenin’s previous formulations! – whereas, counterposed, the revolutionaries are not pictured as striving for “defeat”. Make of it what you will. As a matter of fact, the article goes on to crow over the fact that the Mensheviks have issued a call for “revolt” in the rear of the German army – “this after a whole year of fighting the slogan of civil war!” he exclaims. The muddle is really breath-taking since, obviously, a call for revolt in the rear of the enemy government is hardly in contradiction with opposition to civil war (or any other fight) against one’s own government.

But somehow, Lenin concludes out of this muddle that the defeat-slogan is once more confirmed, because of the Mensheviks’ call and the liberal bourgeoisie’s sentiment:

“... in face of the revolutionary crisis in Russia, which is being accelerated precisely by defeat - and this what the motley opponents of ‘defeatism’ are afraid to admit ... The lessons of the war are compelling even our opponents really to recognize both the position of ‘defeatism’ and the necessity of issuing ... the slogan of ‘a revolt in the rear’ of the German militarists, in other words, the slogan of civil war. The lessons of the war, it appears, are driving into their heads what we have preached from the very beginning. The defeat of Russia has turned out to be the lesser evil, for it has advanced the revolutionary crisis on a vast scale and has aroused millions, tens and hundreds of millions.”

(5) In a polemical article entitled (and against) “Wilhem Kolb and George Plekhanov”, in February 1916, Lenin mentions that “both accuse the revolutionary Social-Democrats of ‘defeatism’, using the favorite expression of the Plekhanovists ...” [74] In this article the social-chauvinists’ fear of defeat of their own government is counterposed to the slogan of wishing defeat: Kolb “is right when he says that they [the tactics of the German Left] mean the ‘military weakening’ of Germany, i.e., desiring and aiding its defeat, defeatism.”

(6) For the first time Lenin put the defeat-slogan forward for a vote before the internationalist Left in his theses presented at the Kienthal Conference (the second Zimmerwald conference). It had not been presented at Zimmerwald itself.

In an extant first draft of these theses, Lenin wrote the following, apparently referring approvingly to a statement made in Bulletin No.3 of the Zimmerwald commission, though it is not contained in the Zimmerwald Manifesto or resolution:

“... if we call the masses to struggle against their governments ‘independently of the military situation of a given country’, we thereby not only deny in principle the admissibility of ‘defense of the fatherland’ in the given war, but we admit the desirability of the defeat of every bourgeois government, for the transformation of the defeat into a revolution. And this must be said openly: the revolutionary mass struggle cannot become an international one unless its conscious representatives unite openly in the name of defeat and overthrow of all bourgeois governments.” [75]

To struggle against the government “independently of the military situation – that is, regardless of the consequences of the class struggle on the military situation – is a version of Formulation No.4. It does not involve a wish for defeat, of course. It most certainly does involve carrying on the anti-war fight “in the name of defeat”.

But whereas this first draft seemed to hail it, the theses as they were finally presented referred to this very same idea as “not sufficient”:

“It is not sufficient to say, as the Zimmerwald Manifesto does [this is a mistake – H.D.], that ... the workers in their revolutionary struggle must not take into account the military situation of their country; it is necessary to say clearly what is here merely hinted at, namely ... that revolutionary action during the war is impossible without creating the risk of defeat for ‘one’s own’ government; and that every defeat of the government in a reactionary war facilitates revolution ... “ [76]

In our own day, this formula of “continuing the class struggle regardless of its effect on the military situation” was to become a most frequent watered-down version of the defeat-slogan as reinterpreted, being embodied in these words in the founding program of the Socialist Workers Party. “It is not sufficient”, says Lenin, and he is right from his point of view, though he fails to say that what is really missing is the “wish for defeat”. This he does not put forward himself, in spite of his bluster in the anti-Trotsky polemic.

(7) In his criticism (August 1916) of Rosa Luxemburg’s “Junius” pamphlet on the war, Lenin relegates the question of the defeat-slogan to a footnote. It is obvious to the naked eye that the approach taken by “Junius” is quite incompatible with the defeat-slogan of Lenin’s, but Lenin does not make a great fuss about it. In his footnote he says that the questions must be raised -

“(1) Is ‘revolutionary intervention’ possible without the risk of defeat? (2) Is it possible to scourge the bourgeoisie and the government of one’s own country without taking the risk? (3) Have we not always asserted, and does not the historical experience of reactionary wars prove, that defeats help the cause of the revolutionary class?” [77]

These are his two most watered-down versions. Luxemburg’s pamphlet, incidentally, does have some comments on the connection between defeat and revolution, though these comments do not at all commit Lenin’s error in viewing this connection from a starkly one-sided view; and though she does not take up the “risk” question in the same form, there could not be any slightest doubt in the mind of a reader what her reply would be: we do not hold back because of the risk of defeat of the German armies.

(8) In an article written August 1916 for the Jugend-Internationale, Lenin mentions “wish for the defeat of ‘its own’ government” in passing. [78]

(9) The last gasp of the defeat-slogan comes in November 1916 with an article On Separate Peace in tones that we have already heard:

“Whatever the outcome of the present war may be, it will prove that those who said that the only possible way out of it is proletarian civil war for socialism were right. It will prove that the Russian Social-Democrats who said that the defeat of tsarism, the complete military defeat of tsarism, is ‘at any rate’ a lesser evil were right ... [Even] if the proletariat of Europe is unable to advance to socialism at the present time ... Eastern Europe and Asia can march with seven-league strides towards democracy only if tsarism meets with utter military defeat and is deprived of all opportunity of practicing its semi-feudal imperialist policy.” [79]

Here, as always in Lenin, the “lesser evil” formula occurs only in connection with tsarism and the perspective of the Russian socialists. Here also, as clearly as ever before, it is made plain without the shadow of a doubt that Lenin is talking about the military defeat of Russia by Germany, and not its defeat by the socialist revolution. With this return to the very first formulation of 1914, the circles closes and the defeat-slogan will not be put forward again while Lenin is still alive.

12. When Defeatism Was Not Put Forward

A certain interest can also be attached to another aspect of Lenin’s writings during 1914-16: the occasions on which he did not put forward the defeat-slogan. Naturally this could be pressed to an absurd point, and there is no reason to expect him to put forward the defeat-slogan in every discussion on the war question. (As a matter of fact, in only 11 articles published during the years 1914-16 did Lenin mention the idea; to which we can add only seven other documents of the period that figure in his collected writings: unpublished articles, letters, notes, etc.)

Obviously it would be easy to draw up a long list of articles in which the nature of the questions discussed might lead us to ask: Why didn’t Lenin bring up defeatism here? – especially if we take seriously some of his statements about the crucial importance of the slogan. But we shall mention here only a few special cases, where the presentation of the defeat-slogan would seem to have been most clearly called for.

(1) We have already mentioned that, in February 1915, Lenin drew up a draft of a joint statement [80] against the war to be presented to the London Inter-Allied Socialist Conference, in response to the proposal for common action made by Nashe Slovo. In this draft he systematically set out to list the ideas which were essential to a complete, consistent internationalist war policy. It was by no means intended as a “compromise” draft in any sense, but as a complete position.

There is no hint of the defeat-slogan, or of anything like it, in any of its versions.

(2) The projected joint statement fell through, but in March 1915 the Bolsheviks did send their own representative (Litvinov, then living in London) to present a statement to the conference in the name of the Bolsheviks alone. [81] Again, it would be easy to show that this statement was not intended to be “conciliatory”. It was, furthermore, written by Lenin himself.

In this statement by the Bolsheviks alone, there is no mention of the defeat-slogan in any form.

(3) Also in March 1915, a Bolshevik delegation attended the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Berne. The resolution on war policy [82] which they introduced had no mention of the defeat-slogan in any form. [12*]

(4) In the October 13, 1915 issue of Sotsial-Demokrat, the editors presented a document entitled A Few Theses on slogans and attitude on the war. [83] (It was written by Lenin.) We mention this particularly because later, in 1917, these Theses were going to be repeatedly referred to, reprinted and quoted by Lenin as the position of the Bolsheviks. They were not intended as a complete summary of war policy but as statements on a number of especially important points.

The defeat-slogan was not one of these.

(5) At the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915, the Bolshevik position was put forward in the documents of the “Zimmerwald Left”, which formed in support of Lenin’s views on the war as distinct from those of the other anti-war elements at the conference. While Lenin voted for the majority resolution after his own was rejected, the resolution and manifesto of the Zimmerwald Left [84] were intended to put on the record what he considered to be the complete anti-war position. In an article in Sotsial-Demokrat on the Zimmerwald Conference (October 11), Zinoviev wrote that the Zimmerwald Left “defended, alone, a complete and definite prograni”. [85]

This complete and definite program had no mention of the defeat-slogan in any form. (We have already pointed out that it was not until the Kienthal Conference in April 1916 that the defeat-slogan was put forward in any version before an international group.)

Even these five outstanding cases would be very strange if Lenin really did regard the defeat-slogan as a sine qua non for anti-war policy. In point of fact, however, they are not strange at all; they stand in contradiction only with the myth. Lenin became a fierce proponent of defeat mainly in counterpunching against an attack, or in factional polemics of his own.

(6) Related to this question are the cases where, in 1917 and later, including during the first years of the Comintern, Lenin harks back to the 1914-16 period in order to summarize in retrospect the different tendencies on the war question in the socialist ranks. The three tendencies are described: the social-chauvinist right, the centrists of various shades, and the internationalist left. There are numerous passages of this sort in the writings of Lenin and the documents of the Comintern from 1917 through 1923. [13*]

The defeat-slogan in any form never figures in this summary, neither its rejection by the “centrists” nor its advocacy by the Bolsheviks.

(7) But the biggest case where Leniin did not put forward the defeat-slogan, but rather abandoned it completely, is the whole period of 1917 between March and November. This will be the subject of the chapter after next.

Notes

8*. It was undoubtedly with relish that Lenin wrote in 1915, using a quotation which obviously had impressed him: “A French philosopher wrote: ‘Dead ideas are those that appear in an elegant cloak, without roughness, without daring. They are dead because they enter into general circulation, forming a part of the usual intellectual equipment of the great army of philistines. Strong ideas are those that give impetus and create scandals, that provoke indignation, anger, irritation among one kind of people, enthusiasm among others.’” (CW18, p.327.)The other side of this virtue is shown by the large number of passages in Lenin in which he resorts to exaggerated one-sided generalizations simply in order to give emphasis, temporarily seeing only the one-sidedness. Whatever benefits there are in this method, his contemporaries got; the same cannot be said for the generation or two that tried to learn from his writings Without understanding that, in reading Lenin, it is as important to know what he is polemically concerned about at the moment as it is to understand what he is saying. If there ever was a case where “authority by quotation” is misleading, it is the business of matching texts from Lenin. Both the Stalinist and bourgeois falsifiers have naturally round that this gives them all sorts of opportunities to ply their trade; but more important is the fact that it is a pitfall for students too.

9*. “There is other evidence of reluctance to adopt the defeatist point of view by party workers in Russia and outside, not only at the beginning of the war but even up to the revolution of 1917”, says Bolsheviks and the World War by Gankin and Fisher (p.151), citing Russian sources.

10*. It is significant that this statement, “both are worst”, which so directly repudiates the previously given motivation for the defeat-slogan, occurs right after a passage in which, arguing against Potresov, Lenin gets into a vigorous analysis of the difference between Marx’s approach to war in the previous epoch of progressive capitalism, and the approach to be taken by Marxists today. With the difference sharply in mind, his pen follows out the consequences and writes “Both are worst” – that is, we cannot base a policy on a choice of which to worst. He sees that defeatism can be retained only in an internationalised form.

11*. Including a scholar like Boris Souvarine, who wrote in his biography of Stalin: “Between the two extremes, defensism and defeatism, there were numerous intermediate opinions. Trotsky and Martov, with the majority of the outstanding personalities of revolutionary internationalism, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring, Rakovsky, Riazanov, etc. came out against national defense but for a peace without victors or vanquished and did not intend to break with socialists like Kautsky ...” (p.135, French ed.).

12*. But later, in 1925 (at the time, we shall see, when Zinoviev was reviving defeatism in the Comintern), Olga Ravich, who had been a delegate to this conference, said that the delegation had declared: “In the struggle against the war the proletariat must persevere to the end and must not fear a defeat of the fatherland. Such a defeat would only facilitate the revolutionary struggle and civil war of the proletariat.” (Gankin & Fisher, Bolsheviks and the World War, p.294). If such a statement was made in a speech (embodying Formulations Nos.2 and 4 but not the “wish for defeat”), it was not included in the Bolshevik document.

13. For the first of these, see CW20, I, pp.147-8.

Reference Notes

49. Lenin, Selected Works (International Pub.), vol.2, p.447, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

50. CW18, p.63, The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War. Not published; circulated as internal discussion document.

51. CW30 (Russ.), p.223, The European War and International Socialism. Not published; rough notes for an article. Words in brackets are interpolated by myself.

52. CW18, pp.74-5. Not published; private letter.

53. Gankin and Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War (Hoover Library Publication), p.151.

54. Trotsky, Stalin, p.168.

55. Gankin and Fisher (note 58), p.148.

56. CW18, p.81, The War and Russian Social-Democracy, theses signed by the Central Committee; pub. Nov. 1, 1914 (written October).

57. CW18, p.101, On the National Pride of the Great Russians; pub. Dec. 12, 1914.

58. CW18, p.117, Russian Südekums; pub. Feb. 1, 1915.

59. CW18, pp.199-200.

60. CW18, p.124, Under a Stolen Flag; not published (until 1917).

61. Gankin and Fisher (note 53), pp.190-1.

62. CW18, pp.149-150, Conference of the Foreign Sections of the RSDLP; pub. March 29, 1915. (The conference itself took place Feb. 27-March 4.)

63. CW18, pp.197-202, Defeat of ‘Our’ Government in the Imperialist War; pub. July 26, 1915.

64. Gankin and Fisher (note 53), pp.164-167.

65. Alfred Rosmer, Le Mouvement Ouvrier Pendant la Guerre (Paris, 1936), p.478.

66. Gankin and Fisher (note 53), p.170.

67. CW18, p.197.

68. Ibid., pp.197-8.

69. Martov and Dan: Geschichte der Russische Sozialdemokratie, p.276. This section was written by Dan.

70. CW18, p.234, Socialism and War; pub. as pamphlet in 1915 (written in August).

71. CW18, p.304, The Collapse of the Second International; pub. in Kommunist, Nos.1-2, 1915 (written during summer).

72. Gankin and Fisher (note 53), p.206. Another translation in Letters of Lenin, ed. Hill and Mudle, p.373. Not published: private letter.

73. Lenin, Selected Works, vol.5, pp.149-153. Not published.

74. CW19, pp.45-6, Wilhelm Kolb and George Plekhanov; pub. Feb. 29, 1916.

75. CW30 (Russ.), 247. Discarded draft of theses for Kienthal Conference; not published; written beginning of April 1916.

76. CW19, p.74, Theses for Kienthal Conference; pub. June 10, 1916. (The conference itself took place April 24-30.)

77. CW19, p.212, The Pamphlet by Junius; pub. Oct. 1916 (written August).

78. CW19, p.370, The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution; written August 1916 but not published till Sept.-Oct. 1917 in the Jugend-Internationale.

79. CW19, p.321, On Separate Peace; pub. Nov. 6, 1916.

80. See note 64.

81. CW18, pp.142-4.

82. Text of resolution in appendix to CW18, 472-3.

83. CW18, pp.356-8.

84. Text in CW18, pp.447-80, appendix.

85. Article on the Zimmerwald Conference, Oct. 11, 1915, collected in Gegen den Strom.

IV. First World War: Zinoviev, Trotsky, Luxemburg

Special attention to Zinoviev is necessary because, during the period that has been under discussion, it was Zinoviev who was virtually the only close colleague of Lenin in the formulating and propagandizing of the Bolshevik war policy, working with Lenin in Berne. And among the leading Bolsheviks it was Zinoviev alone who, under Lenin’s immediate supervision, attempted to defend and expound the defeat-slogan. His role during this period is preserved in the volume Gegen den Strom (Against the Current) which was later published by the Bolsheviks as the collection of published writings by both of them during these years of the world war.

Zinoviev played no independent role in the formulation of the defeat-slogan. He tried to follow Lenin’s lead. Whereas Lenin never mentioned supposed precedents for his defeatism, it was Zinoviev who specialized particularly in giving it an historical tradition, as we have discussed in the first two chapters. The only article by him which is specifically on defeatism, included in Gegen den Strom, is the historical “Defeatism” Then and Now [86] already referred to. There is a long passage on defeatism in another article, [87] and references in a couple of others. [88]

When, however, Zinoviev himself wrote a big book on the war question in 1915-16 (not published until April 1917), The War and the Crisis of Socialism, it did not have a line in it raising the defeat-slogan. [14*] This was not due to its restricted scope, which included an encyclopedic array of topics! – nor was it due to restricted size, which is no less than 652 pages in the German edition. For Lenin’s closest collaborator, this is something of an oversight, in terms of the myth that defeatism was and is the heart of anti-war policy in an imperialist war, or at any rate an essential ingredient.

In his articles, Zinoviev tried to follow Lenin’s lead on defeatism, no doubt as best he could. But how could anybody follow successfully when the lead was so confused and shifting? Here is Lenin’s right-hand collaborator on the same question, and his staggering course is a picture of confusion worse confounded. The last point under this head that we will discuss was not merely a question of confusion: it was the outstanding evidence, even in this world war period, of the social-patriotic potential inherent in the defeat-slogan.

1. On the “Lesser Evil”

Outside of his historical excursions en the subject, Zinoviev’s longest discussion of the defeat-slogan is in his extensive article The Russian Social-Democracy and Russian Social-Chauvinism, written in the summer of 1915. Like Lenin’s anti-Trotsky polemic, it is written under the impress of Trotsky’s attack in his Open Letter. Zinoviev does not even quote Trotsky’s criticism. His direct reference to Trotsky is a snide sideswipe: On the question of defeatism, he writes –

“... the following march against us in a closed Phalanx: the direct social-chauvinists ... the right center ... and the “left-center” (see the rather unenlightening remarks on this point by Trotsky in his Open Letter to the editors of Kommunist). We are firmly convinced that the unity of the center with the social-chauvinists on this point is not at all accidental. Everything has a reason. [89]

Outside of this “amalgam” Zinoviev is not very enlightening himself. He does not discuss the “lesser evil” formulation that Trotsky had criticized. In this he perhaps shows discretion. When, later in the article, he himself presents the “lesser evil” idea, he blunders in where Lenin did not tread.

We have made clear that Lenin never applied the “lesser evil” formulation to any other country but Russia. This fine point, apparently, was never explained to Zinoviev, who says:

“... the internationalists can pursue a consistent struggle against their governments and their chauvinists in none of the warring countries if they do not defend in their agitation the principle that the defeat of the imperialists of their ‘fatherland’ would he the lesser evil from the standpoint of the interests of the proletariat.” [90]

This is flatly in contradiction with the November 1914 theses of the Central Committee that “Under given conditions it is impossible to determine from the standpoint of the international proletariat which is the lesser evil for socialism: the defeat of one or the defeat of the other group of belligerent nations. For us Russian Social-Democrats, however ...”

It is to be doubted whether Zinoviev knew he was doing anything different than loyally repeating the “line”. If the line was too muddled, that was hardly Zinoviev’s fault; he couldn’t make it out either.

2. The “Methodology of Social-Patriotism”

Zinoviev’s most extended course of argumentation is on the “safest” version: we must not halt the class struggle for fear of defeat. In addition to what we have already discussed about this formulation (No.4), there is an extra point to be made about Zinoviev’s use of it.

It bears precisely on the “methodology of social-patriotism” that is embodied in the thinking behind the defeat-slogan. It was the social-patriots who insistently tried to pose the whole question of socialist war policy in terms of “For or against defeat?” This way of posing the question was and is properly a hallmark of social-patriotism. And what is interesting is that, in so many words, Zinoviev puts the stamp of approval on this way of posing the question:

[The social-patriots argue, says Zinoviev:] “Shall we continue the class struggle in the country ... would this not mean weakening the military strength of our government? And this will surely be of benefit to the external enemy. It follows that you are for the defeat of your country? Say, yes or no? If no, then you must grant us that temporarily ... the class struggle must be halted and replaced by a policy of civil peace.” [91]

So he paraphrases the social-patriots. And his comment on it? It is: “Decidedly there is a logic in this way of putting the question.”

And since the social-patriotic methodology is correct, we must take our stand on the same ground as they, but with the sign reversed: we are for defeat.

Although he had found Trotsky’s remarks “unenlightening”, could he possibly have more crudely illustrated their validity?

Yet Zinoviev had just been inveighing against predicating socialist policy on the fear of defeat. That way lies social-patriotism. Just as invalid is the idea of predicating socialist policy on the desire for defeat. That way lies social-patriotism-in-reverse, social-patriotism standing on its head. The Marxist does not take off from the question of defeat in either direction; to the whole dilemma of military victory-or-defeat of the governments he counterposes the struggle for socialist victory against the governments. In terms of such a Marxist methodology, it makes sense to add that we do not halt this struggle for socialist victory out of fear of military defeat of “our own” government; in terms of the methodology which Zinoviev approves, the methodology represented by the social-patriots’ dilemma, this statement does not make sense. For if you have already told the social-patriots that we must wish for defeat, it does not make sense to add that we must not halt for fear of the defeat, which we wish!

3. Defeat and the Interests of the People

Zinoviev puts some stress on an argument which is not used by Lenin in connection with defeatism, though Lenin brought it out in other contexts. This is the, argument that military defeat by the enemy army does not really affect any true national interest of the people but only the imperialist interest of the bourgeoisie:

“The bourgeois ‘fatherlands’ – this becomes more and more obvious in the course of the war -are threatened by nothing but the loss of one colony or another, one border area or another, as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned. The bourgeoisie aspires to nothing but a diplomatic regroupment of powers, nothing but new secret treaties and conspiracies.” [92]

This too is an echo of the feeling during the Russo-Japanese War, when the war was taking place in the Far East, in the colonial and border area itself, and no one (including the Japanese) even dreamed of an attack on and subjugation of the homeland.

When it is brought forward in connection with a wish for defeat (and not merely in connection with an analysis of the imperialist springs of the war, as Lenin did elsewhere), it raises an implication. Granting for the sake of argument that this was so regarding Russia’s participation in the First World War, it certainly is not necessarily so in every imperialist war or even with respect to every nation in the First World War. Suppose defeat of one’s own government in an imperialist war does mean important hardships for the people-as indeed Germany’s defeat in the war did mean, under the Treaty of Versailles-do we cease to wish for defeat? And if furthermore it is argued that defensism and “defeatism” are the only consistent alternatives, then the door is opened for social-patriotic conclusion – once any doubt is cast on the argument for defeatism.

Now as a matter of fact this argument for defeatism is demonstrably false, in the light of the actual consequences of the First World War. It turned out that it was not true that “The bourgeois ‘fatherlands’ ... are threatened by the loss of one colony or another, one border area or another, as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned”. For the defeated bourgeoisies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, etc., defeat had far more serious consequences, consequences which intimately concerned the lot of the people too.

The revolutionary Marxist can recognize this fact without drawing pro-war conclusions. It is precisely the. reason why he may speak of continuing the socialist struggle in spite of the risk of defeat, because for him the alternative to defeat is not the victory of his own imperialist government but a third alternative which has to be pursued and which alone will have progressive consequences.

Not so for one who raises the slogan of “wish defeat”. The proof of this comes further along in Zinoviev’s article (unrelated by him to the quotation just given), when he admits:

“The chauvinists paint the horrors which await the workers in the event of a defeat of their fatherland. For the masses of people, the horrors, deprivations and sufferings of a defeat are in fact monstrous, unimaginable, colossal.”

How does he reply? As follows: “Well, but how about in case of victory? Do not the same masses pay for it – to the benefit of the imperialists? And if they stand on the basis of internationalism, can the workers of one country wish for themselves victory and for the workers of the other country defeat, when defeat would have even more suffering connected with it?” [93]

Zinoviev does not notice that, from the point of view of the defeat-slogan, he has refuted himself. As internationalists (he argues) we cannot wish victory for our own government because this means we are wishing defeat and the colossal sufferings of defeat for the workers on the other side of the lines. Very well, but then why wish defeat for the workers on our side of the lines, as Lenin’s slogan does?

He is entrapped in the vicious circle of victory-or-defeat, just as the social-patriots are, and he cannot extricate himself, except by implicitly shifting to a viewpoint which is not that of defeatism.

4. Pseudonym for Revolution

It must be said that Zinoviev’s attempt to work up a refutation of the critics is more conscientious than any made by Lenin, who never faced up to the problems posed. This is also the reason why Zinoviev is forced to set down in black and white ideas which are not met with in Lenin.

Thus Zinoviev tries to meet the question: “If you are talking about the defeat of all the warring governments, what does this mean? Who then will be the victor?”

It is a perfectly legitimate question given the fact that Lenin’s formulations on defeatism made clear time and again, if not always consistently, that he was thinking of defeats inflicted by the enemy camp. The question had not been any embarrassment in the Russo-Japanese War, because there Lenin was openly in favor of the victory of the enemy camp.

In his anti-Trotsky polemic [94], Lenin had quoted this embarrassing question from the pen of the Menshevik Semkovsky, and had indignantly replied that this showed that Semkovsky was thinking of the military outcome solely in terms of the imperialist governments. (A curious example of a “You too” reply since the question could be asked in the first place only because Lenin’s use of the defeat-slogan was itself obviously based on this kind of thinking.) But in hitting back at Semkovsky, Lenin did not draw the explicit conclusion from his retort. Zinoviev does. The latter replies, in effect: the defeat of all the governments makes good sense if it is understood to mean the defeat of all of them by the revolution. [95] Here, quite clearly, defeat is equated with the European revolution.

But if all the slogan of defeat meant was a pseudonym for the revolution, then the obvious question is: Why on earth should we christen this revolution by the name of “defeat”? It would be an incomprehensible choice of slogan formulation if such were really the case.

But of course, Lenin’s defeat-slogan did not at all mean “we wish defeat of our own government by, our own proletariat only”. Zinoviev is pushed into this interpretation only because he has pushed himself into a corner.

5. The Social-Patriotic Version of Defeatism

We have been pointing out the relationship between the defeat-slogan and the methodology of social-patriotism. We have pointed out how easily the former can turn into the latter. Now, finally, we can show how it does turn into a clearly social-patriotic idea – in the hands of Zinoviev.

This we can show, not by some single quotation from Zinoviev which might have been a passing slip of the pen, but by an idea which he repeats a number of times and in three different articles. In its own way, it is the most amazing facet of the defeat-slogan as put forward by the Bolshevik spokesmen during the war.

It is simply the fact that, in these multiple cases, Zinoviev slips a single word into the formulations on defeat – a single word whose effect on the political meaning is as devastating as the insertion of a “not” in a clause.

It is his repeated limitation of his argumentation to despotic governments.

For example, in his historical article on “Defeatism” Then and Now, Zinoviev writes the following when he finally gets to formulate the principle:

“All other things being equal, [15*] the defeat of a despotic government in foreign war always helps the people to overthrow the government. It is absolutely impossible to seriously deny this principle ... The whole modern history of Russia admirably illustrates this truth that the defeats abroad of reactionary governments redound to the benefit of the democratic movement inside the country.” [96]

Is it possible for a politically-educated polemist to write this without understanding that it means the principle does not apply, to a democratic capitalism?

Similarly in another article: “Yes, we are for the defeat of ‘Russia’ [i.e., tsarism], for this would further the victory of Russia [i.e., the Russian people], its breakaway from slavery, its liberation from the chains of tsarism. Where are the cases in the recent history of Europe where the victory abroad of a reactionary government led to democratic freedom within the country?” [97]

The counterposition is clear: “reactionary” versus “democratic”. In immediate illustration of it, Zinoviev gives the quotation from Wilhelm Liebknecht which we will cite below.

In his long article The Russian Social-Democracy and Russian Social-Chauvinism, where he gives his most elaborate polemic in favor of defeatism, the same thought abounds in the course of his argumentation. [98] The first occasion comes when he attacks Plekhanov:

“Plekhanov maintains that only the liberals were given to desiring a defeat of their despotic government, in the hope that this would broaden the possibility of political freedom, while they themselves had neither the strength nor the inclination to fight for it.”

And Zinoviev replies: “Of course, Plekhanov is completely wrong. That the defeat of a despotic government in war can further a democratic transformation in the country, this idea is not in the least peculiar to the liberals.”

In proof of this, he brings a couple of “defeatists” onto the witness stand, citing their words triumphantly. One is, Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had written: “Has anyone ever heard of a despotic government that became liberal after it won a victory? With defeated governments this has happened on occasion for a short period.”

He hails forth August Bebel as a “defeatist”, quoting him: “It is my opinion that for a nation which lives in an unfree condition, a military defeat is more a help than a hindrance for its internal development.”

Bebel was referring to Prussia as distinct from bourgeois democracies like France or England.

We are now quite a distance beyond the mere “methodology” of social-patriotism. If the formulas of defeatism are to be limited to “despotic” governments, to “reactionary” governments which need a democratic transformation, to nations “in an unfree condition”, then defeatism cannot be internationalized, it cannot be the policy of socialists in all the belligerent countries. And if, simultaneously, it is insisted that defeatism is the only consistent anti-war policy, that the only consistent alternative is defensism, then it is scarcely a step to draw social-patriotic conclusions for the socialists of non-despotic governments. “Democracy versus despotism”, “progress versus reaction”, become the governing criteria. And this is too familiar.

Furthermore, we must note that Zinoviev (as well as his “authorities” W. Liebknecht and Bebel) applies the “despotic” limitation not even to the formulation “wish defeat” but to the idea “defeat facilitates revolution”. The muddle is raised to the second power. Whatever qualifications we might ourselves make to the formulation “defeat facilitates”, it is clear that there is no reason for limiting its application to “despotic” governments only.

Now historically speaking, there is no mystery as to why Zinoviev falls into this formulation, even if it remains amazing that he does not catch himself. His thinking is a reflection of Lenin’s in the Russo-Japanese War; he is reproducing it in toto. He is transplanting it to the First World War. For Lenin in 1904-5, it was a question of “despotism versus progress”, and defeatism was the other side of a wish for Japan’s victory. But Lenin’s defeatist position of 1904-5, transplanted to the world war, is – social-patriotism.

What is the significance of Zinoviev’s “mistake”? He finds himself, perhaps unawares, playing with a “defeatism” which would apply to only one side of an imperialist war. It is not thought out, it cannot be thought out, it teeters on the edge of political debacle. It is not a “position” in reality except insofar as a man can be said to be in a certain “position” when he has retreated to the edge of a cliff and is swinging his arms wildly to recover his balance.

Needless to say, neither Lenin nor Zinoviev was in actuality “teetering cm the brink” subjectively. Their anti-war position was too solidly tied to a quite different analysis which kept them firmly on the ground even in the course of occasional gyrations on the defeat-slogan. It was not fatal, for them. It is a warning for others.

6. Trotsky on “Neither Victory nor Defeat”

The defeat-slogan led Lenin and Zinoviev into a swamp. In positive contrast is the analysis of the victory-or-defeat dilemma which was made by the two outstanding leaders of anti-war socialist opinion outside the Bolshevik ranks. These were Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, whose views on the question we have already referred to.

In his anti-Trotsky polemic of July 1915, Lenin had seemed to ascribe to Trotsky the slogan “Neither victory nor defeat”. It was the Mensheviks who had actually raised as their slogan “Neither victors nor vanquished”, which they coupled with “Peace without annexations”. As put forward by the Mensheviks, the perspective was one of a return to the pre-war status quo as the outcome of the war crisis.

Far from being an advocate of this perspective of “Neither victory nor defeat” in the sense which Lenin had attacked, Trotsky leveled powerful attacks on it, from his own point of view. And he was able to do it in a thoroughly Marxist fashion without in any way falling into the “defeatist” trap.

He did this through a consistent attack on the whole notion of posing the question in terms of victory-or-defeat by the belligerent governments, and, breaking out of that vicious circle, counterposing the socialist victory to both as a third alternative. Thus he simultaneously undercut the “defeatist” approach as well as the Mensheviks. The difference in “methodology” goes to the root of the whole war question, and not in the First World War alone.

This type of analysis can be seen in a work of Trotsky’s during the 1915-16 period which specifically takes up the question of victory-or-defeat. It was published as a series of articles in Nashe Slovo, directed against the Mensheviks. Under the title of “What Is a Peace Program?” it was later republished in pamphlet form after the November revolution. [99]

He shows in detail how the total consequences of the victory of either side (and that means also the defeat of either side!) would be reactionary from the viewpoint of the socialist aims. He devotes special attention to the slogan “Peace without annexations” in order to show that this aim can be realized neither through the victory (or defeat) of one side nor the victory (or defeat) of the other side of the war camps.

He poses “three typical possibilities” for the outcome of the war: “(1) A decisive victory by one of the camps. (2) A general exhaustion of the opponents without the decisive dominance of one over the other. (3) The intervention of the revolutionary proletariat, which forcibly interrupts the development of military events.”

On the first: “Only charlatans or hopeless fools can believe that the freedom of the small nations can be secured by the victory of one side or the other”, he summarizes. “A like result”, he argues, would follow if the war ends in something like a draw, as envisioned by the Menshevik slogan “Neither victors nor vanquished”.

“The absence of a pronounced preponderance by one of the combatants over the other will only set off, all the more clearly, both the dominance of the strong over the weak within either one of the camps, and the preponderance of both over the “neutral” victims of imperialism. The outcome of the war without victors or vanquished is no guarantee for anybody ...

“The second possible outcome of the war, which is mainly depended upon by those who try to promote the narrow program of ‘peace without annexations and nothing more’, presupposes that the war, exhausting as it does all the resources of the warring nations, will end in general lassitude, without victors or vanquished, without being interrupted by the third power, the revolutionary power. To this very condition where militarism is too weak to effect conquests and the proletariat is too weak to make a revolution, the passive internationalists of the Kautsky type adapt their abbreviated program of “peace without annexations”, which not infrequently they present as a return to the status quo ante bellum.”

But, he continues, this is only “apparent realism”, for under the conditions of imperialism, for the reasons given in the first paragraph quoted, this outcome “does not at all exclude annexations but on the contrary presupposes them”.

To the negative peace perspective of “Neither victory nor defeat”, he counterposes the only way out which we call for and wish: the intervention of the proletarian revolution, in this war crisis itself, against the alternatives of victory or defeat for either war camp.

“A powerful movement of the proletariat is thus a necessary prerequisite for the actual realization of a peace without annexations. But again, while presupposing such a movement, the foregoing program [of the Mensheviks] remains quite inadequate in that it accepts the restoration of the order which prevailed prior to the war and out of which the war broke out. The European status quo ante bellum, the resultant of wars, robbery, violations, bureaucratism, diplomatic stupidity and the weakness of peoples, remains as the only positive content of the slogan ‘without annexations’ ... It is possible to overcome this regime only by means of the proletarian revolution.”

What is the guiding line? “We say that ... the line of direction to be followed by the international proletariat and its national fighting corps [the socialist parties] must not be determined by secondary political and national features nor by problematical advantages in military preponderance by one side over the other (whereby these problematical advantages must be paid for in advance with the absolute renunciation of the proletariat’s independent policy) but by the fundamental antagonism existing between the international proletariat and the capitalist regime generally.”

It is easy to see why, from this standpoint, Trotsky rejected Lenin’s “lesser evil” formula.

So Trotsky, to be sure, wished neither victory nor defeat for either of the war camps, but this was not and could not be his slogan. He rejected the disjunction that it posed.

7. Rosa Luxemburg on Victory and Defeat

Rosa Luxemburg took up the identical approach to the victory-or-defeat dilemma – quite independently, of course. It is worthwhile quoting her at more than our usual length. [100]

“Victory or defeat? This is the slogan of all-powerful militarism in every belligerent nation, and, like an echo, the Social-Democratic leaders have adopted it ... And yet, what can victory bring the proletariat?”

She argues that either alternative, victory or defeat, will mean, for the working class and for the people of the nation, impoverishment, economic ruin, an intensification of militarism, etc. In the course of this argument, some of her polemical points are sometimes exaggerated (in hindsight) but what we are concerned about here is the line of her analysis. Thus:

“... even before any military decision of victory or defeat can be established ... the result of the war will be: the economic ruin of all participating nations ... This, in the last analysis, neither victory nor defeat can alter; on the contrary it makes a purely military decision altogether doubtful and increases the likelihood that the war will finally end through a general and extreme exhaustion.” [16*]

After her examination of the reactionary consequences of either victory or defeat as such, she writes:

“Under the circumstances the question of victory or defeat becomes, for the European working class, in its political exactly as in its economic aspects, a choice between two beatings. It is therefore nothing short of a dangerous madness for the French Socialists to believe that they can deal a deathblow to militarism and imperialism, and clear the road for peaceful democracy, by overthrowing Germany. Imperialism and its servant militarism will reappear after every victory and after every defeat in this war. There can be but one exception: if the international proletariat, through its intervention, should overthrow all previous calculations.

“The important lesson to be derived by the proletariat from the war is the one unchanging fact, that it cannot and must not become the. uncritical echo of the ‘victory or defeat’ slogan, neither in Germany nor in France, neither in England nor in Austria. For it is a slogan that has reality only from the point of view of imperialism, and is identical, in the eyes of every large power, with the question: gain or loss of world political power, of annexations, of colonies, of military supremacy.

“For the European proletariat as a class, victory or defeat of either of the two war groups would be equally disastrous. For war as such, whatever its military outcome may be, is the greatest conceivable defeat of the cause of the European proletariat. The overthrow of war and the speedy forcing of peace by the international revolutionary action of the proletariat alwie can bring to it the only possible victory. And this victory alone can truly rescue Belgium, can bring democracy to Europe.

“For the class-conscious proletariat to identify its cause with either military camp is an untenable position. Does-that mean that the proletarian policies of the present day demand a return to the status quo, that we have no plan of action beyond the fond hope that everything may remain as it was before the war? [No, she answers, that is impossible.] ... The proletariat knows no going back, can only strive forward and onward, for a goal that lies beyond even the most newly created conditions. In this sense alone is it possible for the proletariat to oppose, with its policy, both camps in the imperialist world war.”

Her “methodology” excludes the slogan of wishing defeat. And her methodology is clear: it is, in contemporary terms and almost in her own terms, the methodology of the Third Camp. For this is indeed a methodology in the sense which we have been using; and it is equally hostile to both social-patriotism and its bisymmetric opposite, the swamp of “defeatism”.

Notes

14. This is underlined by the fact that there is a mention of defeatism – in a footnote. Here Zinoviev refers to Jaurès as a “defeatist” in the free-wheeling fashion we saw earlier.

