Lecture three: The origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done?
Part 3
By David North
8 September 2005
This is the third part of the lecture “The Origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done?” delivered by World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Chairman David North at the Socialist Equality Party/WSWS summer school held August 14 to August 20, 2005 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The lecture is being posted in seven installments. Part 1 and 2 were posted September 6-7.
This is the third lecture that was given at the school. The first, entitled “The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century” was posted in four parts, from August 29 to September 1. The second, entitled “Marxism versus revisionism on the eve of the twentieth century,” was posted in three parts on September 2, 4 and 5. These lectures were also authored by David North.
The emergence of Ulyanov-LeninThe pioneering work of Plekhanov influenced an entire generation of intellectuals and youth who entered into revolutionary struggle during the late 1880s and early 1890s. The impact of his polemics was all the greater as the social transformations in the city and the countryside more and more corresponded to the analysis made by Plekhanov.
By the 1890s it was increasingly apparent that Russia was undergoing a rapid economic development, with the growth of industry producing an increasingly powerful working class. These were the conditions under which Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, the younger brother of a martyred revolutionary terrorist, entered into the revolutionary movement. By 1893 he established his reputation as a powerful theoretician with a remarkable critique of the populist movement which he entitled What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats. There are certain features of this work which made it a major contribution to the revolutionary workers’ movement and which, despite its preoccupation with the specific conditions of the Russia of the 1890s, endow it with an enduring relevance.
Ulyanov-Lenin devoted a large portion of his work to attacking what he termed the subjective sociology of Mikhailovsky, demonstrating that the politics of the narodnik (populist) movement was not based on a scientific study of the social relations that existed in Russia. He showed that they refused to confront the fact that commodity production had become highly developed and that large-scale industry had been established and concentrated in the hands of individuals who bought and exploited the labor-power of a mass of workers who were without any property. But even more important than the economic analysis—which was much further developed in his next major work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia—was Lenin’s characterization of the class nature of the narodnik movement. He explained that the narodniks, in essence, were petty-bourgeois democrats whose views reflected the social position of the peasantry.
While Lenin insisted on the great importance of the democratic questions—i.e., those related to the abolition of the Tsarist autocracy, the destruction of the remnants of feudalism in the countryside, the nationalization of the land—he held no less passionately that it was fundamentally wrong to ignore the distinction between the democratic and socialist movement. The greatest hindrance to the development of the class consciousness of the proletariat was the tendency to subordinate the proletariat to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democratic opponents of the autocracy.
In his savage attack upon the views of Mikhailovsky, Lenin was determined to prove that the so-called “socialism” of the petty-bourgeois democrat has nothing whatsoever in common with the socialism of the proletariat. At best, the “socialism” of the petty-bourgeoisie reflects its frustration in the face of the powerful growth of capital and its concentration in the hands of the magnates of banking and industry. Petty-bourgeois socialism is incapable of making a scientific and historical analysis of the development of capitalism in as much as such an analysis would demonstrate the hopeless position of the petty-bourgeoisie itself, which, far from being a rising class, represents the surviving fragments of the economic past.
The main conclusion that Lenin drew for the revolutionary socialist movement is that it must wage a relentless struggle against the influence of petty-bourgeois democratic ideology within the workers’ movement. It had to be educated to understand that there was nothing intrinsically socialist about democratic demands, and that the abolition of the autocracy and the destruction of feudal estates, while in one sense historically progressive, did not at all imply the end of the exploitation of the working class. In fact, the outcome of the realization of these demands would, in themselves, merely facilitate the development of capitalism and the intensified exploitation of wage-labor. This did not mean that the working class should not support the democratic struggle. Quite the opposite: the working class must be in the vanguard of the democratic struggle. But under no conditions does it wage that struggle under the banner of the bourgeoisie or petty-bourgeoisie. Rather, it must wage the struggle for democracy only in order to facilitate the struggle against the bourgeoisie itself.
