C L R James
The World Revolution 1937-1936
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL, THE PRECURSOR OF THE THIRD, was formed in 1864. Marx had nothing to do with its actual foundation, but was invited to assist and wrote the original drafts of both the inaugural manifesto and the constitution.
So heterogeneous was the composition of the International that Marx could not state with his usual clarity the programme and tactics of the Permanent Revolution. Yet the following contains his essential ideas and was transferred bodily by Lenin to the statutes of the Third International:
"That the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means;
"That all efforts aiming at that great end have hitherto failed from the want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labour in each country, and from the absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different countries;
"That the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries."
The defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 was a deathblow to the First International, but it should be noted that one of the immediate causes of its collapse was the conflict between Bakunin, the anarchist, and the strong central control of the General Council, dominated first by Marx
and in its last years by Engels. These two devoted themselves with equal interest and energy to whatever national section seemed most important for the movement as a whole. Nationalism of any sort was quite foreign to them. In 1848 the centre of the international working-class movement was for them France, and remained so until 1870. With the defeat of the Paris Commune they saw that the leadership of the working-class struggle had now passed to Germany, which henceforth became the centre of their activities. As in France, after the destruction by the revolution of the provincial restrictions to trade, so the national unity of the German states which resulted from the Franco-Prussian War widened the opportunities of German Capitalism. The reparations tribute extracted from France, the mineral resources of Alsace-Lorraine, were the dynamic forces in this larger arena, and with the growth of German Capitalism followed inevitably the development of the Labour movement in Germany. There was much theoretical confusion in the German party between the years 1870 and 1880, but the party had fought against the Franco-Prussian war in true revolutionary fashion. Chiefly through the untiring efforts of Engels, Marxism in time became the prevailing doctrine of the German Social Democratic Party. The leaders of the German party, Bernstein, Liebknecht, Bebel, Kautsky, were in close and constant touch with Marx and Engels; they taught the irreconcilabiiity of the struggle between classes, and that the State was merely the executive committee of the ruling class, foretold the inevitable collapse of Capitalism, and preached the necessity of the working-class seizing the State-power by armed insurrection. But, there being no immediate prospect of a revolutionary crisis, with the full agreement of Marx and Engels the German party organised itself to wrest immediate concessions from German Capitalism through trade unions and legal political activity. In the course of these struggles the workers would steel themselves for the revolutionary seizure of power.
But despite the recurrent crises the decades that followed the Franco-Prussian War saw a steady expansion of European Capitalism. Revolution seemed more and more remote. The betterment of working conditions, increases in wages, could be won. There was the immediate struggle for full political rights under the constitution. As the years went by Marx and Engels could see that the prosperity of German Capitalism and the concessions which the organised workers could win from their masters were corrupting sections of the German leadership. They used the Marxian terminology but more and more they were slipping into purely parliamentary methods, and, what was worse, purely parliamentary aims. Universal suffrage and the secret ballot gradually superseded the revolution as the means of working-class emancipation. In 1883 Bismarck's anti-Socialist laws drove the most revolutionary leaders into exile and strengthened the hold of the parliamentarians on the workers. The corruption of the movement by these leaders was so great that Engels seriously considered a split by the revolutionary section. Perhaps if Marx had been alive the split would have taken place. But Marx had died in 1883, and in 1887 Engels was still hopeful, at times even confident, that these tendencies would be counteracted by the "wonderful commonsense" of the German workers who had stood so firm and fought so splendidly against Bismarck's repression. But he was wrong. After his death in 1895 bureaucratic corruption conquered in every important Labour movement in Europe, except the Russian, and there it was defeated only after a hard struggle. Marx and Engels in full vigour could have assisted the opposition to organise itself, given it theoretical clarity and helped it to lay such a basis that it could have rallied the most advanced elements to itself and thus been ready for the next great crisis of Capitalism the war of 1914. More they could not have done, for the roots of the change lay deep in the economic developments of the time.
The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century saw European Capitalism making a last attempt to solve its difficulties by more intense exploitation of the old markets and a piratical seizure of the hitherto neglected continent of Africa. Capitalist prosperity increased and side by side with the expansion of trade and industry went the growth of the European Labour movement. In all the great European countries, particularly in Britain, the Labour movement became the happy hunting-ground for a rising crowd of Trade Union officials, parliamentarians, municipal counsellors, election agents, organisers, journalists, printers, publishers, a new caste in society which, on the basis of the successful struggle for better wages and more Labour representation in parliament, controlled the organised Labour movement. The growth of imperialism, the spread of trade, the accumulation of super-profits, strengthened their position. It gave them support from below–in a thin stratum of well-paid and privileged workers who had no quarrel with Capitalism. It gave them support from above, in the radical sections of the increasing petty-bourgeoisie of the cities, notably the intelligentsia, itself a product, as an administrative necessity, of the world-wide expansion of Capitalism. The petty-bourgeois intellectuals supplied the new Socialist ideology–the inevitability of gradualism, the commonsense of municipal trading–Socialism without tears. These ideas, [1] perfectly adapted to the petty-bourgeois movement of their authors, permeated through the bureaucracy and its apparatus into the working-class movement. Basing itself, as all ideas except those of revolutionary Socialism are based, upon the inevitable growth of national Capitalism, this Socialism was national in origin and outlook. Such internationalism as it professed was merely a quixotic gesture having no roots in economics and therefore none in politics, doomed to perish at the first breath of the storm. That this decline from Marxism into national Socialism was no accident but an inevitable phase can be seen from the course followed by the Labour movement in Germany after the death of Engels. Even before Engels died he had had fierce quarrels with the leaders of the German Social Democracy for suppressing the revolutionary passages in his last writings. Now with the old man out of the way Bernstein in 1897 began openly to revise Marxism. By 1899 he had discarded the theory of the class-struggle and the inevitable breakdown of Capitalism, and substituted instead collaboration with the democratic and progressive bourgeoisie, [2] and the gradual growing-over of Capitalism into Socialism. Kautsky and others of the German party led the rejection of this adulteration, but in a lukewarm fashion that showed how near they already were to Bernstein. 1914 and the years of post-war history were to show that this Revisionism was identical with Fabianism. And it is another remarkable testimony to the influence of economic and social environment on men, even men above the average of intelligence and education, that Sidney Webb of the Oxford tradition and the English civil service and Kautsky, disciple and companion of Marx and Engels, the greatest revolutionaries in history, should have arrived at identical conclusions which were demonstrably false.