15. Note this qualification, incidentally; it covers a tremendous amount of territory. It mainly plays the role of a hedge on the statement which Lenin made so categorically. A moment’s thought about it serves to show that it tends to turn the thesis “defeat facilitates revolution” from a “principle” into a historically conditioned possibility, operative or not operative in a given context. Zinoviev seems to be sensitive to this point (he does it more than once) whereas Lenin never wavers in the unqualified assertion. This qualification alone automatically disbars the “facilitate” formula per se as a formulation of any kind of defeatism. Actually, we would suggest, for Lenin the formula “defeat facilitates revolution” is a truncated form of “wish defeat in order to facilitate revolution”.

16. During the war, Trotsky also once expressed the opinion that this was the most likely military outcome.

Reference Notes

86. See note 3.

87. See note 4.

88. See note 2 and note 97.

89. Zinoviev, op. cit. (note 4); in Gegen den Strom, p.243.

90. Ibid., p.245.

91. Ibid., p.245.

92. Ibid., p.246.

93. Ibid., p.247.

94. See note 63.

95. Op. cit. (note 4); in Gegen den Strom, p.248.

96. Op. cit. (note 3); in Gegen den Strom, p.438.

97. Article The War and the Fate of Our Liberation, pub. Feb. 12, 1915; in Gegen den Strom, p.56.

98. Op. cit. (note 4), pp.243-4.

99. L. Trotsky, What Is a Peace Program?, Petrograd, February 1918; pamphlet, in English translation, of a series of articles which had been originally published in Nashe Slovo during 1915-16. The English is very awkward and foreign; I have taken the liberty of polishing it a bit.

100. The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (the “Junius” pamphlet), 1915.

V. The Abandonment of Defeatism in 1917

In a real sense, this is the payoff on the whole question of the meaning of Lenin’s slogan: With the March Revolution in Russia and the overthrow of tsarism, Lenin dropped defeatism and the defeat-slogan completely. The fact itself speaks volumes. A closer examination will underline the essential points we have already made. This period provides a test.

1. “We Were Not Defeatists”

The first words preserved from Lenin’s pen, after the news of the March revolution, are a letter to Kollontai, in which he wrote: “We, of course, retain our opposition to the defense of the fatherland, to the imperialist slaughter directed by Shingarev plus the Kerenskys and Co. All our slogans remain the same ...” [101]

“All our slogans” did not remain the same. The Bolsheviks remained consistently opposed to the war, even now when it was being conducted by a democratic republic of the capitalists; in fact, they had to re-emphasize their opposition to defensism twice as energetically. But on point after point where the Bolsheviks had differed from the other left-wing Marxist internationalists, Lenin revised his distinctive position: the peace slogan, the slogan “turn imperialist war into civil war”, and the defeat-slogan.

Lenin’s explicit statement on his abandonment of defeatism in this period did not come until exactly a year later, in March 1918, after the revolution. Let us record it now. The subject came up almost accidentally, at the special Congress of Soviets called to ratify the Brest-Litovsk treaty of peace with Germany. The S-Rs were against peace and for continuation of the war in spite of the complete exhaustion of the country. In reply to a speech by the Left S-R Kamkov about disrupting the army, Lenin remarked in passing:

“He [Kamkov] heard that we were defeatists, and he reminded himself of this when we have ceased to be defeatists ... We were defeatists under the tsar, but under Tseretelli and Chernov [i.e., under the Kerensky regime] we were not defeatists.” [102]

Lenin uses “under Tseretelli and Chernov” (S-R ministers in the cabinet) to denote the period from March to November 1917 because of the context of Kamkov’s speech, not for any special reason which need concern us. But he never explicitly discussed the reasons for this change, any more (for example) than he ever discussed the simultaneous revision of his opinions on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. [17*]

The abandonment of the defeat-slogan, in any case, is a clear fact even without this categorical statement. It remains to see (a) why, and (b) what took its place. The latter is an especially interesting question. During this period, the Bolsheviks were what they had denied was possible: consistently anti-war without being defeatists.

2. Bath in Social-Patriotism

Insofar as comrades in the movement have thought of this question, it is probable that the change has been viewed as solely an accompaniment of the phenomenon of dual power. That opinion does not quite stand up.

First of all, we must not underestimate the fact that Lenin had spent the war years in Switzerland, a neutral country: here there were no war atmosphere, no war hysteria, no climate of patriotism, no clouds of social-patriotism of the sort that swirled about the head of Trotsky in Paris or the German Left.

It was not until he returned to Russia on April 16 that Lenin for the first time got a bath in the atmosphere of the social-patriotism of the masses. Read his works from 1914 through 1916 and it is evident that, in his thinking, this, the social-patriotism of the rank and file appears simply as a consequence of betrayal from above. It does not play a conditioning role in his formulation of slogans. Lenin’s main emphasis is constantly to draw the hardest, sharpest line against the pro-war leaders and anyone who makes concessions to them. Only rarely does he seem to pay attention to a task which is different: how to bridge the gap between the intransigent line of opposition to the war and the thinking of the masses of workers who are under the spell of defensism, how to present his ideas to them. One of the big differences in tone between Lenin’s writings on the war and those of (say) Luxemburg or Trotsky is conditioned by this fact.

With Lenin back in Petersburg, many Bolshevik memoirs speak of his eagerness to talk to workers, get a feeling of how the people were thinking and talking. He needed it. He was going to find out the “hidden thoughts” about which he had once written so confidently.

What struck him with a fresh and new impact? It was not in the first place the phenomenon of dual power, which looms so much bigger in historical perspective.

The day after his return, he presented theses and made a speech at a caucus meeting of the Bolshevik membprs of the All-Russian Soviet Congress. [103] Here he began to sound the keynote which ran through his speeches and writings from then on, up to the, July days:

“What strikes one particularly is that here in Russia the situation in the socialist movement is the same as in other countries: defensism, ‘saving the fatherland’. The difference is that nowhere is there the degree of freedom we have ...”

And another thing: “The masses approach the question [of the war] not from a theoretical but from a practical viewpoint. Our mistake lies in our theoretical approach ... Before the representatives of the soldiers the matter must be put in a practical way, otherwise nothing will come of it.”

What was this new “practical” approach? “In view of the apparent existence of a defensist sentiment among the masses who accept the war only as a necessity and not as an excuse for making conquests, we must explain to them thoroughly, persistently, and patiently [that the war can be ended only by overthrowing capital] ... When the worker says he wants to defend his country, it is the instinct of an oppressed man that speaks in him.”

A backlight is cast on the approach which he had pursued up to this enlightenment. This was obviously a personal revelation for him. But it was not new or startling for the anti-war socialists in various countries who were immersed in the tidal wave of social-patriotism that had swept over their people. Lenin is “struck” (“hit between the eyes”, says another translation) by the fact that there is defensism in Russia too – not just in, the writings of Plekhanov or Semkovsky or some other politico who should have known better-deeply among the masses. The “Practical” problem is how, to reach them, not by Modifying one’s intransigent opposition to the war but making it comprehensible to them, making it march with their own thinking. He criticizes his previously too “theoretical” approach, but that is not just or accurate. He means his previously too abstract approach, which is not at all the same thing. It was this abstract insistence on hard formulations (not merely on “hard” ideas) which had shown itself in some of his strictures on the slogan of peace, on Luxemburg’s “Junius” pamphlet, on the slogan of defeat, in his insistence on counterposing “civil war” as a slogan to the masses’ yearning for peace and an end to war.

Now he emphasizes and scolds his followers: “We Bolsheviks are in the habit of adopting a maximum of revolutionism. But this is not enough. We must study the situation.” [104]

3. Political Freedom and “Conscientious Defensism”

In this whole period this is a repeated note sounded by Lenin, ostensibly with regard to a “peculiarity” of the Russian situation in 1917. This peculiarity is not merely the existence of dual power, which, to be sure, is “what has made our revolution so strikingly unique”, as he says in one place. [105] It is something else which, in Russia, was an accompaniment of the dual power and a consequence of the revolution, but which is not merely dual power.

This, Lenin emphasizes on occasion after occasion, is the political freedom, which now obtains. Is this any reason for supporting the war of this “free” capitalist country? Of course not. Its impact on Lenin is rather this: it means that if the masses are defensist, they are so not because of constraint by the government but, as it were, of their own free will. They cannot be cured of this by “a maximum of revolutionism”, or by slogans which are designed merely to demarcate, or by appeals to the Basle and Stuttgart resolutions. Slogans which previously seemed to him to be dangerous concessions to social-patriotism now take on a new color as a necessary bridge to the social-patriotism of the masses, as a “practical” approach.

The acquisition of capitalist “freedom” in Russia, then, does not provide any reason to modify views on the war. It is reason to modify how one approaches the masses in seeking to tear them away from their defensist illusions. He comes back to it time and again for months. He tells the Bolshevik caucus on April 17: “Russia at present is the freest, the most advanced country in the world.” [106]

He writes in his April 10 theses that the revolution has stalled “not because of outside obstacles, not because the bourgeoisie uses force ... but simply by the unthinking confidence of the masses”. [107] And again on April 27: “Complete political freedom, we have not of course. But nowhere else is there such freedom as exists in Russia.” [108]

Now he is emphasizing this in connection with the problem of how to deal with the defensist sentiments of the mass of workers. Because the picture impressed him as unique, this “conscientious” (“sincere”) revolutionary-defensism of the masses seemed to him a new phenomenon, peculiar to Russia. Thus he writes in a passage which well represents this course of thought:

“When I spoke of the ‘conscientious’ mass of revolutionary defensists, I had in mind not a moral category, but a class definition. The class represented in the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies is not interested in a predatory war. In Europe it is different ...”

We interrupt the quotation to ask: What! in Europe, then, the working class is interested in a predatory imperialist war? But no: Lenin has just jumped the track to a different line of thought, and goes straight on into the following:

“... There the people are oppressed, the most opportunistic pacifists are not infrequently baited even more than we, the Pravdists. Here the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies carries its policy of revolutionary defensism into effect, not by violence, but because the masses trust it. Europe is one large military prison. Capital rule cruelly there. All over Europe the bourgeoisie should be overthrown, and not argued with. In Russia the soldiers are armed; they allowed the bourgeoisie to beguile them peacefully when they agreed ostensibly only to ‘defend themselves’ against Wilhelm. In Europe, there is no ‘conscientious’ revolutionary defensism, of the sort we have in Russia, where the people have handed over the power to the bourgeoisie, because of ignorance, inertia, the habit to suffer the rod, tradition.” [109]

Now this portrait of the rest of Europe is a caricature even for the year 1917, when anti-war feeling was already germinating all over the Continent and was held back among other things by “sincere” “conscientious” defensism. Qualitatively, the situation which Lenin thinks is a Russian peculiarity was true of the working class of most of Europe in 1914-15. In Germany, Austria and France most particularly, the governments had put their war policy through not by violence but by deceiving the masses (it goes without saying, with the indispensable help of the social-democratic leaders). There too the masses were “peacefully” beguiled into believing that they had to “defend themselves” against a foreign oppressor or would-be oppressor. There too, “conscientious” defensism was based on misconceived class interests.

What Lenin is unwittingly explaining is what he had not really grasped about the problem up to now – the problem, that is, not of whether to support or oppose the war, but the sometimes even more difficult problem of how to present an uncomproinising anti-war line to the masses.

So again on May 10, in his speech oil the war resolution at the “April Conference”, he speaks of “... the peculiarity that distinguishes Russia from the other capitalist Western countries, and from all the capitalist democratic republics. For it cannot be said of those countries that it is the confidence of the ignorant masses that chiefly makes it possible to prolong the war. There the masses are in the iron grip of military discipline.” [110]

Even in May 1917 this was not true in France and England and not even in the Central Powers, let alone its arrant absurdity as a picture of Europe in 1914-16. But it serves the role of allowing Lenin to adopt a new policy without having to face up to what was wrong in the old. For it is on the basis of this new line of thinking that Lenin drops the defeatist formulas.

Clearly this step was not just a matter of reluctance to use “strong” language, that is, it was not just a matter of tactically dropping the term. His new approach left no room for it.

4. A Non-Defensist Program for the Defense of the Nation

Thus, it is impossible to “wish defeat” and at the same time to project the idea of transforming the imperialist war into a revolutionary war. At the same time that Lenin was vigorously fighting defensism under this government, he was offering a program of how to defend the country:

“The example of France tells us one thing and one only: to make Russia capable of defending herself, to achieve ‘marvels’ of mass heroism here, all the old must be swept away with ‘Jacobin’ ruthlessness. Russia must be rejuvenated, regenerated economically. And this cannot be done in the 20th century by merely sweeping away tsarism ...

“It is impossible to render the country capable of defending itself without the greatest heroism on the part of the people in courageously and decisively carrying out great economic transformations. And it is impossible to appeal to the heroism of the masses without breaking with imperialism, without offering to all the peoples a democratic peace, without thus transforming the war from a war of conquest, a predatory, criminal war, into a just, defensive, revolutionary war.

“Only a decisively consistent break with the capitalists both in internal and foreign politics can save our revolution and our country, held in the iron grasp of imperialism.” [111]

At this point, we must take a flashback. We have just seen Lenin urging revolution in order to be able really to defend the country. He had also run into this question in 1915, when he denounced “the revolutionary chauvinists, who desire revolution in order to defeat Germany”, whereas (he continued) we “desire the revolution in Russia for the sake of the proletarian revolution in the West, and simultaneously with that revolution.” [112] It was a false dichotomy. Again in a letter of September 1915 he had drawn a line against the “chauvinist revolutionaries” (among whom he names Kerensky and some Mensheviks) or “revolutionary-patriots”, who “want to overthrow tsarism so as to defeat Germany, whereas “we are working for the international revolution of the proletariat”. [113]

A false dichotomy, indeed. Lenin had missed the point about “revolutionary chauvinism” and understood it only in 1917, when in a sense he too became a “revolutionary-patriot”. The point was that the “revolutionary chauvinists” still based themselves on imperialism, that is, their only condition was the overthrow of tsarism while the war would still be conducted on a purely capitalist basis and in capitalist-imperialist interests. Lenin’s condition in 1917 was “breaking with imperialism” – really breaking with imperialism, and not only in words but in class terms. And in this difference everything is included.

Without ceasing for a moment to oppose the imperialist war being waged by the new democratic government of the capitalists; without ceasing for a moment to concentrate all fire against any kind of defensism under this government, Lenin recognized that the working class had a stake in the defense of the nation. His program for the defense of the nation was a thoroughly revolutionary program: the real interests of the people can be defended, not by supporting the war, but only if capitalism is overthrown and a fundamental break with iniperialism takes place.

It is superfluous to point out how utterly alien to this viewpoint is the slogan “wish defeat”. No Wonder it disappeared as thoroughly as an icicle in fire. It can also be understood why, far from “wishing defeat” any longer, Lenin and the Bolsheviks repudiated the related idea of wishing to disintegrate the army. (Fraternization, yes; but fraternization as a means of bringing about peace from below, not as a means of disintegrating the army.)

Lenin’s clearest expression on this point, it happens, came (later, after the revolution, in 1918) in the same passage that we have already quoted in the dispute over Brest-Litovsk with the S-R Kamkov. [114] The S-R debater had referred to “disrupting the army” in 1917. Lenin replied:

“But how did we disrupt the army? We were defeatists under the tsar, but under Tseretelli and Chernov we were not defeatists. We came out in Pravda with a proclamation which Krylenko, then still persecuted, published in the army: Why I Go to Petersburg. He said: ‘To revolt we do not call you.’ This was not the disintegration of the army. The army was disrupted by those who declared this great war [i.e., by the imperialists who had brought the war on] ... And I assert here that we – beginning with this proclamation by Krylenko, which was not the first and which I mention because I especially remember it – we did not disrupt the army but said: Hold the front – the sooner you will take the power, the easier you will maintain it ...” [18*]

In May 1917 Lenin, calling on the peasants to take the land, added that they should do so “using every effort to increase the production of grain and meat, for our soldiers at the front are suffering terribly from hunger”. He told them to take the land themselves and work it well because: “This is necessary in order to improve the provisioning of the soldiers at the front.” [115]

In September 1917 he wrote that the historic significance of the Kornilov revolt was that it showed people

“... that the landowners and the bourgeoisie ... are now ready to commit, and are committing, the most outlandish crimes, such as giving up Riga (and afterwards Petrograd) to the Germans, laying the war front open, putting the Bolshevik regiments under fire, starting a mutiny, leading troops against the capital with the ‘Wild Division’ at their head, etc. – all in order to seize all power and put it in the hands of the bourgeoisie ...” [116]

Trotsky in September 1917 (now a leading spokesman for the Bolsheviks) wrote in the same vein in a pamphlet:

“The people and the army, if they felt and were convinced that the Revolution was their revolution, that the government was their government, that the latter would stop at nothing in the defense of their interests against the exploiters, that it was pursuing no external aims of oppression or conquest, that it was not curtsying to the ‘Allied’ financiers, that it was openly offering the nations an immediate peace on democratic foundations – the toiling masses and their army would, under these conditions, be found to be inspired with an indissoluble unity; and if the German revolution would not come in time to aid us, the Russian army would fight against the Hohenzollerns with the same enthusiasm that the Russian workers showed in defending the gains of the popular movement against the onslaughts of the counter-revolution. The imperialists feared this path as they feared death ...” [117]

5. New Attitude to Defeat

All this is highlighted from another angle by the attitude of the Bolsheviks on the “July offensive”. We have seen how Lenin had begun by emphasizing the democratic freedom that obtained in Russia after March. But his line on the war was not directly produced by this factor, even though this was what had “struck” him. What motivated his new line on the war, directly, was rather the accompanying phenomenon of “conscientious” defensism – that is, the necessity of shaping a policy of revolutionary anti-war opposition which would mesh with the thinking of the masses.

Proof: After the “July days”, when the Kerensky government began to persecute the Bolsheviks and drive them underground, Lenin openly proclaimed that the freedom he had spoken about was now no more:

“The counter-revolution ... has actually taken state power into its hands ... Fundamentally, state power in Russia is at present actually a military dictatorship ... All hopes for a peaceful development of the Russian revolution have definitely vanished ...” [118]

The dual power was no more, also. So the slogan “All power to the Soviets” temporarily went too. [119]

Now this analysis may have been an exaggeration, but the point is that with this analysis, Lenin’s new line on the war did not change back, with respect to defeatism. It was not decisively based on the phenomenon of dual power.

The fact that the new line continued as before is best shown by the Bolsheviks’ reaction when the Kerensky government carried through its new offensive on the front beginning July 1 and met with a resounding defeat.

The Bolsheviks said the defeat was a catastrophe for the country and that the offensive had been a crime. In the pamphlet of September 1917 by Trotsky, quoted above, he refers to it strongly as “a fierce catastrophe at the front”. The offensive, he wrote, had set new goals for the army and

“... in the name of these goals it was demanded that the army, exhausted, hungry and unshod as it was, should put forward superhuman efforts. Can there be any doubt of the result when we remember, in addition, that certain generals of the staff were consciously working for a Russian defeat.” [120]

The Bolsheviks had declared warningly in the Congress of Soviets (Trotsky recalled) “that in the present state of the army an offensive was a military adventure, which threatened the very existence of the army itself. It transpired that we had seen only too clearly”.

It is consequently quite clear that the “glorious page” of the offensive of the 1st of July has no relation whatever to national defense, for the military efficiency of Russia, as the consequence of the offensive, had simply been made worse. If the bourgeoisie nevertheless speaks of the offensive in terms of approbation, it is for the simple reason that the cruel blow inflicted on our army as a result of Kerensky’s policy created favorable conditions for the spread of panic and for counter-revolutionary schemes. [121]

Yes indeed, “defeat facilitates” ... many things. Lenin, during this period, had to make the point that military defeat at the front was dangerously facilitating ... Bonapartism. He made this point precisely in the situation created by the “July Days” at the same time that he was announcing the end of dual power, democratic freedom, etc. In his article “The Beginning of Bonapartism”, he showed how a state of balanced equilibrium in the class struggle produces the classic soil of Bonapartism, and went on:

“Add to this the fact of military defeat brought about by a foolhardy offensive, when phrases about saving the fatherland are bandied about (concealing the desires of the bourgeoisie to, save its imperialist program), and you have before you a perfect picture of the social and political setting for Bonapartism.” [122]

It turns out, naturally, that the formula “defeat facilitates revolution” – quite apart from the fact that it is not even any version of a real defeatism is not the suprahistorical principle that Lenin’s polemics had made it out to be. What defeat facilitates is various, and is conditioned by the “social and political setting” in which it occurs.

As a matter of fact, while we are at it, let us get another view of how, in 1917, Lenin was using formulas of the type “defeat facilitates revolution”. In September Lenin wrote, for example:

“Needless to say, the approaching famine, economic ruin, military defeat, are capable of extraordinarily hastening this turn towards the transition of power to the proletariat supported by the poorest peasantry.” [123]

At first blush, this sounds as if it is ill contradiction with the previously quoted remark about defeat facilitating Bonapartism. But there is no necessary contradiction at all. Military defeat, by itself, facilitates breakdown of the status quo, and that is all, but what will replace the status quo depends on other factors. Together with famine and economic ruin, it can quicken the pace of a revolutionary development which is taking place – just as it can quicken other things. [19*]

But the most biting comment that this makes on Lenin’s old Formula No.2 of “defeatism” in 1914-16 is this: Previously, Lenin had deduced from the fact that “defeat facilitates revolution” the conclusion that we therefore “wish defeat”. It was an “axiom”. He could not see how anyone could fail to see the unanswerable logic. Now – as was just as clear before – “famine” and “economic ruin” are also acting as “facilitators” of revolution. It was an objective fact, put by Lenin with rigorous correctness. And it would plainly be mad to conclude from this objective fact that we therefore “wish” famine and ruin! On the contrary, Lenin was fighting for the only program to avert the “threatening catastrophe”.

There was only one little catch in this program as far as concerns the defensists – “revolutionary” defensists, “conscientious” defensists or any other kind of defensists: Lenin’s program to defend Russia, to avert the catastrophe, etc. was not any rationalization why workers should be defensists in the present under the imperialist government, but was a revolutionary program for the overthrow of imperialism and capitalism.

And this program was incompatible with any variety of defeatism.

6. Summary

To sum up:

It is not enough merely to point out that Lenin dropped defeatism after the March Revolution. Why he did so, and the program that took its place, is even more illuminating about the mistake of 1914-16.

Lenin dropped defeatism, first of all, in the face of the realization, made vivid to him for the first time, that the defeat-slogan broke all links between the sentiments and interests of the masses and the program of the consistent revolutionaries. In this sense, it was sectarian; and in our opinion the defeat-slogan deserves to be recorded as a classic example of a sectarian shell built around an opportunistic (i.e., in this case social-patriotic) theoretical core, in line with the oft-repeated Marxist truism of the dialectic relationship between the sectarian-opportunist opposites.

Secondly, Lenin discovered in practice that the defeat-slogan was incompatible with a living Marxist approach to the problem of the defense of the nation, conceived not in the social-patriotic sense of the “defense of the fatherland” but in the light of a Marxist class understanding of, and a dynamically revolutionary program for, the nation.

Thirdly: Lenin’s change of line after the democratic (but not socialist) revolution in March reflects the fact – which we have already seen – that the defeat-slogan had a meaning only in terms of a war by the tsarist feudal despotism against a progressive capitalist revolutionary force. This was the situation which Lenin thought obtained in 1904-5, and though he was wrong even then, the defeat-slogan had a clear meaning for him, at least. It was this same arrière pensée which had led Zinoviev to write the qualification “despotic” into his defeatist formulations. The March democratic revolution erased the rock-bottom motive which had led to the defeat-slogan in the first place – the “special Russian” consideration of tsarism as the unique menace, the greatest evil. Naturally, this does not bear on conscious motivation but only on the real theoretical underpinnings, which have their effect despite consciousness.

Fourthly: Lenin’s course proved that defeatism is not any necessary element in a consistent revolutionary anti-war position.

It remains now to follow the history of “revolutionary defeatism” after the First World War, and, most especially, after Lenin. In fact, it is from the reinterpretation that took place in this period that the recent couple of generations of Marxists have taken their ideas on the subject. We have to see why and how this re-interpretation took place.

Notes

17*. Yet he must have been baited by enemies about the previous defeatist line of the Bolsheviks. In an article published in September, Lenin mentions that a campaign has been started against Chernov, the S-R leader and right-wing Zimmerwaldist, “for his alleged ‘defeatist’ articles abroad”. (CW 21, I, p.111.) Needless to say, Chernov was not guilty. But if this smear campaign was launched against him, we can conjecture that Lenin’s authentic defeatist declarations must have been used too. If so, Lenin never riposted or tried to clear the question up. Unless the above-mentioned article, entitled Political Blackmail, was a sort of backhanded way of striking back.

18*. A distinction has to be made at this point between two concepts: (1) the progam of revolution and break with imperialism in order to defend Russia; and (2) even before that revolution, the slogan of “Hold the front” now. The second aspect is, without any doubt, uniquely a reflection of the dual power, in the sense that Trotsky explains in his History of the Russian Revolution apropos of the defense of Petrograd against the Germans. The previous remark we made, above, that the abandonment of defeatism was not conditioned on the dual power, does not apply to this feature of Bolshevik policy.

19*. Cf. also: “... war and economic ruin will hasten the process [of revolutionization] tremendously. These are such ‘hasteners’ that a month or even a week with them is equal to a year otherwise.” (CW21, I, p.48.) And: “That the present imperialist war, by its reactionary character and the hardships it entails, revolutionizes the masses and accelerates the revolution, is true and should be emphasized.” (CW21, II, p.82.)

Reference Notes

101. CW20, I, p.19, Two Letters to A.M. Kollontai. Not published; private letter.

102. CW22 (Russ.), pp.404-5, Concluding Speech on the Report on the Ratification of the Peace Agreement of March 15, at the 4th Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Soviets; pub. March 19, 1918.

103. CW20, I, pp.95-7, Speech at Caucus of Bolshevik Members of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets, April 17, 1917. Not published (till 1924); notes by a participant.

104. Ibid., p.99.

105. CW20, I, p.115.

106. CW20, I, p.98.

107. CW20, I, p.135, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution.

108. CW20, I, p.203, “Report on the Political Situation”.

109. Ibid., p.202.

110. CW20, I, p.296-7, Speech on the War Resolution.

111. CW21, I, p.214-6, The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It; pub. Oct. 1917 (written September 23-7).

112. Lenin, Selected Works, vol.5, p.150.

113. Letter to Shlyapnikov of September 19, 1915, in Letters of Lenin (see note 72), pp.376-7.

114. See note 102.

115. CW20, II, pp.56-7, Open Letter to the Delegates of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasant Delegates; pub. May 24, 1917.

116. CW21, I, p.160, Draft Resolution on the Political Situation. Not published (till 1926); written September 16, 1917.

117. L. Trotsky, What Next?, a pamphlet published in Petrograd in September 1917. Included in L. Fraina, ed., The Proletarian Revolution in Russia, by Lenin and Trotsky (a collection), p.257.

118. CW21, I, 36-37, The Political Situation. Not published (till 1926); written July 23, 1917.

119. Ibid., p.37.

120. In L. Fraina (see note 117), p.258.

121. Ibid., p.261.

122. CW21, I, p.77, The Beginning of Bonapartism. Pub. Aug. 11, 1917.

123. CW21, I, p.147, From a Publicist’s Diary; pub. September 1917.

VI. After Lenin: Revival and Reinterpretation

While Lenin abandoned the defeat-slogan in 1917, we have pointed out, he never himself set down his motivation for this change, and even outside his collected public and private writings it is not recorded that he ever explicitly re-examined his positions of 1914-16. The question of defeatism is not peculiar in this regard; the same thing is true of his position on the peace-slogan, and on the theory of permanent revolution. But for the six years of his life following the November Revolution, the defeat-slogan remained a dead letter, even in historical retrospect.

During this whole period we find only three mentions of the defeat-slogan in his writings and speeches. One is in his 1918 reply to the S-R Kamkov, which we have already quoted, where he mentions the defeat-slogan only in order to point out that it had been dropped “under Tseretelli and Chernov”. A second, also in connection with the Brest-Litovsk dispute, is the one we have quoted in the footnote on page 259 (Sept.-Oct., 1953 issue) [see Note 3*]. The third is the ambiguous remark in passing, in his Notes on the Question of the Tasks of Our Delegation at the Hague, December 4, 1922, in which he jots down notes for the guidance of the Bolshevik delegates to the Hague Peace Conference. Among these notes is the remark – “... first, explanation of ‘defense of the fatherland’. Second, in connection with the latter, explanation of the question of ‘defeatism’”. [124]

That is all, and the Notes are then concerned with quite other matters.

But during these six years, in his writings, speeches, reports, etc. there were numerous occasions when he harked back to the world-war period to summarize and re-analyze the position on the war taken by the different socialist tendencies – the social-patriotic right, the centrist shadings, and the internationalist left. In places too numerous to list, he revives “Turn the imperialist war into civil war”, “The main enemy is in your own country”, etc. But precisely in these contexts, there is no hint of recollection of the defeat-slogan.

But we know that defeatism was destined to become a prominent and oft-repeated “principle” of the Communist movement, continued as such by the Stalinists in their own way, and also continued as such by the Trotskyist movement. Obviously it was given a real revival at some point. When? where? how? why? and by whom?

1. The First Five Years of the C.I. – No Defeatism

This revival of defeatism did not take place while Lenin was alive, that is, during the first five years of the Comintern.

We are not in a position to state categorically that up to Lenin’s death, defeatism is never mentioned in the documents of the Comintern. The elimination of all possibilities in that tremendous bulk of material is a research task we have not been in a position to perform.

But a check of the resolutions and theses, major documents, and publications of the Comintern permits us to say very confidently: if anyone referred to defeatism at all, it certainly played no role in the program, policy and principles of the Communist International under Lenin.

The first four congresses of the Comintern (1919-1922) adopted a large number of long, detailed, analytical theses on all the major (and any number of minor) questions of revolutionary policy. These “theses” are not infrequently marked by discursive historical sections, moreover.

Especially at the Second Congress in 1920, the aim of these theses was not to make it “easy” for individuals or groups to adhere to the new revolutionary international but on the contrary: one of the main dangers, as the Bolsheviks saw it, was the tendency of all kinds of centrists and dubious elements to flock to the new banner, since the Second International was thoroughly discredited (even in the eyes of elements who fundamentally agreed with its politics!) and there were too many who were only too anxious to cover their pasts with present acceptance of the most “revolutionary” slogans, provided only they didn’t have to act like Communists. This was indeed the reason for the adoption by the Second Congress of the famous 21 Points of admission to the C.I.

Yet there is not a hint of any kind of defeat-slogan in any of the documents of the first four congresses of the Comintern.

By 1924 the International and many of its parties were considering the question of new over-all programs. Even at this date (which is after the period we are now discussing, as we shall see) the draft program for the C.I. presented by Bukharin ignores defeatism. Even at the Fifth Congress in 1924 the reports on the Program Question delivered by Bukharin and August Thalheimer ignore defeatism under the head of the war question. At the same time the Young Communist International, the German party and others were also developing new draft programs – without defeatism.

From the revolution up to Lenin’s death, books and pamphlets were issued which contained discussions of the war positions of the world-war period and Lenin’s ideas. Checking many of these, including a number by Zinoviev, we find no recollection of defeatism.

There was the monthly organ of the International, the Communist International. There is no lack of articles from 1919 to 1923 inclusive which review the war question, the world-war period, Lenin’s distinctive ideas, etc. Of these we have been able to check all but eight numbers, including all of the first year (1919) when the war question was freshest and all of 1923. Defeatism is not raised. [20*]

Even allowing for the hiatuses, then, one thing is perfectly clear: defeatism does not have the role which was later assigned to it. The modern myth has not yet been started.

2. How Zinoviev Revived Defeatism in 1924

The suspicion which this is bound to awaken in the minds of all who know the history of this period can be given strong documentary evidence to confirm it.

Defeatism was revived as a “principle of Leninisin” in the beginnings of the Stalinist counter-revolution, most specifically by Stalin’s partner in the “troika” which succeeded to Lenin’s leadership – Zinoviev.

The sign under which this “troika” of Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev took over was the struggle against Trotsky and “Trotskyism”. Defeatism was revived as one lever among others in this struggle. The ideological cover under which this anti-Trotsky coalition worked, created by Zinoviev, was the slogan of “Bolshevization” of the cadres of the Comintern. Defeatism was revived as one of the elements in this anti-Trotskyist “Bolshevization”.

By the time of Lenin’s death in January 1924 Stalin was already in control of the main levers of the party apparatus and Zinoviev, his accomplice, was the boss of the Comintern and public ideological mentor of the anti-Trotsky cabal. They were ready to go into high gear before Lenin’s body was cold. They had, in fact, had a rehearsal in the factional “literary discussion” over Trotsky’s Lessons of October.

The first time that we find defeatism recalled as a “principle of Leninism” in the pages of the Communist International is in the very first issue of that organ published after the death of Lenin! This number is, of course, mostly made up of articles on Lenin, his ideas, his role, etc. One of the most prominent articles among these is by Martynov on The Great Proletarian Leader. In it Martynov, yesterday a Menshevik and now a hatchetman for the troika who had joined the Bolshevik bandwagon with the NEP wave, loads his gun with the defeat-slogan and fires its shot openly and by name – straight at Trotsky.

This is what he wrote:

“Lenin was not the only one to protest against this treason [support of the war] at the very outbreak of the war; a similar attitude was taken by the internationalist minorities of the various socialist parties. But the slogans launched by Lenin at that time were so daring, I should say so defiant, that they contained a challenge not only to the social-patriots but also to all the internationalists ... He said: ‘In order to put an end to the imperialist war, it should be transformed into civil war. Those who will start the civil war may be menaced by defeat in the imperialist war, but we have no fear about that. Particularly to us Russian Social-Democrats, defeat in the war is the lesser evil!’ This ‘defeatism’ aroused the protests not only of social-patriots but even of all the internationalists, including the most Left ones, as for instance Comrade Trotsky. He [Lenin] was told: ‘You want Russia to be defeated, consequently you want Germany to win, and in this case it is social-patriotism inside out! You reason the same way as the social-patriots, but for another country, not your own!’ This accusation, as everyone can now see, was quite beside the mark ... Lenin knew and did not disguise the fact that if we start the revolution during the war, it will lead directly to our military defeat. But he knew more than that; he knew that the revolution started by us will spread also to Germany and that our defeat like the German victory will be short-lived. He therefore said: ‘Dare!’ and he was fully vindicated by history ... Lenin could see farther than his nose, and he therefore launched such slogans as appeared rather unreasonable to the other socialists.” [125]

There can be little doubt why, all of a sudden, after six years of silence, this article gives more space to the defeat-slogan than to any other idea in Lenin’s war position. [21*] A few issues later Zinoviev himself picked up the refrain which he had put Martynov up to launch, in an article on War and Leninism. Here too the sharp point of the reference is turned against Trotsky, anonymously this time, but the dig was lost on no one:

“Leninism was much taken to task for its ‘defeatism’. Even some of the internationalists, on reaching this point, would turn their backs on Bolshevism and their faces to social-chauvinism. Nevertheless, Leninism, remaining true unto itself, said ... [and here Zinoviev quotes the sentence on defeatism from Socialism and War, which just happens to be the pamphlet which he signed together with Lenin. The meaning is: This is how I, Zinoviev, stood at Lenin’s side while Trotsky was attacking him ... ].” [126]

This was the beginning.

It was not until the Sixth Congress that defeatism was canonized as an article of program for the Stalinist movement (by the Fifth Congress in 1924 the sly references were only getting under way). The resolution on The Struggle Against Imperialist War and the Tasks of the Communists at the Sixth Congress (1928) put defeatism almost at the head of “the political program of the Communists in an imperialist war”: “Defeatism, i.e., to work for the defeat of the home imperialist government in the war.”

We need not follow its further progress in the Stalinist movement as an article of faith. The more interesting question that comes up is the reaction to the revival of defeatism by Trotsky himself, who was its butt.

Obviously, the whole point of Zinoviev’s resuscitation of this old difference between Lenin and Trotsky was as a part of what he later confessed to be the “invention of ‘Trotskyism’” as an instrument in the power struggle being developed by the Stalin-Zinoviev group to oust Trotsky from the party leadership in spite of the fact that Lenin’s death left him the single most popular and authentic leader of the Russian Revolution. Every difference that Trotsky had ever had with Lenin was revived, and if defeatism has the distinction of being the very first one to be given the treatment after Lenin’s death, it was not the most important. As is well known, the theory of the permanent revolution, the peasant question, the dispute over the trade-union question, Trotsky’s “organizational” criticisms of the Bolsheviks before 1917, the conflict over Brest-Litovsk, etc., etc. – all of these were systematically recalled. Trotsky was not an “old Bolshevik” but a comparative newcomer to the Bolshevik ranks, in spite of his already pre-eminent position; and the leaders of the Thermidorean reaction struck the pose of “old Bolsheviks” who were defending historical Leninism against an old foe. Thus they threw up a smokescreen of old outlived differences in order to press forward their new revisionist line of national-socialism and bureaucratization.

On these artificially revived historical questions, Trotsky’s approach was quite rightly to minimize the significance of the differences. On some he openly admitted that he had been wrong and Lenin right, as on his pre1917 “organizational” differences. On others, as on the theory of permanent revolution, he fought back vigorously in defense of his views, while seeking to prove that the difference had never been as fundamental and irreconcilable as the Stalinists made out. But on defeatism – he “passed”, as they say in poker.

When Zinoviev and his henchman Martynov hastened, on the day after Lenin’s death, to bring up defeatism as their maneuver in this process, and openly direct it against Trotsky, they were hoping that Trotsky would bite. Trotsky did not. The conspirators had to go on to other red herrings.

3. Trotsky Sidesteps

But for himself, if not only for polemical purposes, Trotsky had to face the question in his own mind. He had always been against the defeat-slogan; when he joined the Bolshevik party in 1917 it was dead; for the next six years it remained virtually buried. He certainly had no reason to change his opinion on the issue. Now, along with the rest, its disloyal revival was tactically embarrassing, even though all political logic and truth was on his side. We have already said that he sought, within the limits of honesty and political clarity, to minimize his differences with Lenin. On this point, it would seem, he managed to convince himself, under the difficult circumstances, that there was no real difference at all.

