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In the November issue of the International Socialist Review an article appeared by Doug Jenness, an editor of the Militant, entitled "How Lenin Saw the Russian Revolution." This article attempted to trace the development of Lenin's views on the problems of revolutionary strategy in Russia from the 1905 revolution through the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the early years of the Soviet state. The article is quite strange in a number of respects. Many of Lenin's principal contributions to the Bolshevik victory in Russia are passed over in silence or with cursory mention. This includes Lenin's concept of the democratically centralized combat workers party, traditionally believed by Marxists to be his single most important contribution to communist strategy; his use of the tactic of "revolutionary defeatism" in wartime; his attitude toward the building of a multinational party in the tsarist "prison house of nations"; his electoral tactics in relation to bourgeois opposition parties such as the Cadets; his views on the relationship between dictatorship and democracy; and his stress on the need for a world party of socialist revolution as an essential framework for the activity of national sections.
One glaring omission from the article is any mention of the positions developed in Lenin's famous State and Revolution for the construction of the new Soviet state along the lines of the Paris Commune, with the working class having from the outset control over its representatives and state officials. Parallel to this, no mention is made of Lenin's last desperate battle to halt the rise of the Stalinist privileged caste within the victorious revolution, and his co-founding with Leon Trotsky of the organized opposition to the growing bureaucracy within the Communist Party, which marked the origin of the movement today known as "Trotskyism." In fact, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union is not referred to at all and one has to be familiar with other writings by Doug Jenness to be certain that he does not think the present Soviet leadership represents a continuity of Lenin's policies.
This silence would be strange enough from a leader of the Trotskyist movement if Jenness limited his discussion of the Russian Revolution to Lenin's lifetime; but he does not do so. He offers an assessment of the legacy of Lenin and the October revolution in the present Soviet state:.,
"It is precisely because of this change in the relationship of forces made possible by the Russian people that imperialism has not been able to crush the Chinese, Cuban, and Indochinese revolutions, which at crucial moments have received military and economic aid from the Soviet workers' state."
This statement is half true, and as Lenin was fond of saying what is half true is basically false. It is true that the planned economy of the Soviet Union — and not only of the Soviet Union, but also of China and of the other bureaucratically deformed workers' states — adds weight to the worldwide anti-capitalist struggle. But it is equally true that the ruling Stalinist bureaucratic caste plays an essentially counterrevolutionary role in world politics, and that the aid it sometimes provides to revolutions against imperialism is a wholly subordinate feature of its foreign policy, which the Russian people have had nothing to say about since the mid-1920s. If, as Jenness says, Soviet aid has saved some revolutions from imperialism, many more revolutions were destroyed as a consequence of the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies, giving imperialism a new lease on life that it could not otherwise have expected.
Under Stalin, the Soviet government was responsible for the defeat of revolutions in China in the 1920s, Germany and Spain in the 1930s, and France, Italy, and Greece in the 1940s, to mention only a few examples. Moscow withdrew its aid from China in 1960, at a crucial juncture in the attacks on China by U.S. imperialism. And as Che Guevara correctly said of the Vietnamese revolution:
North American imperialism is guilty of aggression. Its crimes are immense and known to the whole world. We already know this, gentlemen!
But they are likewise guilty who at the decisive moment vacillated in making Vietnam an inviolable part of the socialist territory — yes, at the risk of a war of global scale, but also compelling the North American imperialists to make a decision.
And they are guilty who keep up a war of insults and tripping each other, begun some time ago by the representatives of the two big powers in the socialist camp.[1]
Since then, the Chinese government, which, no less than the Soviet government, still rests on the planned economy issuing from a mighty socialist revolution, has waged war on the Vietnamese workers' state in open coordination with the interests of U.S. imperialism. And the Soviet government today is attempting to strangle the socialist aspirations of the Polish working class. Perhaps Jenness has left something out here.