Yet Marx's internationalism remained on the lips of the Social Democratic bureaucrats. They organised themselves into the Second International in 1889. But so tenacious were they of their own national independence that it was only in 1900 that they formed a central bureau, and in reality each section always pursued its own policy. In 1904 at the Amsterdam Congress the Second International condemned Revisionism, yet continued to act as if the future of Capitalism were assured and each working class in the fullness of time would win a majority at the polls and institute the Socialist order. [3]
And yet, before their very eyes, the system was showing unmistakable signs of the great fissures into which peer fearsomely all the Capitalist world to-day. Side by side with the superficial prosperity went, as Marx had foretold, the development of Capitalism into monopoly and the enlargement of the scale of competition. The export of capital was industrialising the native populations of foreign countries, and the class-struggle was sharpening steadily all over the world. In the years before the war a series of great strikes in Britain presaged the great conflicts of our own day. Over all, as even the Second International stated in its high-sounding but empty resolutions, the increasing rivalry of national Capitalisms was leading steadily to the most gigantic war in history. But all this had no ultimate significance for the parliamentarians and Trade Union bureaucracy, with their eyes glued on seats, increase of wages, the extension of the party press and all the other day-to-day activities of the organisation, which coincided so admirably with their struggles for personal advancement. It was not a question of intellectual ability or moral calibre. There were many J. H. Thomases and Ramsay MacDonalds among them, and few men of this age were personally superior to Jean Jaures. Yet all went the same road. The leaders of great parties judge history from the necessities of their organisations and not their organisations from the necessities of history.
The disintegration of Capitalism did find some expression in dissenting political groupings within each national section. In Britain, for example, the English Social Democratic Federation, later the British Socialist Party, professed Marx's doctrines. Keir Hardie, of the Independent Labour Party, opposed the Liberal-Labour tendencies of the British working-class leaders, but paid little attention to theory and never stiffened his party with the doctrines of scientific Socialism. Inside the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg fought the internationalism in phrase and Revisionism in action of Kautsky and Bernstein. But the revolutionary wings were weak. Even in Germany they were held in check by the organisational strength and discipline of the German party. The revolutionary leaders feared the isolation which would follow a split. Few, if any of them, could have forseen how corrupt the leadership was. In every great European country except one, 1914 found them helpless before the Revisionists.
We have devoted an apparently disproportionate amount of time to these two tendencies in the labour movement--Marxism and Revisionism, international and national Socialism. The disproportion is only apparent. With the formation of the Third International and the adhesion to it of the revolutionary internationalists, Revisionism became openly and without shame the ruling doctrine of the Second International. But in 1924 Revisionism made its appearance in the Russian Bolshevik Party, for similar reasons to its appearance in the Second International and with the identical results. The Third International and the Russian Bolshevik party is to-day completely revisionist. And yet it was in the Bolshevik Party that unrevised Marxism was kept alive during the years when Revisionism was triumphant all over Europe. The Russian Bolshevik Party gave its stamp to the Third International. The strength of the International was the strength of the Bolshevik Party, but the weakness of that party was the weakness of the International also.
But for Tsarist reaction the war would have found only a few sects in possession of Marxism, and the working-class movement, even though it was certain to find its way in the end, might have floundered for years.
Throughout the nineteenth century the Tsarist feudal autocracy had ruled Russia, a Government that even at the end of the nineteenth century was in many respects more backward than the monarchy which the French Revolution had overthrown a hundred years before. Despite the execration of democratic Europe (hypocritical as far as the financiers and rulers were concerned) Tsarism remained, and would continue to remain until the development of the forces of production had created the social and political forces which would overthrow it and take its place. Through the centuries the peasants had tried in vain to rid themselves of the burden of serfdom. The historical development of Europe and Russia had resulted in the weakness of Russian industry, and the corresponding weakness of the towns. The peasantry, from the geographical conditions of its existence and the intellectual backwardness which this entails, the constant differentiation between its members, is unable to create an effective political party of its own, and the agrarian revolution which lacks the political guidance and support of the towns cannot succeed. By 1861 the defeat in the Crimean War and the increasing pressure of the peasantry warned Tsarism of the necessity of ameliorating the conditions in the countryside. But though serfdom was abolished the peasant was cheated in favour of the landlord, with the result that the agrarian situation was merely temporarily relieved, and, as in pre-1789 France, periodical famines undermined the fabric of the Russian State.
Court conspiracies had at critical moments substituted one Tsar for another more suitable to the nobility. The system remained. The intellectuals who sought the overthrow of Tsarism without the backing of a mass movement slipped, as always, into the morass of terrorism. It was European capital, inevitably seeking new markets and as inevitably creating the means of its own destruction, which provided the basis for the revolutionary Marxist party in Russia, and thereby paved the way for the first great breach in the Capitalist system. Into this predominantly feudal country came the surplus of Western capital, constructing modern large-scale industry with its concomitant organisation of the proletariat and impoverishment of the peasantry, drawing Russia into that relentless see-saw of boom and crisis which was already undermining the far more stable Capitalisms of the west.