We say “it would seem” so, because Trotsky nowhere has discussed this change of view through which he obviously went. In his book The Stalin School of Falsification (which consists mainly of documents from the late ’20s), the question of defeatism comes up only in one place, Trotsky’s speech of August 1, 1927 on The War Danger and the Opposition, at a joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission in the midst of the Stalinists’ drive toward his expulsion. The reference is enough to show that the “defeatism” question is being thrown at Trotsky’s head and that he is dodging it. Trotsky opens his speech with this point:

“Your theses assert that the Opposition allegedly holds some sort of Trotskyist formulation on the questions of war and defeatism. New fictions! Paragraph 13 of your theses is entirely devoted to this twaddle. So far as the Opposition as a whole is concerned, it can in no way be held accountable for my former differences with Lenin, differences which, upon these questions, were altogether secondary in character. So far as I am personally concerned, I can make here a brief reply to the silly insinuations.” [127]

But his brief reply turns out to be merely a citation of facts showing that since the revolution he, Trotsky, has often been assigned to write the war position of the party (he does not refer to the differences on defeatism of 1914-16). And then he continues:

“Now it suddenly appears, after my rejection of ‘economic defeatism’ in 1926 – an absurd and illiterate slogan advanced by Molotov for the English workers – that I had presumably parted company with Leninism. Why then did Molotov hide his silly slogan in his back-pocket after my criticism of it? ... Why then was it deemed necessary to exaggerate rudely old differences which, moreover, were liquidated long ago? For what purpose? For the purpose of covering up and camouflaging the actual palpable and current differences.” [128]

That is all. In the same book, Trotsky’s Letter to the Bureau of Party History (October 21, 1927) takes up some dozens of examples of the Stalin clique’s falsification of his political biography. The first two pages deal with the world-war period. “The organs of the Bureau of Party History”, he writes, “are trying at this late date to describe my work during the war as bordering on social-patriotism.” [129] As we have just seen, the Stalinists’ theses had devoted a whole paragraph to the “defeatist” difference in substantiation of this slander. But Trotsky does not mention it here. He cites various general testimonials to the fact that Lenin and the movement considered him to have taken a clear-cut internationalist position during the war.

Did, then, Trotsky come to agree with Lenin’s defeat-slogan? We have to judge by what he wrote in formulating the defeat-slogan in the ’30s, as theoretical leader of the Trotskyist movement. From this we must conclude that he convinced himself to accept the term – but that he never did accept it in the sense given to it by Lenin or anyone else. What happened is that he sought to reinterpret it in a peculiar fashion which not only deprived it of Lenin’s content but sometimes of any content whatsoever. If the history of defeatism has been one of confusion and muddle up to now, with this period of Trotskyist reinterpretation the muddle reaches awe-inspiring proportions.

4. Trotsky’s Formula in 1934

Trotsky, under the pressure of the Stalinist campaign against his Bolshevik bona fides, wishes to be “orthodox”, but he also wishes to write nothing that he does not believe. None of his defeatist formulations, therefore, comes within a mile of “wishing defeat”. Of Lenin’s four formulas, he sometimes paraphrases the one which is furthest away from “wishing defeat”, namely, No.4: do not stop before the risk of defeat. But in addition, and mainly, he developed for his purpose an ingenious formula of his own which had the advantage of sounding like the “lesser evil” formulation.

We find the latter in his theses War and the Fourth International (1934), under the heading “Defeatism” and Imperialist War. This is what he works out:

“Lenin’s formula ‘defeat is the lesser evil’ means not that defeat of one’s own country is the lesser evil as compared with the defeat of the enemy country but ...”

Pausing at this point for a moment, what we have is already rather peculiar. This meaning which is “not Lenin’s” is also not anybody else’s: whatever it might mean, which is moot, the counterposition was not “defeat of one’s own country” against “defeat of the enemy country”, but rather this: “defeat of one’s own country” is the lesser evil as compared with “victory of one’s own country”. And this was so indubitably Lenin’s conscious and explicit idea that it would be quite impossible to deny it. The peculiar thing that Trotsky does here is to invent a brand-new set of words in order to deny that Lenin ever said it – in which he is undeniably right since he has just invented it himself. Why? Perhaps because the necessary conclusion from Lenin’s actual formula is “wish defeat”, and this is the last thought that Trotsky even desires to suggest. [22*]

“[But, Trotsky continues, Lenin’s formula means] that a military defeat resulting from the growth of the revolutionary movement is infinitely more beneficial to the proletariat and to the whole people than military victory assured by ‘civil peace’.” [130]

Of course, we have seen that Lenin never indicated that he meant any such bowdlerized version at all. This is what Trotsky wants to mean, and he is trying to convince himself that it has some relation to Lenin’s slogan because he has managed to use the word “defeat” and the words “lesser evil” in close association. But let us see how Trotsky has juggled the words to get his effect.

“Military defeat resulting from the growth of the revolutionary movement is better than military victory assured by civil peace.” The italicized qualifiers are what do the trick. To see how little it actually says, let us put other terms into the same algebraic formula and note the effect:

“Hunger due to continuing a hard strike is better than getting a raise which is conditioned on the capitulation and destruction of the union.” This is obviously the analogous slogan of “hungerism”, which proves that “hunger is the lesser evil”. And there is no doubt that hunger is a lesser evil, as compared with an astronomical number of other evils. If this is all that is proved about “defeat”, then an open door is being kicked into splinters. But above all, the exercise in words does not convince us to “wish” hunger any more than to “wish” defeat. The case is, at it were, that we “continue the strike even at the cost of hunger”. [23*]

Secondly, however indubitable Trotsky’s well-qualified version may be in itself (in the case of defeat as in the case of anything else), such a formulation is no positive guide whatsoever on the war question, and this is fundamentally because it poses the question in terms of a defeat or victory of the government. For this reason it is not itself a “formula of proletarian policy` but, at best, a warning against a bad one. Trotsky here has fallen precisely into the methodological error of putting the question in the form of a choice between military outcomes on the government plane – the error which he saw so clearly in Lenin before he started to find “orthodox” formulations.

Thirdly, Trotsky limits his formula to “military defeat resulting from the growth of the revolutionary movement”. Lenin never did. Lenin was thinking in precisely the reverse terms: growth of the revolutionary movement resulting from military defeat at the hands of the enemy government. The hollowness of Trotsky’s attempt at a paraphrase could not be more apparent.

Therefore, also, this limitation of Trotsky’s does not make sense when we try to apply it to the formula “defeat facilitates revolution”. What defeat “facilitates”? – only that defeat “which results from the growth of the revolutionary movement”? Of course not.

Fourthly, and finally: Trotsky presents this set of words as a formula for defeatists. Yet it clearly applies also to situations in which we are defensists! Take, for example, Trotsky’s position on the Spanish civil war, in which he was for revolutionary defensism in the Loyalist camp against Franco. Yet, as a defensist he would have to say – and it would be politically important to say – that “military defeat which results from the growth of the revolutionary movement” is, at any rate, the “lesser evil” as compared with “military victory which is assured by” the Marxists’ abandonment of their revolutionary role and support to popular-frontism and the bourgeois-Stalinist government.

What this illustrates is that the truth which is contained in Trotsky’s formula is of so general a nature, in(Iced so fundamental a nature, that it applies not only in situations where we oppose war but even where we are supporting a progressive war. It is not a formula for “defeatism”; it is not even a formula for an anti-war policy without defeatism; it is a general formula for proletarian class independence.

It simply has nothing to do with defeatism. [24*]

5. How Trotsky Hung on to the Term Defeatism

In his 1938 theses on The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Trotsky limits himself to a pious quotation in referring to defeatism:

“In this struggle [against imperialism and war] the basic principle is: ‘the chief enemy is in your own country’, or ‘the defeat of your own (imperialist) government is the lesser evil’.” [131]

But further down Trotsky is so intent on getting that “lesser evil” formulation in, that he commits an instructive boner. He takes up socialist policy in an imperialist war against a workers’ state and says:

“The defeat of every imperialist government in the struggle with the workers’ state or with a colonial country is the lesser evil.” [132]

But in this case he wishes the victory of the workers’ state on the other side of the lines, which is not any evil at all. [25*] But the phrase “lesser evil” has to be used somehow, as the badge of defeatism.

In 1939 Trotsky engaged in a particularly interesting exchange of views on defeatism with a group of Palestinian Trotskyists. His article A Step Toward Social-Patriotism [133] was a polemic against the idea being advanced by this group (just before the Second World War broke out) that defeatism would apply in the fascist war bloc but not in the democratic camp, even though the latter was considered imperialist too. In both we oppose the war, they said, but only in one of them are we “defeatists”.

Apart from Trotsky’s reply, this position of the Palestinians has great interest for us in itself. It is the first case we know of where serious thinking about Lenin’s concept of defeatism led a group in an objectively social-patriotic direction; where, so to speak, the social-patriotic potential in it was acted out in politics.

Their document said: “The general schema is defeatism in all imperialist countries ... Defeatism, according to Lenin’s definition and as it has been generally understood, signifies a desire for defeat and giving aid to the latter. Is that slogan applicable in any imperialist country in any war?”

No, they answered, it is not applicable in every war. These Palestinians are thinking specifically of the coming war with Nazi Germany. “Do we really desire the defeat of the democratic camp which is at war with Hitler?” they no doubt asked themselves, and they could not find it in them to say yes – while accepting the “generally understood” meaning of defeatism. There can be little doubt that the course of thinking through which they were going was “a step toward social-patriotism”, but the form it took with them was the development of a “theory” of one-way or one-sided defeatism (so to speak) – a “defeatist” anti-war line in one camp, a “non-defeatist” but still presumably anti-war line in the other camp.

Given the fact that this distinction was being drawn on the basis of accepting the defeatist methodology itself, and not through an emancipation from it, it could mean only that they were saying: Let us be completely against the war in the Nazi camp, but in the democratic camp we are against the war only in part, or only in a certain sense, or only with certain reservations. The latter part was naturally not thought-out, as it never could be, since it was essentially a mood of uncertainty poised between social-patriotism and a Third Camp line.

But, we see, they posed the question: Defeatism means we desire defeat – well, do we?

Trotsky’s reply sidesteps on this, the crucial point in meeting the real train of thought of the Palestinians.

“... they have in our opinion [Trotsky replied] given far too nebulous, and especially far too equivocal a definition of ‘defeatism’ as of some special and independent system of actions aimed to bring defeat. That is not so ...”

That is the only comment he makes on the formulation “desire defeat”, which, as he must have known, was Lenin’s standard formula. It was not the Palestinians only who were being equivocal or nebulous.

The rest of this passage from Trotsky’s reply continues as follows:

“... Defeatism is the class policy of the proletariat, which even during a war sees the main enemy at home, within its particular imperialist country. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a policy which locates the main enemy outside one’s own country. The idea of defeatism signifies in reality the following: conducting an irreconcilable revolutionary struggle against one’s own bourgeoisie as the main enemy, without being deterred by the fact that this struggle may result in the defeat of one’s own government; given a revolutionary movement the defeat of one’s own government is a lesser evil. Lenin did not say nor did he wish to say anything else. There cannot even be talk of any other kind of ‘aid’ to defeat.”

Certainly Trotsky in this period is no authority on what Lenin said or wished to say on defeatism. Ad hoc, while assuring the reader that he knows just what Lenin wished to say, he rings in an entirely new qualification, italicized to boot, “given a revolutionary movement”, which was no qualification in Lenin’s formulations. Otherwise Trotsky presents the claim (this time, anyway) that defeatism is merely the idea which we met under Formulation No.4.

6. Exegesis in the Trotskyist Movement

Trotsky’s course of dealing with the defeatist orthodoxy by “interpreting it away” is reflected in all the literature of the Trotskyist movement, which interprets it in virtually every conceivable fashion. [26*] About 1935-6 James Burnham’s pamphlet War and the Workers (signed “John West”, published by the Workers Party) gave a version which had been hovering on the fringes as the “authoritative” one:

“The Marxists fight, but within each country they fight not for the victory but for the defeat of their own government – not for its defeat by the opposing capitalist powers but for its defeat by its own working class.” [134]

This was a very “acceptable” formula since it obligingly made defeatism mean nothing special – nothing, except “the revolution”. The term is retained only as a ritualistic bow to the memory of Lenin and to the myth that no position on war is completely “revolutionary” without something called defeatism.

On the other hand, C.L.R. James’ World Revolution, written by a more conscientious ritualist, writes of 1914:

“Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg had early called for the new international, but Trotsky refused to accept Lenin’s uncompromising demand that each socialist should fight for the defeat of his own country.” [135]

It is amusing that, only a few pages before, James had devoted a long passage to summarizing Lenin’s position on the war – and had not even mentioned defeatism at that point! As is not uncommon in references to defeatism, he “remembered” the slogan only when it was a question of showing how much more “revolutionary” Lenin was than the other anti-war socialists, in line with the myth. In a sense, indeed, this reflects the role which the defeat-slogan actually did play with Lenin, who “forgot” it himself on more than one occasion.

In 1937 the program adopted by the foundation convention of the Socialist Workers Party formulated defeatism (without the term itself being used) as follows, as a variant of Formulation No.4:

“The SWP will advocate the continuance of the class struggle during the war regardless of the consequences for the outcome of the American military struggle ...” [136]

A good part of the movement, especially that part which had entered about this time and later, came to regard this formula as if it were the classic and canonical meaning of defeatism, or at least as particularly “authentic” in some sense. As mentioned before, the political concept embodied in this formulation and its like will be further discussed in another article; but as a definition of “defeatism” it was only one of the numerous tries.

The “defeatism” confusion came in for another working-out in 1939 when the outbreak of the Second World War, and Russia’s role in it, precipitated a fiercely fought political conflict in the SWP, a split, and the formation of the Workers Party (now ISL). The majority led by J.P. Cannon stuck with, and was stuck with, the “defense of the Soviet Union” in response to Moscow’s invasion of Poland and Finland. The minority led by Max Shachtman reacted to the war crisis with a Third Camp policy, rejecting the line of defense of Russia in the war.

“You are against the defense of the Soviet Union?” said the Cannonites. “Then that means you are defeatists in Russia. That means you wish the defeat of Russia by reactionary Finland and Poland. It means you wish the victory of imperialism against the ‘workers state’.”

This faced the anti-defensist minority with the task of defining defeatism. The situation was ironic. The Cannonites knew well enough that they had never considered defeatism to mean favoring the victory of the opposing side. Yet out of sheer demagogy – which was their main stock-in-trade as a substitute for political theory – they began to insist that defeatism meant just that. And little as they knew it, it happened to be basically true, as we have seen, in the sense that the defeatist tradition arose in this way. Yet – and such things were possible only in the Babel of ideas known as defeatism – these same Cannonites considered themselves to be defeatists with respect to American imperialism, and nevertheless indignantly rejected the idea that this put them in favor of the victory of an opposing imperialist camp.

In reply, the minority sought to make clear its belief that being a defeatist did not mean favoring the other side’s victory. In a document summarizing the minority’s position, War and Bureaucratic Conservatism, a new term was even coined to make the distinction: the kind of defeatism where you do wish the other side’s victory was tagged “military defeatism”; the kind of defeatism where you don’t, was left at “revolutionary defeatism”. The newly minted term thereupon entered into the labyrinth of ideas on the subject.

As for the meaning of “revolutionary defeatism”, the document asserted:

“Does revolutionary defeatism mean the defeat of ‘our’ army by the ‘enemy’ army – the American army by the Japanese, the British army by the German, the Italian army by the French? Not at all. It means the defeat of one’s ‘own’ government by one’s own proletariat.” [137]

In point of fact, from here on, at least in the Workers Party formed by the minority, more and more “defeatism” began to mean nothing more than “non-defensism”. Indeed, with the development of the movement’s Third Camp position on the Second World War, all reference to the term pretty much died out, since in this case the term was somewhat worse than useless. So thoroughly had the term been peeled of all significance, in the process begun by Trotsky.

It may be that in the minds of some comrades who thought about it at all, this may have been considered “tactical” – that is, “defeatism” was a “horrid word” (as Cremo cigars’ ads said about spit in those days). But in 1941-42 when the present writer gave a number of talks presenting the viewpoint of this article – namely, that defeatism was a jumble of political confusion in Lenin’s ideas and should be conscientiously buried – there was next to no dissent and certainly no suspicion of “softness” on the war question. [27*]

In September 1941 an article by Max Shachtman in Labor Action recommended, at any rate, dropping “the word out of our vocabulary”:

“Finally, it is necessary to have a little more clarity on the question of defeatism. You remember in the SWP dispute, the gifted Marxist, Cannon, explained to us that the Leninist theory of defeatism means that you PREFER the victory of the enemy to the victory of your own government. That is, you PREFER the defeat of your country by the enemy country, to the defeat of the enemy country by your country. Of course, Lenin never had such an idea, but trifles like that never bothered Cannon in his theoretical flights. I personally think that so much confusion has been introduced in the concept of defeatism that I doubt if we would be losing too much if we dropped the word out of our vocabulary.” [138]

And all in all, for the reasons mentioned as well as the actual line of attack on the war which the movement engaged in (to be touched on in our next article), this is just what happened. “Defeatism” fortunately played no part in our consideration of war policy all through the Second World War – not even as watered down, reinterpreted, emasculated or diluted by the reduction-process it had already gone through. And it stayed that way after the war was over.

7. Shachtman’s New Line

The picture seems to have changed recently in response to problems raised by the looming Third World War of the Western capitalist powers against the Russian empire. Most particularly, two articles in the New International for 1951 on Socialist Policy and the War, by Max Shachtman [139], have served to revive the old exegeses on “what Lenin meant” by defeatism in 1914-16, and this precisely in connection with the question: Will this “defeatism” apply in the next Third World War?

Obviously, from the point of view of the present article, this re-raising of the old confusions from their grave (or, if you will, suspended animation) cannot serve any useful purpose or make for clarity. That is the lesser concern. More than that, inherent in any such approach to the problems of the Third World War is an ambiguity which obtrudes despite the most flawless presentation of the issues of the war in every other respect.

This fundamental ambiguity arises from the following dual characteristic of Comrade Shachtman’s treatment of defeatism in his articles: He presents Lenin’s defeatism as the correct and necessary policy for 1914-16, but rejects it for the Third World War. (Likewise, for Lenin’s insistence on defeatism in 1914-16 as compared with his abandonment of defeatism after the March revolution.)

Now we have tried to show in this article that defeatism had no valid place in a consistent, thoroughgoing anti-war policy throughout the First World War, and it goes without saying, as a consequence, that it only disorients consideration of a concrete Marxist anti-war policy for the present war crisis. Contrariwise, there is a certain meaning (though an incorrect one) in the view that defeatism is just as valid today as in 1914-16 provided only that we “reinterpret” it properly, etc., etc. One view is to throw it out for both periods; one is to accept it for both periods.

But what is the meaning of the alternative, split position which Comrade Shachtman proposes, and which puts forward a brand-new variant on the whole defeatist confusion? Let us consider (a) his discussion of Lenin’s views in the First World War, and (b) his application of this discussion to today.

Comrade Shachtman devotes a relatively large amount of space to expounding Lenin’s defeatism during the war, and presumably this aspect of Lenin’s policy is included when he remarks (at the end of his first article) that there is no need “of adding anything to the justification of Lenin’s policy which was so richly supplied by the living events”. [140] If, on the other hand, this particular remark is intended only to apply to Lenin’s position of 1917, it is still perfectly clear that his acceptance of Lenin’s defeatism is entirely uncritical and approving. Indeed, at the beginning of his article he asserts that “We will dwell mainly upon Lenin’s position ... because the method he employed in arriving at his views remains the model for Marxists today”. [141] We have, on the contrary, seen that with regard to method above all. Lenin’s defeatism bears within itself a serious social-patriotic potential.

8. How Shachtman Explains Lenin’s Defeatism

What is Comrade Shachtman’s understanding of Lenin’s defeatism? He gives it, at one point, as follows:

“What if prosecution of the class struggle imperils the military position of the government, even to the point where it may be defeated by the enemy and lose the war? No matter. The class struggle must be continued in all countries regardless of the cost to the existing governments. This was Lenin’s famous (but not always very clearly understood) theory of ‘defeatism’ or ‘revolutionary defeatism’.” [142]

At this point, then, to Shachtman, defeatism is Formulation No.4: continue the class struggle despite the cost of defeat. (Shachtman adds: despite “the cost to the existing governments”, which is an excellent addition in many respects but which was not a qualification that was or could have been made by Lenin from his viewpoint.)

This defeatism, continues Shachtman, applied to all the warring governments.

Yet we find that the next solid page and a half of his article is devoted to quoting, in the same apparently approving vein, five passages in which Lenin put forward the quite different version No.1 of the “lesser evil” formula – which Lenin never applied to all the governments, but only to tsarist Russia.

This “lesser evil” formulation, Shachtman thus emphasizes, was at bottom based on the conception of the specially reactionary role which was “a hundred times worse than kaiserism” or the other governments, which therefore merited a “special Russian” policy by the socialists which could not apply in the other countries. We have seen the contradiction that this entailed and which Lenin never resolved except by abandoning the original motivation and shifting, from time to time, to other formulations.

But in the world of today this must remind us of what is going on today, when so many disoriented socialists (not to speak of others) are thinking of Stalinist Russia in precisely the way which formed the heart of the old Marx-Engels-Second International methodology on the war question of the pre-imperialist era. It was this same methodology which gave rise to Lenin’s “lesser evil” formula.

Comrade Shachtman’s treatment of this methodology is exactly as “split” in its thinking as Lenin’s, which he is following. He explains [143] that Marx and Engels used to ask: “The success of which bourgeoisie is more desirable?” He quotes Lenin’s analysis that this approach can no longer apply today in the imperialist epoch. (He could have added that the Marx-Engels approach, mechanically transplanted to a different epoch, had actually become the theoretical rationale of “Marxist” social-patriotism.) Yet, a couple of pages later, Comrade Shachtman writes the following:

“He [Lenin] was not blind, either, to the question raised in millions of minds: Whose victory will be the lesser evil from the standpoint of the working class? This question he answered, as it were, on two levels which were closely connected with one another.” [144]

The “two levels”, we find out in effect, refer to Lenin’s contradiction: the old “lesser evil” criterion does not apply “from the standpoint of the international proletariat” but it does apply to one country and one country alone, tsarist Russia. With this reference to “two levels” Shachtman accepts both sides of the contradiction, and therefore devotes the space he does to the “lesser evil” methodology

And so, like Lenin, he must contradict himself. Thus Comrade Shachtman introduces one of Lenin’s “lesser evil” passages with the remark that Lenin was “still making it clear that he was speaking not simply of the defeat of tsarism by the socialist proletariat but of its military defeat by Germany...”. [145] This, of course, is perfectly true, even though it is what most of the movement, including Comrade Shachtman, have denied for many years. Lenin’s “defeat is the lesser evil” meant defeat by the enemy camp. Yet we find Comrade Shachtman writing in a later article (reply to letter by Gordon Haskell in the September-October New International):

“The ordinary citizen, who can think only in terms of his present government winning the war or being defeated and crushed by the arms of the enemy – Russia, the Stalinists – comes to the conclusion that if the socialists are not for the victory of the government in the war, they are for its defeat by the enemy. And so, we regret to note, are some radicals who have misread Lenin badly and misapplied him worse.” [146]

The ambivalence is striking, above all in the context of the present war crisis. On the one hand, the idea is suggested (if not by Shachtman, then inherently by his course of argumentation): Stalinism is “a hundred times worse” than American capitalism, its rival; [28*] therefore its defeat is the “lesser evil”, and by its defeat we make clear that we are “speaking not simply of the defeat of [Stalinism] by the socialist proletariat but of its military defeat by [America]”.

And the “lesser evil” formula means we are for this defeat. Then we are for the victory of the war camp opposed to Russia? At this point Lenin used to protest indignantly, in all outraged sincerity, without ever discussing what is wrong with this perfectly necessary conclusion from his confused methodology. Comrade Shachtman does likewise in his reply to Haskell, just as cogently pointing out that all his other ideas leave absolutely no room for this conclusion.

This is one reason for what Shachtman describes as the “completely unexpected and just as completely unwarranted conclusion that some readers of my articles seem to have drawn”. [147] We can point out that he is in somewhat the same boat as Lenin, whose contradiction he duplicated; and we saw that Lenin was amazed, indignant or furious when the social-patriotic potential in his approach was pointed out to him by Karpinsky, Bukharin and others among his own comrades, by Trotsky and other anti-war political opponents, by Mensheviks and other pro-war political opponents. The first chided, the second attacked, the third sought to cover their own social-patriotic inclinations by gleeful exploitation of his mistake.

9. What Does Shachtman’s Position Mean?

But such a mistake today can be more serious than it was for Lenin. This is especially true when the duplication of Lenin’s confusion of 1914-16 is complicated further by the view that, while this defeatist confusion was correct for the First World War, it must be rejected in a war against Stalinist Russia.

This is Comrade Shachtman’s conclusion: “Socialist policy in the coming war, then, does not put forward any such slogans as ‘revolutionary defeatism’ ...” [148]

He makes the counterposition explicit: “We are not for suspending the class struggle of the toilers ... We are not for subordinating that struggle to the military triumph of imperialism, to the ‘victory’ ... But because we take this view, it does not follow for us that we are for the defeat of the American bourgeoisie and its arms by Stalinism. It is right here that we emphasize the difference between the first world war and the third. It is in this connection that I cited Lenin’s position in 1914 to show why it could not simply be repeated by socialists today, and his position in 1917 to show the extent to which it should be repeated today.” [149]

But when Comrade Shachtman formulates his “different” line for the Third World War, we find that every essential formulation in it should have held good in 1914 – if we look not at Lenin’s distinctive mistakes but at the anti-war line pursued by internationalists like Trotsky and Luxemburg. For example, Shachtman writes:

“We are not indifferent to who defeats Stalinism, because that involves how it is being defeated and what are the consequences of such a defeat; therefore we are not for support of capitalist imperialism in the war. By the same token, we are not indifferent to who defeats capitalism (in general) or our own bourgeoisie (in particular): therefore we are not for support of Stalinism in the war.” [150]

This is absolutely correct. Its analogue was absolutely correct in 1914 also, as Trotsky and Luxemburg always saw and Lenin did not. It was impossible for Russian socialists to “wish for the defeat” of their own oppressive regime by the imperialist enemy, Germany. It was equally impermissible for the German anti-war fighters to wish for the defeat of their own Prussianism by the imperialist enemy, tsarism. We add: just as it was impermissible for either to politically stand for the victory of their own bourgeoisie over the enemy imperialist. The Marxist alternative is to reject the whole victory-or-defeat dilemma with its “lesser evil” trap, in the consistent Third Camp fashion which characterized Trotsky and Luxemburg’s approach.

The same applies to Comrade Shachtman’s summary formulation (in his reply to Haskell) which he apparently considers to be peculiar to the Third World War:

“We do not for a moment suspend the class struggle, even in wartime. But, not being Stalinists and not being cretins, we do not prosecute it in such a way as to produce a defeat of the government by Stalinism. We are for the working class defeating the bourgeoisie in the class war and that is all we work for. We do not work for it in such a way as assures the defeat of the bourgeoisie by a reaction that would crush the proletariat itself ... Our position is: ‘The class struggle during the war must be “subordinated” not to the victory of capitalism, and not to the victory of Stalinism, but only to the victory of the independent working class over them both’.” [151]

Again, absolutely correct. Analogously, this was also the only consistent Marxist line in 1914-16, as far as it goes – and of course, in both cases it is primarily a warning against what not to do, and is not intended as a full positive statement on war policy such as is to be found in the ISL resolutions.

If “some readers” of Comrade Shachtman’s articles reacted differently, their reaction has to be understood in the light of this train of thought: (1) Defeatism, we “know” from Lenin, is the full, undiluted, uncompromising policy of anti-war opposition in un imperialist war which we do not support; (2) Shachtman admits this for 1914-16 but rejects this for the war against Stalinist Russia; (3) it is clear therefore that, somehow or other, he is developing a position which is not a full, undiluted, uncompromising anti-war position. QED.

10. On Lenin’s Motivation

This whole confusion of errors (on both sides) is given reinforcement by certain other points made by Comrade Shachtman on defeatism. Thus, he gives the reason why, he believes, Lenin abandoned defeatism in 1917 after March. The passage purports to paraphrase Lenin’s thought as follows:

“Precisely because the working class is now so organized that it can take all the power into its hands peacefully, it is necessary to abandon all talk of civil war, all talk about transforming the imperialist war into civil war, all talk about defeatism.” [152]

It is true that the slogan of “civil war” was dropped as a direct consequence of the opinion that a “peaceful” transfer of power was possible under the dual power of the Soviets. But not so for defeatism. Notwithstanding Lenin’s claims, which were no clearer on this aspect of the “defeat” question than on others, the connection he had seen between “wishing defeat” and “facilitating revolution” cannot automatically depend on whether the “revolution” is seen as peaceful or violent. We saw, indeed, that even in the period of 1917 when Lenin specifically gave up the hope of a peaceful transfer of power, his line on the war and defeatism did not change. Also, we saw the immediate influences which caused Lenin to give up defeatism, and more important, we expressed the view that he dropped defeatism not because of any thought-out deduction from any new set of conditions but because the fundamental errors of defeatism made the policy impossible when politics had to be acted out before the masses, and not just in polemical articles against political critics.

But what may it suggest to a reader when Comrade Shachtman claims (unwarrantedly) that the decisive motive was the possibility of peaceful assumption of power? In contemporary terms, it tends to establish a “principle” that defeatism (i.e., the “full” anti-war position) is valid only under a totalitarianism, whereas under “democratic” capitalism we must not hold a “full” anti-war position. It seems to suggest a kind of “one-way defeatism” such as was proposed in 1939 by the Palestinian Trotskyists, and which Trotsky quite rightly called “a step to social-patriotism”.

In another passage Shachtman purports to explain why Lenin originally adopted the defeat-slogan. “It was motivated by two considerations”, he writes, and he is entirely wrong on both counts.

“One was that it had to be and could be applied to all the warring countries. To dispute the ‘slogan’, wrote Lenin, it would be necessary to prove ‘that a revolution in connection with it [the war] is impossible’, or ‘that co-ordination and mutual aid of the revolutionary movement in all belligerent countries is impossible’.” [153]

This one is simply blankly irrelevant as a “motivation”. Lenin did not adopt defeatism because he was looking for something that would apply to all warring countries. The quotation from Lenin is one that we have already discussed, from the latter’s deplorable anti-Trotsky polemic, and it is somewhat more irrelevant here than it was there. In his article, at least, Lenin did not present these points as motivation: he said that “He who wishes earnestly to dispute the ‘slogan’ ... would have to prove” three propositions, of which Shachtman quotes two. (The remaining one is the proposition “that the war ... is not reactionary”.) But agreement with Lenin on all three propositions, and a dozen more for good measure, would not even get near motivating the specific defeat-slogan; it motivates only opposition to the war.

The other was that the proletarian classes could follow a policy of intensified class struggle against their own governments as the main enemy – a struggle that would be facilitated by military defeat and would at the same time contribute to military defeat of their own country – because even if such a defeat were to occur the country would not run the risk of being subjugated by the enemy. [154]

This “motivation” for defeatism was surely not Lenin’s, who does not present any such argument for defeatism, let alone any such motivation. This idea – that the warring countries themselves do not run the risk of being subjugated by the enemy since the war is really being fought over who shall rule over other peoples – occurs in Lenin only in connection with the argument that the war is imperialist in nature. Also, we ourselves referred to this idea in the Russo-Japanese War as supplying part of the reason why liberal-bourgeois elements were willing to embrace defeatism then. Finally we can add: although Lenin himself never linked this idea up with defeatism, and although it certainly was not his motivation, one can argue speculatively that it must have constituted an unrecognized precondition for his position. Zinoviev had come pretty close to making it explicit.

But, given all that, “some readers” may be led to wonder what conclusions are supposed to be drawn from this “motivation” as far as the present situation is concerned. Is it bound up with reasons for rejecting defeatism now while approving it for 1914? Does it suggest to them the idea that the U.S., being democratic and all, would not “subjugate” a defeated Russia, whereas a victorious Russia would “subjugate” a defeated United States – and that therefore “we have something to fight for” whereas the slaves of Stalin do not, for which reason they might as well go all-out against war and be “defeatists” while we cannot? And what relationship does this course of thinking have to another one, very well-known indeed, which uses the same methodology, but which comes to the conclusion not merely that there must be a difference in attitude toward the two war camps on the fine point of defeatism but that – for the same reasons – “we” must support war on this side while “they” must oppose the war on their side?

11. “One-Way” Defeatism?

The proposal for a “one-way” or “one-sided” defeatism raises another question: What exactly is the difference between a “defeatist” anti-war policy and a “non-defeatist” anti-war policy? We have already quoted Comrade Shachtman’s suggestion on this point, in his summary formulation: a “non-defeatist” policy means that we do not wish (seek to produce) the defeat of our own government by the enemy, specifically, by Stalinism. Now it is no wonder that “some readers” are confused, since virtually every comrade in the movement has been under the impression that this was also true of the defeatist position! True, Comrade Shachtman had casually remarked earlier in his article, in a participal phrase, that Lenin’s lesser-evil formula had involved defeat-by-the-enemy, but this passing mention of a basic point (even if noticed) could hardly be expected to outweigh some years of contrary “education” in the movement.

In view of this fact, in the context of an article where Lenin’s defeatism of 1914-16 is given a premier place as a component of his intransigent anti-war policy, it is not at all surprising that suspicions are awakened that this new talk of a “non-defeatist” policy entails more serious changes than the article seems to admit.

We wish to repeat and re-emphasize that all of this is an inherent and objective consequence of the confusion which is ineradicable from the defeat-concept of Lenin’s, and was not due to the otherwise excellent explanation by Comrade Shachtman of the bases of a socialist anti-war policy today. But we cannot afford to nourish the ambiguity and ambivalence which the defeat-slogan enforces. It is an untenable position, and like many another untenable position it gives rise to opposite errors as a way out. On the one hand it may encourage a tendency, in reaction, to cling to Lenin’s defeat-formulas in all their crudity, since at least these will “guard against social-patriotism” like a blessed medallion (which they will not); and on the other hand, as an equal and opposite reaction, it may encourage a tendency to push the objectively indicated conclusions from a “one-sided” defeatism to their politically disastrous end.

Bury the dead. The tradition of Lenin’s defeatism was born in a political mistake in 1904-5; it was revived in confusion in 1914, to be shelved without stock-taking in 1917; it was revived again in malice and reaction in 1924; it was turned into a hollow phrase by “explaining away” in the ’30s; it was ignored in the ’40s; and now in the ’50s any war policy based on it can only be disorienting or worse. It can only stand in the way of a clear, “full”, uncompromising Marxist anti-war position, the position of the Third Camp.

Notes

20*. With one exception which can be considered to “prove” the rule: in issue No.25 of 1923, the magazine reprinted a polemical exchange of articles that had appeared in the German organ Die Internationale between Thalheimer and a critic named Sommer, on policy with respect to the French invasion of the Ruhr. In this situation (which also evoked the notorious “Schlageter” speech by Radek heavily tinged with a sort of “national-Bolshevism”) Thalheimer’s articles did all but take a defensist position. In this context, one of the articles by Thalheimer which is reprinted mentions the defeatism of 1914-16 – in order to reject it now!

Not an exception to the rule but an example of it is an article by Karl Radek in the April-May 1921 issue, where the consequences of defeat are not painted as too happy. Radek wrote: “Not a proletarian revolution but Wilsonianism was the slogan of the working masses in the victorious countries. In the defeated countries on the contrary the thirst for peace and quiet predominated over all other proletarian feelings: a morsel of bacon was of more value than dreams for the liberation of mankind ...” and so on along the same lines. We do not cite this distorted picture, reflecting Radek’s tendency to journalistic subjectivity at its worst, as a contribution to history; but in order to point out: How far were Lenin’s formulas about defeat.

21*. Incidentally, this same Martynov, just six months before in the July 1923 issue of the Communist International, had written another article with a section on the world-war period. In this earlier article, not only is there no mention of defeatism but one of its main points is quite contrary in implication: during an imperialist war, as the Russian and German Revolutions proved, he says, “the widening of the scope of a revolution does far more in the long run to protect the country from foreign domination than does strengthening the old military apparatus, which, at any moment, is prepared to serve as an instrument of the foreign and native bourgeoisie against the working class”. If anything, it is the bourgeoisie which is being accused of a sort of “defeatism” here!

22*. There is also the minor point that Lenin never spoke of “defeat of one’s own country”, except in one slip. We should also remind the reader at this point that Lenin never proposed the “lesser evil” formula for international use. But in the attempt to be “orthodox”, Trotsky is here combining the well-known “lesser evil” phrase with the equally well-known fact that Lenin internationalized the defeat-slogan – perhaps without being aware of the fact that these two well-known features never come together in Lenin.

23*. Or try this: “Defeat of a socialist party [in an election] resulting from a revolutionary program is better than its victory assured by compromising deals, class collaboration, etc.” Then call this the principle of “electoral defeatism”, and you have Trotsky’s formula.

24*. In another section of War and the Fourth International (point 25), Trotsky has another mention of defeatism which is tell-tale: “In reality no possessing class ever recognized the defense of the fatherland as such ... Overthrown privileged classes always become ‘defeatists’; that is, are ready to restore their privileged position with the aid of foreign arms.” Note that here, in the most casual sort of way, Trotsky is identifying defeatism with support to the victory of the other side. Without going into the possible explanations that Trotsky might have given, we must admit that it is bound to be a little confusing ...

25*. It happens that this very same point is made (in a different connection, not as a criticism of Trotsky’s theses) by the article of W. St., Principles and Tactics in War, written the same year (New International, May 1938, p.146). The author was the then secretary of the Fourth International.

26*. As a curio, we mention the formulation used by the sect which split off from the Trotskyist movement, the “Oehlerltes”, in a pamphlet called The Workers’ Answer to Boss War. It is the one and only place where the full enormity of the defeatist concept is to be found set down in black and white: defeatism means “to work for the military defeat of their ‘own’ army by the ‘enemy’ army”.

On the other hand, this is as good a point as any to pay respects to Alfred Rosmer, who, in his great historical work Le Mouvement Ouvrier Pendant la Guerre, has a short passage which stands out in post-war Marxist literature as one of the few (if there are any others) that indicates the hollowness of the defeat-slogan as used by Lenin. As mentioned, Rosmer was a collaborator with Trotsky on Nashe Slovo during the war and his point of view no doubt stems from that period, “unreconstructed”. His first point is that there is no validity to Lenin’s claim that defeatism is necessary to a fearless and thoroughly consistent anti-war fight. Besides “I see clearly the dangers which it involves. The word ‘defeatism’ is very widely used during war. The press utilizes it unceasingly to scare and frighten. It is useless to reinforce this if it is not absolutely necessary. I will recall here a retort by Noah Ablett that I mentioned in 1915. When the Welsh miners went out on strike, all of chauvinist England rose up against them, crying: ‘You are helping the enemy! You are Germanophiles!’ And Noah Ablett, in the name of the miners, calmly answered, ‘We are not Germanophiles; we are the working class’. I believe that is the best basis, a sure and sufficient basis to carry on the working-class struggle against war and justify it in the eyes of all workers. ‘Defeatism’, even though preceded by the qualification ‘revolutionary’, puts the accent on defeat while we ought to put it on revolution.” (Pages 478-9.)