The great majority of the Jenness article is devoted to elaborating one aspect of Lenin's thinking on the Russian Revolution: his use of the slogan of a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," first put forward by the Bolsheviks in the spring of 1905. Jenness presents this as though it were the very essence of Leninism. Moreover, he insists that from 1905 to the end, Lenin never changed his position on the validity and class content of this slogan. Jenness writes:
The course projected by the Bolsheviks [in 1905] gave an accurate portrayal of the line of march the Russian workers would follow and how the revolution would unfold. It armed them to participate effectively in the class struggle and to assume a leadership role in the revolution.
Leon Trotsky, in his article "Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution," written in 1939, presented a different appraisal:
The perspective of Menshevism was false to the core: it pointed out an entirely different road for the proletariat. The perspective of Bolshevism was not complete: it indicated correctly the general direction of the struggle but characterized its stages incorrectly. The inadequacy of the perspective of Bolshevism was not revealed in 1905 only because the revolution itself did not receive further development. But at the beginning of 1917 Lenin was compelled, in a direct struggle against the oldest cadres of the party, to change the perspective. [2]
Can Lenin's views on the class forces in the coming Russian Revolution be characterized as simple continuity from 1905 onward, as Jenness maintains, or was Trotsky right that Lenin substantially modified his perspective in the spring of 1917?
Let us begin our examination by restating the terms of the debate among the Russian Marxists in the 1905 period. For more than two decades the Russian followers of Marx had waged a political struggle against their chief opponents on the left, the petty-bourgeois populists, organized first in the "People's Will," the Narodniks, and, after 1900, in the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The populists maintained that the class distinctions between workers and peasants should be ignored, since both classes were "toilers." They insisted that the peasant majority in Russia was a prosocialist class and that Russia, unlike Western Europe, could skip the stage of capitalist development and proceed directly from the overthrow of the semifeudal tsarist autocracy to the creation of a socialist state based on rural peasant communal land ownership, which had survived from medieval times.
The Marxists replied that far from escaping a stage of capitalist development, tsarist Russia was already capitalist, albeit still burdened with a medieval landed aristocracy and bureaucratic state machine of an "Asiatic" type. The development of capitalism had already destroyed the vitality of the peasant commune.
The Marxists made a different assessment of the peasantry on a more fundamental ground as well. They said that the peasants were not a prosocialist class, but a class of petty proprietors, who could, as a whole, be brought into struggle against the tsar and the aristocracy around demands for land reform, an end to semifeudal survivals, and the creation of a democratic capitalist state, but not in support of socialism as such. These ideas were worked out most fully by George Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism. Plekhanov argued that the coming revolution in Russia, as a result of the numerical weakness of the working class, would be essentially a bourgeois revolution like the French Revolution of 1789-93. The creation of a modern capitalist republic would set the stage for an economic development like that of Western Europe under which the Russian working class could begin the long process of gathering the forces necessary for a later socialist revolution.
Plekhanov maintained that the natural leader of a bourgeois revolution was the bourgeoisie, and looked to the liberal capitalists to play the central part in the struggle against the tsarist autocracy. In 1905, Lenin and the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party proposed a radical modification of this perspective of the party, advancing the idea that the bourgeois revolution could and should be led by a revolutionary coalition of the working class and the peasantry, not by the halfhearted capitalist liberals.
Jenness basically picks up the debate at this point. But he leaves out of his article any reference to the theoretical underpinnings of this discussion—why did all the Russian Marxists believe that only a bourgeois and not a socialist revolution was possible in Russia, and what did they mean by this? By omitting this essential dimension of the debate, Jenness limits his presentation to the tactics employed by the Bolsheviks to cement an alliance with the peasantry between 1905 and 1919. Since Lenin's tactics were always to unite the working class with the peasant masses in struggle, Jenness emerges from his exposition with the appearance of simple continuity in Bolshevik thought and action from 1905 onward.