The soil was fruitful for Marxism. In 1883 was formed the Emancipation of Labour Group, composed of Russian intellectuals in exile with Plekhanov as its leading figure. In 1889 Plekhanov paid a special visit to London to see Engels and to seek his advice on the new developments in Russia. At the inaugural congress of the Second International in 1889 Plekhanov made his famous pronouncement that the revolutionary movement in Russia could triumph only as a revolutionary movement of the working class. "There is not, nor can there be, any other way." Even to the Liberal bourgeoisie in Russia, stifled economically and politically by Tsarism, Marxism came as a revelation. They could see Marx's analysis of Capitalism being enacted before their very eyes. But these gentlemen no sooner touched Marxism than, as is their way, they expelled from it all that was revolutionary and made it "legal"; the backward workers of Russia should confine themselves to economic struggle, and in politics support the Liberal bourgeoisie. This was the theoretical origin of the First Russian variant of Revisionism-Economism. Between 1890 and 1900 Capitalism in Russia developed at a furious rate. The production of pig iron increased by 220 per cent, iron ore by 272 per cent, oil by 179 per cent. The organisation of industry, being new, was on the largest modern scale giving the workers, though proportionately few, enormous power in action. The number of workers in industry was 1,424,000 in 1890. It was 2,098,000 in 1897. There were 17,000 on strike in 1894, 48,000 in 1895, 67,000 in 1896, 102,000 in 1897, 87,000 in 1898, 130,000 in 1899. In this period of Capitalist expansion the workers could win concessions, for it paid the employers to maintain production. But in 1900 the European crisis struck Russia. The decline in production threw the whole of Russian economy into disorder, the increase of unemployed killed the strike movement. Both workmen and the Liberal bourgeoisie were brought sharply up against the burden that the country carried in the mediaeval Tsarist Government. In 1900, 1901 and 1902 the influence of Economism declined, the students began to take to the streets in political demonstrations, and the striking workers joined them. In November, 1902, at Rostov-on-Don a great economic strike ended as a political strike, and for days the organised workers called for the revolutionary overthrow of the Government. In the middle of 1903 in Baku, Tiflis, Odessa, all the towns of the Ukraine and Trans-Caucasia, a quarter of a million workers took part in political strikes which again demanded the revolutionary overthrow of the Government. Even the bourgeois intellectuals could see the coming revolution.
Lenin was a genius, but it was this environment which enabled him to read Marxism and accept it so thoroughly that he could apply its principles to Russia and the rest of the world with the confidence and sureness which made him the greatest political leader in history. Social Democratic propaganda groups sprang up in the large towns, at first small circles, then reaching out to make contact with the masses. In 1900 some of them coalesced, and sent Lenin abroad to found a paper.
By 1903 his ideas were already clear. The revolution was inevitable. The masses would be inexorably driven to take the solution of Russia's problems into their own hands. But in the modern world the successful accomplishment of the revolution was essentially the work of an organisation, a revolutionary political party which would lead the masses. He distinguished three stages in the perspective–the first when insurrection was a theoretical objective, the second when the political party organised the insurrection, and the third when the party issued the call for insurrection. Each of these merged into the other, and their demarcation would depend on historical factors, some of which could be foretold, others recognised, proclaimed and acted upon. It was the party which would do these things. "Give us an organisation of revolutionaries and we will overturn Russia." This was, and remains, his greatest contribution to the practice of Marxism. The party's first duty was to give theoretical direction, to clarify. "No revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice." Only that party could lead the revolution which was guided by an advanced political theory-Marxism; and for Lenin Marxism embraced every phase of human thought. The ideas of any epoch were the ideas of its ruling class, dominated always by the conception that the existing form of society was permanent. If the revolutionary party did not propagate its own ideas, scientific Socialism, the Marxist interpretation not only of politics but of society, then the ideas of the ruling classes, directed to the maintenance of the existing system, would continue to corrupt the minds of the masses and weaken their will to struggle. Bourgeois ideology was with him no hysterical term of abuse, but a definite obstacle in the way of the revolution, to be hacked away from the working-class movement wherever it appeared. The idea of workers putting faith in the bourgeois conception of a League of Nations would have been intolerable to him.
By means of an all-Russian newspaper the party could do more than spread its Marxist analysis of politics and society and give general directions. The very work of disseminating such a paper over the huge country would keep the various members of the party in close touch with the centre, and build up a skeleton organisation in preparation for the revolutionary mass movement. For him the first aim of the masses was to seize the State-power. Between 1900 and 1903 therefore he waged ceaseless war against the Economists. But although the day-to-day economic struggle was always waged with a view to the ultimate political objective, yet the members of his party dug themselves deep into the workers' movements, pointing out the political implications of the struggle between capital and labour but fighting with the workers for their immediate demands. Lenin spent two years writing a philosophical work against a philosophical deviation from Marxism, but his party was always rooted in the masses, speaking to them in their own language about the things they could understand.
The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party met in London in 1903. Chiefly owing to Lenin's paper and the intensification of the class-struggle following the crisis, Economism seemed defeated. The majority of the class-conscious workers in Russia were supporters of Lenin's revolutionary wing. Neither Lenin nor any other member of the party had any idea of a split. Yet it came over a matter comparatively simple but which by degrees was seen to be what it really was, another variant within the Russian Labour movement of the opposing tendencies which we have seen at work in Western Europe. Lenin wanted a rigid narrow organisation, with a highly centralised discipline. Far better to lose ten absolutely firstclass revolutionaries, rather than allow one chatterbox in. He wanted a strict division of labour inside the party, each member being responsible for a job of work with which he mainly concerned himself. The regulation of the party, he demanded, should be equally harsh. Under the regime of Tsarism formal democracy was impossible. He advocated democratic centralism. The Central Committee should be freely elected, whenever possible there would be free discussions, but once a decision had been taken it would have to be obeyed blindly. This meant long periods when the Central Committee living abroad would have to take decisions which party members in Russia would have to obey without question. Lenin himself could hardly have been conscious of all that these plans implied; otherwise he would not have been so shocked and grieved at the opposition he met with. [4] But he would not give way, and won by a narrow margin. Thenceforward his group was known as the Bolsheviks (the majority) and the others the Mensheviks (the minority). Trotsky, a young but even then a very brilliant member of the party, went with the minority on this question of organisation. He has since admitted that he was wrong; too generously, for the question is not so simple. The leaders of the Second International, even the revolutionary internationalists, were divided on Lenin's democratic centralism which had split the Russian section. Rosa Luxemburg was against Lenin. It is only on reading the old disputes in the light of to-day that we see the complex gravity of the issues involved. Few in Lenin's party understood them. Stalin and the Stalinists do not understand them to this day.
Lenin saw the party as a small cog putting the great body of the workers into motion. Hence his insistence on the quality of the party.
"The stronger our party organisations, made up of genuine social democrats, and the less the waverings and instability within the party, the broader and more varied, the richer and more fertile will be the influence of the party on the working-class masses who environ it and whom it leads." [5]
Trotsky, believing in a much broader organisation, attacked Lenin with extreme bitterness and sarcasm:
"In order to prepare the working-class for political power, it is necessary to develop and exercise in it the spirit of initiative and the habit of constant and active control over the entire executive personnel of the revolution. This is the great political task pursued by the international social democracy. But for the 'Social Democratic Jacobins,' [6]
for the fearless representatives of the system of organisational substitutionalism, the preparation of the class for the government of the country, is supplanted by an organisational technical task, preparation of the apparatus of power. ...