27*. At any rate, such was my impression at the time, and it is certainly a fact that I did not feel sufficiently exercised about the question to publish an article about it then. In retrospect, it would seem that the question hung on in a sort of suspended animation.

28*. This idea is emphasized by Comrade Shachtman: “Without hesitation or ambiguity, we can say that the only greater disaster that humanity could suffer than the war itself, which would be disastrous enough if it broke out, would be the victory of Stalinism as the outcome of the war.” (Page 198.) And again: “We repeat: no greater disaster can be expected in connection with the Third World War than the victory of Stalinism.” (Page 200.) The question, of course, is not whether this statement is true in itself, but whether it plays the same role in a political line as was played by Lenin’s motivation that “tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism.”

Reference Notes

124. Lenin, Selected Works, vol.10, p.316, Notes on the Question of the Tasks of Our Delegation at the Hague, written December 4, 1922, not published.

125. Communist International (Eng. ed.), No.1. New Series; n.d. (c. February 1924); p.41.

126. Communist International (Eng. ed.), No.5, New Series; n.d. (c. June 1924); pp.6-7.

127. Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification, p.162.

128. Ibid., p.165.

129. Ibid., p.2.

130. War and the Fourth International, Pt.58, p.26.

131. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, p.32.

132. Ibid.

133. New International, July 1939, pp.208-9.

134. John West, War and the Workers, p.13.

135. C.L.R. James, World Revolution, p.74.

136. Declaration of Principles and Constitution of the SWP, 1938, p.24.

137. Mimeographed document, War and Bureaucratic Conservatism.

138. Labor Action, Sept. 1, 1941, A Letter to a Comrade: On Some Aspects of the Russian Question.

139. New International, for May-June 1951, p.164, and July-August 1951, p.195; followed in the Sept.-Oct. 1951 issue, p.294, by an exchange between Gordon Haskell and Shachtman on the subject of the latter’s article.

140. New International, May-June 1951, p.174.

141. Ibid., p.165.

142. Ibid., p.169.

143. Ibid., p.186-7.

144. Ibid., p.168.

145. Ibid., p.170.

146. New International, Sept.Oct. 1951, p.300.

147. Ibid., p.296.

148. New International, July-Aug., 1951, p.205.

149. New International, Sept.-Oct., 1951, p.300.

150. Ibid., pp.300-1.

151. Ibid., p.301.

152. New International, May-June 1951, p.172.

153. Ibid., p.169.

154. Ibid.

The Two Souls of Socialism

(1966)

Hal Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism, New Politics 5, no.1, Winter 1966, pp.57-84.
Reprinted in numerous editions, both authorised and unauthorised. [1]
Downloaded from the Marxism Page – many thanks to Rick Kuhn.The full PDF of the 1966 edition can be downloaded here.
© Center for Socialist History (CSH), Berkeley; published here with kind permission of the copyright holders.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

The Two Souls of Socialism

1. Some Socialist “Ancestors”

2. The First Modern Socialists

3. What Marx Did

4. The Myth of Anarchist “Libertarianism”

5. Lassalle and State Socialism

6. The Fabian Model

7. The “Revisionist” Facade

8. The 100% American Scene

9. Six Strains of Socialism-From-Above

10. Which Side Are You On?

A Few References

Note from The Two Souls of Socialism International Socialists, Highland Park, Michigan, revised edition, fourth printing 1970

This is a completely rewritten and expanded version of a study which originally appeared in the socialist student magazine Anvil (Winter 1960) and was subsequently reprinted two or three times elsewhere. The framework, the general content, and some passages remain, but I have taken advantage of this new edition to make a thorough revision of what was a hasty first draft.

The aim is not to give a history of socialist thought in a nutshell, but simply to illustrate a thesis – the thesis being a historical interpretation of the meaning of socialism and of how socialism came to mean what it does today. To this end I have selected for discussion a few of the most important socialist currents up to the early 20th century, since the object of the inquiry is the wellsprings of the modern socialist movement. There are a number of tendencies which would have been difficult to treat briefly, and are therefore not discussed here at all, such as syndicalism, DeLeonism, Bolshevism, the IWW, the collectivist liberals, etc.; but I believe that their study leads to the same conclusions.

The chief difficulty in treating the subject briefly is the heavy encrustation of myth over the written history of socialism. At the end I have listed a very few works which are especially useful for some of the figures discussed here; for others the interested reader simply has to go back to the sources. There is no half-decent history of socialist thought extant today: and there probably will not be one until more socialist scholars do the kind of job that E.P. Thompson did for William Morris, whose image had been almost obliterated by the myths.

Speaking of William Morris, I re-read A Dream of John Ball, and came once again across the oft-quoted passage about – Well, let us quote it again, as motto for the following pages: “... I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name...”

H.D.

Note on this edition

1. The Two Souls of Socialism appeared in New Politics 5, no.1 (Winter 1966) pp.57-84, a pamphlet published by the International Socialists, Highland Park, Michigan, revised edition, fourth printing 1970 and was included in Socialism From Below by Hal Draper, essays selected, edited and with an introduction by E. Haberkern, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands 1992 pp.2-33. That edition is now out of print. The The Two Souls of Socialism was scanned and digitized into ASCII text and mounted on the Guelph Socialists Homepage (now defunct). The Guelph version was edited to eliminate some divergences from the Socialism From Below text to form the edition below. The paragraph in section 3. What Marx Did in {curly brackets} appeared in the 1966 pamphlet but not the Socialism From Below edition.

The Two Souls of Socialism

Socialism’s crisis today is a crisis in the meaning of socialism. For the first time in the history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves “socialist” in one sense or another; but there has never been a time when the label was less informative. The nearest thing to a common content of the various “socialisms” is a negative: anti-capitalism. On the positive side, the range of conflicting and incompatible ideas that call themselves socialist is wider than the spread of ideas within the bourgeois world.

Even anti-capitalism holds less and less as a common factor. In one part of the spectrum, a number of social democratic parties have virtually eliminated any specifically socialist demands from their programs, promising to maintain private enterprise wherever possible. The most prominent example is the German social-democracy. (“As an idea, a philosophy, and a social movement, socialism in Germany is no longer represented by a political party,” sums up D.A. Chalmers’ recent book The Social Democratic Party of Germany.) These parties have defined socialism out of existence, but the tendency which they have formalized is that of the entire reformist social democracy. In what sense are these parties still “socialist”?

In another part of the world picture, there are the Communist states, whose claim to being “socialist” is based on a negative: the abolition of the capitalist private-profit system, and the fact that the class which rules does not consist of private owners of property. On the positive side, however, the socio-economic system which has replaced capitalism there would not be recognizable to Karl Marx. The state owns the means of production – but who “owns” the state? Certainly not the mass of workers, who are exploited, unfree, and alienated from all levers of social and political control. A new class rules, the bureaucratic bosses; it rules over a collectivist system – a bureaucratic collectivism. Unless statification is mechanically equated with “socialism,” in what sense are these societies “socialist”?

These two self-styled socialisms are very different, but they have more in common than they think. The social democracy has typically dreamed of “socializing” capitalism from above. Its principle has always been that increased state intervention in society and economy is per se socialistic. It bears a fatal family resemblance to the Stalinist conception of imposing something called socialism from the top down, and of equating statification with socialism. Both have their roots in the ambiguous history of the socialist idea.

Back to the roots: the following pages propose to investigate the meaning of socialism historically, in a new way. There have always been different “kinds of socialism,” and they have customarily been divided into reformist or revolutionary, peaceful or violent, democratic or authoritarian, etc. These divisions exist, but the underlying division is something else. Throughout the history of socialist movements and ideas, the fundamental divide is between Socialism-from-Above and Socialism-from-Below.

What unites the many different forms of Socialism-from-Above is the conception that socialism (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) must be handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control in fact. The heart of Socialism-from-Below is its view that socialism can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands, mobilized “from below” in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history. “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”: this is the first sentence in the Rules written for the First International by Marx, and this is the First Principle of his lifework.

It is the conception of Socialism-from-Above which accounts for the acceptance of Communist dictatorship as a form of “socialism.” It is the conception of Socialism-from-Above which concentrates social-democratic attention on the parliamentary superstructure of society and on the manipulation of the “commanding heights” of the economy, and which makes them hostile to mass action from below. It is Socialism-from-Above which is the dominant tradition in the development of socialism.

Please note that it is not peculiar to socialism. On the contrary, the yearning for emancipation-from-above is the all-pervading principle through centuries of class society and political oppression. It is the permanent promise held out by every ruling power to keep the people looking upward for protection, instead of to themselves for liberation from the need for protection. The people looked to kings to right the injustices done by lords, to messiahs to overthrow the tyranny of kings. Instead of the bold way of mass action from below, it is always safer and more prudent to find the “good” ruler who will Do the People Good. The pattern of emancipation-from-above goes all the way back in the history of civilization, and had to show up in socialism too. But it is only in the framework of the modern socialist movement that liberation from below could become even a realistic aspiration; within socialism it has come to the fore, but only by fits and starts. The history of socialism can be read as a continual but largely unsuccessful effort to free itself from the old tradition, the tradition of emancipation-from-above.

In the conviction that the current crisis of socialism is intelligible only in terms of this Great Divide in the socialist tradition, we turn to a few examples of the two souls of socialism.

1. Some Socialist “Ancestors”

Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the Second International, began his book on Thomas More with the observation that the two great figures inaugurating the history of socialism are More and Münzer, and that both of them “follow the long line of Socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Cataline, Christ ...”

This is a very impressive list of early “socialists,” and considering his position Kautsky should certainly have been able to recognize a socialist when he saw one. What is most fascinating about this list is the way it falls apart under examination into two quite different groups.

Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus led the early socialists to adopt him as the founder of Spartan “communism” – this is why Kautsky lists him. But as described by Plutarch, the Spartan system was based on equal division of land under private ownership; it was in no way socialistic. The “collectivist” feeling one may get from a description of the Spartan regime comes from a different direction: the way of life of the Spartan ruling class itself, which was organized as a permanent disciplined garrison in a state of siege; and to this add the terroristic regime imposed over the helots (slaves). I do not see how a modern socialist can read of the Lycurgan regime without feeling that he is meeting not an ancestor of socialism but a forerunner of fascism. There is quite a difference! But how is it that it did not impress itself on the leading theoretician of social-democracy?

Pythagoras founded an elite order which acted as the political arm of the landed aristocracy against the plebeian-democratic movement; he and his party were finally overthrown and expelled by a popular revolutionary rising. Kautsky seems to be on the wrong side of the barricades! But besides, inside the Pythagorean order a regime of total authoritarianism and regimentation prevailed. In spite of this, Kautsky chose to regard Pythagoras as a socialist ancestor because of the belief that the organized Pythagoreans practised communal consumption. Even if this were true (and Kautsky found out later it was not) this would have made the Pythagorean order exactly as communistic as any monastery. Chalk up a second ancestor of totalitarianism on Kautsky’s list.

The case of Plato’s Republic is well-enough known. The sole element of “communism” in his ideal state is the prescription of monastic-communal consumption for the small elite of “Guardians” who constitute the bureaucracy and army; but the surrounding social system is assumed to be private-property-holding, not socialistic. And – here it is again – Plato’s state model is government by an aristocratic elite, and his argument stresses that democracy inevitably means the deterioration and ruin of society. Plato’s political aim, in fact, was the rehabilitation and purification of the ruling aristocracy in order to fight the tide of democracy. To call him a socialist ancestor is to imply a conception of socialism which makes any kind of democratic control irrelevent.

On the other hand, Catiline and the Gracchi had no collectivist side. Their names are associated with mass movements of popular-democratic revolt against the Establishment. They were not socialists, to be sure, but they were on the popular side of the class struggle in the ancient world, the side of the people’s movement from below. It seems it was all the same to the theoretician of social-democracy.

Here, in the pre-history of our subject, are two kinds of figures ready-made for adoption into the pantheon of the socialist movement. There were the figures with a tinge of (alleged) collectivism, who were yet thorough elitists, authoritarians and anti-democrats; and there were the figures without anything collectivist about them, who were associated with democratic class struggles. There is a collectivist tendency without democracy, and there is a democratic tendency without collectivism but nothing yet which merges these two currents.

Not until Thomas Münzer, the leader of the revolutionary left wing of the German Reformation, do we find a suggestion of such a merger; a social movement with communistic ideas (Münzer’s) which was also engaged in a deep-going popular-democratic struggle from below. In contrast is precisely Sir Thomas More: the gulf between these two contemporaries goes to the heart of our subject. More’s Utopia pictures a thoroughly regimented society, more reminiscent of 1984 than of socialist democracy, elitist through and through, even slaveholding, a typical Socialism-from-Above. It is not surprising that, of these two “socialist ancestors” who stand at the threshold of the modern world, one (More) execrated the other and supported the hangmen who did him and his movement to death.

What then is the meaning of socialism when it first came into the world? From the very beginning, it was divided between the two souls of socialism, and there was war between them.

2. The First Modern Socialists

Modern socialism was born in the course of the half century or so that lies between the Great French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. So was modern democracy. But they were not born linked like Siamese twins. They traveled at first along separate lines. When did the two lines first intersect?

Out of the wreckage of the French Revolution rose different kinds of socialism. We will consider three of the most important in the light of our question.

I. Babeuf. – The first modern socialist movement was that led in the last phase of the French Revolution by Babeuf (“the Conspiracy of the Equals”), conceived as a continuation of revolutionary Jacobinism plus a more consistent social goal: a society of communist equality. This represents the first time in the modern era that the idea of socialism is wedded to the idea of a popular movement – a momentous combination. [1]

This combination immdiately raises a critical question: What exactly in each case is the relationship that is seen between this socialist idea and that popular movement? this is the key question for socialism for the next 200 years.

As the Babouvists saw it: The mass movement of the people has failed; the people seem to have turned their backs on the Revolution. But still they suffer, still they need communism: we know that. The revolutionary will of the people has been defeated by a conspiracy of the right: what we need is a cabal of the left to re-create the people’s movement, to effectuate the revolutionary will. We must therefore seize power. But the people are no longer ready to seize power. Therefore it is necesary for us to seize power in their name, in order to raise the people up to that point. This means a temporary dictatorship, admittedly by a minority; but it will be an Educational Dictatorship, aiming at creating the conditions which will make possible democratic control in the future. (In that sense we are democrats.) This will not be a dictatorship of the people, as was the Commune, let alone of the proletariat; it is frankly a dictatorship over the people – with very good intentions.

For most of the next fifty years, the conception of the Educational Dictatorship over the people remains the program of the revolutionary left – through the three B’s (Babeuf to Buonarroti to Blanqui) and, with anarchist verbiage added, also Bakunin. The new order will be handed down to the suffering people by the revolutionary band. This typical Socialism-from-Above is the first and most primitive form of revolutionary socialism, but there are still today admirers of Castro and Mao who think it is the last word in revolutionism.

II. Saint-Simon. – Emerging from the revolutionary period, a brilliant mind took an entirely different tack. Saint-Simon was impelled by a revulsion against revolution, disorder and disturbances. What fascinated him was the potentialities of industry and science.

His vision had nothing to do with anything resembling equality, justice, freedom, the rights of man or allied passions: it looked only to modernization, industrialization, planning, divorced from such considerations. Planned industrialization was the key to the new world, and obviously the people to achieve this were the oligarchies of financiers and businessmen, scientists, technologists, managers. When not appealing to these, he called on Napoleon or his successor Louis XVIII to implement schemes for a royal dictatorship. His schemes varied, but they were all completely authoritarian to the last planned ordinance. A systematic racist and a militant imperialist, he was the furious enemy of the very idea of equality and liberty, which he hated as offspring of the French Revolution.

It was only in the last phase of his life (1825) that, disappointed in the response of the natural elite to do their duty and impose the new modernizing oligarchy, he made a turn toward appealing to the workers down below. The “New Christianity” would be a popular movement, but its role would be simply to convince the powers-that-be to heed the advice of the Saint-Simonian planners. The workers should organize – to petition their capitalists and managerial bosses to take over from the “idle classes.”

What then was his relationship between the idea of the Planned Society and the popular movement? The people, the movement, could be useful as a battering-ram – in someone’s hands. Saint-Simon’s last idea was a movement-from-below to effectuate a Socialism-from-Above. But power and control must remain where it has always been – above.

III. The Utopians. – A third type of socialism that arose in the post-revolutionary generation was that of the utopian socialists proper – Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet, etc. They blueprinted an ideal communal colony, imagined fullblown from the cranium of the Leader, to be financed by the grace of the philanthropic rich under the wing of Benevolent Power.

Owen (in many ways the most sympathetic of the lot) was as categorical as any of them: “This great change ... must and will be accomplished by the rich and powerful. There are no other parties to do it ... it is a waste of time, talent and pecuniary means for the poor to contend in opposition to the rich and powerful ...” Naturally he was against “class hate,” class struggle. Of the many who believe this, few have written so bluntly that the aim of this “socialism” is “to govern or treat all society as the most advanced physicians govern and treat their patients in the best arranged lunatic hospitals,” with “forbearance and kindness” for the unfortunates who have “become so through the irrationality and injustice of the present most irrational system of society.”

Cabet’s society provided for elections, but there could be no free discussion; and a controlled press, systematic indoctrination, and completely regimented uniformity was insisted on as part of the prescription.

For these utopian socialists, what was the relationship between the socialist idea and the popular movement? The latter was the flock to be tended by the good shepherd. It must not be supposed that Socialism-from-Above necessarily implies cruelly despotic intentions.

This side of these Socialisms-from-Above is far from outlived. On the contrary, it is so modern that a modern writer like Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, can perform the remarkable feat of treating the old utopians as if they were great democrats and “libertarians”! This myth is quite widespread, and it points once again to the extraordinary insensitivity of socialist writers and historians to the deep-rooted record of Socialism-from-Above as the dominant component in the two souls of socialism.

Note

1. Strictly speaking, this combination had been anticipated by Gerrard Winstanley and the “True Levelers,” the left wing of the English Revolution; but it was forgotten and led to nothing, historically speaking.

3. What Marx Did

Utopianism was elitist and anti-democratic to the core because it was utopian – that is, it looked to the prescription of a prefabricated model, the dreaming-up of a plan to be willed into existence. Above all, it was inherently hostile to the very idea of transforming society from below, by the upsetting intervention of freedom-seeking masses, even where it finally accepted recourse to the instrument of a mass movement for pressure upon the Tops. In the socialist movement as it developed before Marx, nowhere did the line of the Socialist Idea intersect the line of Democracy-from-Below.

This intersection, this synthesis, was the great contribution of Marx: in comparison, the whole content of his Capital is secondary. This is the heart of Marxism: “This is the Law; all the rest is commentary.” The Communist Manifesto of 1848 marked the self-consciousness of the first movement (in Engels’ words) “whose notion was from the very beginning that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.”

The young Marx himself went through the more primitive stage just as the human embryo goes through the gill stage; or to put it differently, one of his first immunizations was achieved by catching the most pervasive disease of all, the illusion of the Savior-Despot. When he was 22, the old kaiser died, and to the hosannahs of the liberals Friedrich Wilhelm IV acceded to the throne amidst expectations of democratic reforms from above. Nothing of the sort happened. Marx never went back to this notion, which has bedeviled all of socialism with its hopes in Savior-Dictators or Savior-Presidents.

Marx entered politics as the crusading editor of a newspaper which was the organ of the extreme left of the liberal democracy of the industrialized Rhineland, and soon became the foremost editorial voice of complete political democracy in Germany. The first article he published was a polemic in favor of the unqualified freedom of the press from all censorship by the state. By the time the imperial government forced his dismissal, he was turning to find out more about the new socialist ideas coming from France. When this leading spokesman of liberal democracy became a socialist, he still regarded the task as the championing of democracy – except that democracy now had a deeper meaning. Marx was the first socialist thinker and leader who came to socialism through the struggle for liberal democracy.

{In manuscript notes made in 1844, he rejected the extant “crude communism” which negates the personality of man, and looked to a communism which would be a “fully developed humanism.” In 1845 he and his friend Engels worked out a line of argument against the elitism of a socialist current represented by one Bruno Bauer. In 1846 they were organizing the “German Democratic Communists” in Brussels exile, and Engels was writing: “In our time democracy and communism are one.” “Only the proletarians are able to fraternize really, under the banner of communist democracy.”}

In working out the viewpoint which first wedded the new communist idea to the new democratic aspirations, they came into conflict with the existing communist sects such as that of Weitling, who dreamed of a messianic dictatorship. Before they joined the group which became the Communist League (for which they were to write the Communist Manifesto), they stipulated that the organization be changed from an elite conspiracy of the old type into an open propaganda group, that “everything conducive to superstitious authoritarianism be struck out of the rules,” that the leading committee be elected by the whole membership as against the tradition of “decisions from above.” They won the league over to their new approach, and in a journal issued in 1847 only a few months before the Communist Manifesto, the group announced:

“We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced ... that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership... [Let us put] our hands to work in order to establish a democratic state wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas ...”

The Communist Manifesto which issued out of these discussions proclaimed that the first objective of the revolution was “to win the battle of democracy.” When, two years later and after the decline of the 1848 revolutions, the Communist League split, it was in conflict once again with the “crude communism” of putschism, which thought to substitute determined bands of revolutionaries for the real mass movement of an enlightened working class. Marx told them:

“The minority ... makes mere will the motive force of the revolution, instead of actual relations. Whereas we say to the workers: ‘You will have to go through fifteen or twenty or fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change extant conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and to render yourselves fit for political dominion,’ you, on the other hand, say to the workers: ‘We must attain to power at once, or else we may just as well go to sleep.’”

“In order to change yourselves and to render yourselves fit for political dominion”: this is Marx’s program for the working-class movement, as against both those who say the workers can take power any Sunday, and those who say never. Thus Marxism came into being, in self-conscious struggle against the advocates of the Educational Dictatorship, the Savior-Dictators, the revolutionary elitists, the communist authoritarians, as well as the philanthropic do-gooders and bourgeois liberals. This was Marx’s Marxism, not the caricatured monstrosity which is painted up with that label by both the Establishment’s professoriat, who shudder at Marx’s uncompromising spirit of revolutionary opposition to the capitalist status quo, and also by the Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, who must conceal the fact that Marx cut his eyeteeth by making war on their type.

“It was Marx who finally fettered the two ideas of Socialism and Democracy together” [2] because he developed a theory which made the synthesis possible for the first time. The heart of the theory is this proposition: that there is a social majority which has the interest and motivation to change the system, and that the aim of socialism can be the education and mobilization of this mass-majority. This is the exploited class, the working class, from which comes the eventual motive-force of revolution. Hence a socialism-from-below is possible, on the basis of a theory which sees the revolutionary potentialities in the broad masses, even if they seem backward at a given time and place. Capital, after all, is nothing but the demonstration of the economic basis of this proposition.

It is only some such theory of working-class socialism which makes possible the fusion of revolutionary socialism and revolutionary democracy. We are not arguing at this point our conviction that this faith is justified, but only insisting on the alternative: all socialists or would-be reformers who repudiate it must go over to some Socialism-from-Above, whether of the reformist, utopian, bureaucratic, Stalinist, Maoist or Castroite variety. And they do.

Five years before the Communist Manifesto a freshly converted 23-year-old socialist had still written in the old elitist tradition: “We can recruit our ranks from those classes only which have enjoyed a pretty good education; that is, from the universities and from the commercial class ...” The young Engels learned better; but this obsolete wisdom is still with us as ever.

Note

2 The quotation is from H.G. Wells’ autobiography. Inventor of some of the grimmest Socialism-from-Above utopias in all literature, Wells is here denouncing Marx for this historic step.

4. The Myth of Anarchist “Libertarianism”

One of the most thoroughgoing authoritarians in the history of radicalism is none other than the “Father of Anarchism,” Proudhon, whose name is periodically revived as a great “libertarian” model, because of his industrious repetition of the word liberty and his invocations to “revolution from below.”

Some may be willing to pass over his Hitlerite form of anti-Semitism (“The Jew is the enemy of humankind. It is necessary to send this race back to Asia, or exterminate it ...”). Or his principled racism in general (he thought it was right for the South to keep American Negroes in slavery, since they were the lowest of inferior races). Or his glorification of war for its own sake (in the exact manner of Mussolini). Or his view that women had no rights (“I deny her every political right and every initiative. For woman liberty and well-being lie solely in marriage, in motherhood,in domestic duties ...”) – that is, the “Kinder-Kirche-Küche” of the Nazis.

But it is not possible to gloss over his violent opposition not only to trade-unionism and the right to strike (even supporting police strikebreaking), but to any and every idea of the right to vote, universal suffrage, popular sovereignty, and the very idea of constitutions. (“All this democracy disgusts me ... What would I not give to sail into this mob with my clenched fists!”) His notes for his ideal society notably include suppression of all other groups, any public meeting by more than 20, any free press, and any elections; in the same notes he looks forward to “a general inquisition” and the condemnation of “several million people” to forced labor – “once the Revolution is made.”

Behind all this was a fierce contempt for the masses of people – the necessary foundation of Socialism-from-Above, as its opposite was the groundwork of Marxism. The masses are corrupt and hopeless (“I worship humanity, but I spit on men!”) They are “only savages ... whom it is our duty to civilize, and without making them our sovereign,” he wrote to a friend whom he scornfully chided with: “You still believe in the people.” Progress can come only from mastery by an elite who take care to give the people no sovereignty.

At one time or another he looked to some ruling despot as the one-man dictator who would bring the Revolution: Louis Bonaparte (he wrote a whole book in 1852 extolling the Emperor as the bearer of the Revolution); Prince Jerome Bonaparte; finally Czar Alexander II (“Do not forget that the despotism of the czar is necessary to civilization”).

There was a candidate for the dictator’s job closer to home, of course: himself. He elaborated a detailed scheme for a “mutualist” business, cooperative in form, which would spread to take over all business and then the state. In his notes Proudhon put himself down as the Manager in Chief, naturally not subject to the democratic control he so despised. He took care of details in advance: “Draw up a secret program, for all the managers: irrevocable elimination of royalty, democracy, proprietors, religion [and so on].” – “The Managers are the natural representatives of the country. Ministers are only superior Managers or General Directors: as I will be one day ... When we are masters, Religion will be what we want it to be; ditto Education, philosophy, justice, administration and government.”

The reader, who may be full of the usual illusions about anarchist “libertarianism,” may ask: Was he then insincere about his great love for liberty?

Not at all: it is only necessary to understand what anarchist “liberty” means. Proudhoun wrote: “The principle of liberty is that of the Abbey of Theleme [in Rabelais]: do what you want!” and the principle meant: “any man who cannot do what he wants and anything he wants has the right to revolt, even alone, against the government, even if the government were everybody else. “the only man who can enjoy this liberty is a despot; this is the sense of the brilliant insight by Dostoyevsky’s Shigalev: “Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”

The story is similar with the second “Father of Anarchism,” Bakunin, whose schemes for dictatorship and suppression of democratic control are better known than Proudhon’s.

The basic reason is the same: Anarchism is not concerned with the creation of democratic control from below, but only with the destruction of “authority” over the individual, including the authority of the most extremely democratic regulation of society that it is possible to imagine. This has been made clear by authoritative anarchist expositors time and again; for example, by George Woodcock: “even were democracy possible, the anarchist would still not support it ... Anarchists do not advocate political freedom. What they advocate is freedom from politics...” Anarchism is on principle fiercely anti-democratic, since an ideally democratic authority is still authority. But since, rejecting democracy, it has no other way of resolving the inevitable disagreements and differences among the inhabitants of Theleme, its unlimited freedom for each uncontrolled individual is indistinguishable from unlimited despotism by such an individual, both in theory and practice.

The great problem of our age is the achievement of democratic control from below over the vast powers of modern social authority. Anarchism, which is freest of all with verbiage about something-from-below, rejects this goal. It is the other side of the coin of bureaucratic despotism, with all its values turned inside-out, not the cure or the alternative.

5. Lassalle and State Socialism

That very model of a modern social-democracy, the German Social-Democratic Party, is often represented as having arisen on a Marxist basis. This is a myth, like so much else in extant histories of socialism. The impact of Marx was strong, including on some of the top leaders for a while, but the politics which permeated and finally pervaded the party came mainly from two other sources. One was Lassalle, who founded German socialism as an organized movement (1863); and the other was the British Fabians, who inspired Eduard Bernstein’s “revisionism.”

Ferdinand Lassalle is the prototype of the state-socialist – which means, one who aims to get socialism handed down by the existing state. He was not the first prominent example (that was Louis Blanc), but for him the existing state was the Kaiser’s state under Bismarck.

The state, Lassalle told the workers, is something “that will achieve for each one of us what none of us could achieve for himself.” Marx taught the exact opposite: that the working class had to achieve its emancipation itself, and abolish the existing state in the course. E. Bernstein was quite right in saying that Lassalle “made a veritable cult” of the state. “The immemorial vestal fire of all civilization, the State, I defend with you against those modern barbarians [the liberal bourgeoisie],” Lassalle told a Prussian court. This is what made Marx and Lassalle “fundamentally opposed,” points out Lassalle’s biographer Footman, who lays bare his pro-Prussianism, pro-Prussian nationalism, pro-Prussian imperialism.

Lassalle organized this first German socialist movement as his personal dictatorship. Quite consciously he set about building it as a mass movement from below to achieve a Socialism-from-Above (remember Saint-Simon’s battering-ram). The aim was to convince Bismarck to hand down concessions – particularly universal suffrage, on which basis a parliamentary movement under Lassalle could become a mass ally of the Bismarckian state in a coalition against the liberal bourgeoisie. To this end Lassalle actually tried to negotiate with the Iron Chancellor. Sending him the dictatorial statutes of his organization as “the constitution of my kingdom which perhaps you will envy me,” Lassalle went on:

“But this miniature will be enough to show how true it is that the working class feels an instinctive inclination towards a dictatorship, if it can first be rightly persuaded that the dictatorship will be exercised in its interests; and how much, despite all republican views – or rather precisely because of them – it would therefore be inclined, as I told you only recently, to look upon the Crown, in opposition to the egoism of bourgeois society, as the natural representative of the social dictatorship, if the Crown for its part could ever make up its mind to the – certainly very improbable – step of striking out a really revolutionary line and transforming itself from the monarchy of the privileged orders into a social and revolutionary people’s monarchy.”

Although this secret letter was not known at the time, Marx grasped the nature of Lassalleanism perfectly. He told Lassalle to his face that he was a “Bonapartist,” and wrote presciently that “His attitude is that of the future workers’ dictator.” Lassalle’s tendency he called “Royal Prussian Government socialism,” denouncing his “alliance with absolutist and feudal opponents against the bourgeoisie.”

“Instead of the revolutionary process of transformation of society,” wrote Marx, Lassalle sees socialism arising “from the ‘state aid’ that the state gives to the producers’ cooperative societies and which the state, not the worker, ‘calls into being.’” Marx derides this. “But as far as the present cooperative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the government or of the bourgeoisie.” Here is a classic statement of the meaning of the word independent as the keystone of Socialism-from-Below versus state-socialism.

There is an instructive instance of what happens when an American-type academic anti-marxist runs into this aspect of Marx. Mayo’s Democracy and Marxism (later revised as Introduction to Marxist Theory) handily proves that Marxism is anti-democratic mainly by the simple expedient of defining Marxism as “the Moscow orthodoxy.” But at least he seems to have read Marx, and realized that nowhere, in acres of writing and a long life, did Marx evince concern about more power for the state but rather the reverse. Marx, it dawned on him, was not a “statist”:

“The popular criticism leveled against Marxism is that it tends to degenerate into a form of ‘statism.’ At first sight [i.e., reading] the criticism appears wide of the mark, for the virtue of Marx’s political theory ... is the entire absence from it of any glorification of the state.”

This discovery offers a notable challenge to Marx-critics, who of course know in advance that Marxism must glorify the state. Mayo solves the difficulty in two statements: (1) “the statism is implicit in the requirements of total planning ...” (2) Look at Russia. But Marx made no fetish of “total planning.” He has so often been denounced (by other Marx-critics) for failing to draw up a blueprint of socialism precisely because he reacted so violently against his predecessors’ utopian “plannism” or planning-from-above. “Plannism” is precisely the conception of socialism that Marxism wished to destroy. Socialism must involve planning, but “total planning” does not equal socialism just as any fool can be a professor but not every professor need be a fool.

6. The Fabian Model

In Germany, behind the figure of Lassalle there shades off a series of “socialisms” moving in an interesting direction.

The so-called Academic Socialists (“Socialists of the chair,” Kathedersozialisten – a current of Establishment academics) looked to Bismarck more openly than Lasalle, but their conception of state-socialism was not in principle alien to his. Only, Lassalle embarked on the risky expedient of calling into being a mass movement from below for the purpose – risky because once in motion it might get out of hand, as indeed it did more than once. Bismarck himself did not hesitate to represent his paternalistic economic policies as a kind of socialism, and books got written about “monarchical socialism,” “Bismarckian state-socialism,” etc. Following further to the right, one comes to the “socialism” of Friedrich List, a proto-Nazi, and to those circles where an anti-capitalist form of anti-Semitism (Dühring, A. Wagner, etc.) lays part of the basis for the movement that called itself socialism under Adolf Hitler.

The thread that unites this whole spectrum, through all the differences, is the conception of socialism as equivalent merely to state intervention in economic and social life. “Staat, greif zu!” Lassalle called. “State, take hold of things!” – this is the socialism of the whole lot.

This is why Schumpeter is correct in observing that the British equivalent of German state-socialism is – Fabianism, the socialism of Sidney Webb.

The Fabians (more accurately, the Webbians) are, in the history of the socialist idea, that modern socialist current which developed in more complete divorcement from Marxism, the one most alien to Marxism. It was almost chemically-pure social-democratic reformism unalloyed, particularly before the rise of the mass labor and socialist movement in Britain, which it did not want and did not help to build (despite a common myth to the contrary). It is therefore a very important test, unlike most other reformist currents which paid their tribute to Marxism by adopting some of its language and distorting its substance.

The Fabians, deliberately middle-class in composition and appeal, were not for building any mass movement at all, least of all a Fabian one. They thought of themselves as a small elite of brain-trusters who would permeate the existing institutions of society, influence the real leaders in all spheres Tory or Liberal, and guide social development toward its collectivist goal with the “inevitability of gradualness.” Since their conception of socialism was purely in terms of state intervention (national or municipal), and their theory told them that capitalism itself was being collectivized apace every day and had to move in this direction, their function was simply to hasten the process. The Fabian Society was designed in 1884 to be pilot-fish to a shark: at first the shark was the Liberal Party; but when the permeation of Liberalism failed miserably, and labor finally organized its own class party despite the Fabians, the pilot-fish simply reattached itself.

There is perhaps no other socialist tendency which so systematically and even consciously worked out its theory as a Socialism-from-Above. The nature of this movement was early recognized, though it was later obscured by the merging of Fabianism into the body of Labor reformism. The leading Christian socialist inside the Fabian Society once attacked Webb as “a bureaucratic Collectivist” (perhaps the first use of that term.) Hilaire Belloc’s once-famous book of 1912 on The Servile State was largely triggered by the Webb type whose “collectivist ideal” was basically bureaucratic. G.D.H. Cole reminisced: “The Webb’s in those days, used to be fond of saying that everyone who was active in politics was either an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ – an anarchist or a bureaucrat – and that they were ‘B’s’ ...”

These characterizations scarcely convey the full flavor of the Webbian collectivism that was Fabianism. It was through-and-through managerial, technocratic, elitist, authoritarian, “plannist.” Webb was fond of the term wirepulling almost as a synonym for politics. A Fabian publication wrote that they wished to be “the Jesuits of Socialism.” The gospel was Order and Efficiency. The people, who should be treated kindly, were fit to be run only by competent experts. Class struggle, revolution and popular turbulence were insanity. In Fabianism and the Empire imperialism was praised and embraced. If ever the socialist movement developed its own bureaucratic collectivism, this was it.

“It may be thought that Socialism is essentially a movement from below, a class movement,” wrote a Fabian spokesman, Sidney Ball, to disabuse the reader of this idea; but now socialists “approach the problem from the scientific rather than the popular view; they are middle-class theorists,” he boasted, going on to explain that there is “a distinct rupture between the Socialism of the street and the Socialism of the chair.”

The sequel is also known, though often glossed over. While Fabianism as a special tendency petered out into the larger stream of Labor Party reformism by 1918, the leading Fabians themselves went in another direction. Both Sidney and Beatrice Webb as well as Bernard Shaw – the top trio – became principled supporters of Stalinist totalitarianism in the 1930s. Even earlier, Shaw, who thought socialism needed a Superman, had found more than one. In turn he embraced Mussolini and Hitler as benevolent despots to hand “socialism” down to the Yahoos, and he was disappointed only that they did not actually abolish capitalism. In 1931 Shaw disclosed, after a visit to Russia, that the Stalin regime was really Fabianism in practice. The Webbs followed to Moscow, and found God. In their Soviet Communism: a New Civilization, they proved (right out of Moscow’s own documents and Stalin’s own claims, industriously researched) that Russia is the greatest democracy in the world; Stalin is no dictator; equality reigns for all; the one-party dictatorship is needed; the Communist Party is a thoroughly democratic elite bringing civilization to the Slavs and Mongols (but not Englishmen); political democracy has failed in the West anyway, and there is no reason why political parties should survive in our age...

They staunchly supported Stalin through the Moscow purge trials and the Hitler-Stalin Pact without a visible qualm, and died more uncritical pro-Stalinists than can now be found on the Politburo. As Shaw has explained, the Webbs had nothing but scorn for the Russian Revolution itself, but “the Webbs waited until the wreckage and ruin of the change was ended, its mistakes remedied, and the Communist State fairly launched.” That is, they waited until the revolutionary masses had been straitjacketed, and the leaders of the revolution cashiered, the efficient tranquillity of dictatorship had settled on the scene, the counter-revolution firmly established; and then they came along to pronounce it the Ideal.

Was this really a gigantic misunderstanding, some incomprehensible blunder? Or were they not right in thinking that this indeed was the “socialism” that matched their ideology, give or take a little blood? The swing of Fabianism from middle-class permeation to Stalinism was the swing of a door that was hinged on Socialism-from-Above.

If we look back at the decades just before the turn of the century that launched Fabianism on the world, another figure looms, the antithesis of Webb: the leading personality of revolutionary socialism in that period, the poet and artist William Morris, who became a socialist and a Marxist in his late forties. Morris’ writings on socialism breathe from every pore the spirit of Socialism-from-Below, just as every line of Webb’s is the opposite. This is perhaps clearest in his sweeping attacks on Fabianism (for the right reasons); his dislike of the “Marxism” of the British edition of Lassalle, the dictatorial H.M. Hyndman; his denunciations of state-socialism; and his repugnance at the bureaucratic-collectivist utopia of Bellamy’s Looking Backward. (The last moved him to remark: “If they brigaded me into a regiment of workers, I’d just lie on my back and kick.”)