Jenness seems to pursue his examination on the basis of projecting backward in time the assumption of the present-day Trotskyist movement that socialist revolution is possible in a backward country. This leads him to treat Lenin's 1905 distinction between a bourgeois and socialist revolution as merely two closely interrelated aspects of a single process, as we would see it today, in which the passage from one "stage" to the next is simply a matter of education and organization of the oppressed in struggle, without objective limitations that sharply separate the two stages in time. The "bourgeois" revolution is reduced to a political tactic of alliances: bloc with the whole of the peasantry until the landowners and the monarchy are defeated, then shift to an alliance with the poor peasants, which can rapidly isolate the precapitalist sector of the well-to-do peasantry.
This pattern of successive alliances is, of course, correct and played an important part in the Bolshevik October revolution in 1917. It is also true, as Jenness points out, that the shift from a bloc with the peasantry as a whole to a bloc with the poor peasants was not completed until the autumn of 1918, and until that time the essential social content of the Russian Revolution remained bourgeois in a sociological sense. But that leaves unanswered the question of the class character of the government that issued from the revolution. Was it to be a workers'-government or a two-class government? How did this key governmental question fit into Lenin's concept of the system of alliances with sectors of the peasantry? Did he have the same opinion in 1917 that he had in 1905? To answer these questions it is necessary to first examine Plekhanov's economic theory of the bourgeois revolution in Russia, a theory that all the Russian Marxists shared in common, including Lenin.
George Plekhanov had imbued the Russian Marxists with an outlook that in retrospect we would call an economic-determinist distortion of Marxism — although, in all fairness, the socialist movement had no experience in revolutions outside Europe, in relatively backward countries, from which to make a more rounded judgment. In addition, the rapid industrialization in Russia from the 1890s into the first decade of the twentieth century vitiated the plausibility of Plekhanov's prognosis, which was not so wrong in 1884 as it was in 1905. Nevertheless, it took the Russian Marxists some considerable time to rethink the inherited orthodoxy and draw the appropriate conclusions. In 1884, in his book Our Differences, Plekhanov wrote:
... let us picture to ourselves a country in which large-scale industry as yet only aspiring to supremacy while commodity production has already become the basis of the economy, in other words, let us transport ourselves into a petty-bourgeois country. What economic task will face the "self-governing people in that case"? Primarily, and exclusively, the task of guaranteeing the interests of the small individual producers, since that is the class which forms the majority of the people. But following that path you cannot avoid either capitalism or the domination of the big bourgeoisie, for the objective logic of commodity production itself will take care to transform the small individual producers into wage-labourers on the one side and bourgeois employers on the other. When that transformation has taken place, the working class will of course use all political means in a deadly fight against the bourgeoisie. But then the mutual relations of the classes in society will become sharply defined, the working class will take the place of "the people" and self-government of the people will change into the dictatorship of the proletariat. [3]
Plainly, in Plekhanov's perspective, the democratic, bourgeois revolution must be followed by long years of capitalist development to transform the very class composition of the country. Only then will the dictatorship of the proletariat cease to be a Utopian and ultraleft idea. He does not conceive of any possible purely political action or bloc of class forces that can move from the bourgeois revolution to a socialist revolution without going through that objective, long-term economic reconstruction of the class relationship of forces.
We know today, and have known basically since the Bolshevik October revolution, that this prognosis is wrong. But the Russian Marxists, including Lenin, did not know it was wrong in 1905. Jenness selectively quotes from Lenin in the 1905 period in such a way as to blur Lenin's thinking on this question, to make it sound more like the mature Bolshevism of 1917, which had discarded Plekhanov's economic-determinist restrictions on the potential of the revolution. He is able to do this only by omitting Lenin's definition of the democratic revolution, and by dropping any reference to Trotsky, as Trotsky was the first of the Russian Marxists to break decisively with the Plekhanov framework and advance the idea that the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat was possible in backward Russia — his celebrated theory of permanent revolution.
Jenness correctly outlines the differences between the revolutionary Bolsheviks and the reformist Mensheviks over the class forces to be blocked with in the 1905 revolution. But he does not record accurately the significance of the bourgeois limitations of the revolution in the expectations of both sides. Plekhanov and the Mensheviks, as Jenness says, insisted that because the revolution was basically a bourgeois revolution, its natural leader was the liberal bourgeoisie. They maintained that the Russian Social Democrats, as the Marxists called themselves then, should aid the bourgeoisie in the struggle against tsarism but not enter a provisional revolutionary government that might issue from the struggle. This flowed from Plekhanov's belief that a long historical period of capitalist development was needed before a workers' government would be possible. A workers' party, Plekhanov maintained, would compromise itself by taking responsibility for administering a capitalist government, even one created in revolutionary struggle.