"The first task sees its main problem in the methods of political education and re-education of the entire, constantly increasing proletariat by the means of drawing them into active political work. The second task reduces everything to the technical selection of disciplined executives into the links of the 'strong and authoritative organisation,' a selection which, for the sake of reducing the work cannot but be carried on by the mechanical elimination of those considered to be unfit: by 'derivations' and 'deprivations' of rights."
Lenin had answered this objection in advance: No political party could educate the whole working class.
"We must not confuse the Party as the vanguard of the working class with the whole class. ...
"We are the Party of a class, and therefore almost the whole class (and in 'time of war' or civil war, absolutely the whole class) must act under the leadership of our Party and must be associated with our Party as intimately as possible. But it would be sheer Manilovism, sheer Khvotism, [7]
to think that the whole class, or nearly the whole class, can ever under Capitalism attain to the level of class consciousness and activity of its vanguard, its Social Democratic Party."
There can to-day be no argument about the differing points of view. Trotsky was wrong. Yet from this false approach the specific criticisms which he levelled against Lenin's principles as they worked out in practice cannot be dismissed, least of all to-day. He painted a picture of party life since Lenin's insistent advocacy of centralism. "During the last three to four years of intense party frictions, the life of very many committees has consisted of a
series of coups d'etat in the spirit of our court revolutions of the eighteenth century. Somewhere way up on top somebody is incarcerating, replacing, choking somebody else, somebody proclaims himself something–and as a result, the top of the committee house is adorned by a flag with the inscription, 'Orthodoxy, centralism, political struggle.' " He accused the central apparatus itself of starting a new discussion every month, "the apparatus supplies the topic for it, feeds it by false materials, draws its summary, dispenses justice, postpones congress for a year, and is now preparing a congress from among its own apparatus workers previously appointed, who are to authoritate the people on top to continue this work in the future as well."
Even to-day after forty years of political life, Trotsky's fundamental intellectual integrity remains unshaken. These charges must have had solid foundation. Between " 1903 and 1923 the Bolshevik Party did all that a political party could do. Yet it cannot be accidental that the history of the Russian Communist Party and of the whole Communist International from the moment Lenin lay hopelessly ill, up to the unanimous vote on the "final and irrevocable victory" in 1935, iS but a series of gigantic variations on Trotsky's reasons for refusing to accept Lenin's methods of organisation. For fourteen years he fought Lenin on this question. For him Lenin's democratic centralism meant that "the organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party, the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation, and finally the dictator substitutes himself for the Central Committee." It was "the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the dictatorship over the proletariat, of the political rule of the class by the organisational rule over the class." While Plekhanov [8] wrote some equally memorable and Prophetic words: "The ultimate end of all this will be that everything will revolve around a single man who, ex providentia, will concentrate all the power in himself."
There is more in this than simple wrong and right. No Proletarian revolution can succeed without a revolutionary party of the proletariat. No party can succeed without a strong centralised discipline, an International without centralism is no International at all. But centralism is a dangerous tool for a party which aims at Socialism, and can ruin as well as build. Lenin was a man big enough to forge this weapon fearlessly, use it to the utmost limit and yet realise its limits. He was a dialectician and knew that democratic centralism was very near to democracy at one time and equally near to pure centralism at another. Yet it would be idle to deny that all through his association with the party he dominated it. But he was utterly selfless and devoted, and, lucky in the fact of his unquestioned superiority, at the height of his power he used party discipline for the party, never for himself. He remained always subject to it, prepared at critical times in 1917 to offer his resignation rather than seek to manipulate the party. Yet despite his authority he was more than once the prisoner of the conceptions he had so rigidly instilled. The dangerous centralism of the Soviet regime in Russia was the constant preoccupation of his last years. He could not have been unaware that he had himself contributed to this by countenancing the usurpation of the power of the masses in their Soviets. He had hoped that until the revolution in Western Europe relieved Russia, the party, always the advance guard, would act in defence of the masses against the bureaucracy, mobilise the masses against it. But it was only during his last illness that he saw clearly what was coming, what had already come in the party, that abuse of democratic centralism which Trotsky had always feared in any system which, like Lenin's, so openly glorified central control. From his sick-bed he fought it with a feverish intensity. He failed, and with the development of the bureaucracy the democracy dropped completely out of centralism. From the Russian party it spread to the whole International. Centralism which helped to create the International helped to ruin it.
There is no specific for this problem. It will have to be fought out anew in each party as every emergency presents itself. But that can best be done only when there is a clear understanding of the issues involved. It is perhaps the greatest of the many bows that the revolutionary Ulysses will have to bend.
Unconsciously the two groups had been fighting the first decisive engagement in a battle of far-reaching significance, over no less a question than whether international Socialism was to be kept alive in Europe elsewhere than in the studies of a few devotees. Engels had not been dead ten years.
That Lenin and the Bolsheviks won was due chiefly to the Tsarist regime in Russia. Liberal thought kept in contact with the Labour movement through the Menshevik party, seeking to turn the workers from revolution to Liberalism. But Tsarism kept so tight a grip on the nation, allowed so little scope for parliamentary maneuvering, that not even the Liberals, far less the opportunist leaders of the Labour movement, could ever identify themselves with the Russian Government. The Russian petty-bourgeois Socialists had no parliamentary prospects because there was no parliament. Trade Unions were prohibited by law and allowed only on sufferance. An office in a Trade Union was a post of danger, not of security. Yet Menshevism proved itself inside two years to be incontestably another form of Revisionism. All sorts of cross-currents, personal and otherwise, had played their part in the dispute of 1903, and continued to do so during the years that followed. But at every serious crisis the masses of the workers followed the Bolsheviks in action, while in ordinary times they could not see the differences between the two groups and were bewildered and discouraged by the bitterness of the factional struggle. Yet it was in the intervals between political crises that Lenin had to fight hardest, keeping the Bolsheviks ideologically clear and organisationally firm against all forms of corruption, open or insidious. Never was any victory of world-historical importance won so much by a single man as was this victory by Lenin. It is the intrigue, corruption and stupidity of fellow-workers in the cause which destroys revolutionary will, and not the repression of the bourgeoisie. Lenin, one of the strongest of men, nearly gave up in 1904, and contemplated going to America to study statistics. The fit of discouragement passed and he remained. [9]
In the second week of the following year, on January 9, Tsarism in defence of law and order shot down thousands of petitioners going to lay their grievances before their ruler. The great masses learnt from Tsarist bullets what the revolutionaries had been preaching for years. The whole Social Democratic Party recognised that the insurrection, the first stage of the revolution, was on the order of the day, but when Lenin, for the Bolsheviks, issued the call for the organisational preparation and the arming of the people, the Menshevik leaders accused him of adventurism, of trying to overthrow the Government by conspiracy, of Blanquism. Did they admit that the revolution was on the way? They did. What then was to be done? Why not call upon the workers to prepare? No. Instead Martinov, one of their leaders, said that the revolution should be "unleashed" not "organised," that instead of seeking to arm the workers, they should be filled with "a burning desire" to arm. Behind these differences in phrasing were different conceptions of the coming revolution which would make all the difference between a possible success and a certain failure. Like their brothers of the Second International to-day, the Mensheviks trembled at the prospect of the armed workers.