Morris’ socialist writings are pervaded with his emphasis from every side on class struggle from below, in the present; and as for the socialist future, his News from Nowhere was written as the direct antithesis of Bellamy’s book. He warned

“that individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other ... Variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and ... nothing but an union of these two will bring about real freedom.”

“Even some Socialists,” he wrote, “are apt to confuse the cooperative machinery towards which modern life is tending with the essence of Socialism itself.” This meant “the danger of the community falling into bureaucracy.” Therefore he expressed fear of a “collectivist bureaucracy” lying ahead. Reacting violently against state-socialism and reformism, he fell backwards into anti-parliamentarism but he did not fall into the anarchist trap:

“... people will have to associate in administration, and sometimes there will be differences of opinion ... What is to be done? Which party is to give way? Our Anarchist friends say that it must not be carried by a majority; in that case, then, it must be carried by a minority. And why? Is there any divine right in a minority?”

This goes to the heart of anarchism far more deeply than the common opinion that the trouble with anarchism is that it is over-idealistic.

William Morris versus Sidney Webb: this is one way of summing up the story.

7. The “Revisionist” Façade

Eduard Bernstein, the theoretician of social-democratic “revisionism,” took his impulsion from Fabianism, by which he was heavily influenced in his London exile. He did not invent the reformist policy in 1896: he merely became its theoretical spokesman. (The head of the party bureaucracy preferred less theory: “One doesn’t say it, one does it,” he told Bernstein, meaning that the politics of German social-democracy had been gutted of Marxism long before its theoreticians reflected the change.)

But Bernstein did not “revise” Marxism. His role was to uproot it while pretending to prune away withered limbs. The Fabians had not needed to bother with pretense, but in Germany it was not possible to destroy Marxism by a frontal attack. The reversion to Socialism-from-Above (“die alte Scheisse”) had to be presented as a “modernization”, a “revision”.

Essentially, like the Fabians, “revisionism” found its socialism in the inevitable collectivization of capitalism itself; it saw the movement toward socialism as the sum of the collectivist tendencies immanent in capitalism itself; it looked to the “self-socialization” of capitalism from above, through the institutions of the existing state. The equation of Statification = Socialism is not the invention of Stalinism; it was systematized by the Fabian-Revisionist-State-socialist current of social-democratic reformism.

Most of the contemporary discoveries which announce that socialism is obsolete, because capitalism no longer really exists, can already be found in Bernstein. It was “absurd” to call Weimar Germany capitalist, he declared, because of the controls exercised over the capitalists; it follows from Bernsteinism that the Nazi state was even more anti-capitalist, as advertised ...

The transformation of socialism into a bureaucratic collectivism is already implicit in Bernstein’s attack on workers’ democracy. Denouncing the idea of workers’ control of industry, he proceeds to redefine democracy. Is it “government by the people”? He rejects this, in favor of the negative definition “absence of class government.” Thus the very notion of workers’ democracy as a sine qua non of socialism is junked, as effectively as by the clever redefinitions of democracy current in the Communist academies. Even political freedom and representative institutions have been defined out: a theoretical result all the more impressive since Bernstein himself was not personally antidemocratic like Lassalle or Shaw. It is the theory of Socialism-from-Above which requires these formulations. Bernstein is the leading social-democratic theoretician not only of the equation statification = socialism, but also of the disjunction of socialism from workers’ democracy.

It was fitting, therefore, that Bernstein should come to the conclusion that Marx’s hostility to the state was “anarchistic,” and that Lassalle was right in looking to the state for the initiation of socialism. “The administrative body of the visible future can be different from the present-day state only in degree,” wrote Bernstein; the “withering away of the state” is nothing but utopianism even under socialism. He, on the contrary, was very practical; for example, as the Kaiser’s non-withering state launched itself into the imperialist scramble for colonies, Bernstein promptly came out for colonialism and the White Man’s Burden: “Only a conditional right of savages to the land occupied by them can be recognized; the higher civilization ultimately can claim a higher right.”

Bernstein contrasted his own vision of the road to socialism with that of Marx: Marx’s “is the picture of an army. It presses forward, through detours, over sticks and stones ... Finally it arrives at a great abyss. Beyond it there stands beckoning the desired goal – the state of the future, which can be reached only through at sea, a red sea as some have said.” In contrast, Bernstein’s vision was not red but roseate: the class struggle softens into harmony as a beneficent state gently changes the bourgeoisie into good bureaucrats. It didn’t happen that way – when the Bernsteinized social-democracy first shot down the revolutionary left in 1919, and then, reinstating the unregenerate bourgeoisie and the military in power, helped to yield Germany into the hands of the fascists.

If Bernstein was the theoretician of the identification of bureaucratic collectivism with socialism, then it was his left-wing opponent in the German movement who became the leading spokesman in the Second International of a revolutionary-democratic Socialism-from-Below. This was Rosa Luxemburg, who so emphatically put her faith and hope in the spontaneous struggle of a free working class that the myth-makers invented for her a “theory of spontaneity” which she never held, a theory in which “spontaneity” is counterposed to “leadership.”

In her own movement she fought hard against the “revolutionary” elitists who rediscovered the theory of the Educational Dictatorship over the workers (it is rediscovered in every generation as The Very Latest Thing), and had to write: “Without the conscious will and the consious action of the majority of the proletariat there can be no socialism ... [We] will never assume governmental authority except through the clear unambiguous will of the vast majority of the German working class ...” And her famous aphorism: “Mistakes committed by a genuinely revolutionary labor movement are much more fruitful and worthwhile historically than the infallibility of the very best Central Committee.”

Rosa Luxemburg versus Eduard Bernstein: this is the German chapter of the story.

8. The 100% American Scene

At the Wellsprings of American “native socialism,” the picture is the same, only more so. If we overlook the imported “German socialism” (Lassallean with Marxist trimmings) of the early Socialist Labor Party, then the leading figure here is, far and away, Edward Bellamy and his Looking Backward (1887). Just before him came the now forgotten Laurence Gronlund, whose Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) was extremely influential in its day, selling 100,000 copies.

Gronlund is so up-to-date that he does not say he rejects democracy – he merely “redefines” it; as “Administration by the Competent,” as against “government by majorities,” together with a modest proposal to wipe out representative government as such as well as all parties. All the “people” want, he teaches, is “administration – good administration.” They should find “the right leaders,” and then be “willing to thrust their whole collective power into their hands.” Representative government will be replaced by the plebiscite. He is sure that his scheme will work, he explains, because it works so well for the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Naturally he rejects the horrible idea of class struggle. The workers are incapable of self-emancipation, and he specifically denounces Marx’s famous expression of this First Principle. The Yahoos will be emancipated by an elite of the “competent,” drawn from the intelligentsia; and at one point he set out to organize a secret conspiratorial American Socialist Fraternity for students.

Bellamy’s socialist utopia in Looking Backward is expressly modeled on the army as the ideal pattern of society – regimented, hierarchically ruled by an elite, organized from the top down, with the cozy communion of the beehive as the great end. The story itself pictures the transition as coming through the concentration of society into one big business corporation, a single capitalist: the state. Universal suffrage is abolished; all organizations from below eliminated; decisions are made by administrative technocrats from above. As one of his followers defined this “American socialism”: “Its social idea is a perfectly organized industrial system which, by reason of the close interlocking of its wheels, shall work at a minimum of friction with a maximum of wealth and leisure to all.”

As in the case of the anarchists, Bellamy’s fanciful solution to the basic problem of social organization – how to resolve differences of ideas and interests among men – is the assumption that the elite will be superhumanly wise and incapable of injustice (essentially the same as the Stalinist-totalitarian myth of the infallibility of the Party), the point of the assumption being that it makes unnecessary any concern about democratic control from below. The latter is unthinkable for Bellamy because the masses, the workers, are simply a dangerous monster, the barbarian horde. The Bellamyite movement – which called itself “Nationalism” and originally set out to be both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist – was systematically organized on a middle-class appeal, like the Fabians.

Here were the overwhelmingly popular educators of the “native” wing of American socialism, whose conceptions echoed through the non-Marxist and anti-Marxist sectors of the socialist movement well into the 20th century, with a resurgence of “Bellamy Clubs” even in the 1930s, when John Dewey eulogized Looking Backward as expounding the American ideal of democracy.” Technocracy, which already reveals fascist features openly, was a lineal descendant of this tradition on one side. If one wants to see how thin the line can be between something called socialism and something like fascism, it is instructive to read the monstrous exposition of “socialism” written by the once famous inventor-scientist and Socialist Party luminary Charles P. Steinmetz. His America and the New Epoch (1916) sets down in deadly seriousness exactly the anti-utopia once satirized in a science-fiction novel, in which Congress has been replaced by direct senators from DuPont, General Motors and the other great corporations. Steinmetz, presenting the giant monopolistic corporations (like his own employer, General Electric) as the ultimate in industrial efficiency, proposes to disband the political government in favor of direct rule by the associated corporate monopolists.

Bellamyism started many on the road to socialism, but the road forked. By the turn of the century, American socialism developed the world’s most vibrant antithesis to Socialism-from-Above in all its forms: Eugene Debs. In 1897 Debs was still at the point of asking none other than John D. Rockefeller to finance the establishment of a socialist utopian colony in a western state; but Debs, whose socialism was forged in the class struggle of a militant labor movement, soon found his true voice.

The heart of “Debsian socialism” was its appeal to, and faith in, the self-activity of the masses from below. Debs’ writings and speeches are impregnated with this theme. He often quoted or paraphrased Marx’s “First Principle” in his own words: “The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves their freedom must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity; the heart of their hope...” His classic statement is this: “Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves.” He echoed Marx’s words of 1850:

“In the struggle of the working class to free itself from wage slavery it cannot be repeated too often that everything depends on the working class itself. The simple question is, Can the workers fit themselves, by education, organization, cooperation and self-imposed discipline, to take control of the productive forces and manage industry in the interest of the people and for the benefit of society? That is all there is to it.”

Can the workers fit themselves? ... He was under no starry-eyed illusions about the working class as it was (or is). But he proposed a different goal than the elitists whose sole wisdom consists in pointing a finger at the backwardness of the people now, and in teaching that this must always be so. As against the faith in elite rule from above, Debs counterpoised the directly contrary notion of the revolutionary vanguard (also a minority) whose faith impels them to advocate a harder road for the majority:

“It is the minorities who have made the history of this world [he said in the 1917 anti-war speech for which Wilson’s government jailed him]. It is the few who have had the courage to take their places at the front; who have been true enough to themselves to speak the truth that was in them; who have dared oppose the established order of things; who have espoused the cause of the suffering, struggling poor; who have upheld without regard to personal consequences the cause of freedom and righteousness.”

This “Debsian socialism” evoked a tremendous response from the heart of the people, but Debs had no successor as a tribune of revolutionary-democratic socialism. After the postwar period of radicalization, the Socialist Party became pinkly respectable on the one hand, and the Communist Party became Stalinized on the other. On its side, American liberalism itself had long been undergoing a process of “statification,” culminating in the great New Deal illusion of the ’30s. The elite vision of a dispensation-from-above under the aegis of the Savior-President attracted a whole strain of liberals to whom the country gentleman in the White House was as Bismarck to Lassalle.

The type had been heralded by Lincoln Steffens, the collectivist liberal who (like Shaw and Georges Sorel) was as attracted to Mussolini as to Moscow, and for the same reasons. Upton Sinclair, quitting the Socialist Party as too “sectarian,” launched his “broad” movement to “End Poverty in California,” with a manifesto appropriately called I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty (probably the only radical manifesto with two I’s in the title) on the theme of “Socialism-from-Up-in-Sacramento. One of the typical figures of the time was Stuart Chase, who wove a zigzag course from the reformism of the League for Industrial Democracy to the semi-fascism of Technocracy. There were the Stalinoid intellectuals who managed to sublimate their joint admiration for Roosevelt and Russia by hailing both the NRA and the Moscow Trials. There were signs of the times like Paul Blanshard, who defected from the Socialist Party to Roosevelt on the ground that the New Deal program of “managed capitalism” had taken the initiative in economic change away from the socialists.

The New Deal, often rightly called America’s “social-democratic period,” was also the liberals’ and social-democrats’ big fling at Socialism-from-Above, the utopia of Roosevelt’s “people’s monarchy.” The illusion of the Rooseveltian “revolution from above” united creeping-socialism, bureaucratic liberalism, Stalinoid elitism, and illusions about both Russian collectivism and collectivized capitalism, in one package.

9. Six Strains of Socialism-From-Above

We have seen that there are several different strains or currents running through Socialism-From-Above. They are usually intertwined, but let us separate out some of the more important aspects for a closer look.

1. Philanthropism. – Socialism (or “freedom,” or what-have-you) is to be handed down, in order to Do the People Good, by the rich and powerful out of the kindness of their hearts. As the Communist Manifesto put it, with the early utopians like Robert Owen in mind, “Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.” In gratitude, the downtrodden poor must above all avoid getting rambunctious, and no nonsense about class struggle or self- emancipation. This aspect may be considered a special case of –

2. Elitism. – We have mentioned several cases of this conviction that socialism is the business of a new ruling minority, non-capitalist in nature and therefore guaranteed pure, imposing its own domination either temporarily (for a mere historical era) or even permanently. In either case, this new ruling class is likely to see its goal as an Educational Dictatorship over the masses – to Do Them Good, of course – the dictatorship being exercised by an elite party which suppresses all control from below, or by benevolent despots or Savior-Leaders of some kind, or by Shaw’s “Supermen,” by eugenic manipulators, by Proudhon’s “anarchist” managers or Saint-Simon’s technocrats or their more modern equivalents – with up-to-date terms and new verbal screens which can be hailed as fresh social theory as against “nineteenth-century Marxism.”

On the other hand, the revolutionary-democratic advocates of Socialism-from-Below have also always been a minority, but the chasm between the elitist approach and the vanguard approach is crucial, as we have seen in the case of Debs. For him as for Marx and Luxemburg, the function of the revolutionary vanguard is to impel the mass-majority to fit themselves to take power in their own name, through their own struggles. The point is not to deny the critical importance of minorities, but to establish a different relationship between the advanced minority and the more backward mass.

3. Plannism. – The key words are Efficiency, Order, Planning, System – and Regimentation. Socialism is reduced to social-engineering, by a Power above society. Here again, the point is not to deny that effective socialism requires over-all planning (and also that efficiency and order are good things); but the reduction of socialism to planned production is an entirely different matter; just as effective democracy requires the right to vote, but the reduction of democracy merely to the right to vote once in a while makes it a fraud.

As a matter of fact, it would be important to demonstrate that the separation of planning from democratic control-from-below makes a mockery of planning itself; for the immensely complicated industrial societies of today cannot be effectively planned by an all-powerful central committee’s ukases, which inhibit and terrorize the free play of initiative and correction from below. This is indeed the basic contradiction of the new type of exploiting social system represented by Soviet bureaucratic collectivism. But we cannot pursue this subject further here.

The substitution of Plannism for socialism has a long history, quite apart from its embodiment in the Soviet myth that Satification = Socialism, a tenet which we have already seen to have been first systematized by social-democratic reformism (Bernstein and the Fabians particularly). During the 1930’s, the mystique of the “Plan,” taken over in part from Soviet propaganda, became prominent in the right wing of the social-democracy, with Henri de Man hailed as its prophet and as successor to Marx. De Man faded from view and is now forgotten because he had the bad judgment to push his Revisionist theories first into corporatism and then into collaboration with the Nazis.

Aside from theoretical construction, Plannism appears in the socialist movement most frequently embodied in a certain psychological type of radical. To give credit due, one of the first sketches of this type came in Belloc’s The Servile State, with the Fabians in mind. This type, writes Belloc,

“loves the collectivist ideal in itself ... because it is an ordered and regular form of society. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of their vice, ignorance and folly. [Belloc writes further:] In him the exploitation of man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar ... [Belloc’s eye is on Sidney Webb here.] ... the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes ... gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.”

As far as concerns contemporary examples with a pro-Stalinist coloration, examples-a-go-go can be found in the pages of Paul Sweezy’s magazine Monthly Review.

In a 1930 article on the “motive patterns of socialism,” written when he still thought he was a Leninist, Max Eastman distinguished this type as centered on “efficiency and intelligent organization ... a veritable passion for a plan ... businesslike organization.” For such, he commented, Stalin’s Russia has a fascination:

“It is a region at least to be apologized for in other lands – certainly not denounced from the standpoint of a mad dream like emancipation of the workers and therewith all mankind. In those who built the Marxian movement and those who organized its victory in Russia, that mad dream was the central motive. They were, as some are now prone to forget, extreme rebels against oppression. Lenin will perhaps stand out, when the commotion about his ideas subsides, as the greatest rebel in history. His major passion was to set men free ... if a single concept must be chosen to summarize the goal of the class struggle as defined in Marxian writings, and especially the writings of Lenin, human freedom is the name for it ...”

It might be added that more than once Lenin decried the push for total-planning as a “bureaucratic utopia.”

There is a subdivision under Plannism which deserves a name too: let us call it Productionism. Of course, everyone is “for” production just as everyone is for Virtue and the Good Life; but for this type, production is the decisive test and end of a society. Russian bureaucratic collectivism is “progressive” because of the statistics of pig-iron production (the same type usually ignores the impressive statistics of increased production under Nazi or Japanese capitalism). It is all right to smash or prevent free trade-unions under Nasser, Castro, Sukarno or Nkrumah because something known as “economic development” is paramount over human rights. This hardboiled viewpoint was, of course, not invented by these “radicals,” but by the callous exploiters of labor in the capitalist Industrial Revolution; and the socialist movement came into existence fighting tooth-and-nail against these theoreticians of “progressive” exploitation. On this score too, apologists for modern “leftist” authoritarian regimes tend to consider this hoary doctrine as the newest revelation of sociology.

4. “Communionism.” – In his 1930 article Max Eastman called this “the united-brotherhood pattern,” of “the gregarian or human-solidarity socialists” – “those yearning with a mixture of religious mysticism and animal gregariousness for human solidarity.” It should not be confused with the notion of solidarity in strikes, etc., and not necessarily identified with what is commonly called comradeship in the socialist movement or a “sense of community” elsewhere. Its specific content, as Eastman says, is a “seeking for submersion in a Totality, seeking to lose himself in the bosom of a substitute for God.”

Eastman is here pointing to the Communist Party writer Mike Gold; another excellent case is Harry F. Ward, the CP’s hardy clerical fellow-traveler, whose books theorize this kind of “oceanic” yearning for the shucking-off of one’s individuality. Bellamy’s notebooks reveal him as a classic case: he writes about the longing “for absorption into the grand omnipotency of the universe;” his “Religion of Solidarity” reflects his mistrust of the individualism of the personality, his craving to dissolve the Self into communion with Something Greater.

This strain is very prominent in some of the most authoritarian of the Socialisms-from-Above and is not seldom met in milder cases like the philanthropic elitists with Christian Socialist views. Naturally, this kind of “communionist” socialism is always hailed as an “ethical socialism” and praised for holding class struggle in horror; for there must be no conflict inside a beehive. It tends to flatly counterpose “collectivism” to “individualism” (a false opposition from a humanist standpoint), but what it really impugns is individuality.

5. Permeationism. – Socialism-from-Above appears in many varieties for the simple reason that there are always many alternatives to the self-mobilization of masses from below; but the cases discussed tend to divide into two families.

One has the perspective of overthrowing the present, capitalist hierarchical society in order to replace it with a new, non-capitalist type of hierarchical society based on a new kind of elite ruling class. (These varieties are usually ticketed “revolutionary” in histories of socialism.) The other has the perspective of permeating the centers of power in the existing society in order to metamorphose it – gradually, inevitably – into a statified collectivism, perhaps molecule by molecule the way wood petrifies into agate. This is the characteristic stigmatum of the reformist, social-democratic varieties of Socialism-from-Above.

The very term permeationism was invented for self-description by what we have already called the “purest” variety of reformism ever seen, Sidney Webb’s Fabianism. All social-democratic permeationism is based on a theory of mechanical inevitability: the inevitable self-collectivization of capitalism from above, which is equated with socialism. Pressure from below (where considered permissible) can hasten and straighten the process, provided it is kept under control to avoid frightening the self-collectivizers. Hence the social-democratic permeationists are not only willing but anxious to “join the Establishment” rather than to fight it, in whatever capacity they are allowed to join it, whether as cabin boys or cabinet ministers. Typically the function of their movement-from-below is primarily to blackmail the ruling powers into buying them off with such opportunities for permeation.

The tendency toward the collectivization of capitalism is indeed a reality: as we have seen, it means the bureaucratic collectivization of capitalism. As this process has advanced, the contemporary social-democracy has itself gone through a metamorphosis. Today, the leading theoretician of this neo-reformism, C.A.R. Crosland, denounces as “extremist” the mild statement favoring nationalization which was originally written for the British Labor program by none other than Sidney Webb (with Arthur Henderson)! The number of continental social democracies that have now purged their programs of all specifically anti-capitalist content – a brand new phenomenon in socialist history – reflects the degree to which the ongoing process of bureaucratic collectivization is accepted as an installment of petrified “socialism.”

This is permeationism as grand strategy. It leads, of course, to permeationism as political tactic, a subject we cannot here pursue beyond mentioning its presently most prominent U.S. form: the policy of supporting the Democratic Party and the lib-lab coalition around the “Johnson Consensus,” its predecessors and successors.

The distinction between these two “families” of Socialism-from-Above holds for home-grown socialism, from Babeuf to Harold Wilson; that is, cases where the social base of the given socialist current is inside the national system, be it the labor aristocracy or declassé elements or any other. The case is somewhat different for those “socialisms-from-outside” represented by the contemporary Communist Parties, whose strategy and tactics depend in the last analysis on a power base outside any of the domestic social strata; that is, on the bureaucratic collectivist ruling classes in the East.

The Communist Parties have shown themselves uniquely different from any kind of home-grown movement in their capacity to alternate or combine both the “revolutionary”-oppositionist and the permeationist tactics to suit their convenience. Thus the American Communist Party could swing from its ultra-left-adventurist “Third Period” of 1928-34 into the ultra-permeationist tactic of the Popular Front period, then back into fire-breathing “revolutionism” during the Hitler-Stalin Pact period, and again, during the ups-and-downs of the Cold War, into various degrees of combination of the two. With the current Communist split along Moscow-Peking line, the “Krushchevites” and the Maoists tend each to embody one of the two tactics which formerly alternated.

Frequently, therefore, in domestic policy the official Communist Party and the social-democrats tend to converge on the policy of permeationism, though from the angle of a different Socialism-from-Above.

6. Socialism-from-Outside. – The preceding varieties of Socialism-from-Above look to power at the tops of society: now we come to the expectation of succor from the outside.

The flying-saucer cult is a pathological form, messianism a more traditional form, when “outside” means out of this world; but for the present purposes, “outside” means outside the social struggle at home. For the Communists of East Europe after World War II, the New Order had to be imported on Russian bayonets; for the German Social-Democrats in exile, liberation of their own people could finally be imagined only by grace of foreign military victory.

The peacetime variety is socialism-by-model-example. This, of course, was the method of the old utopians, who built their model colonies in the American backwoods in order to demonstrate the superiority of their system and convert the unbelievers. Today, it is this substitute for social struggle at home which is increasingly the essential hope of the Communist movement in the West.

The model-example is provided by Russia (or China, for the Maoists); and while it is difficult to make the lot of the Russian proletarians half-attractive to Western workers even with a generous dose of lies, there is more success to be expected from two other approaches:

a. The relatively privileged position of managerial, bureaucratic and intellectual-flunky elements in the Russian collectivist system can be pointedly contrasted with the situation in the West, where these same elements are subordinated to the owners of capital and manipulators of wealth. At this point the appeal of the Soviet system of statified economy coincides with the historic appeal of middle-class socialisms, to disgruntled class-elements of intellectuals, technologists, scientists and scientific employees, administrative bureaucrats and organization men of various types, who can most easily identify themselves with a new ruling class based on state power rather than on money power and ownership, and therefore visualize themselves as the new men of power in a non-capitalist but elitist setup.

b. While the official Communist Parties are required to maintain the facade of orthodoxy in something called “Marxism-Leninism,” it is more common that serious theoreticians of neo-Stalinism who are not tied to the party do free themselves from the pretense. One development is the open abandonment of any perspective of victory through social struggle inside the capitalist countries. The “world revolution” is equated simply with the demonstration by the Communist states that their system is superior. This has now been put into thesis-form by the two leading theoreticians of neo-Stalinism, Paul Sweezy and Isaac Deutscher.

Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capitalism (1966) flatly rejects “the answer of traditional Marxist orthodoxy – that the industrial proletariat must eventually rise in revolution against its capitalist oppressors.” Same for all the other “outsider” groups of society – unemployed, farm workers, ghetto masses, etc.; they cannot constitute a coherent force in society.” This leaves no one; capitalism cannot be effectively challenged from within. What then? Some day, the authors explain on their last page, “perhaps not in the present century,” the people will be disillusioned with capitalism “as the world revolution spreads and as the socialist countries show by their example that it is possible” to build a rational society. That is all. Thus the Marxist phrases filling the other 366 pages of this essay become simply an incantation like the reading of the Sermon on the Mount at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The same perspective is presented less bluntly by a more circumlocuitous writer in Deutscher’s The Great Contest. Deutscher transmits the new Soviet theory “that Western capitalism will succumb not so much – or not directly – because of its own crises and contradictions as because of its inability to match the achievements of socialism [i.e. the Communist states]”; and later on: “It may be said that this has to some extent replaced the Marxist prospect of a permanent social revolution.” Here we have a theoretical rationale for what has long been the function of the Communist movement in the West: to act as border guard and shill for the competing, rival establishment in the East. Above all, the perspective of Socialism-from-Below becomes as alien to these professors of bureaucratic collectivism as to the apologists for capitalism in the American academies.

This type of neo-Stalinist ideologist is often critical of the actual Soviet regime – a good example is Deutscher, who remains as far as possible from being an uncritical apologist for Moscow like the official Communists. They must be understood as being permeationists with respect to bureaucratic-collectivism. What appears as a “socialism-from-outside” when seen from the capitalist world, becomes a sort of Fabianism when viewed from within the framework of the Communist system. Within this context, change-from-above-only is as firm a principle for these theoreticians as it was for Sidney Webb. This was demonstrated inter alia by Deutscher’s hostile reaction to the East German revolt of 1953 and to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, on the classical ground that such upheavals from below would scare the Soviet establishment away from its course of “liberalization” by the Inevitability of Gradualness.

10. Which Side Are You On?

From the point of view of intellectuals who have a choice of roles to play in the social struggle, the perspective of Socialism-from-Below has historically had little appeal. Even within the framework of the socialist movement it has had few consistent exponents and not many inconsistent ones. Outside the socialist movement, naturally, the standard line is that such ideas are visionary, impractical, unrealistic, “utopian”; idealistic perhaps but quixotic. The mass of people are congenitally stupid, corrupt, apathetic and generally hopeless; and progressive change must come from Superior People rather like (as it happens) the intellectual expressing these sentiments. This is translated theoretically into an Iron Law of Oligarchy or a tinny law of elitism, in one way or another involving a crude theory of inevitability – the inevitability of change-from-above-only.

Without presuming to review in a few words the arguments pro and con for this pervasive view, we can note the social role it plays, as the self-justificatory rite of the elitist. In “normal” times when the masses are not moving, the theory simply requires pointing with scorn, while the whole history of revolution and social upheaval is simply dismissed as obsolete. But the recurrence of revolutionary upheavals and social disturbances, defined precisely by the intrusion onto the historical stage of previous inactive masses and characteristic of periods when basic social change is on the agenda, is just as “normal” in history as the intervening periods of conservatism. When the elitist theorist therefore has to abandon the posture of the scientific observer who is merely predicting that the mass of people will always continue quiescent, when he is faced with the opposite reality of a revolutionary mass threatening to subvert the structure of power, he is typically not behindhand in switching over to an entirely different track: denouncing mass intervention from below as evil in itself.

The fact is that the choice between Socialism-from-Above and Socialism-from-Below is, for the intellectual, basically a moral choice, whereas for the working masses who have no social alternative it is a matter of necessity. The intellectual may have the option of “joining the Establishment” where the worker does not; the same option holds also for labor leaders, who, as they rise out of their class, likewise confront a choice that did not exist before. The pressure of conformity to the mores of the ruling class, the pressure for bourgeoisification, is stronger in proportion as personal and organizational ties with the ranks below become weak. It is not hard for an intellectual or bureaucratized official to convince himself that permeation of and adaptation to the existing power is the smart way to do it, when (as it happens) it also permits sharing in the perquisites of influence and affluence.

It is an ironic fact, therefore, that the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” is iron-clad mainly for the intellectual elements from whom it arises. As a social stratum (i.e., apart from exceptional individuals) intellectuals have never been known to rise against established power in anything like the way that the modern working class has done time and again through its relatively brief history. Functioning typically as the ideological flunkies of the established rulers of society, the brain-worker sector of the non-propertied middle classes is yet, at the same time, moved to discontent and disgruntlement by the relationship. Like many another servant, this Admirable Crichton thinks, “I am a better man than my master, and if things were different we would see who should bend the knee.” More than ever in our day, when the credit of the capitalist system is disintegrating throughout the world, he easily dreams of a form of society in which he can come into his own, in which the Brain and not Hands or Moneybags would dictate; in which he and his similars would be released from the pressure of Property through the elimination of capitalism, and released from the pressure of the more numerous masses through the elimination of democracy.

Nor does he have to dream very far, for existing versions of such a society seem to be before his eyes, in the Eastern collectivisms. Even if he rejects these versions, for various reasons including the Cold War, he can theorize his own version of a “good” kind of bureaucratic collectivism, to be called “Meritocracy” or “managerialism” or “Industrialism” or what-have-you, in the U.S.; or “African Socialism” in Ghana and “Arab Socialism” in Cairo; or various other kinds of socialism in other parts of the world.

The nature of the choice between Socialism-from-Above and Socialism-from-Below stands out most starkly in connection with a question on which there is a considerable measure of agreement among liberal, social-democratic and Stalinoid intellectuals today. This is the alleged inevitability of authoritarian dictatorships (benevolent despotisms) in the newly developing states of Africa and Asia particularly – e.g. Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, et al. – dictatorships which crush independent trade unions as well as all political opposition and organize to maximize the exploitation of labor, in order to extract from the hides of the working masses sufficient capital to hasten industrialization at the tempo which the new rulers desire. Thus to an unprecented degree, “progressive” circles which once would have protested injustice anywhere have become automatic apologists for any authoritarianism which is considered non-capitalist.

Apart from the economic-determinist rationale usually given for this position, there are two aspects of the question which illuminate what is broadly at stake:

1. The economic argument for dictatorship, purporting to prove the necessity of breakneck industrialization, is undoubtedly very weighty for the new bureaucratic rulers – who meanwhile do not stint their own revenue and aggrandizement – but it is incapable of persuading the worker at the bottom of the heap that he and his family must bow to super-exploitation and super-sweating for some generations ahead, for the sake of a quick accumulation of capital. (In fact, this is why breakneck industrialization requires dictatorial controls.)

The economic-determinist argument is the rationalization of a ruling class viewpoint; it makes human sense only from a ruling-class viewpoint, which of course is always identified with the needs of “society.” It makes equally good sense that the workers at the bottom of the heap must move to fight this super-exploitation to defend their elementary human dignity and wellbeing. So was it also during the capitalist Industrial Revolution, when the “newly developing states” were in Europe.

It is not a question simply of some technical-economic argument but of sides in a class struggle. The question is: Which side are you on?

2. It is argued that the mass of people in these countries are too backward to control the society and its government; and this is no doubt true, not only there. But what follows? How does a people or a class become fit to rule in their own name?

Only by fighting to do so. Only by waging their struggle against oppression – oppression by those who tell them they are unfit to govern. Only by fighting for democratic power do they educate themselves and raise themselves up to the level of being able to wield that power. There has never been any other way for any class.

Although we have been considering a particular line of apologia, the two points which emerged do in fact apply all over the world, in every country, advanced or developing, capitalist or Stalinist. When the demonstrations and boycotts of the Southern Negroes threatened to embarrass President Johnson as he faced an election, the question was: which side are you on? When the Hungarian people erupted in revolt against the Russian occupier, the question was: which side are you on? When the Algerian people fought for liberation against the “socialist” government of Guy Mollet, the question was: which side are you on? When Cuba was invaded by Washington’s puppets, the question was: which side are you on? and when the Cuban trade unions are taken over by the commissars of the dictatorship, the question is also: which side are you on?

Since the beginning of society, there has been no end of theories “proving” that tyranny is inevitable and that freedom-in-democracy is impossible; there is no more convenient ideology for a ruling class and its intellectual flunkies. These are self-fulfilling predictions, since they remain true only as long as they are taken to be true. In the last analysis, the only way of proving them false is in the struggle itself. That struggle from below has never been stopped by the theories from above, and it has changed the world time and again. To choose any of the forms of Socialism-from-Above is to look back to the old world, to the “old crap.” To choose the road of Socialism-from-Below is to affirm the beginning of a new world.

A Few References

As mentioned in the Note, following are a few useful titles, but for most of the questions dealt with, one must go back to the sources.

For Section 1, one book worth reading is A.D. Winspear’s The Genesis of Plato’s Thought, which discusses Pythagoras somewhat too. For Proudhon, see the chapter in J.S. Schapiro’s Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism, and Proudhon’s Carnets. For Bakunin, see E. Pyzuir’s The Doctrine of Anarchism of M.A. Bakunin, with E.H. Carr’s biography for background. For Lassalle, see E. Bernstein’s F. Lassalle as a Social Reformer, and D. Footman’s biography. For Fabianism, there is only one half-decent published study, A.N. McBriar’s Fabian Socialism and English Politics, and E.J. Hobsbawm’s unpublished thesis, Fabianism and the Fabians, neither adequate for our purpose. For Rosa Luxemburg, see Paul Frölich’s biography, and Tony Cliff’s thin book both titled with her name. For Bellamy and Gronlund, see Arthur Lipow’s unpublished thesis, Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (Berkeley, Univ. of Calif., 1965).

Two articles by me in New Politics bear on some aspects of the subject: Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformists (I, 1, Winter 1962) and The New Social-Democratic Reformism (II, 2, Winter 1963). Also relevant are parts of the following two publications of the Independent Socialist Committee: Independent Socialism: a Perspective for the Left (pamphlet), and Introduction to Independent Socialism (a “clipping-book”). [H.D.]

Hal Draper

Toward a New Beginning –
On Another Road

The Alternative to the Micro-Sect

(1971)

Introduction to this document

1. Let’s start by going back to Marx ...

2. Marx: the negative side

3. Anatomy of the sect

4. Well, what about the Bolsheviks?

5. How and when the sect form was revived

6. A quick look at the trotskyist sect pattern

7. The WP/ISL experience

8. What is a “political center”?

9. What is it that we want to accomplish?

Back to index

The problem is still: how to build a revolutionary socialist party. In the U.S., no appreciable progress towards this goal is visible in the last third of a century (since the end of WW2). The goal is still there, but the road to this goal can hardly be considered immune from re-examination.

The road we have been on leads up a blind canyon. We have to go back to pick up another road, one which forked off a certain distance back.

The road we have been slogging along has a name: it is the road of the sect. We will define this.[1*] We will see how and when it got started. And we will explain why it leads to getting lost – i.e. to where we are now.

We will argue that history shows there must be another road, a different road.

In fact, without thinking the problem through, we did get started on a different road in early 1964 when the Independent Socialist Committee was formed to revive Independent Socialism as a political tendency, by encouraging the formation of local clubs. (The first Independent Socialist Club, on the Berkeley campus, was formed in the fall of 1964.) But we did not then think it through as an alternative to the sect type of organization. As a result, the barely nascent Independent Socialist movement slipped back into the “sect” rut as a result of easily identifiable pressures. We propose to think it through now.

Back to index

1. Let’s start by going back to Marx ...

There is no question about what Marx’s views and practice were on this point. In fact, he probably over-reacted, so intense was his determination to have nothing to do with any sect, including a sect of his very own.

To Marx, any organization was a sect if it set up any special set of view (including Marx’s views) as its organizational boundary; if it made this special set of views the determinant of its organizational form.

Neither Marx nor Engels ever formed or wanted to form a “Marxist” group of any kind – that is, a membership group based on an exclusively Marxist program. All of their organizational activity was pointed along a different road.

According to their thinking: what should you do if you agreed with their views – how should you try to implement these views? Your task would be to carry those views into the movements and organizations naturally arising from the existing social struggle. Your task would not be to invent a “higher” form of organization out of your head. Your task would be to permeate these class movements and organizations with your views; in the process of doing so, to develop cadres of revolutionaries in these movements and organizations; and thus to work finally raising the movement as a whole to a higher level.

The movement as a whole: Marx and Engels knew and said that this process might, indeed probably would, involve splits; they made no fetish of unbroken unity as a condition of the process. But the splits which they considered natural were not the artificial splits of an ideological wing which is out to unfurl an abstract programmatic banner. The splits they expected were those arising organically as the mass level rose. They expected such splits from two directions: from bourgeoisified elements who objected to a class line and a class-struggle course of development of the movement; and from sec-ideologists who saw the class movement moving away from their own special nostrums and prescriptions for it. They expected that either such elements would split away, or that the healthy class elements would have to split with them; but however it came about formally, the line of organizational demarcation was never to be special programmatic views of an ideological vanguard for its own sake (i.e. program in the abstract) but rather the political meaning, in terms of ongoing social struggle, of the political level of the development reached by the movement of the class (i.e. program in the concrete, program as concretized in the real class struggle going on).

Thus, during 1847 Marx and Engels, who had joined the Communist League, worked to rid it of its sectarian and conspiratorial hangovers, and succeeded handily; but at the very same time, in Brussels where he lived, Marx devoted his organizational efforts to building the Democratic Association, which was not even programmatically socialist. And when the revolution broke out on the Continent, their first move was to dump the Communist League (dissolve it) as the vanguard vehicle of the organizational operation.

In Cologne during the revolution, they operated (organizationally speaking) on three levels, not one of which resembled a Marxist sect: (1) In the left-democratic movement (Democratic Union). [This part of the picture has nothing to do with our present problem, being related to the problem of policy in a bourgeois-democratic revolution.] (2) In the Workers Association of the city, a board class organization; and (3) In their own political center. And what did they create as “their” political center? Not an organization at all, but rather a newspaper and its editorial board, that is, a voice. And it was this editorial board which functioned as the “Marx tendency” – which regarded itself as such, and was publicly regarded as such.