Lenin rejected this view, but not, as Jenness implies, on the grounds that socialist revolution was possible in Russia.[4]
Lenin in fact strongly denied that. What he did say was that the bourgeoisie was seeking a rotten compromise with the monarchy and would not carry through to the end of the fight for a democratic bourgeois republic. Lenin looked for allies to the peasantry. He counterposed to the Mensheviks' strategy his call for a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" that would lead the democratic revolution and dominate the government created by it. But Lenin still regarded the preponderant weight of the peasantry in Russian society as an objective and absolute bar to the direct fight for a workers' government committed to a socialist perspective, without a very complex and possibly very prolonged intermediate stage in which capitalism as an economic system would remain unchallenged. Trotsky, in the 1939 article cited above, spelled out both the advance in Lenin's new position, the "democratic dictatorship" slogan, and its important limitations:
Lenin's conception represented an enormous step forward insofar as it proceeded not from constitutional reforms but from the agrarian overturn as the central task of the revolution and singled out the only realistic combination of social forces for its accomplishment. The weak point of Lenin's conception, however, was the internally contradictory idea of "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." Lenin himself underscored the fundamental limitation of this "dictatorship" when he openly called it bourgeois. By this he meant to say that for the sake of preserving its alliance with the peasantry the proletariat would in the coming revolution have to forego the direct posing of the socialist tasks. But this would signify the renunciation by the proletariat of its own dictatorship. Consequently, the gist of the matter involved the dictatorship of the peasantry even if with the participation of the workers.[5]
Until April 1917, Lenin functioned in the expectation that there would be two revolutions in Russia, more or less separated in time. The first of these would be fought by the working class in alliance with the peasantry as a whole against the monarchy and the landlords, with the bourgeoisie playing a neutral role. After the first revolution had solved the problems of the bourgeois stage — land reform, the cleansing of medieval survivals, the calling of a constituent assembly that would preside over a modern bourgeois-democratic republic, preparation for a second revolution would begin, aimed at the precapitalist sector of the peasantry, which would in turn have to be overthrown, along with the bourgeoisie, as a property-owning class.
(Lenin occasionally speaks of three revolutions, in the event that the temporizing bourgeoisie did succeed in capturing the leadership of the democratic revolution and established a constitutional monarchy that failed to carry through the agrarian reform. This variant is basically what happened in the February 1917 revolution, but by that time Lenin decided to dispense with the "democratic dictatorship" stage.)
In the context of this "two-revolution" concept, Lenin at various times expressed different expectations on the pace of the development and the factors that might tend to speed up the transition from the first to the second revolution. His most optimistic variant rested on the expectation that the bourgeois revolution in Russia would spark a socialist revolution in Western Europe, and that aid from the socialist proletariat in the West would give the workers' component in the "democratic dictatorship" a weight out of proportion to what he conceived of as its objective limitations as a minority class in Russia and permit a fairly rapid posing of the second, socialist, revolution. In that very favorable circumstance, the tactic of alliances with progressively poorer strata of the peasantry could be pursued as a purely political dynamic without waiting for the economic transformation of Russian society in the bourgeois stage. This very condensed variant of the two-stage process appears clearly in Lenin's writings only very briefly in the fall of 1905 and early in 1906. More commonly, as in his Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, written in June-July 1905, and in his writings and speeches from the spring of 1906 onward, Lenin retains Plekhanov's 1884 position, modifying it only by the inclusion of the workers' and peasants' government, which would be compelled to preside over a long-term transformation in objective class relations, in the numerical weight of the proletarians, before any move could be made to even restrict, much less abolish, capitalism.