In the middle of 1905, under the influence of the coming revolution, the groups held separate conferences, and with the Menshevik resolutions before him Lenin realised clearly for the first time that there was more between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks than the organisational question. "Theoretical differences have grown." The Mensheviks had watered down the whole revolutionary analysis of the insurrection "lest the bourgeoisie desert." Whatever their internationalism in phrase the Mensheviks were looking to their own bourgeoisie for help in the revolution. Lenin was looking to the Russian proletariat and beyond them to the proletarian revolution in Europe. It is this belief in the international proletariat which so sharply distinguished Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, from other leaders of the working-class movement. That is the eternal struggle in the Labour movement, in 1905 against Tsarism, in 1914, in 1935 on behalf of Abyssinia, in 1936 on behalf of Spanish workers and peasants, either to be with and therefore subordinate to your own bourgeoisie, or to be with the international proletariat. It is a struggle which will go on until international Socialism is achieved. Men like Citrine, Bevin and Leon Blum have a contempt for the proletarian movement far greater than many capitalists have. And Stalin has joined them. Stalin to-day is the complete Menshevik, seeking to save Soviet Russia with the help of the French, British and Czechoslovakian bourgeoisie. Trotsky maintains the Leninist position. The new ideological conflict is only another variant of the old.
In those early days of the 1905 revolution there were three views of the coming upheaval, the Bolshevik view of Lenin (for those close to Lenin no views apart from his own or if they had soon dropped them), the Menshevik view, and Trotsky's theory of the Permanent Revolution.
It was in the shock of the first events of the revolution that Trotsky produced his theory. It was opposed in essentials by Lenin, adopted by him in April, 1917, at a most critical moment in the history of the third revolution, and formed the theoretical foundation of the Soviet Union and the Third International until a few months after the death of Lenin in 1924. Both Lenin and Trotsky, like Marx and Engels in their instructions to the German revolutionaries of 1850, based their analysis on a scrupulous examination of the Russian problem in its relation to the International Socialist revolution.
Peasant Russia in 1905 was a country with some hundred million peasants in the countryside, living under semi-feudal conditions. The great landlords who dominated the countryside formed the natural support of the reactionary Tsarist autocracy. In France in 1789 the peasant revolt was successful because the bourgeoisie was also hostile to the existing regime. The French bourgeoisie using (however reluctantly) the leverage of the peasantry to destroy feudalism and create the conditions for the expansion of Capitalist production, give the classical example of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Such a revolution seemed to be facing Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the Russia of 1905 was vastly dissimilar to the France of 1789. The more to the East they are, the more treacherous and cowardly are the bourgeoisie. This is a famous Marxist aphorism. With the discovery of America the bourgeoisie of the sea-board countries of Europe so dominated the economy of the State that they were the natural leaders of peasants and people against feudal reaction. In Russia, however, owing to the Tartar invasions which cut off the Eastern trade and ruined the industrial towns, and on the other hand to the long start of Western European industry whose goods flooded Russia and impeded native production, the bourgeoisie remained always helpless before Tsarism. Just as Spanish feudalism used the gold of America to strengthen its position against the Spanish bourgeoisie and ruin the future of the country, so Russian autocracy was able to use the means of repression developed in Western Europe, and later, Western capital, in order to retain its position and thus retard the industrial development of Russia. For the big bourgeoisie of Western Europe, while prating of democracy, quite shamelessly supported Tsarism against the bourgeoisie and lent it money, because State loans were more dependable in their short-sighted view than any other. To this age-old historical weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie was added the rapid development of the Labour movement in the last years of the nineteenth century, so that whereas the peasantry of France and the masses in Paris and the other big towns of France marched against feudalism full of confidence in their ·bourgeoisie, and could always find some section of the bourgeoisie to lead them when one section deserted, the industrial workers in the Russian towns long before the revolution were already in bitter conflict with their own bourgeoisie, the insoluble conflict of capital and labour.
Lenin, therefore, saw that the Russian bourgeoisie might talk of overthrowing Tsarism (as Liberals will talk of overthrowing Fascism). But as soon as the Liberals saw the workmen in the streets they would see not only the enemies of Tsarism, but their own enemies, and would of necessity rush to compromise with the reaction. Neither could they lead the peasantry. For the bourgeoisie in Russia Here dependent, as the industrial bourgeoisie everywhere, upon the banks to which the landlords were heavily indebted. The bourgeoisie could not give the peasants the land without ruining the bourgeois banks. The proletariat therefore would have to lead the peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie against Tsarism, and accomplish the bourgeois revolution over the heads of the bourgeoisie. Hence the Bolshevik slogans–the eight-hour working day for the proletariat, the confiscation of land for the peasants, and the democratic republic.
This plan of linking the proletarian revolution with the agrarian was, as with so much in the history of the Russian Revolution, Lenin's own; and as with so many of Lenin's ideas, he was developing a thought of Marx during the revolutionary period of 1848-1850, when he suggested that the task in Germany was to link the struggle of the German proletariat with the desire of the serfs to free themselves. In all this Trotsky followed Lenin.