With the ebb of the revolution, and after returning to London, Marx did agree to the reconstitution of the Communist League temporarily; but soon, by the fall of 1850, Marx saw that the revolutionary crisis was over, while the majority of the membership reacted to frustration with a severe case of sectarian infantilism. The League then split and fell apart. Marx never repeated this experience.

During the 1850s, Marx and Engels made no effort to set up anything, but concentrated exclusively on producing and publishing the literature which was to make possible the education of a cadre. This period came to an end only when the working-class movement itself threw up the ad-hoc organization which we know as the First International.

The First International was so polar distant from the sect concept of organization that it never even clearly came out for communism, and barely endorsed a version of economic collectivism at a later congress. And it was so broadly inclusive, within the framework of a clear-cut class character, that no one would dream of duplicating today. In any case, the approach which it evidenced was the 180° opposite of the sect: Instead of starting with the Full Program and then assembling the band of chosen around it, from any class strata (especially intellectuals), Marx wanted to start with strata of the working class that were in movement – moving in class struggle, even if on a “low” level – and adapt the program to what these strata were ready for. This is the way to start.

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2. Marx: the negative side

Within this broad class movement of the First International, Marx and Engels set up no political center of their own of any kind; and it is this which raises the question of over-reaction, not their disinclination to create a Marxist sect.

In effect Marx used the General Council, and his influence in the General Council, as his “political center”; it would be easy to explain why this was not enough. Probably Marx felt that any other course would impede his personal influence in the General Council; but the price was that the formation of a definite Marxist cadre was still in a less-than-elementary stage when the International went under.

This negative fact – not the failure to create a Marxist sect, but the failure to build a Marxist cadre of any kind – is one of the background reasons for the way in which the various socialist parties arose in the different countries – even the so-called “Marxist” parties.

Take England, right under Marx’s nose: – The first “Marxist” center of any kind was established by a man (Hyndman) in hostility to Marx and to the small circle of English socialists directly influenced by Marx; a man who established this “Marxist” center as a typical sect of the worst kind, and whose disastrous influence on the patterns of English Marxism has not been overcome to this day. No alternative kind of Marxist political center was ever offered by Marx or Engels or by any of their circle. The result was that the embodiment of Marx to the British public was a man who was the cruddiest “founder of Marxism” of any country in the world.

The obvious alternative to the sect would have been what Marx did in Cologne: the establishment of an organ by Marx’s British friends, a publication acting as the voice of Marxist ideas, a model of how to address oneself to the class movement, an organizer of a cadre. Nothing like this was done; there was a vacuum. The Hyndman sect operation stepped into the vacuum.

While Eleanor Marx did brilliant work as an organizer of the New Unionism (militant mass unionism), organizing the unorganized and unskilled trades, she did it as an individual, with no other visible point of reference. While she and Aveling did good work in spreading advocacy of independent working-class political action in London’s proletarian ghetto, with an impact which eventually helped to produce the Labor Party, yet their work could not have the concomitant effect of helping to select out and train up a Marxist cadre – which would do more of what they were doing.

(This failing – the failure to establish any kind of visible political center even if not in the form of a sect – was later repeated, with less excuse, by Rosa Luxemburg in Germany; while in Poland her Polish comrades established a sect, not a class party.)

Marx’s very extreme detestation of the sect type of organization did not mean that he was unable to recognize the positive contributions made by some sects. He did not have to fall into this one-sided appraisal of the historical role played by some sects, any more than his hatred of capitalism ruled out credit for the great positive contributions of capitalism to the development of society. Just as the Communist Manifesto offers what has been called a paean of praise to the historical benefactions of the bourgeoisie, so also Marx and Engels were often glowing in their praise of the contributions made by the Utopian sects.

They did not waste any time deploring the fact that these contributions were first made by sects (sometimes rather grotesque sects, like the Saint-Simonian “religion”); for they understood the pressures which pushed socialist ideologists into the sect-form. All the more important, they thought, to push in a different direction, to orient socialists toward a different organizational road.

Marx summarized this in a well-known letter (1871):

“The International was founded in order to replace the socialist or semi-socialist sects by real organization of the working class for struggle... On the other hand, the International could not have maintained itself if the course of history had not already smashed sectarianism. The development of socialist sectarianism and that of the real labor movement always stand in reverse ratio to each other. So long as the sects are justified (historically), the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historical movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary. For all that, what history exhibits everywhere was repeated in the history of the International. What is antiquated tries to reconstitute and assert itself within the newly acquired form.

“And the history of the International was a continual struggle of the General Council against the sects and against amateur experiments, which sought to assert themselves within the International against the real movement of the working class.”

The point is not to try to determine a priori on exactly what date the sect-form becomes reactionary, etc. That can’t be done. Marx set out to struggle for his own road to a revolutionary movement, and that meant setting himself foursquare against the sect-idea. That the possible contributions of a sect were not entirely historically exhausted in 1864 was amply proved in hindsight, but it is irrelevant to Marx’s course. The Lassallean “sect” in Germany (see Marx’s remarks in the same letter) or the above-mentioned Hyndman sect in England continued to play a role (alas) – a role which also had a positive side as long as there was no working alternative.

Unquestionably, sometimes a set may be better than nothing, but that piece of wisdom does not point to a line. On the other hand, the socialist sect of the German-American émigrés was, in Marx and Engels’ view, worse than nothing, and they hoped it would smash up and disappear. (Unfortunately it is still with us a century later: SLP.)

So it does not follow, even from Marx’s all-out abhorrence of the sect-form, that all sects are always equally harmful. The reverse is true: there is naturally a tremendous variation in this regard. If we look nearer than Marx’s examples: – The “Oehlerites” (a micro-sect which splintered from the Trotskyist sect in 1935) contributed nothing to the development of a revolutionary movement except a subject for hilarity (which is not to be sneezed at in grim times). On the other hand, as we shall mention, the Independent Socialist League worked out the essentials of the revolutionary socialism of our day. That is quite a difference! But it does not gainsay the only conclusion we want to point to at this juncture:

There is a road to a revolutionary party which is not the road of the sect.

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3. Anatomy of the sect

To sum up: we have seen three approaches so far. One we can throw out: the approach of confining oneself only to individual militants without any political center. The real problem is whether the political center must necessarily be a sect. It is a question of the relationship between the vanguard and the class, not merely of two organizational forms.

The sect establishes itself on a HIGH level (far above that of the working class) and on a thin base which is ideologically selective (usually necessarily outside working class). Its working-class character is claimed on the basis of its aspiration and orientation, not its composition or its life. It then sets out to haul the working class up to its level, or calls on the working class to climb up the grade. From behind its organizational walls, it sends out scouting parties to contact the working class, and missionaries to convert two here and three there. It sees itself becoming, one day, a mass revolutionary party by a process of accretion; or by eventual unity with two or three other sects; or perhaps by some process of entry.

Marx, on the other, saw the vanguard elements as avoiding above all the creation of organizational walls between themselves and the class-in-motion. The task was not to lift up two workers here and three there to the level of the Full Program (let alone two students here and three intellectuals there!) but to go after the levers that could get the class, or sections or the class, moving as a mass onto higher levels of action and politics.

The sect mentality sees its sanctification only in its Full Program, that is, in what separates it from the working class. If, god forbid, some slogan it puts forth bids fair to become to popular, it gets scared. “Something must be the matter! We must have capitulated to somebody.” (This is not a caricature: it is drawn from life.) Marx’s approach was exactly the opposite. The job of the vanguard was to work out slogans that would be popular in the given state of the class struggle, in the sense of being able to get broadest possible masses of workers moving. That means: moving on an issue, in a direction, in a way that would bring them into conflict with the capitalist class and its state, and the agents of capitalists and state, including the “labor lieutenants of capitalism” (its own leaders).

The sect is a miniaturized version of the revolutionary party-to-be, a “small mass party,” a microscopic edition or model of the mass party that does not yet exist. Rather, it thinks of itself this way, or tries to be such a miniature.

Its organizational method is the method of “as if”: let us act as if we were a mass party already (to a miniscular degree, naturally, in accordance with our resources), and this is the road to becoming a mass party. Let us publish a “workers’ newspaper,” just as if we were a workers’ party; and if we cannot publish a daily like a real mass party, at least we can publish a weekly or bi-weekly by draining all our resources – this makes us a small (unreal) mass party. (But such a facade is only self-deluding, since if it ever succeeds in deluding a single worker, he finds out soon enough that there is little behind it.) Let us build a “Bolshevik” party be being “disciplined” like good Bolsheviks. (So, on the basis of a false notion of “Bolshevik” discipline absorbed from the enemies of Leninism, the sect is “Bolshevized” into a contracting, petrifying coterie, which replaces the bonds of a political cohesion by iron hoops such as are needed to hold together the staves of a crumbling barrel.

There is a fundamental fallacy in the notion that the road of miniaturization (aping a mass party in miniature) is the road to a mass revolutionary party. Science proves that the scale on which a living organism exists cannot be arbitrarily changed: human beings cannot exist either on the scale of the Lilliputians or of the Brobdingagians; their life mechanisms could not function on either scale. Ants can life 200 times their own weight, but a six foot ant could not lift 20 tons even if it could exist in some monstrous fashion. In organizational life too, this is true: If you try to miniaturize a mass party, you do not get a mass party in miniature, but only a monster.

The basic reason for this is the following: The life-principle of a revolutionary mass party is not simply its Full Program, which can be copied with nothing but an activist typewriter and can be expanded or contracted like an accordion. Its life-principle is its integral involvement as a part of the working-class movement, its immersion in the class struggle not by a Central Committee decision but because it lives there. It is this life-principle which cannot be aped or miniaturized; it does not reduce like a cartoon or shrink like a woolen shirt. Like a nuclear reaction, this phenomenon comes into existence only at critical mass; below critical mass, it does not simply become smaller, it disappears.

Hence, what can the would-be micro-mass party ape in miniature? Only the internal life of the mass party (some of it, in a way); but this internal life, mechanically carried over, is now detached from the reality which governs it in a real mass party. Detach the guts of a lion from its body, and what you have in reality is – tripe. This is why the internal life of a sect has a tendency to be an exercise in unreality, in facades, in ritual imitations.

Also, since only the mass party’s internal life is available for ritualized parody, the set mentality finds only internal life congenial. For outside of that internal life, the harsh realities of isolation and impotence are unbuffered and unbearable, having not the slightest resemblance to the external life of a mass party. The internal life of the sect becomes not a necessary evil keyed to its outside activities, but rather a substitute gratification. On the one hand, the mass-party worker chafes at the necessity of spending much time at internal branch meetings, fraction meetings etc., even if he is a good enough Marxist to understand that these things are necessary. The sect mentality, in contrast, finds comfort and zest only in such ingrown activities, where suitably revolutionary talk can be enjoyed, whereas a trade-union meeting is just a drag.

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4. Well, what about the Bolsheviks?

But didn’t the Bolshevik party have to develop from a sect to a mass party? If they can do it, so can we ...

No, that is not how the Bolsheviks became a mass party – not by the road of the sect. And there is no proposal for a sect form of organization in What Is To Be Done?. The whole mass of fairy-tale history about Lenin’s party conceptions is an invention of the professional anti-Bolsheviks and Stalinists; however, we obviously cannot go into that here, The following will suffice for the present problem:

Take the route embodied in What Is To Be Done?. In the preceding period, the preliminaries for a mass party had taken shape in Russia in the form not of sects but of local workers’ circles, which remained loose, and founded loose regional associations. They had not developed as branches of a central organization but autonomously, in response to social struggles – loosely.

What Lenin set out to organize abroad, first of all, was not a sect, not any membership organization, but a political center: a publication (Iskra) with an editorial board. The Iskra tendency was embodied as an editorial board, not a sect. The membership organization to which Lenin looked was to be a mass party, not one consisting exclusively of those who agreed with his revolutionary Marxism, but rather a mass Party broad enough to include all socialists, indeed all militant workers. It would have different tendencies within it, and the consistent Marxists might be a minority at least for a while.

But while Lenin did not make the mistake of proposing to interpose the walls of a sect between his tendency (i.e. the one with the correct line) and the broad movement of the class-in-struggle, he also did not make the other mistake: the mistake of neglecting to build a political center and thereby a Marxist cadre.

It was the Mensheviks and right-wingers, not Lenin, who split rather than permit a left-wing majority. Nor, in the years of the Bolshevik party’s formation, did Lenin make a virtue out of necessity: he did not adopt the view that the Party had to be limited to Bolsheviks. On the contrary, he fought consistently for the conception of a broad Party in which, however, the left wing had as much right to take over the leadership by democratic vote as did the right wing. This is what the Bolshevik-leadership split was all about, on the organizational side.

Of course, the state of illegality in which the movement functioned conditioned organizational forms in many ways, but it is not illegality that determined that Lenin refused to take the road of forming a Bolshevik sect. If Iskra had been set up in Petrograd instead of abroad, the essential relation would not have changed; and in fact, when partial legality was attained for a short period after the 1905 revolution, one of the consequences was temporary fusion of the Bolshevik and Menshevik groups in a united mass party, though Lenin retained a political center in the form of a publication and its editorial board. The onset of a measure of legality did not push Lenin toward a Bolshevik sect formation but in the opposite direction, toward unity with the Mensheviks in a mass party (not unity of the ideological political centers).

But weren’t both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks “factions” of the split party? – Yes, formally speaking they were; but a faction meant something else again in those days. On both sides, as well as for other organized tendencies in the Russian movement, a “faction” functioned as a public political center with its own publication and editorial board as the carrier of its politics.

Nor were these factions (Bolshevik as well as Menshevik) “membership organizations” in the sense of the sects we hive been trying to build. Look at the documents written by Lenin shortly before 1914 when the Socialist International bureau was inquiring into the Bolshevik-Menshevik unity question: – Lenin, to prove that the Bolsheviks had the support of a majority of the socialist workers in Russia, gives statistics on circulation of organs, financial contributions, etc., but not membership. Nor did anyone expect membership figures. For the membership organizations in Russia were local and regional party groups which might be part Bolshevik and part Menshevik in sympathy, or might shift support from one to the other from time to time, etc. Every time a “party congress” or conference was held, each party group had to decide whether to attend this one or that one, or both.

What this points at is the fact that both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were, in organizational form, not membership sects, and not even “factions” in any organizational meaning relevant to today. What were they? Both were political centers based on a propaganda/publishing enterprise, plus a central organizational apparatus for forging links with sections of the workers’ movement, through “agents”, literary collaborators, etc. (This plus is a crucial addition, though we do not dwell on it at this point.) Individual party members in Russia, or party groups, might decide to distribute Lenin’s paper or the Menshevik organ or neither – many preferred a “non-faction” organ such as Trotsky put out in Vienna; or they might use in their work those publications of the Bolsheviks which they liked plus those of the Mensheviks and others, on a free-wheeling basis.

Obviously much of this scene was conditioned by illegality; much of it by the nature of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, etc. It is not we who propose it as an automatic model for us today; we are discussing it for the very opposite reason: viz., because there are some who, erroneously thinking that the Bolsheviks developed in the shape of a sect, erroneously propose the “Bolshevik-type sect” as a model. But there never was anything like a “Bolshevik sect.” That invention came later, after the Comintern.

In any case, it is obvious there must be the following tentative conclusion: If the Bolshevik party did not develop as a revolutionary party through the road of the sect, then there must be another way.

In fact, the historical conclusion goes farther: There is no revolutionary mass party, or even semi-revolutionary mass party, which ever became a mass party by the road of the sect.

That does not prove there never will be. That does not prove, by itself, that it is forever impossible for a sect to evolve into a mass party in some organic way, that is, without at some point realizing it is on the wrong road and taking a different route. But we are not interested in proving that. All that needs to be understood is that there must be another road – a road which was in fact actually taken by revolutionary socialists, and with more or less success.

What is proved is that the road of the sect should not be followed uncritically, without thinking it through, as if it were the only one possible or thinkable. On the contrary the road of the sect has never worked up to now at all. What has worked is a quite different road, one which therefore at least deserves consideration.

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5. How and when the sect form was revived

This other road dropped out of the consciousness of most revolutionary Marxists only relatively recently – that is, during the Comintern period.

The big historic development which dropped the curtain over it, and pushed the sect route to the fore, was the post-World War I Period of evolution in which the Comintern first posed the formation of revolutionary parties as an immediate “emergency” necessity. In every country, a revolutionary party had to be constituted forthwith, even if the party had to be hothouse-forced; this was demanded by the Comintern’s Twenty-One Points. The motivation was clear: the world revolution was on the order of the day for all of Europe. And it was true that the world revolution was on the immediate order of the day (in Europe).

But we now know that it proved to be flatly impossible to forge genuine revolutionary parties by a short-order forcing- process. (At any rate, not revolutionary parties capable of victory.) This is the essential reason why the enemy (primarily the Social-Democracy) was able to defeat this European revolution. And the defeat of this revolution was the turning-point of modern social history: all of the world today flows from it.

The best-known consequence was the rise of Stalinism – the Stalinization of the Communist parties as well as of Russia. A bi-symmetric consequence hit the currents that rejected Stalinization or broke with it: they generally saw the degeneration of the movement as the consequence of Stalinization, instead of seeing Stalinization as the consequence of the defeat and degeneration of the movement. On the basis of the former view revolutionary success as seen simply as depending on the forging of a vanguard leadership that was not Stalinist, that was truly revolutionary – that is, on the forming of a vanguard leadership that had the Correct Line, which would be enough. The hothouse-forcing process of setting up a revolutionary “party” by issuing one’s own Twenty-One Points (detached from the objective context of the real Twenty-One Points) was taken as the Given, by a new generation of revolutionaries or would-be revolutionaries for whom history had begun in 1917.

The result was a first wave of “Bolshevik” sects – that is, sects that tried to ape what they thought was Bolshevik – in the first period of the decline of the European revolution.

A typical example was the Italian “Bordiguists” and other offshoots of the infantile-leftists of the Comintern – the trends that Lenin had attacked in his Leftwing Communism, an Infantile Sickness. For one thing, as is well known, these well-intentioned but quite ignorant leftists then knew nothing about how the Bolshevik party had really been forged. For them., the Twenty-One Points ultimatum was not a special emergency measure, one which arose from sensible revolutionists only in the not-very-common situation of having an immediate revolutionary crisis breathing down one’s neck without a revolutionary party in existence. For them, this emergency measure, this desperate emergency measure, became the norm – the “regular” “Bolshevik” thing to do ... to do even if there did not exist the historical situation which alone explained why the Twenty-One Points had been resorted to.

Generalized as the normal pattern, this hothouse road to a revolutionary “party” (or facsimile thereof) went like this: You raise the Banner of the Correct Program to establish your organizational boundary. You do this regardless of the objective situation for it is a supra-historic imperative. You do this with whomever you have around – 2 other good people for example. (For was it not said that in the dark days of the war Lenin[’s] Bolshevik party was reduced to a handful?) You declare yourself The Revolutionary Party and since you have the Correct Program, eventually the workers will have to come to you door. .. And you have your sect.

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6. A quick look at the Trotskyist sect pattern

Trotsky’s reluctance of several years against breaking with the Communist Parties was conditioned, among other things, on the fact that he too saw no alternative but the formation of a Trotskyist sect – a conclusion he was loath to take.

It must be remembered that, during the whole period of his political development (i.e. before 1914), Trotsky had never begun to understand what it was that Lenin was doing, For decades he had fought bitterly against Lenin’s organizational course, which he had denounced as a “splitting” policy. What was the “splitting” policy that horrified him? It was the course of forming a distinct political center around one’s Full and Correct Program – not basing a sect on the Full Program, but rather a political center.

Trotsky’s course as an organizational “conciliator” in the Russian movement meant that he too (like Luxemburg in Germany and most of the Second International “left”) never understood the nature of Lenin’s road to a revolutionary party. During most of Trotsky’s political life, the only organizational course he could understand was either the course of the sect- and-splitters (which is how he interpreted Lenin) or else the swamp of factitious “party-unity”-mongering.

It is ironic that the Stalinization of the CPs forced Trotsky into the road of forming his own “political center”, (the Left Opposition) inside the Communist Parties – that is, inside a Stalinized movement which tolerated no oppositional political center whatsoever! The road that he had denounced inside the pre-war Russian Social-Democracy (where it had been possible) was the one he was compelled to take inside the Stalinist movement (where it was impossible).

It is not very surprising, therefore, that, when the Trotskyist groups could no longer continue the organizational form of a Left Oppositional political center within the CPs, they naturally adopted the only other form they knew: the sect. Trotsky did so very unhappily, without any doubt; that is why the next experiment was with the entry into the Social- Democracy, in the hope that a non-sect road to a mass party could be found there. The hoped-for substitute was the incubation of a revolutionary party cadre in the mass movement which the Social-Democracy was supposed to represent. It would be digressive to pursue this story further, here.

The point we are interested in is this: that before and after this “entry” experiment, the un-thought-through acceptance of the “Bolshevik sect” pattern produced a profusion of micro-sects peeling off from the Trotskyist macro-sect from the 1930s on. In the U.S., in addition, the absence of any mass political movement of the working class made it so much the harder to see any other road.

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7. The WP/ISL experience

There is one other case that demands immediate discussion, since it is the case of our immediate ancestor: the Workers Party/Independent Socialist League of 1940-58. In outline (though it deserves lengthier discussion some other time), the case goes as follows, in three stages:

Formation of the Socialist Workers Party out of the SP. – The Trotskyist entry into the Socialist Party (gestation in the womb of the Social-Democracy) was aborted by the end of 1937 when Trotsky (and with him part of the Trotskyist leadership around Cannon) decided that the world, including the U.S. was on the point of entering a revolutionary situation. This immediately triggered off the Twenty-One Points pattern (At least, this time, the motivation was a felt emergency situation, too,) By this pattern, as we have seen, The Revolutionary Party must at all costs be announced to the world, its banner and program unfurled, in good time to anticipate the sweep of the revolution. The SP right wing was just as anxious to expel us as Trotsky was for getting out: the actual result was a collaboration. In any case, by the beginning of 1938, the “Socialist Workers Party” was declared to the working class of the United States, and later the same year the “Fourth International” was likewise hothouse-forced into existence.
There was no ambiguity about the way the new party regarded itself: it was The Revolutionary Party at last vouchsafed to the world, and it would grow by swift accretion until it was the leading force in the working class – hopefully in good time to lead the developing revolution. By unfurling, the Full and Correct Program, the sect (i.e. the “party” that actually existed) would shoot down the road to become a mass party.
The outbreak of the war punctured this unquestioned view in two ways. What is best know is that the Full Program did turn out to be Full of something, but not Correct. (Defense of the Soviet Union, Hitler-Stalin pact, emergence of Stalinist imperialism, the invasion of Finland and Poland, etc.) More pertinent here is the second issue that figured in the 1939-40 fight that rocked and split the organization: the so-called “organizational question.”
For what happened (as we detailed at the time in a lengthy document titled War and Bureaucratic Conservatism) is that the sect-which-called-itself-a-party reacted. to the outbreak of the war like a ... sect. We did not understand it that way then: we called it “bureaucratic conservatism” in the Cannon leadership. This sect-response was acted out far more plainly by the SWP after the split than at the outset: the SWP went through the entire war period like a shellfish; it crawled into its shell., to protect its jellylike body, and announced the policy of “preserving its cadres,” by putting them on the shelf (along with the shelf-fish) for the duration, instead of seeking to find ways and means of hardening its cadres in struggle during the war.

In complete contrast, the Workers Party which we formed after the split followed a course which can be described as that of a “small mass party.” But we really acted like a “small mass party,” and did not merely talk about it. That is, the WP moved energetically and militantly into activities which would be undertaken by a mass party if one had existed – excellent revolutionary oppositional and shop work in the plants and trade unions, accompanied by mass circulation (distributions) of an agitational popular weekly, etc.
To be sure, this “mass party” work could be done only on a relatively small scale – or, what is the same thing, on a bigger scale only in a few very limited local situations – for we were a very small “mass party.” The underlying assumptions were still the same: revolutionary crisis by the end of the war, or thereabouts, and rapid growth along the lines we were working.
This course could seem to make sense, if only temporarily, for obvious conjunctural reasons: we were the only, sole and exclusive socialist opposition tendency in the working-class movement for this whole period of the war. This is a monopoly position which has not existed for anyone since then! “Industrialization” or “proletarianization” of our membership had been made relatively easy by the war situation (for those who were not drafted). It is not unimportant to mention also that, because of industrial wages, a dedicated membership, and an astronomical income-tax dues system, financing the work was never easier. In short, for this limited period and special situation, the contradictions of a sect-acting-as-a-small mass party could be and were glossed over, in the heat of activity.
It can perhaps be argued that if the outcome of the war had been revolution in Europe and America, as anticipated then this course would have been historically justified. I am not interested in arguing this, since I am not interested in maintaining any theory of inevitability about all this; nor in arguing that if we had been “smarter” we should have done something else. None of this is to the point, and I mention them only to throw them cut of the discussion. I am interested at it this point only in explaining how and why the course of a “small mass party” sect was temporarily and conjuncturally possible and hopeful.

The day of reckoning came by 1946. This year marks a watershed. As it dawned, it was becoming clear to most that the looked-for post-war World Revolution had been aborted, or at any rate was not going to come off. A basic reorientation was forced on us.
It was therefore in 1946 that a final reckoning took place with the systematic-sectarian group in the WP (“Johnsonite” clique). This was a clique with a faction program – indeed, any number of programs to suit any occasion. In 1946 the Johnson clique-faction reacted formally to the new turn of affairs by asserting twice as vehemently that the revolution was around the corner, soviets might be expected in two years, capitalism had collapsed all over Europe and power was rolling in the streets: in other words, with the typical fantasizing of the sectarian mentality faced with unpleasant reality. Accordingly also, they unfurled a program which counterposed “struggle groups” (then called “factory committees”) to the now-counterrevolutionary trade unions, which had been statified, etc. With this rigmarole, these systematic-sectarians then packed up and moved into the SWP, where they did very revolutionary factional activity for a brief moment, before unfurling their banner to the whole world in a sect of their very own, which then bifurcated, etc.
The same year, there war another attempt at reorientation in the Workers Party, by more serious people. This was an effort to theorize and systematize (i.e. think thru) the “small mass party” conception of the organizational course, not simply as the ad-hoc reaction to the circumstances of the war (which is what it had been) but as a general and timeless concept, applicable now even more than before. The phrase “small mass party” as invented and written down. It was rejected by the organization.
Out of this discussion, and with the steady descent of the U.S. political situation into the doldrums (cold-war climate, then McCarthyism, etc.), the organization had to face up, without any self-deception, to its future as one sect among others. In a thesis presented in 1948 and discussed until adoption in 1949, the organization overwhelmingly accepted a few basic truths: that it was not a “party” except in name; that no socialist “party” existed in the country; that all the socialist groups, including ours, where in reality sects – at best “propaganda groups”; that one could only hope to be a good sect, a sensible sect, rather than a stupid, fantasmagorical and self-deceiving sect; that although history made nothing but a sect possible at this time, one could determine not to carry on a sectarian policy with relation to the working class and its movements; and other concretizations of this approach. Accordingly, the organization changed its name from “Workers Party” to “Independent Socialist League.”
All this was very sensible as far as it went. I think the ISL was the best and most sensible sect possible: but that didn’t help it for more than a few years, as the 1950s dried up the entire left. The ISL did not shake itself apart with monstrosities and sectarian fantasies; it merely withered on the vine and then dropped off; while other socialist sects went through political contortions, the SP dwindling to nothing, the SWP transforming itself into a Stalinoid appendage.

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8. What is a “political center”?

Since all of the history discussed above was acted out without any self-examination, without any analytical differentiation between this road and that, it all has to be differentiated in hindsight. It would appear from the above account that, in practice, the establishment of a “political center” as distinct from a sect – i.e. a non-membership propaganda/educational center as distinct from a membership group enclosed in organizational walls – has taken the concrete form a publishing enterprise and its editorial board, with more or less an organizational apparatus attached to it for the purpose of carrying out the political tasks of the center.

The fact is that this route has been even more common than the above account might indicate. Contemporary U.S. shows several examples that repay a quick look. It is true that the radical scene seems to be strewn with sects, but in addition there are several tendencies which are not organized in the form of sects but in the form of political centers around a publication.

Perhaps the most effective, for its politics, has been the political tendency represented by the Monthly Review – i.e. the somewhat amorphous spectrum of Stalinoid polictics independent of the CP. While the magazine has been both the expression of an organizer of a political tendency, yet has not moved toward organizational (membership) crystallization, except in some tentative efforts at local groups of “Friends” of
, or
Associates, or something like that. The same has been true, more or less, of the Guardian. It is doubtful if these elements even had, or have, a distant perspective of some day contributing to a revolutionary party; they certainly think primarily in terms of permeating the left with their specific ideas.

Another relatively successful example is Liberation, but at the cost of what were originally its own politics. This magazine was set up as a political center for the absolute-pacifist tendency. As such, it has been a nullity; absolute-pacifism was never deader. In fact, it turned into something else, with pacifism only one crouton in the soup. Since its politics is confused, it is not very important as a political center. It has maintained itself mainly a diffuse radical journalism.

Dissent was founded more or less consciously as an effort to maintain something of a political center, without a sect organization, by people who had become social democrats in a country without social-democracy. Later, Dissent and the L.I.D. sort of merged. The L.I.D. is an interesting example of what was originially a membership organization which, as its membership disappears, turned itself into a political-center type of operation, social-democratic in politics – but not around a magazine. The New Leader has been another kind of example of a social-democratic (CIA wing) operation of a political center without a membership organization. All these cases, in their specifics, are strongly conditioned by their source of finances.

In fact, almost any political journal tends to become a political center of a sort, by its very nature, since it is a dispenser of ideas. I have mentioned several disparate examples in indicate there can be quite a variation. There is no organizational model that we can simply copy.

The point is to get the general idea of a course that does not involve the building of a membership sect, and then work it out to express our political aims and views. The first thing that is distinctive about the course we want to take is this: we want to build a political center which has, as its goal, the formation of the prerequisites for a revolutionary socialist party.

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9. What is it that we want to accomplish?

Lenin’s organizational accomplishment was the following, if we try to abstract all national peculiarities, peculiarities of place and time and conditions. The painstaking formation of the Bolshevik tendency accomplished three things in the course of time – three things which, it seems to me, apply in almost every case, and certainly apply to what we are obliged to do.

The process of formation of the Bolshevik tendency –

created a body of doctrine, a body of political literature expressing a unified kind of revolutionary socialism;

formed cadres of party workers and militants around this political core;

established its “kind of socialism” as a presence in left politics, with its own physiognomy and name.

This sums up our tasks too.

There is no real need for us to try to foresee or predict now exactly how the revolutionary party of the future will come into being. However it happens, it is only insofar as these three tasks are accomplished that the results can be favorable.

If our tasks are thought of under these heads, then certain activities take on different significance and priority. For example, the publication of literature is thought of by a sect as one activity among others, and not one with a high priority. With one exception, it tends to be pushed to the bottom of the agenda. The exception is the publication of a “mass” organ, which tends to take so much precedence over everything else that nothing else can be done. From our point of view, this is a grave mistake in priorities. The creation (publication and distribution) of a basic body of literature is the accomplishment of a political center on which everything else depends. It is the key means to the end. The first task of this basic body of literature is to make possible the formation of the cadres – to provide the political nourishment on which cadres can be raised. Without it, no healthy cadre formation is possible.

Such cadres will of course develop locally. A political center has an enormous advantage over the set’s National Committee or Central Committee which issues directives, theses, disciplinary cases, etc. to its micro-empire of mini-branches. That is: the former’s relations with local clubs, socialist groups, trade-union groups, workers’ groups, and individual activists can be infinitely varied and flexible. But the latter’s relations are dichotomized into two types: with members, the relation rigified by the by-laws; with non- members, a relation hampered by an organizational barrier. After a first period during which a big job of preparation will have to be accomplished, we look forward to far more involvement with local cadres, not less – but in a quite different relationship, which offers new possibilities.

It is no part of this article’s aim to spell out our program for the next six months. We already see far more than we can handle. And that is only to get started; for we will be doing well along these lines if it takes us most of a year to get started.

We have to have a long-term perspective. What we have here is not a get-rich-quick scheme but its opposite: a line of preparation for the future which can bear real fruit only after a long haul. We should think in terms of at least a Ten Year Plan. (I mention ten years because it is a good round figure and is called a decade.) We spent the last decade in two blind alleys. If, by the end of the ‘70s, we have a number of solid accomplishments in carrying out the three basic tasks listed above, then we will have taken the first appreciable steps toward the goal of a revolutionary party.

Notes

1*. “Sects” and “sectarian” have as many different definitions as there are political viewpoints. Here, of course, we are concerned with a Marxist definition. For example, denunciation of sects, as of sectarianism, is standard for all reformists. To them “sectarian” simply means revolutionary Marxism, and a “sect” is any revolutionary organization. This empty literature causes a certain amount of confusion. For one of the silliest examples, see Lewis Coser in Dissent, 1:4, 1954.

Anatomy of the Micro-Sect

(1973)

Unpublished document circulated privately in 1973. [1]
Downloaded with thanks from the Center for Socialist History Website.
© Center for Socialist History. Published here with kind permission of the copyright holders.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

The original subtitle [of this document] was: A Position Paper by the Independent Socialist Committee. This was not a membership group but an educational and publishing agency.

In its original form, the first page bore a long footnote explaining the paper’s use of the term ‘sect’. It is better presented here, as an introduction to the essay:

Introduction

There is a terminological problem. “Sect” is often used as a cuss-word to mean a group one doesn’t like. “Movement” is often used to describe something that does not exist in organized form; as when “the American socialist movement” is used as an abbreviation for scattered socialist elements that often do not “move” at all. We shall use these terms with more precise meanings. A sect presents itself as the embodiment of the socialist movement, though it is a membership organization whose boundary is set more or less rigidly by the points in its political program rather than by its relation to the social struggle. In contrast, a working-class party is not simply an electoral organization but rather, whether electorally engaged or not, an organization which really is the political arm of decisive sectors of the working class, which politically reflects (or refracts) the working class in motion as it is. A “socialist movement” sums up the mass manifestations of a socialist working class in various fields, not only the political, usually around a mass socialist party. For present purposes, the important distinction is between the sect form of organization and a form of organization common in other countries but which does not yet exist in this backward country.

This approach is basic to the paper, for essentially it deals with the question: Is there an alternative to the sect mode of organization which dominates the whole history of American socialism, past and present?

H.D.

About the Road to an American Socialist Movement

Since there are socialists in America but no socialist movement, it is understandable that the socialists will say, “Let us go and form a socialist movement.” All considerations argue for this obvious step, and there are no arguments against it: except one. This is the fact – historical fact – that no one can decide to “make” a revolution. Whatever is formed by fiat will turn out to be a sect alongside the other sects, even if it is that better kind of sect which believes in not being sectarian.

Let us make clear from the outset that we do not have the answer to the $64 question, viz., a formula or gimmick which, if only followed, will infallibly produce a party or movement out of the woodwork. We will all have to grope for some time. But we have some conceptions about the direction in which to grope, and the criteria for deciding whether developments are hopeful or hindering.

1. The Road Forward

A socialist movement will become a possibility in this country, as it did in others, as its bases are matured by social-political conditions. If, however, it cannot be created simply by an effort of will, it is also historically true that it is not simply a matter of spontaneous generation. When the bases for a socialist movement mature, it will be difficult for it to come into being unless the nascent movement is crystallized with the help of active socialist elements. Every socialist movement has been the outcome of the fusion of spontaneity and leadership, of naturally developed elements and conscious organization.

This means that, for us American socialists today who look forward to the building of a genuine socialist movement, there is a course we can take which will further this objective and bring it nearer, which will fructify the ground on which it will arise, which will make it easier for its elements to mature from place to place. The alternative to creation-by-fiat is not that we passively wait for it to arise by itself without the intervention of human hands.

It follows that the course taken now by American socialists can also have the opposite effect: of turning off dispositions toward a genuine movement; of sterilizing the ground on which the seeds of the movement might germinate; of making it harder for workers to find their way to a socialist movement-in-the-making.

Unfortunately, it is this latter course which today is dominant among the sects, sectlets, and micro-sects of what passes nowadays as American socialism. The sect form of American socialist groupment today is a roadblock in the way; and the sect notions that are dominant among this groupment constitute a poison which could immobilize and abort a socialist movement even if it got started.

2. Fragmentation

American socialism today has hit a new low in terms of sect fragmentation. There are more sects going through their gyrations at this moment than have ever existed in all previous periods in this country taken together. And the fragments are still fissioning, down to the submicroscopic level. Politically speaking, their average has dropped from the comic-opera plane to the comic-book grade. Where the esoteric sects (mainly Trotskyist splinters) of the 1930s tended toward a sort of super sophistication in Marxism and futility in practice, there is a gaggle of grouplets now (mainly Maoist-Castroite) characterized by amnesia regarding the Marxist tradition, ignorance of the socialist experience, and extreme primitivism. The road to an American socialist movement surely lies over the debris, or around the rotting off-shoots of, this fetid jungle of sects.

To be sure, we recognize that there are sects and sects: we still have with us some sects and sectlets of the “classic” type, i.e., mainly futile and fossilized, as distinct from the new crop of neo-Stalinist (Maoist-Castroite-etc.) sects that represent a more positive danger to any healthy development in the working-class movement. it is characteristic of the latter that they do not want a class movement – not because of some special organization conception but because of their basic political conceptions. Just as their “socialism” is the rule of a state despotism over a bureaucratically collectivized economy, so their organizational road to power is the formation of an elite band of Maximum Leaders which holds itself ready to bestow its own rule, at a propitious movement, on an elemental upsurge of the people. (This is new only in the sense of being a regurgitation, in new forms, of the oldest type of leftist movement, the Jacobin-putschist circles that dominated before the rise of Marxism.)

If these neo-Stalinist sects are “oriented” toward the working class – or toward the lumpenpoor, or the blacks, or the “third world”, etc. – it is only in the sense that men in a hurry orient toward a pack of horses. They make clear that the historical content of “Maoism” in its different varieties is the conception of the bureaucratic revolution-from-above engineered by a band of self-appointed leaders riding on the back of a class movement, and bridling it; for which end, the most suitable class is one with a minimum of capacity for initiative and self-organization, such as a peasantry. These elements are – some for reasons of class makeup, enemies to the revolutionary democracy of socialism.

Hence also these elements need the sect form of organization. For them the sect is not an unfortunate necessity due to the absence of a real movement: it is their movement. Minuscule size may not even be a drawback; for didn’t Castro “make” the revolution with only umpteen good men? [1*] How many commissars are needed on the Long March? This indeed is part of the dynamic behind the current proliferation of sects, since they are not inhibited by the prejudice that a “party” needs much of a rank and file.