Jenness quotes only one side of these contradictory expectations. To indicate the range of Lenin's views on this question, let me repeat the most radical of his formulations from the 1905 period, presented by Jenness as though it was Lenin's definitive position:
... from the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way. If we do not now and immediately promise all sorts of "socialisation," that is because we know the actual conditions for that task to be accomplished, and we do not gloss over the new class struggle burgeoning within the peasantry, but reveal that struggle....
To try to calculate now what the combination of forces will be within the peasantry "on the day after" the revolution (the democratic revolution) is empty utopianism.... [W]e shall bend every effort to help the entire peasantry achieve the democratic revolution, in order thereby to make it easier for us, the party of the proletariat, to pass on as quickly as possible to the new and higher task—the socialist revolution.[6]
This statement comes quite close, as close as he ever came before April 1917, to the idea of direct seizure of power by the workers party, drawing the peasantry in under its leadership—which was the course advocated by Trotsky from 1905, and the actual course followed by the Bolsheviks in the fall of 1917. It should be noted here, however, that Lenin is not talking about two sets of tasks, carried out in sequence by one revolutionary government, as, for example, we might today describe the pace of socialist vis-a-vis democratic measures after the Cuban or Nicaraguan revolutions. He is speaking of two separate revolutions. Now, pedants might tell us that a "revolution" is the transfer of property from one class to another, and that the final nationalization of capitalist property after an interim period following the overthrow of a capitalist dictatorship could be called a "revolution." Plainly, Plekhanov in 1884 meant a distinct, separate, real revolution against a part of the forces that had participated in, and constituted a majority of, the anti-tsarist revolution. It seems clear to me that Lenin has the same idea in mind. That is, an actual revolution against the precapitalist sector of the peasantry who had participated in the "democratic dictatorship," not just a sociological definition of a property seizure carried out by a more or less homogeneous revolutionary government. (This idea is spelled out with graphic simplicity hundreds of times in Lenin's pre-1917 writings.)
Even at that, the above statement is almost unique in Lenin's thinking before 1917 in its optimism about the pace of possibly moving from the democratic to the socialist revolutions. The quotation, in fact, has a particular history of its own that Jenness seems to be unaware of. It was later used by Stalin to deny that there was an evolution in Lenin's thought between 1905 and 1917, in order to revalidate the discarded, two-stage, economic-determinist framework for use in class-collaborationist operations by the Soviet bureaucracy in China. As Trotsky wrote in his History of the Russian Revolution, after quoting the above words by Lenin:
This quotation, surprising as it may be, has been employed by Stalin in order to identify the old prognosis of the party with the actual course of events in 1917. It only remains incomprehensible why the cadres of the party were taken unawares by the "April theses" of Lenin.[7]
In truth, if the above quotation from Lenin represented his finished position in 1905, his twelve-year controversy with Trotsky over the theory of permanent revolution would be difficult to understand. Lenin's overall presentation of this question, however, did not envisage such a condensed outcome of the revolution and its stages as this one quotation might suggest. Let me offer some additional statements by Lenin to make clear his whole position on the relationship between bourgeois and proletarian revolution in Russia.
In his Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution Lenin writes:
Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does that mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system, and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European, and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class. The Socialist Revolutionaries cannot grasp this idea, for they do not know the ABC of the laws of development of commodity and capitalist production; they fail to see that even the complete success of a peasant insurrection, even the redistribution of the whole of the land in favour of the peasants and in accordance with their desires ("general redistribution" or something of the kind) will not destroy capitalism at all, but will, on the contrary, give an impetus to its development and hasten the class disintegration of the peasantry itself....