The question on which they split was: what form would the State-power take which would carry through this revolution, and what would happen afterwards? All revolutionaries, indeed all students of history except Social Democrats, know that the transition from one social regime to another is made by a stern dictatorship, which violently destroys the basis of the old order and clears the way for the new. Cromwell's dictatorship had been a dictatorship of the petty-bourgeoisie; Robespierre's dictatorship had been the same. Marx had therefore labelled the dictatorship which would accomplish the transition from Capitalism to Socialism the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But for Lenin, as for Trotsky and all the great European Socialists of the time, Socialism for backward Russia was an absurdity. The proletariat could lead the nation against Tsarism and destroy it. But in Russia, overwhelmingly an agrarian country, the productive forces were too backward, the proletariat, the new class which would create Socialism, was too weak in relation to the rest of the country to begin the task of transforming Russian Capitalist society into Socialist with any real prospect of success. Therefore, for Lenin, the dictatorship of the proletariat in the familiar Marxian sense was out of the question. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a Government that would destroy the bourgeois State and maintain power until the abolition of every vestige of Capitalism. But the Russian proletariat had to abolish feudalism and institute a democratic republic. The dictatorship he foresaw was, therefore, a democratic dictatorship. But though the proletariat was to lead, the driving force of the revolution was to come from the peasantry, and the proletariat would have to share the political power with a party representing the peasantry. Hence his final formula of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. The relationship between proletarian party and peasant party in this revolutionary Government he did not know, and according to the period at which he was writing he gave a different content to the formula. The Social Revolutionaries, the party which worked among the peasantry and claimed to represent its interests, were an unknown factor. He at one time even considered that it might have such support from the peasantry as would enable it to dominate the proletarian party. Lenin did not know. The most cautious of men, he put forward his formula and observed events to see how things would work out in practice. Whatever form this revolutionary Government took, its work was to give the land to the peasants, clear away Tsarism, crush the reaction, and call a constituent assembly to elect a democratic parliament. He knew the elementary truth, that the nature of the constituent assembly and the coming democratic constitution of Russia depended on the class nature of the revolutionary dictatorship which summoned the assembly and laid down the conditions of election and suffrage. His intention was to drive the democratic constitution as far forward as possible.
His further perspective was a great development of Russian Capitalism under a democratic Russia. [10] It was the revolutionary proletariat of Russia leading the peasantry that would give the craven Liberal bourgeoisie its chance at last. In this republic the proletarian party would for a period occupy the same position that the Communist parties in Western Europe to-day occupied up to 1935, fighting for the Socialist revolution. But the revolution did not end there. The peasantry as a whole would have supported the revolution at the beginning, but as the revolution drove forward, the peasants would detach themselves and join with the reaction. The democratic revolution, left to itself, would then most certainly be defeated. Lenin was as clear on this as he was on any point. [11] But the proletariat and the poorer peasantry in Russia had an ally–the proletariat of Europe. He calculated that the first few years of a revolution in Russia led by the proletariat would unloose tremendous upheavals in the shaky structure of European Capitalism. He counted on a Socialist revolution in Western Europe, and stated over and over again that, unless there were such revolution even the democratic republic of Russia would collapse. With Socialist revolutions in Europe, however, the Russian proletariat, further strengthened by the Capitalist development in Russia, would be able to achieve the second revolution in Russia–the Russian Socialist revolution. This would institute the dictatorship of the proletariat and set out on the building of Socialism.
Up to 1904 Trotsky had a similar perspective. Then in 1905 he changed and waged irreconcilable polemic with the Bolsheviks against Lenin's formula of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, leading to a bourgeois regime. According to Trotsky's new theory the Russian proletariat would lead the revolution from the start, but the revolutionary Government would result in the dictatorship of the proletariat and the road to Socialism, or it would collapse. The peasants could not form an effective political party of their own. The moment the proletariat held the power, the proletarian Government would be faced with the opposition of the capitalists. These would immediately decide upon the lock-out because, there being no Socialism, their property was still capitalist property. The proletarian Government, faced with unemployment and the disorganisation of economy, would have no alternative but to take over the factories and run them themselves for the benefit of the workers. This was the Socialist road, and once begun the process could not stop. The proletariat would have to hold the power. The peasantry would support the revolution until the confiscation of the land. But after that, every socialistic step that the proletariat would be compelled to take would send the richer peasantry into the arms of the reaction, so that these allies of the proletariat to-day would be its enemies of to-morrow. So backward Russia was ready for Socialism! Both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks derided him. No. He saw the salvation of the premature dictatorship of the Russian proletariat in the Socialist revolution in Europe, which would place the State-power in the hands of the proletariat of one or more of the advanced countries such as Germany, England or France. Like Lenin, his analysis of European Capitalism led him to the belief that the revolution in Russia would serve as a detonator for the revolution in Western Europe. Without that revolution the Russian proletariat was doomed and the reaction would conquer. He did not ask for the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be raised forthwith. The struggle would begin as a struggle for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, but the logic of the situation in Russia would lead inevitably to the proletariat establishing its own dictatorship and beginning the Socialist reconstruction of Russian economy. So that the revolution was permanent in three ways. First, in the way that what was apparently a revolution for the rights of bourgeois democracy would grow inevitably into the dictatorship of the proletariat. Secondly, the way in which the dictatorship of the proletariat would be compelled to begin the long transformation of Russian Capitalism into Socialism. Thirdly, the way in which the Russian revolution would lead to proletarian revolution in Europe and the permanent economic revolution in Capitalist society. We shall understand and appreciate the range and profundity of these analyses when we remember that for both this was a perspective covering decades. The Russian Revolution would last years.
The Mensheviks produced a special theory of their own. Marx had said that a new social order appeared only when the old is exhausted. Obviously Capitalism in Russia still had a large capacity for expansion. Therefore they agreed with Lenin that the revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and agreed with him and Trotsky that Russia was not ripe for Socialism. But like the Russian bourgeoisie they saw Russian Capitalism in isolation. They would not see what Marx and Engels had always seen, that Capitalist production was international and therefore was always to be teen as a whole. For these nationalists, therefore, the only ally of the Russian proletariat was the Russian bourgeoisie. Nothing was to be done to frighten it. The workers were not to arm themselves too soon. Instead they should be stimulated with "burning desire." The revolution would be "spontaneously" accomplished somehow. The Social Democratic Party was to take no part in the provisional revolutionary government–this was to be left to the bourgeoisie. The workers party would supply vigilant criticism. Thus, even when hounded down by tyranny, imprisoned; tortured and executed, driven by the knout of Tsarism to admit the necessity of revolution, with the workers of their own accord challenging the Government in the streets, the Mensheviks, first in theory and afterwards, as we shall see, in practice, had no perspective beyond supporting the Liberal bourgeoisie. They would "urge" the Liberals, they would "bring pressure to bear" on them.