3. The Classic Sect

As for the “classic” type of sects still operating: these presently divide more or less into those that stem from the Trotskyist sect tradition and those that exemplify the social-democratic pattern. (To be sure, the Trotskyist grouplets shade off at one end into the neo-Stalinist type, particularly the larger sect called the Socialist Workers “Party”, whose politics has steadily moved since Trotsky’s death in the direction of Stalinization.)

What characterizes the classic sect was best defined by Marx himself: it counterposes its sect criterion of programmatic points against the real movement of the workers in the class struggle, which may not measure up to its high demands. The touchstone of support (the “point d’honneur,” in Marx’s words) is conformity with the sect’s current shibboleths – whatever they may be, including programmatic points good in themselves. The approach pointed by Marx was different: without giving up or concealing one’s own programmatic politics in the slightest degree, the real Marxist looks to the lines of struggle calculated to move decisive sectors of the class into action – into movement against the established powers of the system (state and bourgeoisie and their agents, including their labor lieutenants inside the workers’ movement). And for Marx, it is this reality of social (class) collision which will work to elevate the class’s consciousness to the level of the socialist movement’s program.

To move a fighting sector of the class into action against the established powers by only a step is more important than “a thousand programs,” Marx and Engels used to reiterate, and there’s no use denouncing them for deprecating programmatic politics. To the sect mind, their approach is utterly incomprehensible. For over a century now, we have seen the two touchstone; and the difference is as glaring nowadays as it ever was. The most important test has always been the relationship of the self-styled Marxist and the working class organized on the elementary economic level, i.e., the trade-union movement. (The test is all the more decisive in the United States where, unfortunately, the trade-union movement is the only class movement of the workers in existence.)

4. Sects and Trade Unions

The sect-socialist [2*] has always felt a soul-torn difficulty in the face of a trade-union movement which rejects socialism; and the dominance of sect life in the history of socialism has been accompanied by the predominance of a leftist hostility to trade-unionism as such.

Marx and Engels constituted the first socialist school to hold a position supporting trade-unionism as such (while critical of given policies, leaders, etc., of course). And after their time, socialist history divides mainly between the social-democratic types who supported reformist trade-unionism precisely because they were themselves reformist rather than Marxist, and the would-be revolutionary socialists who found “revolutionary” arguments for returning to the old crap of socialist anti-trade-unionism – with the addition of Marxistical rhetoric to dress up their sectist approach. Very few so-called or self-styled Marxists have understood the heart of Marx’s approach to proletarian socialism: The basic strategy for building a socialist movement lies in fusing two movements – the class movement for this-or-that step which gets a decisive sector of the class into collision with the established powers of state and bourgeoisie, a collision on whatever scale possible; and the work of permeating this class movement with educational propaganda for social revolution, which integrates the two.

If this has been true in the best days of the Marxist movement to a greater or lesser extent, it took grotesque forms in the recent past of the American left, i.e., during the Sixties when the radical impulse was temporarily coming from non-worker sectors (students and some blacks not rooted in working-class life, for example). [3*] The student New Left commonly swallowed the image of Labor dished out by the sociological brainwashers of the academy: “Big Labor” alongside Big Business etc., identification of trade-unionism with George Meany or Hoffa, implicit equation of the trade-union movement with its bureaucracy, organized workers as an ipso-facto “middle class” stratum and part of the Establishment, and the rest of the ideological garbage from the real Establishment’s anti-working-class mind mills.

Even among those New Left elements – the better ones – who oriented toward going to work in factories or plants (“going to the people”), the dominant conception was that trade unions as such had to be replaced with more “radical” formations of shop organization which would somehow be outside the trade-union structure without being a dual trade union. These conceptions either remained in the realm of fantasy while making it impossible for their holders to integrate themselves into the real movement as trade-union militants, or (worse) were acted out destructively in certain places, bringing harm to the workers and discreditment to the radicals. Nowhere did the New Left impulse into the factories eventuate in a more or less well-rooted movement of militants inside the trade-union movement that could really offer opposition to the established bureaucracy: this is its indictment.

The sectist approach to the class movement showed its pointed ears in many ways that need illustration. Here are two.

Item. The student radical, heart filled with sympathy for poor workers, turns to the Farm Workers’ struggle as one clearly meriting his support. Typically he does not “go to the people” by going to work in the fields like other workers; for should his special talents be buried under a clod? He goes to work “for the union”, i.e., as what the union calls a student volunteer. Impressed by his own self-sacrifice on the one hand, on the other he finds that the Farm Workers union scarcely measures up to his ideal of what the class struggle should look like. Pretty soon he complains that the student volunteers “have no say” in policy, i.e., he demands that powers of decision be partly shifted out of the union members’ hands and into those of the alien-class visitors who have deigned to donate their time. Or, finding that the internal life and democracy of the union are far from satisfactory, he may decide that the Farm Workers do not really deserve his support. He would bestow his saving presence only on certified-pure class struggles taking place on a different planetary plane.

Item. The trade-union movement was very behindhand in producing opposition to the Vietnam war, as is well known, while antiwar feeling grew around the campuses. In student circles, the programmatic touchstone for complete opposition to the war came to be the slogan of unilateral withdrawal, which was richly justified. But finally, here and there pockets of antiwar opposition in the trade-union movement did start developing. Eventually a number of the more socially conscious and progressive labor leaders did screw up courage and founded the Labor Assembly for Peace in the teeth of violent denunciations by the Meany bureaucracy. These beginnings were timid in many respects, and, among other hesitancies, stated opposition to the war without specifying the slogan of unilateral withdrawal. We know of no more flagrant example of the sect mentality than the scornful attitude taken by New-Leftists toward this beginning of an organized anti-war opposition in the labor movement. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, which had the most militant and most wide-open branch of the Labor Assembly for Peace and where leaders of the group if not the group itself openly spoke out for unilateral withdrawal, not one single New-Leftist eligible could be persuaded to taint his soul by having anything to do with a group so backward as to fall short of the unilateral-withdrawal program. The fact that this development represented the first steps of a responsible sector of the trade unions moving into collision with the established powers – this fact meant nothing to the sectists. The only consideration they understood was their soul-saving shibboleth, which they counterposed to the real initiation of class motion.

5. The Rut We Are In

Such is the road of the sect. How to get out of that rut? There are two notions that try to remedy the ills of sectism by broadening the sect. The intention is good; the remedy impractical.

One is the proposal to abolish sectarianism by a call for the unity of all the sects. This may also be presented as a road to forming a socialist “movement”. It is a piteous illusion. In practice, it may mean a spate of unity negotiations among some of the sects (a common time-killing enterprise), or even a unification or two (a drop out of the bucket). But the actual unification of all the sects is an inherent impossibility where the programmatic shibboleths on which the sects are based are politically incompatible. The product of sect unification turns out to be nothing but a somewhat larger sect, as long as the conditions for a genuine socialist movement do not obtain. The idea of an “all-inclusive” sect is a will o’ the wisp.

Incompatible political programs can be held together, at least for a historical period, within the framework of a party/movement; for the cement which holds such a formation together is its role in the class struggle itself, the fact that it is the class-in-movement; what holds the antagonistic political tendencies in place is the pressure of the class enemies outside. As long as this is not the real situation of the movement, nothing else can take its place, including exhortations against “sectarianism”.

The second proposal is one that aims at the same result by a different route: viz., launching a sect whose distinguishing programmatic point is that it will voluntarily eschew distinguishing programmatic points. This is to be achieved by limiting the program to some minimum socialist (or radical) basis on which “everyone” can agree, i.e., a statement of abstract socialism. If a left wing wants to push the group to a revolutionary position, like “No support to Democrats,” the minimum is exploded; in practice, therefore, the program must be reformist. The Socialist Party has wanted to be this kind of sect most of the time since it ceased to be a mass movement; and more recently the New American Movement has set out to concretize this aim in some still unclear form.

Sometimes the aim is derived by reminiscence from the different historical period (before 1917) when the Socialist Party was a congeries of different political views which were not yet consciously understood to be basically antagonistic and whose consequences had not yet been acted out. But we cannot simply pass a motion to go back to the Debs era.

As long as the life of the organization (whether or not labeled “party”) is actually based on its politically distinctive ideas, rather than on the real social struggles in which it is engaged, it will not be possible to suppress the clash of programs requiring different actions in support of different forces. The key question becomes the achievement of a mass base, which is not just a numerical matter but a matter of class representation. Given a mass base in the social struggle, the party does not necessarily have to suppress the internal play of political conflict, since the centrifugal force of political disagreements is counterbalanced by the centripetal pressure of the class struggle. Without a mass base, a sect that calls itself a party cannot suppress the divisive effect of fundamental differences on (for example) supporting or opposing capitalist parties at home in the shape of liberal Democrats and such, or supporting or opposing the maneuvers of the “Communist” world.

6. What Then?

If the road of the sect is a blind alley, what then?

The road of the sect has always been a blind alley; yet socialist movements have come into existence.

There has never been a single case of a sect which developed into, or gave rise to, a genuine socialist movement – by the only process that sects know, the process of accretion. The sect mentality typically sees the road ahead as one in which the sect (one’s own sect) will grow and grow, because it has the Correct Political Program, until it becomes a large sect, then a still larger sect, eventually a small mass party, then larger, etc., until it becomes large and massy enough to impose itself as the party of the working class in fact. But in two hundred years of socialist history, this has never actually happened, in spite of innumerable attempts.

This is no proof that it will never happen in the unforeseeable future. But it is proof that there must be some other road to the formation of a genuine socialist movement which is not the road of the sect.

This road has been will-nigh totally forgotten in the general “sectification” of socialist circles in our period. the slightest acquaintance with Marx’s view of what is to be done to build a socialist movement is enough to remind that Marx was violently and unconditionally hostile to anything resembling a sect. Not only did he never try to organize a Marxist sect, but he positively scorned those who did.

It is less easily understood that Lenin never wanted to form a sect and never did do so, and that the Bolshevik party was not the result of a sect formation that grew by accretion. When Lenin came out of exile in 1900 and went abroad to begin the struggle to permeate the existing socialist circles with the ideas of revolutionary Marxism, he never thought to et up an ideological grouplet of his own, a sect, even though the Russian socialists in exile were already divided into sects (which were already splitting, etc.).

What Lenin helped to launch was a Marxist political center in a non-sect form, in the form of a periodical manned by an editorial board, Iskra.

The political center itself educated for full revolutionary Marxism. At the same time, the party/movement it called for was an all-inclusive socialist party in which the revolutionary Marxist center would constitute one tendency, hopefully eventually dominant. Both sides of the picture conditioned each other: “Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all firmly and definitely draw the lines of demarcation between the various groups [tendencies],” wrote Lenin on launching Iskra. But the lines of demarcation were not to be drawn along sect lines, with organizational walls bounding them: this was the sect course which he did not follow.

Iskra was not merely a “literary” enterprise: this is a misunderstanding. A worker in Russia became an “Iskraist” insofar as he agreed with the political views of that political center; and as an “Iskraist” he himself became a political center for further spreading those views in the popular circles in which he worked, in his factory, in his village, in his socialist circle. One of the views spread by this political center was that the party/movement to be built should be a broad one. Lenin never gave up this conception of how to build a socialist movement at any time before the October Revolution. It was on the basis of this conception that the Leninist party actually evolved.

We do not propose either the Russian movement or Lenin’s course as the model for America in the 1970s. The significance of the case is different. On the other hand, it is many of the sects that believe they are following in Lenin’s footsteps in building a hard sect on the basis of a shibboleth-program. They are wrong because in this belief they have merely internalized what they have been told of the nature of “Leninism” by the anti-Bolshevik industry of the American establishment. On the other hand, the case of Lenin’s road to a revolutionary party is important because he applied it uniquely. His unique course was to be serious and uncompromising about maintaining a revolutionary Marxist political center as the instrument of permeating the whole movement with its ideas, and insisting that majorities so gained be recognized by the whole movement. It was the right wing that split.

We do maintain that the alternative to the sect road which is suggested by the successes and failures of socialist history is also suggested by generalizing from Lenin’s Iskra model as well as from a dozen other cases of the building of real socialist movements in various contexts and circumstances.

7. The Political Center

What should be done to prepare the ground for the eventual formation of a socialist movement/party in America, that is, a mass-based socialist formation which is the political expression of the working class moving toward a collision with the established powers of capitalist society?

We first address ourselves to the individual socialist who wonders what he or she should and can do other than join the sect of his choice and waste his energies in the vicissitudes of sect life:

You have the opportunity for undertaking a two-sided socialist enterprise keyed to your own circumstances. We suggest the following double-barreled liaison for you, both sides of which are necessary for the whole thing to be meaningful.

(1) Your basic contribution to the eventual formation of a socialist movement is what you do to develop a socialist circle around you where you are now. We are thinking in the first place of your role in the work-place (factory, office, school, or whatever).

First things first: what the American working-class movement needs first of all is the crystallization of an organized militant opposition in the trade unions, because this is the existing class movement of the workers and the only one.

It would be a sad sectarian mistake to think of this as a “radical” or socialist opposition, even though it will inevitably be powered mostly by radicals and socialists of sorts, and also inevitably lead its militants to think in radical and socialist terms. What is needed is a broad progressive wing of the labor movement. In Marxist terms, this is adequately defined as a wing which advocates class-struggle unionism as against business unionism, whether it defines itself in “class struggle” language or not. From the point of view of the worker, there is a felt need to carry on a militant union fight without getting “mixed up” with socialism and reds. From the point of view of the socialist, the organization of a militant opposition to the union establishment sets up an elementary school of class-struggle socialism. One of its consequences, for example, is bound to be the politicalization of the trade-union movement: its entry into independent political action, which depends in turn on breaking up its attachment to Democratic Party politics.

This opposition movement must be a loyal opposition. That means: loyal to the interests of trade-unionism in the same degree that it fights the boss and the bureaucrat, whose power is not in the interests of trade-unionism. It is necessary to proclaim this today – to put it on the banner, so to speak – because the sect radicals have been so successful in discrediting themselves before conscientious trade-unionists, and confusing “radical trade-unionism” with a sect’s commando raids to rip off a plant situation by a display of “militancy” even if the workers’ interests are harmed, or the union work is wrecked, as long as a couple of members are recruited to the sect. The sectists who operate in unions and plants to subordinate the workers’ interests to their sect-advertising adventures and sorties are enemies of the working class and of socialism, not merely “misguided radicals” who are to be chided in Marxistical editorials. They are not “adventuristic” allies of our camp in the class struggle; they are wreckers who cannot always be distinguished from police provocateurs. Any militant opposition movement in the trade unions which makes alliances with such elements will deserve its fate.

If you are in regular contact with a number of people – in the work-place or some other “mass” situation – whom you are trying to influence in a socialist direction, then you are doing something. What the future socialist movement needs is a network of informal socialist circles – or formal ones if you will – which have an integral relation to the real struggles people are carrying on. [4*]

The same goes for the black movement, the women workers’ movement, the student movement, etc.

You may be accustomed to the belief that only members of a sect are interested in such work. That is not so. There are innumerable cases where such cells of militancy have sprung up in work-place, office or school around people who are not even socialists, or do not know they are.

What is true is that membership in a sect has often been the stimulus to undertaking this role, through group pressure and guidance, and that the sect performs the service of providing reading and study materials, etc., for the circle activity. This does point to the positive side of sect work, which we cannot deny. What this means is that socialist efforts along these lines need the assistance of a political center of some sort, to which one can look for literature, advice and help. Moreover, there soon arises the need for separate individual and circle efforts to be linked up.

(2) But the role of a political center need not be carried by a sect.

Historically, this job has been done most often and most successfully by a paper or other publication of a socialist political center which is organized simply as an editorial board or other editorial enterprise. (Iskra was only one of dozens of examples of how this was done as socialist movements came into existence all over the world.) Historically, also, political centers of this sort have frequently undertaken organizing functions as their influence spread, the organizing being the product or by-product of the work of its agents and representatives. (Iskra agents were the organizing arms of the first Leninist center.) The point would be utterly lost if these enterprises were to be considered merely literary enterprises in the usual bourgeois sense. there is a continuous line which has carried such political centers from their function as producers of “literature” to their role as centers for the stimulation of organization in one form or another.

Such political centers are operating today in this country, alongside the proliferating sects, and often quite effectively. Naturally, it is a question of political centers with widely varying political complexions, most of them distasteful to our own views and to each other’s. We mention them not to celebrate their work but to exhibit alternatives to the sect road.

The Guardian and Sweezy’s Monthly Review have functioned more or less as political centers emerging from a neo-Stalinist tendency of one kind or another. (Indeed, the Guardian is now involved with a brace of neo-Stalinist sects in talking up the formation of a Maoist “party” out of their unification.) On the right wing social-democratic side, the clique of litterateurs around Dissent functions as the only political center for that tendency that exists outside of George Meany’s offices.

These examples differ in the amount of attention they pay, or have paid at other times, to the function of relating to their readers (followers) in the field. For our present purposes we wish only to stress that a political center does not have to be a sect. More: a political center can undertake a relationship with its followers which is not bedeviled by the rigid requirements of organizational life, its life-and-death votes, faction fights, splits, internal disputes, and ingrown rituals of imitating a miniature or micro-”mass party”.

From the point of view of the individual socialist who wants to “do something”, we would summarize our suggestion as follows:

(1) Crystallize a circle of co-thinkers around you wherever you are, in the course of your activity in the arena of the social struggle that goes along with your situation. You are the smallest-unit political center there is.

(2) Make contact with a political center that makes sense from your own point of view, for help in literature, advice, and outside linkups, and work with it to whatever extend you find useful. But there is no reason against having this relationship with more than one political center, if they suit your own political views. Such a political center may even be a sect; but if you do not join it, it relates to you only as one political center among others. This relationship is a hang-loose relationship: if you do not have a vote in deciding its affairs, it is likewise true that it cannot tell you what to do by exerting its sect “discipline” over your own judgment. You do not erect an organizational barrier between you as the adherent of one sect and someone else who cleaves to another sect or none. In your work, you use whatever literature you wish, whatever their source. You will use your money not for the sect’s fund drives but to finance your own work. If enough take this course to break up the sect system, that would be a good thing for the future potentialities of an American socialist movement.

There is a better chance of a genuine socialist movement arising out of such a hang-loose complex of relationships than out of the fossilized world of the sects. We are not under the impression that a very large number of individuals are going to start tomorrow by following the course we have described above. We have been interested so far simply in illustrating the way in which socialist movements have arisen elsewhere – the only way, in broad outline. We have sketched the kind of development which provides an alternative to the sect mode of organization which is driving American socialism into the ground.

Very likely, whatever will actually happen in this country will happen somewhat differently – as usual. If the springing up of socialist circles is not happening on a mass scale, it is also true that there is no other direction visible in which the emergence of a mass socialist movement is just around the corner. All one can do is push in a direction in which one’s efforts will not be wasted, no matter what the outcome. The only thing we are sure of is that the road of the sect is a dead end.

The Independent Socialist Committee is itself an effort to establish a political center for our current of revolutionary Marxism: the view that the workers of all countries constitute the class base of a Third Camp which must fight and destroy both the capitalist system and “Communist” bureaucratic collectivism if the revolutionary democracy of a socialist world is to be established. It begins as an editorial board for the production of books and pamphlets (not yet a periodical) embodying the case for this world outlook. In this way we are exemplifying our own advice.

October 1973

Footnotes

1*. The answer, by the way, is: No, the Cuban revolution made Castro, not vice-versa. But that is another story.

2*. We use this awkward term instead of “sectarian,” which is usually understood to mean one who carries on certain policies. A term is needed for one who bases himself on sect organization, whatever the policies of the sect.

3*. For a more positive appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the New Left, see the collection The New Left of the Sixties, edited by M. Friedman (Independent Socialist Press, 1972).

4*. Instead of the proliferation of sect-type groups, we should like to see a proliferation of open socialistic clubs, discussion circles, forums, and similar loose and unpretentious aggregations which are formed around work-place situations by people engaged in common work. These would be among the nuclei around which a real socialist movement could crystallize, given favorable conditions. We freely recognize that favorable conditions do not obtain now, especially since the sectists would be eager to crush such hopeful developments in their lethal embrace.

Note on the text

1. This paper was originally drafted when the quarterly journal New Politics was planning to run a symposium on the question of how to rebuild a socialist movement in America. The editors of New Politics chose not to include this piece in the symposium. Later (1973) I revised the text somewhat, and it was circulated privately.

The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party”

or

What They Did to
What Is To Be Done?

(1990)

Introduction to this document

1. Socialist Consciousness and Intellectuals

2. “Professional Revolutionaries” and Spontaneity

3. Lenin’s Party Concepts
Sectism or Mass Party
Split and Unity

4. Lenin After WITBD

5. Toward Party Democratization

6. Last Words on WITBD

Special Note: Utechin’s Edition of Lenin’s WITBD

Footnotes
(these give additional information that should be read in conjunction with the text)

Reference Notes
(these are references to other works)

Top of the page

The myth for today is an axiom of what we may call Leninology – a branch of Kremlinology that has rapidly grown in the hands of the various university Russian Institutes, doctoral programs, political journalists, et al. According to this axiom, Lenin’s 1902 book What Is To Be Done? (for short, WITBD) represents the essential content of his “operational code” or “concept of the party”; all of Bolshevism and eventually Stalinism lies in ambush in its pages; it is the canonical work of “Leninism” on party organization, which in turn bears the original sin of totalitarianism. It establishes the “Leninist type of party” as an authoritarian structure controlled from the top by “professional revolutionaries” of upper-class provenance lording it over a proletarian rank and file.

My focus here will be on WITBD itself, and on Lenin’s views and practices in the period between WITBD and the Russian Revolution. Issues ramifying farther into the inevitable multitude of questions will not be treated in the same detail.

The Leninological axiom under discussion is commonly reinforced from two directions. As was pointed out by the prominent Leninologist Utechin (for whom see the appended Special Note), WITBD is given a similar exalted position in the party schools of the Stalinist regime. In fact, Utechin’s way of demonstrating the basic importance of WITBD is to quote the Kremlin’s official History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on this point. The work, says Utechin (much like other Leninologists), “became a guide-book for his followers in matters of organization, strategy and tactics and ... has been adhered to by Communists ever since. Lenin himself consistently applied these views ... In WITBD ... his argument has a general validity and has in fact been generally applied by Communists ...” [1] In short, both the Western Leninologists and the Stalinists agree that Lenin’s book was a totalitarian bible: which is not surprising but does not settle the matter.

“Lenin himself consistently applied these views”: we will see how far from the truth this lies. My subject is not my own interpretation of WITBD, but a survey of Lenin’s own opinions, recorded many times, on the question raised, viz., the place of WITBD in his thought. According to the myth, endlessly repeated from book to book, Lenin’s “concept of the party” –

saw the party as consisting mainly of “intellectuals,” on the basis of a theory according to which workers cannot themselves develop to socialist consciousness; rather, the socialist idea is always and inevitably imported into the movement by bourgeois intellectuals;

posited that the party is simply a band of “professional revolutionaries” as distinct from a broad working-class party;

repudiated any element of spontaneity or spontaneous movement, in favor of engineered revolution only;

required that the party be organized not democratically but as a bureaucratic or semi-military hierarchy.

In point of fact, we will see that these allegations are contrary to Lenin’s views as many times repeated and explained by him, beginning with WITBD itself. We will indeed begin with WITBD, where we will find something different from the myth. But even more important, it must be understood that WITBD was not Lenin’s last word – it was closer to being his first word. It is only the Leninologists who write as if WITBD were the sum-total of Lenin’s writings on the issue.

We will find, for example, that Lenin protested more than once that his initial formulations in WITBD were being distorted and misinterpreted by opponents, after which he went on to clarify and modify. If we want to know Lenin’s “concept of the party” we must look at the formulations he came to, after there had been discussions and attacks. There is not a single prominent Leninologist who has even mentioned this material in his exposition of WITBD’s original sin.

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1. Socialist Consciousness and Intellectuals

Let us start with the myth which claims that, according to Lenin’s views in 1902 and forever, the workers cannot come to socialist ideas of themselves, that only bourgeois intellectuals are the carriers of socialist ideas.

We will be eager to see what WITBD actually said on this point; but there is an introductory point to be made beforehand.

It is a curious fact that no one has ever found this alleged theory anywhere else in Lenin’s voluminous writings, not before and not after WITBD. It never appeared in Lenin again. No Leninologist has ever quoted such a theory from any other place in Lenin.
This should give pause at least. In ordinary research, a scholar would tend to conclude that, even if Lenin perhaps held this theory in 1902, he soon abandoned it. The scholar would at least report this interesting fact, and even perhaps try to explain it. The Leninologists do not behave in this fashion. On the contrary, they endlessly repeat that the virtually nonexistent theory (nonexistent after WITBD) is the crux of Leninism forever and onward – though they never quote anything other than WITBD. (The explanation for the curious fact itself will emerge from the points that follow.)

Did Lenin put this theory forward even in WITBD? Not exactly.
The fact is that Lenin had just read this theory in the most prestigious theoretical organ of Marxism of the whole international socialist movement, the Neue Zeit. It had been put forward in an important article by the leading Marxist authority of the International, Karl Kautsky. And this was why and how it got into WITBD. In WITBD Lenin first paraphrased Kautsky. [2] Then he quoted a long passage from Kautsky’s article, almost a page long. Here is Kautsky, whom Lenin then looked up to as the master (some said the “pope”) of socialist theory:

Of course, socialism, as a doctrine, has its roots in modern economic relationships ... But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. Indeed, modern economic science is as much a condition for socialist production as, say, modern technology, and the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no matter how much it may desire to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia [emphasis by Kautsky]: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians ... Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously. [3]

There it is – the whole theory laid out, the devilish crux of “Leninism”; and it turns out to be the product of Kautsky’s pen! When Lenin paraphrased it a few pages before, he began, “We have said that ...” – that is, he tied it up immediately as the accepted view of the movement (or so he seemed to think). His summary was by no means as brash as Kautsky’s formulation. But we will return to Lenin’s formulation.
Why did Kautsky emphasize this view of socialist history at this time? The reason is perfectly clear: the new reformist wing of the movement, the Bernsteinian Revisionists, were arguing that all one needed was the ongoing movement of the workers, not theory; that the spontaneous class activity of the trade-union movement and other class movements was enough. “The movement is everything, the goal is nothing” was Bernstein’s dictum, thereby seeking to shelve theoretical considerations in favor of shortsighted concentration on the day-to-day problems. Reform was the concern of today (the movement); revolution had to do with tomorrow (theory). Kautsky’s generalization about the role of the “bourgeois intelligentsia” in importing socialist ideas into the raw class movement was one way, in his eyes, of undercutting the Revisionist approach. And this, of course, gave it equal appeal for other opponents of the new right wing, like Lenin.
It is no part of my subject to explain why Kautsky was misguided in this line of argument, and why his theory was based on a historical half-truth. But it is curious, at any rate, that no one has sought to prove that by launching this theory (which he never repudiated, as far as I know) Kautsky was laying the basis for the demon of totalitarianism.

So it turns out that the crucial “Leninist” theory was really Kautsky’s, as is clear enough to anyone who really reads WITBD instead of relying only on the Leninological summaries. Did Lenin, in WITBD, adopt Kautsky’s theory?
Again, not exactly. Certainly he tried to get maximum mileage out of it against the right wing; this was the point of his quoting it. If it did something for Kautsky’s polemic, he no doubt figured that it would do something for his. Certainly this young man Lenin was not (yet) so brash as to attack his “pope” or correct him overtly. But there was obviously a feeling of discomfort. While showing some modesty and attempting to avoid the appearance of a head-on criticism, the fact is that Lenin inserted two longish footnotes rejecting (or if you wish, amending) precisely what was worst about the Kautsky theory on the role of the proletariat.
The first footnote was appended right after the Kautsky passage quoted above. It was specifically formulated to undermine and weaken the theoretical content of Kautsky’s position. It began: “This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology.” But this was exactly what Kautsky did mean and say. In the guise of offering a caution, Lenin was proposing a modified view. “They [the workers] take part, however,” Lenin’s footnote continued, “not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able ...” In short, Lenin was reminding the reader that Kautsky’s sweeping statements were not even 100% true historically; he pointed to exceptions. But he went on to a more important point: once you get beyond the original initiation of socialist ideas, what is the role of intellectuals and workers? (More on this in the next point.)
Lenin’s second footnote was not directly tied to the Kautsky article, but discussed the “spontaneity” of the socialist idea. “It is often said,” Lenin began, “that the working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism. This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory reveals the causes of the misery of the working class ... and for that reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily,” but he reminded that this process itself was not subordinated to mere spontaneity. “The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism; nevertheless, ... bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree.” [4]
This second footnote was obviously written to modify and recast the Kautsky theory, without coming out and saying that the Master was wrong. There are several things that happen “spontaneously,” and what will win out is not decided only by spontaneity! – so went the modification. It cannot be overemphasized that if one wants to analyze Lenin’s developing views about “spontaneity” one cannot stick at this by-play in WITBD, but rather one must go on to examine precisely what the developing views were going to be. All that was clear at this point was that Lenin was justifiably dissatisfied with the formulation of Kautsky’s theory, however conveniently anti-Bernstein it might have been. We will see more about his dissatisfaction.

Even Kautsky’s theory, as quoted in WITBD, was not as crass as the Leninologists make it out to be (while calling it Lenin’s theory, to be sure). The Leninologists run two different questions together: (a) What was, historically, the initial role of intellectuals in the beginnings of the socialist movement, and (b) what is – and above all, what should be – the role of bourgeois intellectuals in a working-class party today.
Kautsky was not so ignorant or dull-witted as to believe (as so many Leninologists apparently do) that if it can be shown that intellectuals historically played a certain initiatory role, they must and should continue to play the same role now and forever. It does not follow; as the working class matured, it tended to throw off leading strings. The Leninologists do not argue this point because they do not see it is there.
As a matter of fact, in the International of 1902 no one really had any doubts about the historical facts concerning the beginnings of the movement. But what followed from those facts? Marx for one (or Marx and Engels for two) concluded, from the same facts and subsequent experiences, that the movement had to be sternly warned against the influence of bourgeois intellectuals inside the party. [5] “Precisely in Germany these are the most dangerous people,” they averred. The historical facts were so many reasons to take the dangers seriously, to combat intellectuals’ predominance as a social stratum in the movement.

No one in the international movement was more forceful or frequent than Lenin in decrying and combating the spread of intellectuals’ influence in the movement. This is easy to demonstrate, but I will not take the space to do so here. In any case a mere couple of well-chosen specimens would not be enough. Just to cull the most virulent passages alone would fill a book. As against this indubitable fact, let us ask a question: can anyone cite any passage in which Lenin ever advocated increased influence, or predominant influence, by intellectuals in the party?
There is no such passage, in point of fact. None is cited by the Leninologists. Their whole case on this point is hung on a deduction (of theirs) from a theory in WITBD which is essentially Kautsky’s, it turns out. We know indeed that the typical social-democratic reformist party is very much dominated on top by intellectuals derived from the bourgeoisie. We do not typically see the leaders of these parties denouncing this state of affairs. On the other hand, Lenin’s collected works are chock-full of denunciations of increased influence by intellectuals. Obviously, this does not settle the matter, but still less is it reasonable to rest virtually the whole case against Lenin, on this point, on what is not in Lenin’s 1902 book.
In the Russian movement, the Marxist left’s denunciations of intellectuals in the movement started with the founding congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party itself (the congress to which WITBD was directed). In fact, the Bolshevik-Menshevik split over the notorious membership rule (who could be a party member) was directly connected with the Mensheviks’ anxiety to make it easier for nonparty intellectuals to be accounted as members, while Lenin fought to make it harder. (This is hardly disputed.) The Leninological myth that, according to Lenin’s “concept of the party,” the organization is to consist only or mainly or largely of bourgeois intellectuals – this is contrary to fact.

Lastly, since it is a question of a “party concept” alleged to be peculiar to Lenin and Leninism, we should find that it is not true of the other Russian socialist parties – the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. But just the reverse is true. The case is most clear-cut with regard to the S-Rs, for while this party aspired to represent the peasants’ interests and mentality, it was very far from being a party of peasants. Notoriously it was a party composed overwhelmingly of bourgeois intelligentsia. (You need only read the main scholarly work on the S-Rs, by O.H. Radkey.) The proportion of bourgeois intellectuals in the Mensheviks or supporting the Mensheviks was greater than in the case of the Bolsheviks, not less.

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2. “Professional Revolutionaries” and Spontaneity

Let us take the second claim, that the Leninist “concept of the party” demanded that the party should consist of so-called professional revolutionaries only. This view was “deduced” from WITBD by opponents. As soon as the deduction and the claim appeared, Lenin denied (scores of times) that he wanted a party made up of professional revolutionaries only. The Leninologists endlessly repeat the “deduction,” and do not mention that Lenin consistently and firmly repudiated it.

One of the difficulties (not Lenin’s) is that there are several questions confused under this head, as usual. In the first place, the most important background fact was the condition of illegality suffered in Russia by any revolutionary party. It was not a question of some general or suprahistorical “concept of the party” offering a formula for any country at any time. WITBD asked what was to be done in this autocratic czarism in this year of 1902. Whatever views on this question are discerned in WITBD, it is false to ascribe them to a generalized program of organization good for any time or place.

In WITBD Lenin was discussing the need for a core of “professional revolutionaries” in the party for the sake of effective functioning – to make sure that the history of the party was not simply one shipment of revolutionaries after another to Siberia. A good part of the Leninological myth rests on a confused definition of “professional revolutionary.” The Leninologists seem to assume that to Lenin a “professional revolutionary” meant a full-time party worker or functionary, devoting all his time to party activity. This is absurd from Lenin’s viewpoint; it would indeed exclude workers, as the Leninologists deduce.

It can easily be shown, from Lenin’s copious discussions of the professional revolutionary for years after WITBD, that to Lenin the term meant this: a party activist who devoted most (preferably all) of his spare time to revolutionary work. The professional revolutionary considers his revolutionary activity to be the center of his life (or of his life-style, if you will). He must work to earn a living, of course, but this is not his life’s center. Such is the professional revolutionary type.

I have come to believe that part of the confusion stems from the important difference in the meaning of professional between English and most Continental languages. In French (and I think the German, etc. usage stems directly from the French) the word professionnel refers simply to occupation. Whereas in English only lawyers, doctors and other recognized “professions” can be said to have “professional” activity, in French this can be said of anyone in any occupation; the reference is simply to occupational activity. Under the aegis of the English language, a “professional” revolutionary must be as full-time as a doctor or lawyer. (Of course this does not account for non-English Leninologists, and is only one factor in the confusion.)

It follows from Lenin’s view that even the “core” of professional revolutionaries were not necessarily expected to be full-time party activists, which usually means functionaries. (The number of functionaries in a revolutionary group is a question with its own history, but this history is not presently ours.) The point of defining a professional revolutionary as a full-timer, a functionary, is to fake the conclusion, or “deduction”: only non-workers can make up the party elite, hence only intellectuals. This conclusion is an invention of the Leninologists, based on nothing in Lenin.

From Lenin’s standpoint, professional-revolutionary workers were important to the movement for two reasons. One is obvious: the greater amount of time and activity that they could devote to the work of the movement. A professional revolutionary regarded even the hours he spent on the job as opportunities for socialist and trade-union propaganda and organization. The second aspect of the professional revolutionary type, much emphasized by Lenin, was that such a worker could be trained in revolutionary work, in a more meaningful way; that is, given conscious education and courses in self-development on how to operate as a revolutionary. The professional revolutionary worker was, or could become, a trained revolutionary worker.

Lenin had no trouble understanding and acknowledging that only a “core” of the party could consist of such elements. All he argued was that the more such the party had, the more effective its work. This is a far cry from the Leninological myth.

As for the myths about the alleged “theory of spontaneity” versus “conscious organization”: much of this is the result simply of failing to understand what the issues were. No one in the movement, certainly not Lenin, had any doubts about the important and positive role played by “spontaneity” – spontaneous revolts, struggles, etc. (In many cases, when we say a certain revolt was “spontaneous,” all we mean is: we do not know how it was organized or by whom.)

What Lenin argued against in WITBD and elsewhere was the glorification of spontaneity for its own sake; for what this glorification meant in actuality was a decrying of conscious organizational activity or party work or leadership. This latter attitude made sense only for anarchists, but it was also likely to be assumed by extreme reformists as a cover for opposing independent working-class organization. For the Russian “Economists” (who advocated “economic” action only) the line was that no revolutionary party was necessary and the Russian party should be liquidated; and in this context the glorification of “spontaneity” was simply a way of counterposing something to the organized political struggle by the working class.

The claim that Lenin was hostile to “spontaneous” struggles verges on nonsense. Whenever a Leninologist purports to quote Lenin on this subject, what he really quotes are Lenin’s arguments against relying only on spontaneity to usher in socialism by some millennial date. Lenin advocated that the spontaneous action of the people must be integrated with the element of political leadership by trained socialist workers, and part of such training was precisely the capacity to take advantage of spontaneous struggles when they turned up. The overwhelming majority of the International would heartily agree. There was nothing specially “Leninist” about this, except Lenin’s usual clarity on the point, as compared with the often hazy thinking of reformists.

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3. Lenin’s Party Concepts

We still have to take up Lenin’s later comments on WITBD. But something of a historical introduction is necessary here.

The reader of Lenin’s WITBD must understand that if it embodied some specially Leninist “concept of the party” Lenin himself was entirely unaware of it at the time. He thought he was putting forward a view of party and movement that was the same as that of the best parties of the International, particularly the German party under the leadership of August Bebel – only allowing for the big difference that the Russian movement faced the special problems of illegality under an autocracy.

The naive Leninologist seems to assume that when Lenin referred to “centralization” or “centralism,” he was necessarily talking about some supercentralized organizational form. But in fact the Russians (and others) who used this language often meant the same thing that the Germans had once meant when “Germany” was a geographical expression fragmented into thirty-odd states and statelets. Where there was no center at all, the demand for “centralism” was a call to establish a center. In 1902 there was no all-Russian party in existence at all.

A First Congress had taken place in 1898, but had led to nothing. The Russian movement consisted of isolated circles, discrete regional conglomerations, unconnected factory groups, etc. There was no center; in fact there was no “party” except as a future label. The Second Congress scheduled for 1903 was hopefully going to establish an organized all-Russian party for the first time. This was the situation toward which Lenin directed his little book in 1902.

The point of holding a congress was to establish a center at last. No “central” organization whatever existed as yet. Everyone who looked to the congress was in favor of “centralizing” the work of the now-decentralized circles operating inside Russia. This was what “centralization” meant under the circumstances. But it was ambiguous then as now.