A bourgeois revolution is a revolution which does not depart from the frame work of the bourgeois, i.e., capitalist, socio-economic system. A bourgeois revolution expresses the needs of capitalist development, and, far from destroying the foundations of capitalism, it effects the contrary—it broadens and deepens them. The revolution, therefore, expresses the interests not only of the working class but of the entire bourgeoisie as well. Since the rule of the bourgeoisie over the working class is inevitable under capitalism, it can well be said that a bourgeois revolution expresses the interests not so much of the proletariat as of the bourgeoisie. But it is quite absurd to think that a bourgeois revolution does not at all express proletarian interests.[8]
Lenin continues on the following page:
The bourgeois revolution is precisely an upheaval that most resolutely sweeps away survivals of the past, survivals of the serf-owning system (which include not only the autocracy but the monarchy as well), and most fully guarantees the broadest, freest, and most rapid development of capitalism.[9]
Recall that Lenin is speaking here of a bourgeois revolution carried out under a workers' and peasants' "democratic dictatorship." And it must be asked: has such a revolution ever happened in real life, or is Lenin here still speaking from within the framework of Plekhanov's economic-determinist schema, in which a prolonged period of capitalist development is all that is possible in the aftermath of the democratic revolution? Look at the actual history of twentieth-century revolutions in which the workers and peasants, in any combination, controlled the government, and ask if any of them, from Russia in 1917 to China, Yugoslavia, "Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada, resulted in even the briefest period of the "broadest, freest, and most rapid development of capitalism," or made it possible for the "bourgeoisie to rule as a class," or in the opposite in the immediate restriction of the field of capitalism's operation and its eventual liquidation as an economic system? Ask also if there is a single recorded instance in which a workers' state resulted from a revolution in which the proletarian party — or in Cuba, the party that was transformed into the proletarian party — did not have a preponderant majority in the government on the day after the insurrection. (I leave aside here the petty-bourgeois character of the Stalinist parties. Their capacity to create workers' states flowed from the fact that they operate in the workers' movement and came to define their place in the political spectrum by establishing a relationship, however bureaucratized, with the working class of their respective countries.) In no case was there a second revolution. Either the party that finished the job had its majority the first time around, or the revolution failed.
My conclusion, to anticipate a possible rejoinder, is not that "Trotskyism" is counterposed to Leninism, but that Jenness misrepresents Leninism when he tries to explain the 1917 revolution as a consequence of and not a break by Lenin with his "democratic dictatorship" theory.
Jenness's approach is to reduce the "democratic dictatorship" theory to one of its aspects, a formula for establishing the workers' alliance with the peasantry. He writes:
The class forces that the Bolsheviks saw could carry through the democratic revolution most resolutely were the working class in alliance with the revolutionary peasantry as a whole. Thus, they proposed that the monarchy be replaced with a revolutionary government to achieve the goals of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, in which the workers and peasants would exercise political power and repress their oppressors. This was the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. (Emphasis in original.)
Of course!—With the peasantry as a whole against the monarchy, then with the poor peasants in the fight for socialism. But before we can speak intelligently about tactics for alliances with the various strata of the peasantry, we must first resolve the question of whether socialist revolution is possible in a backward country, and the corollary question: which of the two oppressed classes will be dominant in the alliance. Today, all Leninists believe that socialist revolution is possible, and hence the discussion over how to involve the peasantry is on the level of tactics. But Lenin in 1905 had not yet decided that it was possible. This central question of perspectives is entirely absent from Jenness's presentation.