He denounced the “amalgamators” and “alliance advocates” who proposed that the workers should, in the name of fighting against Tsarism, play down their independent class aims and, without concerning themselves with programmatic issues, form alliances with all the political opponents of the regime.
Marxists advance the democratic struggle not by adapting to the liberals and petty-bourgeois democrats, but by organizing the workers into an independent political party of their own, based on a revolutionary socialist program. Summing up the nature of Russian populism, Lenin wrote: “If you refuse to believe the flowery talk about the ‘interests of the people’ and try to delve deeper, you will find that you are dealing with the out-and-out ideologists of the petty-bourgeoisie...”
In bringing his work to a conclusion, Lenin stressed that the work of the revolutionary party must be directed toward making the worker “understand the political and economic structure of the system that oppresses him, and the necessity and inevitability of class antagonism under this system.... When its advanced representatives have mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas become widespread, and when stable organizations are formed among the workers to transform the workers’ present sporadic economic war into conscious class struggle—then the Russian WORKER, rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletarians of ALL COUNTRIES) along the straight road of open political struggle to THE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.”
Already, in this seminal work, Lenin presented in a fairly developed form the conceptions that were to guide the construction of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin did not invent the concept of the party or of the independent political organization of the working class. But he endowed these concepts with a political and ideological concreteness of unequalled intensity. He was convinced that the political organization of the working class proceeds not merely through measures of a practical character, but through a ruthless theoretical and political struggle against all the ideological forms through which the bourgeoisie seeks to influence and dominate the working class. The political unity of the working class required an unrelenting struggle against all theories and programs which reflected the interests of alien class forces. In other words, the political homogeneity of the working class could be realized only on the basis of the highest theoretical consciousness.
In 1900, in an article on “The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement,” Lenin wrote the following:
“Social Democracy is the combination of the working class movement and socialism. Its task is not to serve the working class movement passively at each of its separate stages, but to represent the interests of the movement as a whole, to point out to this movement its ultimate aim and its political tasks, and to safeguard its political and ideological independence. Isolated from Social Democracy, the working class movement becomes petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois. In waging only the economic struggle, the working class loses its political independence; it becomes the tail of other parties and betrays the great principle: ‘The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ In every country there has been a period in which the working class movement existed apart from socialism, each going its own way; and in every country this isolation has weakened both socialism and the working class movement. Only the fusion of socialism with the working class movement has in all countries created a durable basis for both.”[4]
When Lenin wrote those words, he was waging a bitter struggle against a new tendency that had emerged inside Russian Social Democracy, known as Economism, whose existence was bound up with the growth of Bernsteinite revisionism in Germany. The gist of the economists’ views was the belittling of the revolutionary political struggle. Instead, adapting themselves to the spontaneous working class movement in the mid-1890s, the economists proposed that the social democratic movement concentrate on the development of the strike struggles and other aspects of the economic struggle of the working class. The implication of this outlook was that the labor movement should renounce as a practical goal its revolutionary socialist aims. Pride of place in the political struggle against the autocracy was to be conceded to the liberal democratic bourgeois opposition. The independent revolutionary program that had been proclaimed by Plekhanov and Lenin was to be abandoned in favor of trade union activity aimed at improving the economic conditions of the working class within the framework of capitalist society. Or, as E.D. Kuskova proposed in the infamous Credo published in 1899:
“Intolerant Marxism, negative Marxism, primitive Marxism (which holds to too schematic a concept of the class division of society) will give way to democratic Marxism, and the social position of the party in contemporary society will have to change drastically. The party will recognize society; its narrow corporative and, in the majority of cases, sectarian tasks will broaden into social tasks and its striving to seize power will be transformed into a desire for change, for the reform of contemporary society along democratic lines that are adapted to the present state of affairs, with the object of protecting, in the most complete and effective way, (all) the rights of the laboring classes.”[5]
That was not all: the Credo declared that “Talk of an independent workers’ political party is nothing but the result of transplanting alien aims and alien achievements on to our soil.”[6]
The emergence of Economism was part of an international phenomenon: under conditions in which Marxism had become the dominant political and ideological force in the labor movement of Western Europe, there developed within that labor movement what amounted to a bourgeois opposition to Marxism. In other words, the growth of revisionism represented, as I have already explained, the attempt by the petty-bourgeois ideologists of capitalism to counteract and undermine the expansion of Marxist influence inside the workers’ movement. By 1899, the implications of this revisionism had become fairly clear, when the French socialist Millerand entered a bourgeois government.