After 1903, as soon as Trotsky realised where the Mensheviks were tending, he disentangled himself from them. But separated from Lenin first by the organisational question and then by his opposition to Lenin's democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the party, he remained outside both groups. It was one of the fundamental weaknesses of Trotsky as a revolutionary leader that he could produce this masterly theory of the Permanent Revolution, driving ahead so far beyond Lenin, and yet at the same time advocated organisational fusion with the Mensheviks.
Lenin was consumed with rage at the programme which the Mensheviks put before the revolutionary workers. "The revolutionary mood of the proletariat is growing daily and hourly. At such a moment Martinov's views are not only absurd, they are criminal." He proposed that more workers should be brought into the local committees which controlled various sections of the movement. In 1903 his rigid restriction of the party membership was aimed at keeping out the bourgeois intellectuals. Now in 1905 he closed the net against them still tighter. They did not understand discipline, and he knew that the Menshevik ideas which would assuredly lead the revolution to ruinous defeat came from above–from the Liberal bourgeoisie.
So often to many even of his closest followers did Lenin's ideas at their first utterance seem the product of a disordered brain, so logically on the other hand did they follow from his Marxist outlook, that it is imperative and convenient here to give some example of how he thought. Without this his theorising about Russian revolution and world revolution (and Trotsky's theory of the Permanent Revolution) must seem to be mere raving. A quite casual article, written in 1908 after the failure of the 1905 revolution, will show us how different from those of the bourgeois and the Second Internationalists was his view of politics. He entitles his article "Inflammable Material in World Politics," [12] but he is really writing about the second Russian Revolution which for him is "inevitable."
"The revolutionary movement in the various states of Europe and Asia has manifested itself so formidably of late that we can discern quite clearly the outlines of a new and incomparably higher stage in the international struggle of the proletariat."
He begins with Persia. It is nothing unexpected that the Tsar had helped the barbarous rulers of Persia to crush a revolution, but he notes as a phenomenon that the Liberal English bourgeois, irritated by the growth of the Labour movement at home, and frightened by the rise of the revolutionary struggle in India, are more and more frequently revealing how brutal the most civilised European "statesmen can be in defence of Capitalism. In Turkey the young Turk movement has won only half a victory, but such a half-victory involving concessions given by the old Government under pressure are the direct pledges of new, far more decisive, and acute vicissitudes of civil war, involving broader masses of the people. Civil war includes "inevitably" the victories of the counter-revolution with its debaucheries of enraged reactionaries, and savage punishments meted out by old Governments to rebels. But only down-right pedants and decrepit mummies can grieve over the fact that the nations have entered the painful school of revolution in which the oppressed learn how to conduct a victorious civil war.
There is no end to the violence and plunder which is called British rule in India. Lenin details the oppression and the tyranny, but notes that the Indian masses are beginning to come out into the streets in defence of their native writers and political leaders. "The Indian proletariat too has already matured sufficiently to wage a class conscious and political mass-struggle–and that being the case Anglo-Russian methods in India are played out." Further plunder and terrorism will only harden millions and tens of millions of proletarians in Asia. "The class conscious workers of europe now have Asiatic comrades and their number will grow by leaps and bounds." There is little information from China, but the transformation of the old Chinese riots into a conscious democratic movement is inevitable. In France, and even in America and England "where there is complete political liberty," and revolutionary and Socialist traditions are lacking, the growth of Socialism and the independent proletarian struggle are plainly visible. [13] "Two hostile camps are slowly but surely increasing their forces, are strengthening their organisations and are separating with increasing sharpness in all fields of public life, as if silently and intently preparing for the impending revolutionary battles." In France and Italy the conflict has reached sudden outbursts of civil war. The international revolutionary movement of the proletariat does not proceed and cannot proceed evenly and in the same form in different countries. The thorough and all-sided utilisation of all possibilities in all spheres of activity comes only as a result of the class-struggle of the workers of various countries. Every individual country has its own weaknesses, theoretical or practical; every country has its own distinctive traits to contribute. But international Socialism has made an enormous stride forward, and in a number of concrete encounters the millions of proletarians are welding themselves together for the decisive struggle against the bourgeoisie–a struggle for which the working-class is immeasurably better prepared than at the time of the Paris Commune, the last great struggle of the proletariat.
It is in relation to this background that he places the "inevitable" second Russian revolution. This "stride forward by the whole of international Socialism together with the sharpening of the revolutionary democratic struggle in Asia, places the Russian revolution in a peculiar and particularly difficult position." The Russian revolution possesses a great international ally both in Europe and in Asia, but "just because of this" it possesses "not only a national, not only a Russian, but also an international enemy." Reaction against the growing struggle of the proletariat is inevitable in all Capitalist countries, and this reaction unites bourgeois governments of the whole world against any revolution, in Asia and especially in Europe. The opportunists, the Mensheviks, like the Russian intelligentsia, were dreaming of a revolution which would not "scare" the bourgeoisie. "Vain hopes! A philistine Utopia!" Inflammable material is accumulating in the progressive countries, and awakening so rapidly the countries in Asia which yesterday were fast asleep, that the struggle of inter national bourgeois reaction against each individual national revolution is absolutely inevitable. The Russian proletariat must therefore follow its own path independently and assist the peasantry to destroy feudal reaction; "it must set itself the task of establishing the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry in Russia and bear in mind that its struggle and its victories are indissolubly bound up with the international revolutionary movement. Fewer illusions concerning the liberalism of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie (in Russia and the entire world); more attention to the growth of the inter-national revolutionary proletariat!"