Had Doug Jenness quoted in a more representative way from Lenin's 1905 writings, it would have been clear that Lenin, while excluding the bourgeoisie as a claimant for leadership-in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, had not yet come to definite conclusions on the potential relationship between the two remaining classes, and the effect that relationship would have on the possibility — passing through whatever intermediate stages — for socialist revolution. More accurately, Lenin still operated on the basis of a different conclusion from the one he would base his strategy on in 1917. Let me cite one more quotation from Lenin in the period of the first Russian revolution, on the workers' relations with the peasantry. In his "Report on the Unity Congress of the RSDLP," written in May 1906, Lenin outlined the following position:
...the only complete guarantee against restoration [of the tsarist monarchy — L.E.] in Russia (after a victorious revolution in Russia) is a socialist revolution in the West. There is and can be no other guarantee. Thus, from this aspect, the question is: how can the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia facilitate, or accelerate, the socialist revolution in the West?[10]
Why did Lenin think that even a nonsocialist, bourgeois republic could not be maintained in Russia without a socialist revolution in the West, particularly if the capitalists of all stripes were consciously excluded from the government? His answer, given on the same page, hinged on his conception of worker-peasant relations:
What is the economic foundation of restoration on the basis of the capitalist mode of production... ? The condition of the small commodity producer in any capitalist society. The small commodity producer wavers between labour and capital. Together with the working class he fights against the survivals of serfdom and the police-ridden autocracy. But at the same time he longs to strengthen his position as a property-owner in the bourgeois society, and therefore, if the conditions of development of this society are at all favourable (for example, industrial prosperity, expansion of the home market as a result of the agrarian revolution, etc.), the small commodity producer inevitably turns against the proletarian who is fighting for socialism. Consequently, I said [at the RSDLP congress — L.E.], restoration on the basis of small commodity production, of small peasant property in capitalist society, is not only possible in Russia, but even inevitable, for Russia is mainly a petty-bourgeois country. I went on to say that from the point of view of restoration, the position of the Russian revolution may be expressed in the following thesis: the Russian revolution is strong enough to achieve victory by its own efforts; but it is not strong enough to retain the fruits of victory. It can achieve victory because the proletariat jointly with the revolutionary peasantry can constitute an invincible force. But it cannot retain its victory, because in a country where small production is vastly developed, the small commodity producers (including the peasants) will inevitably turn against the proletarians when they pass from freedom to socialism. To be able to retain its victory, to be" able to prevent restoration, the Russian revolution will need non-Russian reserves, will need outside assistance. Are there such reserves? Yes, there are: the socialist proletariat in the West. (Emphasis in original.)
Is there any doubt that here Lenin conceives of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" — whether he views this as a governmental formula or merely as a class relationship in the general society—with the peasantry completely dominant and determinate? And even more than that: opposed to socialism so strongly that it is "inevitable" that they will restore the tsar rather than permit the workers to establish a workers' government! Lenin makes no suggestion here that the Russian workers and their party, even in alliance with the poor peasants, have the power to stop the "small commodity producers" from their inevitable course of successful counterrevolution — except through the outside intervention of the socialist revolution in an advanced Western country. But we are still waiting for the socialist revolution in the West, whereas the Russian workers made not only their democratic revolution but their socialist revolution sixty-four years ago!
At some point Lenin had to change this estimate of the workers' relationship with the peasantry defined here in his democratic dictatorship theory.
Let us turn now to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, which Jenness does not mention, but which sheds considerable light on Lenin's later thinking.
Trotsky would have been the first, after he finally joined the Bolsheviks in July 1917, to admit that he was wrong in relation to Lenin on many questions in the past. Above all he was wrong on Lenin's concept of the democratic-centralist combat parry, and in his efforts to reunite the Bolsheviks with the reformist Mensheviks, particularly in the "August bloc" enterprise of 1912. But on one disputed question Trotsky always believed himself right, and believed, until he was corrected by Doug Jenness, that he had seen Lenin come over to his position. That was on the question of the theory of permanent revolution.
Now, of course, the theory of permanent revolution is not original with Trotsky. Both the name and the tactics were devised by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the course of the 1848 revolution in Germany, and spelled out most clearly in their joint "Address of the Central Authority to the [Communist] League" of March 1850.[11] But their tactic was for driving forward the socialist revolution in a combination of unity and struggle with bourgeois democrats in a country where it was agreed that socialist revolution was possible. As the whole debate in Russian Marxism indicates, that is exactly what was not agreed on. Trotsky's innovation was in being the first to say outright that the Marxist theory of permanent revolution was applicable to Russia, that the direct struggle for a workers' government was a realistic possibility in Russia.
In the 1903 split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the RSDLP, Trotsky had sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin's centralism. By 1905, while remaining an active party member, he stood between the factions. Lenin regarded him as representing a particular, very left-wing, current in the Mensheviks, closer to Bolshevism than the "regular" Mensheviks.
In the revolution of 1905 Trotsky first emerged as a central leader of the Russian Social Democracy, and was the principal figure of the St. Petersburg Soviet, being elected its president after the arrest of its initial leader, George Khrustalev-Nosar.