The eruption of opportunism provoked a crisis inside international Social Democracy. As I’ve already noted, the first to come out against it was Plekhanov. Later, Rosa Luxemburg contributed to the struggle with her magnificent pamphlet, Reform or Revolution? Reluctantly, the German social democrats were drawn into the fray. But nowhere was the struggle against opportunism so fully developed as it was in Russia under the leadership of Lenin.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian socialist movement was not a unified political organization. There existed numerous tendencies and groups which identified themselves as socialist, even Marxist, but which conducted their political and practical work on a local basis, or as the representative of a specific ethnic or religious group within the working class. The Jewish Bund was the most famous of the latter type of organization.
As the Russian workers’ movement gathered strength in the second half of the 1890s, the need for programmatic and organizational coherence became evident and urgent. The first attempt to hold a congress of all Russian social democrats, in Minsk in 1898, was aborted as a result of police repression and the arrests of delegates. In the aftermath of this setback, the plans for the convening of a congress were complicated by the increasingly heterogeneous character of the Russian socialist movement, of which the emergence of the Economist tendency was a significant expression.
Although Plekhanov was still the revered theoretical leader of Russian socialism, Ulyanov-Lenin emerged as the major figure in the course of the intense preparatory work for the convening of a unifying congress of Russian social democrats. The basis of his influence was his leading role in the publication of the new political newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Iskra (The Spark). Within the émigré movement and among Marxists engaged in practical revolutionary activity in Russia, Iskra gained immense stature as it provided theoretical, political and organizational coherence, on an all-Russia basis, for what would have remained in its absence a disparate movement.
The first issue of Iskra was published in December 1900. Lenin explained in a major statement published on its front page that “Our principal and fundamental task is to facilitate the political development and the political organization of the working class. Those who push this task into the background, who refuse to subordinate to it all the special tasks and particular methods of struggle, are following a false path and causing serious harm to the movement.”
In words which remain, even after the passage of a century, extraordinarily relevant to contemporary conditions, Lenin harshly criticized those “who think it fit and proper to treat the workers to ‘politics’ only at exceptional moments in their lives, only on festive occasions...” Excoriating the representatives of the Economist tendency, for whom militant trade unionism and agitation over economic demands represented the alpha and omega of radical activity in the working class, Lenin insisted that the decisive task that confronted socialists was the political education of the working class and the formation of its independent socialist political party. “Not a single class in history,” Lenin wrote, “has achieved power without producing its political leaders, its prominent representatives able to organize a movement and lead it.” In conclusion, Lenin proposed somewhat laconically “to devote a series of articles in forthcoming issues to questions of organization, which are among the most burning problems confronting us.”[7]
What emerged from this proposal was perhaps the most brilliant, influential and controversial political tract of the twentieth century, Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Given the bitter controversy provoked by this book, especially in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it is a remarkable fact that What Is To Be Done?, when it was first published in 1902, was accepted by leading Russian social democrats—most importantly, by Plekhanov—as a statement of party principles on questions of political tasks and organization. This is of some political significance insofar as many of the denunciations of Lenin’s pamphlet assert that What Is To Be Done? introduced a conspiratorial and totalitarian element into socialism that had no basis in classical Marxism. We will address these criticisms in the course of our review of this work.
To be continued
Notes:
[4] Collected Works, Volume 4 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 368.
[5] Marxism in Russia, Key documents, 1879-1906, edited by Neil Harding (Cambridge 1983) p. 251.
[6] Ibid, p. 252.
[7] Ibid, p. 369-70.