That was Lenin. He saw society internationally, not nationally; horizontally, not vertically. In the unruffled , confidence of this luminous survey we see into the basic structure of his thought. He could no more wrench the Russian Revolution (or for that matter any other revolution) from its international background than he could wrench the heart out of his body. "Fewer illusions concerning the liberation of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie (in Russia and the entire world); more attention to the growth of the international revolutionary proletariat." Who but Lenin, Trotsky and a few others were thinking of the international proletariat as a force in 1908? The war accelerated, it did not create. The international proletariat, despite Fascist victories over so many countries in Europe, is still a powerful force to-day; it could have been used on behalf of Abyssinia, on behalf of Spain, if the will and the means existed to set it in motion. Lenin would have made a pact with France, but never at the cost of the french proletariat. Stalin, his successor, has been congenitally unable to think in this way. Whenever faced with a choice between proletariat and bourgeoisie, he and the bureaucracy whom he represents have always chosen the bourgeoisie, and always paid heavily for that choice.
The 1905 Revolution failed. But the whole course of the revolution served only to strengthen Lenin's belief in his ideas. A general strike in 1903 had indicated that this was the initial form the revolution would take. The October strike of 1905 began in Moscow, and in a few days had stopped the whole life of the country. Trotsky and one of his collaborators in the theory of the Permanent Revolution took over a small paper, the Russian Gazette. In a few days the circulation went from 30,000 to 100,000. Inside a month it was at half a million. To Witte, the Tsarist bureaucrat, the whole people seemed to have gone mad. For Lenin, 1905 was only another proof of the terrific driving power and creative capacity of the masses during a revolution. On the initiative of the Mensheviks the workers formed their Soviets or factory councils, one delegate to every five hundred workers, and Trotsky, the acknowledged leader of 1905, as far as there was one, in time became president of the Petersburg Soviet. Lenin reached Russia late, and as always without him his party blundered. The workers, irrespective of party, rushed to join and support the Soviets. But the Bolshevik leaders, misunderstanding Lenin's insistence on the organisational integrity of the party, wanted to keep the Bolsheviks away from the Soviet as a non-party organisation. It was only after Lenin arrived that the Bolsheviks entered these mass organisations of the workers to influence them. In the onward sweep of the revolution Bolshevik and Menshevik workers insisted that the two fractions should work together. The Menshevik leaders exercised little influence, and Trotsky's policy at the Soviet coincided so closely with Lenin's that the two groups for a time worked harmoniously. When Tsarism, in an attempt to split the anti-Tsarist [14] forces, offered a travesty of a constitution, it was at once gladly accepted by the Liberals. The Mensheviks were ready to trot docile]y behind, but the masses of the workers followed the Bolsheviks always. With the defeat of the revolution, however, and the decline of the movement the differences again became acute. At a unity congress in 1907 the Mensheviks had a majority of sixty-two to forty-nine. They raised the cry that the revolt should not have taken place. Lenin ordered a change of tactics from the organisation of revolution to ordinary hum-drum everyday constitutional activity. But he poured scorn on the impertinent thesis that the great mass uprising of the Russian people against Tsarism "should not have taken place."
In the international field the revolution showed that the analyses of both Lenin and Trotsky were fundamentally correct. The Russian Revolution, failure though it was, stirred the sleepy Second International; it gave universal suffrage to Austria; it was felt in the Liberal elections of 1906. In those days when revolution at home was, in their opinion, impossible, the Second Internationalists had no objection to revolutions elsewhere. Even Ramsay MacDonald was pro-Bolshevik in those days, and insisted that some money for the Russian revolutionaries should be used for active revolution and not for propaganda.[15]
Confident of a second uprising, Lenin called for and set the example of a close study of the revolution to see why it failed, in order to guarantee success next time. The period of the reaction saw a great development of Russian capitalism, and the strengthening of the liberal bourgeoisie. Their influence on the Mensheviks increased. They subsidised the Menshevik papers. A large body of Mensheviks, the Liquidators, sought to liquidate the illegal organisation and the preparation for a new revolution in Russia. They were expelled from the party. Trotsky, still outside both groups, fought for unity, making his last attempt in August, 1912. But Lenin, though anxious for unity, was adamant on his principles, and this time the split was final. The movement began to rise again in 1912, and with its rise it was clear that the majority of the Petersburg workers were following the Bolsheviks. Despite his untiring abuse of Trotsky for seeking unity, Lenin always knew the calibre of the man, and as the movement rose again asked him to write for his paper. Trotsky refused. He edited a paper of his own, and in addition to polemics with Lenin made one important contribution to Marxist theory. In his studies of economics, he discovered that after the failure of a revolution and the demoralisation of the masses, a period of prosperity was needed to strengthen the masses and make them take up the struggle again. As prosperity increased, the masses on the basis of increased wages, successful strikes, etc., grew stronger and more militant. Another economic crisis would then precipitate the new revolution. The theory was to prove its value in the post-war years.
The revolutionary movement gathered strength. In July, 1914, there were barricades in Petersburg. The war dammed the revolution for a time, only to give it greater ,force three years later. August, 1914, found Bolsheviks and Mensheviks still split, each section claiming to represent the Russian Social Democracy at the Second International. The Bolsheviks had kept alive the theories and practice of Marxism. Thus it happened that when they were needed the European Labour movement did not have to search painfully for them.
[1] As late as 1926 Bernard Shaw was preaching them in his Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism.
[2] Despite all the revolutionary trimmings the Popular Front is nothing more.
[3] The Social Democrats of to-day do not believe that. But it is highly probable that most of them did before 1914.
[4] Krupskaya says that the break then and afterwards with old friends severely shook his health.
[5] Half the secret of a revolutionary party is wrapped in those words. Not only the layman but many so-called revolutionaries cannot understand that mere size is not and never has been decisive.
[6] A name flung at Lenin in controversy, which he thankfully accepted.
[7] Tailing behind.
[8] He sided with Lenin at first, then left him.
[9] Souvarine, Stalin's French biographer, says categorically: No Lenin, no Bolshevism. The writer subscribes entirely to that dictum. Those who would oppose this designedly sharp formulation have to produce some evidence in contemporary leaders of Lenin's peculiar quality–that combination of theory and organisation which was Bolshevism. It has not been seen on any scale in Europe since.
[10] See for example his Two Tactics, which contains a dozen references to this future Capitalist development of Russia after the revolution.
[11] See p. 64.
[12] P. 297. Selected Works, Vol. iv, Martin Lawrence.
[13] The great strikes that preceded the War were still to come.
[14] To-day read "anti-Fascist."
[15]
Lenin on Britain, Martin Lawrence, p. 109.