The German party had also gone through a period of illegality, from 1878 to 1890; and during this period its practices had not been ideally democratic at all. One of the main features was the domination of practical party work in Germany, insofar as it was possible, not by the elected National Executive in exile, but by the Reichstag Fraction of deputies, who remained legal. But this Fraction had never been elected by the party; the deputies had been elected by local voters. Marx and Engels looked askance at what they considered to be the “dictatorship” of the Reichstag deputies over the party; but the arrangement was generally accepted for its practical usefulness.

As the Russian situation developed from 1902 to 1914, it turned out – in hindsight – that there was something distinctive about Lenin’s “concept of the party,” even though he was not specifically aware of it. There are two points to be made under this head, the second being more important.

(1) Sectism or Mass Party

Throughout the history of the socialist movement, there has been a tendency for socialist currents that considered themselves to have distinctive ideas to organize as a sect. The alternative is to operate as a current in a class movement.

One must distinguish clearly between these two organizational forms. The class movement is based on, and cemented by, its role in the class struggle; the sect is based on, and cemented by, its special ideas or program. The history of the socialist movement began mostly with sects (continuing the tradition of religious movements). It was only the continued development of the working class which gave rise to mass parties that sought to represent and reflect the whole class-in-movement.

The outstanding example of the class movement, as counterposed to the sect, was given by the First International, which broke down sect lines (it did not even start with socialism in its program). In the form that Marx brought about, it sought to organize the entire working-class movement in all its forms. This much of its character was continued by the Second International, except that trade unions were not affiliated. In France the fragmentation of the socialist movement into sects continued until 1905, when a united Socialist Party was formed. In Germany the Lassallean sect had been absorbed fairly quickly, in 1875. Sects still continued to operate in many countries, like the Social Democratic Federation in Britain, which claimed to represent “revolutionary” socialism.

In 1902 when Lenin wrote WITBD, there was a big difference between Germany and Russia (which indeed WITBD discussed): in Germany the revolutionary wing (or what Lenin and others considered such) was in control of the party, whereas in Russia the right wing had the dominant influence. Lenin’s response to this situation was not to organize the revolutionary wing as a left-wing sect outside the general movement. In fact, if we consider the whole period before 1914, Lenin never organized, or sought to organize, a “Leninist” sect. (The theory of “revolutionary” sectification arose out of the degeneration of the Comintern to become a “principle of Leninism”; before 1917 it had been kept alive on the fringes of the Second International and in the anarchist movement.)

The course which the young Lenin took was then the normal one in the International: he sought to organize the revolutionary current as a political center of some sort inside the mass party (or what was going to be the mass party if the Second Congress was successful). Most political centers in the socialist movement, leaving aside sects, were currents established around periodical organs; this was the case in the German party, for example. When Lenin went into exile from Russia, he did not establish a “Leninist” sect; he went to the Iskra editorial board, which was not a membership group. Even after the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, and for the next several years (at least until shortly before World War I), the term “Bolsheviks” and “Mensheviks” meant a political center inside the mass party, the RSDLP, not a membership sect.

(2) Split and Unity

This involved the second distinctive feature of Lenin’s party concept. One can distinguish three approaches to this question, as follows.

There were those who believed in split at any cost, that is, the revolutionary wing in a reformist party must split away at the most opportune moment, and organize its own sect. This is the characteristic theory of sectism.

There were those, and they were legion, who believed in unity at any cost. The unity of the mass social-democratic party must never be breached; a break was the ultimate disaster. This was the mirror image of the first approach: the fetishism of unity.
This approach was the dominant one in the International, including the German party. What it meant in practice was: accommodation with the right wing, even by a majority left wing. If the right wing must be persuaded from splitting at any cost, then the majority left had to make concessions to it, sufficient to keep it in the party.
One of the most enlightening examples of this pattern took place in the Russian party soon after the 1903 congress, at which Lenin’s wing won majority control with the support of Plekhanov. The Menshevik minority then split. Thereupon Plekhanov, under pressure, swung around and demanded that the majority of the Iskra editorial board be handed back to the Mensheviks, for the sake of “unity.” In short: if the Mensheviks had won the majority, there is no doubt that Lenin would have stayed in as a minority; but if the left wins, the right wing picks up its marbles and quits; then for the sake of “unity” the left has to hand control back to the right ...

Lenin’s distinctive approach was this: he simply insisted that where the left won majority control of a party, it had the right and the duty to go ahead with its own policy just as the right wing was doing everywhere. The Bolshevik-Menshevik hostilities hardened when Lenin rejected Plekhanov’s demand to reverse the outcome of the congress. This distinctive approach was: unity, yes, but not at the cost of foiling the victory of the majority. Unity, yes, but on the same democratic basis as ever: the right wing could work to win out at the next congress if it could, but it would not do to demand political concessions as a reward for not splitting.
One of the chapters in Lenin’s life most industriously glossed over by the Leninologists is the period that followed the Second Congress and Plekhanov’s about-face. One must read Volumes 6 and 7 of Lenin’s Collected Works to see how heartsick he was in face of the break, and what continued efforts he put into healing the split with the Mensheviks on the basis of full democratic rights for all. In test after test, it was the Mensheviks who rejected unity on this basis, or on any basis that failed to give them party control in defiance of the Second Congress outcome. In fact, the first test of course had come at the congress itself, since it was the Mensheviks that split away because Lenin had gained a majority in the voting (after extreme right-wing elements had walked out for their own right-wing political reasons). The common claim that it was the Bolsheviks who split is one of the myths of Leninology.
All this was tested again in the period after the upheaval of the 1905 revolution, which opened up Russian political life for a while. Legal organization became possible temporarily, open elections, etc. In this situation, the question of unity of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was again raised. But we will come back to this in Section 5.

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4. Lenin After WITBD

In the first two sections we discussed what is in WITBD and what isn’t; but, as mentioned, this is very far from exhausting the question of Lenin’s attitude toward WITBD. Part of the Leninological myth is the claim that the “concept of the party” found in WITBD (whatever this is) was Lenin’s permanent and abiding view, which he “consistently applied” from then on. We must therefore turn to find out what Lenin thought about WITBD in the ensuing years.

For one thing we will find this: that, from the time WITBD was published until at least the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin insisted that this 1902 work of his was not a canonical exposition of a model form of party organization, but simply an organizational plan for the given time and place. It was devised for (a) an underground movement functioning in secrecy under conditions of autocracy, and (b) a movement which had not yet succeeded even in forming a national organizing center in its own country, as had most social-democratic parties in Europe. This 1902 plan was therefore not automatically applicable to other situations – to other places in Europe, or to other periods in Russia, where there was more elbow room for political liberty. This plan was time-bound and place-specific.

In his Letter to a Comrade on Our Organizational Tasks, September 1902, that is, a few months after the publication of WITBD, Lenin explained more than once that the forms of organization needed were determined by the interests of secrecy and circumscribed by the existence of the autocracy. [6] But then, at this time his later opponents, like Martov and Plekhanov, were at one with him in viewing the ideas of WITBD as unexceptionable conclusions from the struggle of a serious revolutionary underground movement. It was only after a falling-out on other grounds that these opponents, and their successors, began to read into WITBD everything they thought was sinister in Lenin’s course, including his inexplicable refusal to yield up the congress majority power to the people who had been the congress minority.

Already at the Second Congress itself, before the final split, Lenin had pleaded with critics not to take WITBD passages “wrenched from the context.” In doing so, the first point he had made was the one mentioned above, viz., that WITBD was not intended to present “principles” of party organization. The discussion on WITBD, he said optimistically, had clarified all the questions: “It is obvious that here an episode in the struggle against ‘Economism’ has been confused with a discussion of the principles of a major theoretical question (the formation of an ideology). Moreover, this episode has been presented in an absolutely false light.” [7]

He directly confronted the claim about subordinating the working-class movement to bourgeois intellectuals:

It is claimed that Lenin says nothing about any conflicting trends, but categorically affirms that the working-class movement invariably “tends” to succumb to bourgeois ideology. Is that so? Have I not said that the working-class movement is drawn towards the bourgeois outlook with the benevolent assistance of the Schulze-Delitzsches and others like them? And who is meant here by “others like them”? None other than the “Economists” ...

This was a further step in adding qualifications to the bare Kautsky theory, without breaking with Kautsky. He added an even more serious qualification:

Lenin [it is claimed, says Lenin] takes no account whatever of the fact that the workers, too, have a share in the formation of an ideology. Is that so? Have I not said time and again that the shortage of fully class-conscious workers, worker-leaders, and worker-revolutionaries is, in fact, the greatest deficiency in our movement? Have I not said there that the training of such worker-revolutionaries must be our immediate task? Is there no mention there of the importance of developing a trade-union movement and creating a special trade-union literature? ... [8]

And to end this same speech, Lenin made the point which is among the most important to keep in mind about WITBD:

To conclude. We all know that the “Economists” have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out somebody had to pull in the other direction, and that is what I have done. [9]

This is the main key to what Lenin was doing in WITBD. Throughout his life his constant pattern was to “bend the bow” in an opposite direction in order to push back against some immediate dangerous pressure. His metaphor on these occasions was often to “turn the helm the other way” in order to compensate for the dangerous pressure. Now it happens that personally I do not sympathize with this propensity, though I admit it is natural enough. I think that a bow which is bent in various directions is apt to be bent out of shape. But it is a common enough resort by people of all political complexions, and only asks for understanding. In Lenin’s case it is a fact that demands understanding, especially when he specifically explained the pattern in so many words, as he did often enough. And any Leninologist who refuses to understand it is bound to write a great deal of nonsense.

We are still at the Second Congress. On August 15 Lenin’s first speech in the Rules discussion was summarized in the minutes in nine lines. Most of it was devoted to saying this:

It should not be imagined that Party organizations must consist solely of professional revolutionaries. We need the most diverse organizations of all types, ranks and shades, beginning with extremely limited and secret [ones] and ending with very broad, free, lose Organisationen [loose organizations]. [10]

He could not have been more explicit in correcting any false impression that might have been conveyed by his “bow-bending” in WITBD.

Lenin repeated this clarification in his second speech that day:

Comrade Trotsky completely misunderstood the main idea of my book What Is To Be Done? when he spoke about the party not being a conspiratorial organization (many others too raised this objection). He forgot that in my book I propose a number of various types of organizations, from the most secret and most exclusive to comparatively broad and “loose” organizations. [11]

If it is charged that this was not clear in WITBD, well – that is the function of discussion: to clarify and modify. Lenin clarified and modified, not merely later but right in the congress discussion.

It may be said that if WITBD was misunderstood by so many, there must have been a reason. This is quite true. There was more than one reason, and the first has been mentioned: Lenin’s bow-bending. In addition there was a will to “misunderstand,” as there is still today. An objective scholar writing today with the advantage of a longer perspective and fuller documentation should be expected, however, to set forth and weigh Lenin’s repeated attempts to clarify and modify (qualify and recast) his views. What is typical about contemporary Leninology is that it ignores Lenin’s clarifications in favor of a purely demonological exegesis.

Lenin, we said, was not thinking in terms of a general “concept of party organization.” When in a 1904 article in the Neue Zeit Rosa Luxemburg attacked his ideas, as set forth in his brochure One Step Forward, Two Steps Back dealing with the Second Congress, Lenin wrote a reply which rather mildly protested – what? Not that he was right, but that he did not hold the opinions Luxemburg ascribed to him. [1*] This is what Lenin wrote:

Comrade Luxemburg says, for example, that my book is a clear and detailed expression of the point of view of “intransigent centralism.” Comrade Luxemburg thus supposes that I defend one system of organization against another. But actually that is not so. From the first to the last page of my book, I defend the elementary principles of any conceivable system of party organization. [12]

That is, Lenin believed that he was only working out the forms of any party that could conceivably exist under the given conditions in Russia.

Rosa Luxemburg further says that “according to his [Lenin’s] conception, the Central Committee has the right to organize all the local Party committees.” Actually that is not so ... Comrade Luxemburg says that in my view “the Central Committee is the only active nucleus of the Party.” Actually that is not so. I have never advocated any such view ... Comrade Rosa Luxemburg says ... that the whole controversy is over the degree of centralization. Actually that is not so. ... our controversy has principally been over whether the Central Committee and Central Organ should represent the trend of the majority of the Party Congress, or whether they should not. About this “ultra-centralist” and “purely Blanquist” demand the worthy comrade says not a word, she prefers to declaim against mechanical subordination of the part to the whole, against slavish submission, blind obedience, and other such bogeys. ... Comrade Luxemburg fathers on me the idea that all the conditions already exist in Russia for forming a large and extremely centralized workers’ party. Again an error of fact ... [13]

And so on. By the way, anyone who thinks that Rosa Luxemburg was a sainted angel in internal party brawls is naive. In this case, either she was retailing vicious slanders, of the sort she was familiar enough with in the Polish movement, or else someone should demonstrate that Lenin was advocating the views with which she charged him. The latter has not been done.

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5. Toward Party Democratization

Let us put demonology aside. It must be noted that, in the period inaugurated by the 1905 upheaval, as the situation in Russia changed and the pressure of the autocracy lightened, Lenin’s “concept of the party” changed drastically, in accord with the new circumstances – just as we would expect if his protestations were taken seriously.

Already in February 1905, in a draft resolution for the Third Party Congress, Lenin wrote: “Under conditions of political freedom, our Party can and will be built entirely on the elective principle. Under the autocracy this is impracticable for the collective thousands that make up the party.” [14] Writing in September 1905, he hailed the German party as “first in respect of organization, integrality and coherence” and pointed to its organizational decisions as “highly instructive to us Russians.”

Not so long ago organizational questions occupied a disproportionate place among current problems of Party life, and to some extent this holds true of the present as well. Since the Third Congress two organizational tendencies in the Party have become fully defined. One is toward consistent centralism and consistent extension of the democratic principle in Party organizations, not for the sake of demagogy or because it sounds good but in order to put this into effect as Social-Democracy’s free field of activity extends in Russia. The other tendency is toward diffusiveness of organization, “vagueness of organization” ... [15]

In November 1905 he stressed in an article that the socialist worker “knows there is no other road to socialism save the road through democracy, through political liberty. He therefore strives to achieve democratism completely and consistently in order to attain the ultimate goal – socialism.” [16] The same month he published an important essay, titled The Reorganization of the Party. In it he called for a new party congress in order to put the whole organization “on a new basis.”

This article went to the main point directly: “The conditions in which our Party is functioning are changing radically. Freedom of assembly, of association and the press has been captured.” [17] What followed? Lenin answered: “organize in a new way” ... “new methods” ... “a new line.”

We, the representatives of revolutionary Social-Democracy, the supporters of the “Majority” [Bolsheviks], have repeatedly said that complete democratization of the Party was impossible in conditions of secret work, and that in such conditions the “elective principle” was a mere phrase. And experience has confirmed our words. ... But we Bolsheviks have always recognized that in new conditions, when political liberties were acquired, it would be essential to adopt the elective principle. [18]

It must be kept in mind that the impracticality of open election of local leading committees under conspiratorial conditions was not a Bolshevik peculiarity; the secret police had made it as difficult for Mensheviks or S-Rs.

Our party [wrote Lenin] has stagnated while working underground ... The “underground” is breaking up. Forward, then, ... extend your bases, rally all the worker Social-Democrats round yourselves, incorporate them in the ranks of the Party organizations by hundreds and thousands. [19]

These were “new methods” only in Russia, of course; this was what bourgeois democratic regimes had possible in Western Europe before this. Lenin had always viewed the German Social-Democracy as a model of organization; now the Russian Social-Democrats could emulate it.

The decision of the Central Committee ... is a decisive step towards the full application of the democratic principle in Party organization. [20]

All comrades, he enjoined, must “devise new forms of organization” to take in an influx of workers, new forms that were “definitely much broader” than the old, “less rigid. more ‘free,’ more ‘loose.’” “With complete freedom of association and civil liberties for the people, we should, of course, have to found Social-Democratic unions ...” [21] “Each union, organization or group will immediately elect its bureau, or board, or directing committee ...” [22] Furthermore, he recommended, it was now possible to bring about party unity, Bolsheviks with Mensheviks, on the basis of a broad democratic vote of the rank and file, since this could not be organized under the new conditions. [23]

All of this sea-change had to be explained to Russian workers who had never faced such conditions before. We must not be afraid, Lenin argued, of “a sudden influx of large numbers of non-Social-Democrats into the Party.” [24]

Note this remark made almost in passing: “The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social-Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by Social-Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness.” [25] It looks as if Lenin had forgotten even the existence of the Kautsky theory he had copied out and quoted in 1902!

The initiative of the workers themselves will now display itself on a scale that we, the underground and circle workers of yesterday, did not even dare dream of. [26]

He seized on the new conditions especially to advocate that mass recruitment of workers (possible for the first time) should swamp over the influence of intellectuals in the party work:

At the Third Congress of the Party I suggested that there be about eight workers to every two intellectuals in the Party committees. How obsolete that suggestion seems now! Now we must wish for the new Party organizations to have one Social-Democratic intellectual to several hundred Social-Democratic workers. [27]

The article concluded this way, with a typical Lenin reaction:

“We have ‘theorized’ for so long (sometimes – why not admit it? – to no use) in the unhealthy atmosphere of political exile, that it will really not be amiss if we now ‘bend the bow’ slightly, a little, just a little, ‘the other way’ and put practice a little more in the forefront.” [28]

So now the bow bent the other way – “slightly.”

The situation would now be quite clear even if Lenin never mentioned WITBD again. But in fact we can now turn to remarks by Lenin in which he reconsidered WITBD specifically, in the light of the new conditions and of these new concepts of party organization (new for Russia).

In November 1907 Lenin published a collection of old articles, called Twelve Years. Its aim was to review the thought and action of the movement over that period of time, a historical purpose. His preface to this collection was plainly addressed to the new audience generated by the revolutionary upheaval going on since 1905, an audience to whom the old disputes were now past history. Here he explained why WITBD had been included in the collection. Note in the first place that it required an explanation.

WITBD had been included (explains Lenin) because it “is frequently mentioned by the Mensheviks” and bourgeois-liberal writers; therefore he wanted to “draw the attention of the modern reader” to what was its “essential content.” His explanation began with a statement that might just as well be addressed to contemporary Leninologists:

The basic mistake made by those who now criticize WITBD is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our Party.

This applied, he said, to those “who, many years after the pamphlet appeared, wrote about its incorrect or exaggerated ideas on the subject of an organization of professional revolution-aries.” Such criticisms were wrong “to dismiss gains which, in their time, had to be fought for, but which have long ago been consolidated and have served their purpose.” [29]

It is obvious that the reference to “exaggerated ideas” is an admission of a degree of incorrectness, even if the confession simultaneously maintains that the incorrectness was pardonable. But that had already been the sense of the “bending the bow” remarks; it was not really even new.

WITBD had done its 1902 job, and should not be treated any more as if it were a current proposal; it had been by-passed. Lenin did not apologize for it or repudiate it; this was something different. He was pigeonholing it as of historical interest only. Socialists would not repudiate the First International either, but no one would dream of bringing it back to life.

It was a far cry from a permanent “concept of the party.”

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6. Last Words on WITBD

Typically Lenin argued that the “exaggeration” in WITBD had been necessary at the time in order to make progress in the direction desired, even if the exaggerations themselves were not tenable.

To maintain today that Iskra exaggerated (in 1901 and 1902!) the idea of an organization of professional revolutionaries is like reproaching the Japanese, after the Russo-Japanese War, for having exaggerated the strength of Russia’s armed forces, for having prior to the war exaggerated the need to prepare for fighting these forces. [2*] To win victory the Japanese had to marshal all their forces against the probable maximum of Russian forces ... [T]oday the idea of an organization of professional revolutionaries has already scored a complete victory. That victory would have been impossible if this idea had not been pushed to the forefront at the time, if we had not “exaggerated” so as to drive it home to people who were trying to prevent it from being realized. [30]

The claim made here that the professional-revolutionary idea had “already scored a complete victory” showed once more how little the usual Leninological version of this idea jibed with Lenin’s. This “victory” included opening the party to an influx of “raw” workers who, hopefully, would swamp not only the party intellectuals but also the old experienced cadre of trained activists (professional revolutionaries). The idea that had shown its power (“scored a complete victory”) was the need for a core of trained activists in the organization. It had nothing to do with the chimera of a party composed only or mainly of full-time functionaries. This chimera was especially grotesque in the light of Lenin’s appeal for mass recruitment.

WITBD, continued Lenin, was merely a summary of the organizational policy of the Iskra group of 1901-1902, “no more and no less.” [31] That is, it was the joint policy of those (the Iskra group) who later divided into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks on other grounds. In other words, Lenin was again insisting, in still another way, that at the time he did not regard the ideas of WITBD as unique to himself or his tendency. [3*]

Now, under the new conditions of legality, Lenin boasted as follows:

Despite the split, the Social-Democratic Party earlier than any of the other parties was able to take advantage of the temporary spell of freedom to build a legal organization with an ideal democratic structure, an electoral system, and representation at congresses according to the number of organized members. You will not find this, even today, either in the Socialist-Revolutionary or the Cadet parties ... [35]

Here he was talking about the party (the RSDLP) as a whole, not just the Bolshevik wing; there had been a unity congress in May. Who built the party to its present effectiveness as a democratic structure? “It was accomplished by the organization of the professional revolutionaries ... glance at the delegate list of any of the groups at, say, the London congress, in order to be convinced of this ...” [36] Note that he referred to the “delegate list,” or, as he put it in the same sentence, “the central core that had worked hardest of all to build up the Party and make it what it is.” It scarcely makes sense to believe that in Lenin’s view the party membership (far wider than the “delegate list” or the core) was to consist of professional revolutionaries only – even if we stick with Lenin’s reasonable definition.

The Kautsky theory of 1902 had long disappeared from Lenin’s ken by this time; there was no indication that he even remembered its existence. At this point he was busy pointing with pride: the organizational successes of the party were due to the inherent organizational capacities of the working class.

Without this condition an organization of professional revolutionaries would be nothing more than a plaything, an adventure, a mere signboard. WITBD repeatedly emphasizes this, pointing out that the organization it advocates has no meaning apart from its connection with the “genuine revolutionary class that is spontaneously rising to struggle.” ... The professional revolutionary has played his part in the history of Russian proletarian socialism. No power on earth can now undo this work ... [37]

Throughout these pages, more often than we can reasonably cite, Lenin repeated the theme that the day of WITBD was in the past. “In the historical conditions that prevailed in Russia in 1900-1905, no organization other than Iskra could have created the Social-Democratic Labor Party we now have.” This preceded the statement that “The professional revolutionary has played his part ...” The bitter disputes within the émigré circles characterized “a young and immature workers’ movement”; “only the broadening of the Party by enlisting proletarian elements can help to eradicate the “circle spirit.” “And the transition to a democratically organized workers’ party, proclaimed by the Bolsheviks ... in November 1905, i.e., as soon as the conditions appeared for legal activity – this “transition” was a break from the “old circle ways that had outlived their day.” [38]

“Yes, ‘that had outlived their day,’” Lenin repeated, “for it is not enough to condemn the old circle spirit; its significance in the special circumstances of the past period must be understood ...” – and so on. “The differences among the circles were over the direction the work was to take ... The circles played their part and are now, of course, obsolete.” [39]

Next Lenin commented on Plekhanov’s statement that “he differed from me in principle on the question of spontaneity and political consciousness.” [40] Once again Lenin insisted that there was no real difference involved at the time. “Plekhanov’s criticism,” he said, was “based on phrases torn out of context,” and, he added, “on particular expressions which I had not quite adroitly or precisely formulated.” The particular criticisms by Plekhanov to which Lenin was here referring were to the pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, but against them Lenin here appealed to “the general content and the whole spirit of my pamphlet WITBD.” All of us had agreed (he went on to say) upon the “formulation of the relation between spontaneity and political consciousness” in the draft Party program put forward by the Iskra group. And then Lenin made a statement which capped the whole problem:

Nor at the Second Congress did I have any intention of elevating my own formulations, as given in WITBD, to “programmatic” level, constituting special principles. On the contrary, the expression I used – and it has since been frequently quoted – was that the Economists had gone to one extreme. WITBD, I said, straightens out what had been twisted by the Economists ... [41]

The meaning of these words is clear enough: WITBD is a controversial correction of Economist distortions and it would be wrong to regard the pamphlet in any other light.

It would be hard to imagine any more telling refutation of the WITBD myth, unless perhaps Lenin had staged a bonfire of all extant copies of WITBD.

There is no record that Lenin ever went back on the above-quoted statements about WITBD. In fact, there is no record that he was aware of a problem about it. [4*]

Now which is “the Leninist concept of party organization” – Lenin’s approach of 1905-1907, just described, or the formulations of 1902 in WITBD? The answer that Lenin’s ghost would give, obviously, is: neither – no “concept of the party” taken as a “principle” divorced from time and place. Lenin’s ideas on party organization, like those of most others, varied depending on conditions, especially such an immense difference in conditions as that between the underground conditions in an autocracy and the conditions of relative political liberty and open organizational opportunity that characterized Russia in the 1905-1907 period.

At least one Leninologist was able to recognize this elementary idea, and as a result drew the wrathful fires of Leninological authority on his own head. Deviating from the consensus, John Plamenatz wrote this much:

There is nothing specifically undemocratic about the opinions so vigorously expressed in WITBD ... He never, when he wrote WITBD, intended that the “party of the proletariat” should drive and bully the workers, or even that it should make their revolution for them, and then govern Russia in their name but without taking the trouble to consult them.

If it were not for what happened after the Bolshevik Revolution, says Plamenatz, “We should not venture to call them [the ideas of WITBD] undemocratic, but merely say of them that they were advice perhaps well enough adapted to the needs of a revolutionary party active in Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century.” [43]

Lenin’s 1902 proposals for the Russian movement of the day may have been good or bad proposals – this discussion is pre-empted by the Leninological myth. Recognition that WITBD was not antidemocratic in its views still leaves open the belief (which Plamenatz for one holds) that “Leninism” took an antidemocratic turn in “what happened after the Bolshevik Revolution.” The point about the Leninological myth is that it makes discussion of these developments impossible: political-historical analysis is replaced by demonology.

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Special Note

Amazing Story: Utechin’s Edition of Lenin’s WITBD

The preceding essay was in part drafted in 1963 for use in a book review. The year 1963 was a great year for the Leninologists, with the publication of three biographies of Lenin, plus a relevant volume of memoirs by Angelica Balabanoff. Another event of the year was the publication of a new English translation of WITBD:

What Is To Be Done? Translated by S.V. and P. Utechin. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by S.V. Utechin. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 213p.

This edition was noteworthy especially because it was, I think, the first example of a major Western publisher’s recognition that Lenin’s writings were at least as important for the history of sociopolitical thought as, say, those of Lactantius, Leibniz, Lilburne or Luther. It was the first production, from these scholarly precincts, of a critical edition with scholarly appurtenances, annotation, etc.

The milestone was the fact that it was done at all. The nature of the edition issued was of no mean interest. The job was done by S.V. Utechin, author of Russian Political Thought and a Concise Encyclopaedia covering Russia. The present note will not discuss the views expressed by Utechin’s introduction; these views were rather standard specimens of the Leninological consensus on the original sin of WITBD as the fountainhead of all Bolshevik deviltry. We will be concerned only with what editor Utechin did to the text of Lenin’s work.

In the first place, the Utechin edition does not present the complete text. This is doubly puzzling, because (1) Lenin’s brochure makes a fairly small booklet to begin with, and (2) the amount cut out by Utechin is not very great in bulk. The reason could hardly have been an overwhelming need for economy by Oxford’s Clarendon Press. (The publisher could have saved more space by cutting Utechin’s footnotes arguing that conditions under czarism were better than Lenin made out.) There is, of course, reason for condensed versions of notable books, but usually for inclusion in fat collections. This is a small book made smaller.

To justify publishing an incomplete version like this, Utechin refers to the “slightly abridged” version which Lenin himself published in 1907 as part of a collection titled Twelve Years. As compared with the original 1902 edition, Lenin here made about a dozen cuts, none of them very important, the largest being the elimination of Chapter 5, Section A. (We should recall that when this 1907 publication took place, Lenin explained to the reader of the collection that WITBD was now mainly of historical interest.)

Utechin claims in his preface that “The 1907 version [that is, the abridged one] was used for the only English translation hitherto, that by ... J. Fineberg, which has appeared both as a separate pamphlet and in various selections and collections of Lenin’s works put out by Communist publishers in Moscow and outside the Soviet Union.” This is not true. The Fineberg translation was of the full 1902 text. It appeared in the old (unfinished) Collected Works, Volume 4, Book II, published by International Publishers of New York in 1929; and also in the paperbound edition widely read, viz., No.4 of the Little Lenin Library. Moreover, another full translation of the 1902 edition was subsequently available in English in a paperbound edition put out by the Foreign Languages Publishing House of Moscow. Finally (as Utechin does mention a little later) the new multi-volume Collected Works in English, published by FLPH, presented still another full translation in its Volume 5. These translations were not the same; and so we had three different English versions of the unabridged text before Utechin. The abridged version of 1907 appeared in English only in the various sets titled Selected Works.

In any case, the abridgment practices followed by the Communist publishing houses should hardly have been a model for the first Western scholarly edition of a Lenin work.

The second strange thing about Utechin’s edition is that he does not even present the abridged 1907 version. His surgical operation on the body of WITBD only starts with the 1907 abridgment, for he accepts all but a couple of the cuts made there. Then in addition he makes thirty-two further excisions in the text, ranging in length from over a page to a line here and there. Then, from the text which is left, he cuts twenty-four of Lenin’s footnotes – some of them rather long ones and several of them quite important and interesting.

The reader may wonder why Lenin’s first Western scholarly editor snips his shears around the work like that; but he may assume that all of the cuts are of unimportant passages. This is true in a few cases, especially where only an odd line has been snipped out here or there. It is odd indeed, but –

Now we come to the fantastic. Many of Utechin’s excisions are of passages with considerable interest; some of the excisions are important enough to stay in the most drastically condensed edition; and a couple of the excisions are among the most important passages in the work.

We have already seen that one of the most-discussed sections of WITBD concerns the role of bourgeois intellectuals in the socialist movement, and the theory that the working class by itself can come only to trade-unionist consciousness. I have pointed out that in reality Lenin presented this theory by quoting it from Kautsky, and that his own paraphrase was based on Kautsky. I have mentioned that Leninologists’ discussions of WITBD rarely or never mention the inconvenient fact that the demonic theory was really Kautsky’s. How does Utechin handle this problem?

Easy: he simply exercises his editorial shears and excises the whole quotation from Kautsky from the text of the book.

The reader of this sanitized edition will never be confused by finding out that the very crux of Leninist deviltry actually started with Kautsky, not Lenin. [5*]

Fourthly: if the suppression of this crucial passage is bizarre, there are a whole group of cuts that are no less so. Here is an enlightening example.

One of the disputed points in disquisitions on WITBD is the question of the origins of Lenin’s thought: does it stem mainly from the European Marxist tradition or from the Russian revolutionary past? Utechin is a rather all-out proponent of the latter thesis: his introduction argues that Lenin’s spiritual ancestors were Tkachev and Ogarev in particular. The Tkachev bogey is most commonly dangled before readers, for Tkachev was a Blanquist-type nineteenth-century revolutionary of the vulgarest sort.

The text of WITBD, writes Utechin in this connection, “is not particularly enlightening on this question.” It was not advisable for him to refer to the text. For he has carefully excised from this text every passage in WITBD that fails to conform with his thesis, and that he can take out without ruining the continuity.

Take the specific case of the bogeyman Tkachev, Lenin’s “real” ancestor according to Utechin and Leninology. It would have been a kindness to Utechin if Lenin had thrown into his writings a few enthusiastic references to Tkachev – say about one percent of the number of references he constantly makes to his European Marxist models. It would have been a boon for Leninologists if he had published just one kind word about his “real ancestor.” But in all of the forty-five volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works there are about five references to Tkachev’s name in toto, and only one of these is a substantive passage expressing an opinion. This one passage bearing Lenin’s view of Tkachev occurs, as it happens, in WITBD. And it is distinctly hostile to Tkachev as a protagonist of “excitative terror.” [44]

Now what does a scholarly editor do when the text fails to conform to the consensus of Leninology? Utechin strikes out of the text the whole passage on Tkachev.

This one and only passage in which Lenin actually expressed an attitude toward his “real ancestor” (leaving aside secondhand claims) must not be allowed to confuse the innocent reader. Not only that: in a couple of other places in the text, Utechin cuts out substantial passages in which Lenin attacks terrorism and terrorist views.

This bears only on one side of the question raised about Lenin’s ancestors. As mentioned, Utechin wants to play down the extent to which Lenin based himself on the European Marxist tradition. The text of WITBD (the text as written by Lenin) abounds in arguments taken from this arsenal. In fact, WITBD contains some of the most interesting material in all of Lenin showing his reliance on the European Marxist parties as models of party organization. It is this sort of material that Utechin tends to strike out, though it is too voluminous to excise altogether.

Utechin’s preface refers quite consciously to this practice of his: “omitted ... are chiefly details of polemics that are of no particular relevance to the main line of argument, and examples given by Lenin from the practice of the German Social-Democracy in order to illustrate points he was making, examples which would now be more likely to obscure than to elucidate his reasoning.” These passages not only “obscure” Lenin’s “reasoning,” they ruin Utechin’s case: out they must go – from the text.

For example, there is the passage Utechin throws out of Chapter 3, Section F, a eulogy of how the German Social-Democratic Party operates. It is not true that this is only an “illustration,” as Utechin claims – though he never explains why enlightening “illustrations” have to be struck out of his text. This passage is an argument which Lenin is making in favor of his proposals. Lenin is citing the most admired socialist party as his model. Moreover, in his account of how the admirable Germans work, he is implicitly also giving his own views on how a party should work, on the basis of a legality such as did not obtain in Russia. If one wants to find out Lenin’s “organizational concepts,” it is important (to put it mildly) to find out his views on the organizational concepts and practices of the leading European socialist party.

There are a brace of equally interesting references to the European movement that Utechin throws out. But it is not really necessary to take the space to pile one enormity on another.

Such is this first “scholarly” edition of Lenin from a major publisher, under the auspices of an eminent Western institution of learning, to reveal the lamentable original sins of Bolshevism. If a mangle-job like this had been done on, say, John Stuart Mill by a Moscow publishing agency, we would all know exactly what to think; and Utechin would probably not be behindhand in saying it. It would be called a work of falsification. But we must not be impolite.

After all, there are few Leninologists who are in the fortunate position of being able to “prove” their interpretation of a work by pruning the text to suit the interpretation. This does not necessarily mean that Utechin performed his operation on the body of WITBD with conscious dishonesty. It is far more likely that he knows only one way to read Lenin: through his own specially made glasses. The leading authorities of Leninology in the Western scholarly establishment are not different in kind from their blood-brothers in the Stalinist professoriat.

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Footnotes

1*. Luxemburg’s article is commonly reprinted under the bogus title Leninism or Marxism? – a title which is not only a Leninological invention but distortive of Luxemburg’s view. Those who are sensitive to questions of inner-party democracy, so popular with Leninologists, should note that although Luxemburg’s article was a virulent attack on Lenin, the democratic editors of the Neue Zeit refused to print Lenin’s mild reply.

2*. It should be remembered that Lenin (along with almost the entire International) favored the victory of Japan in that war with Russia.

3*. Some previous statements should be mentioned too. In August 1903 Lenin had scribbled a few lines for himself, as a note on Martov’s Contradictions and Zigzags. The second of four points was that “He [Martov] always defended Iskra’s ideas of organization (What Is To Be Done?), but secured the incorporation of a Jaurésist [reformist] first clause in the Rules.” [32] In January 1904 Lenin published a pamphlet preface in which he challenged the Mensheviks to state their new concepts of organization: they have “announced ... the existence of differences over questions of organization. Unfortunately, the editors are in no hurry to specify just what these differences are, confining themselves for the most part to hinting at things unknown.” [33] The man who wrote these words was plainly under the impression that up to this point the Mensheviks had no distinctive line on “concept of organization.” In March 1905, in a reply to Plekhanov, Lenin insisted that “Plekhanov’s assertion that our relations cooled on account of WITBD is absolutely untrue.” [34] These are only a few of the many indications of this fact: at least when he published WITBD, and until controversy developed subsequently, Lenin thought that the book’s views were the common property of the Iskra group.

4*. As far as I know, the only claim that Lenin ever came back to the subject appeared in an article which requires notice because it has occasionally been quoted. This article, published in 1938 by Max Shachtman in the theoretical organ of the American Trotskyist group, ascribed WITBD to the specific Russian conditions of the time and went on to say: That is why Lenin, in answer to a proposal to translate his brochure for the non-Russian parties, told Max Levien in 1921: “That is not desirable; the translation must at least be issued with good commentaries, which would have to be written by a Russian comrade very well acquainted with the history of the Communist Party of Russia, in order to avoid false application.” [42]

Unfortunately the article gave no source for this quotation; and while it gave a list of sources for the article as a whole, I have not been able to find this episode in any of the works listed.

5*. The rule that Leninologists do not mention Kautsky in this connection has exceptions that prove the rule. One of the few exceptions is one of the Lenin biographies published in 1963, namely, the one by Possony, who starts off his chapter on WITBD with this very quote from Kautsky. The reason is entirely clear and revealing: as a far-out political rightist, Possony is interested in extending the usual anti-Lenin attaint to the whole socialist movement, right wing included. The other two biographies published in the same year, by Louis Fischer and Robert Payne, do not mention Kautsky in this connection at all. Naturally it is all a question of objective scholarship ...

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Reference Notes

1. For Utechin’s book, see the beginning of the Special Note.

2. Lenin: Collected Works (Moscow: FLPH, Progress Pub., 1960-70), 5:375. (This work is hereafter abbreviated: CW.)

3. CW 5:383f.

4. CW 5:386.

5. I have dealt with this subject at large in Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (New York: Monthly Rev. Press, 1978), Vol.2, Chaps.17-18.

6. CW 6:235+.

7. CW 6:490.

8. CW 6:490f.

9. CW 6:491.

10. CW 6:500.

11. CW 6:502.

12. CW 7:474.

13. CW 7:474-76.

14. CW 8:196.

15. CW 9:291.

16. CW 9:442.

17. CW 10:29.

18. CW 10:30.

19. CW 10:32.

20. CW 10:33.

21. CW 10:34.

22. CW 10:35.

23. CW 10:37f.

24. CW 10:31.

25. CW 10:32.

26. CW 10:36.

27. CW 10:36 fn.

28. CW 10:38f.

29. CW 13:101.

30. CW 13:102.

31. CW 13:102.

32. CW 6:522.

33. CW 7:132.

34. CW 8:245.

35. CW 13:103.

36. CW 13:103.

37. CW 13:104.

38. CW 13:104f.

39. CW 13:106.

40. CW 13:106.

41. CW 13:107f.

42. Shachtman, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, in The New International (N.Y.), May 1938, p.143.

43. John Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London: Longmans, Green, 1954), p.225f.

44. CW 5:510f.

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