During that period, Trotsky collaborated closely with Alexander Parvus, and together they worked out the theory of permanent revolution. This set of ideas was first fully elaborated in Trotsky's "Results and Prospects," published in 1906.
At the risk of oversimplifying, Trotsky's theory consisted of three basic points. The first was a frontal rejection of Plekhanov's economic-determinist framework for the Russian Revolution. On this Trotsky wrote:
But the day and hour when power will pass into the hands of the working class depends directly not upon the level attained by the productive forces but upon relations in the class struggle, upon the international situation, and, finally, upon a number of subjective factors: the traditions, the initiative and the readiness to fight of the workers.
It is possible for the workers to come to power in an economically backward country sooner than in an advanced country.... To imagine that the dictatorship of the proletariat is in some way automatically dependent on the technical development and resources of a country is a prejudice of "economic" materialism simplified to absurdity. This point of view has nothing in common with Marxism.[12]
Trotsky's second point was his governmental formula:
In the event of a decisive victory of the revolution, power will pass into the hands of that class which plays a leading role in the struggle — in other words, into the hands of the proletariat. Let us say at once that this by no means precludes revolutionary representatives of non-proletarian social groups entering the government. They can and should be in the government: a sound policy will compel the proletariat to call to power the influential leaders of the urban petty-bourgeoisie, of the intellectuals and of the peasantry. The whole problem consists in this: who will determine the content of the government's policy, who will form within it a solid majority?[13]
Trotsky's third point was his conception of the relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry. It is implicitly counterposed here to Lenin's assumption that the peasantry will outweigh the workers in a government or state issuing from the revolution against tsarism by virtue of the numerical preponderance of the peasants in the population. Trotsky writes:
But is it not possible that the peasantry may push the proletariat aside and take its place? This is impossible. All historical experience protests against this assumption. Historical experience shows that the peasantry are absolutely in capable of taking up an independent political role.
The history of capitalism is the history of the subordination of the country to the town.[14]
Although in general both Trotsky and Lenin regarded each other as in the revolutionary camp and better than their mutual Menshevik opponents, there were a number of sharp exchanges between them over the counterposed perspectives of a workers' government versus Lenin's democratic dictatorship idea. (I leave aside here Lenin's often very sharp polemics with Trotsky over Trotsky's conciliationist attitude toward the Mensheviks, where Trotsky later conceded he was in the wrong.) I would like to quote one sally from each side to indicate how matters stood on the eve of the February revolution.
In 1909 Trotsky published an article entitled "Our Differences" in the Polish journal Przeglad social-demokratyczny. While mainly directed against the Mensheviks' class-collaborationist perspective, he said of Lenin's ideas:
Whatever the theoretical auspices under which the proletariat seizes power, it is bound immediately, on the very first day, to be confronted with the problem of unemployment. An explanation of the difference between socialist and democratic dictatorship is not likely to be of much help here. In one form or another (public works, etc.) the proletariat in power will immediately have to undertake the maintenance of the unemployed at the state's expense. This in turn will immediately provoke a powerful intensification of the economic struggle and a whole series of strikes.
We saw all this on a small scale at the end of 1905. And the capitalists' reply will be the same as their reply to the demand for the eight-hour day: the shutting down of factories and plants. They will put large padlocks on the gates and will tell themselves: "There is no threat to our property because it has been established that the proletariat is at present in a position of democratic, not socialist dictatorship." What can the workers' government do when faced with closed factories and plants? It must re-open them and resume production at the government's expense. But is that not the way to socialism? Of course it is. What other way do you suggest?
The objection might be raised that I am imagining a situation in which the dictatorship of the workers is unlimited, whereas in fact what we are talking about is the dictatorship of a coalition between the proletariat and the peasantry. Very well, let us take this objection into account. We have just seen how the proletariat, despite the best intentions of its theoreticians, must in practice ignore the logical boundary line which should confine it to a democratic dictatorship. Lenin now proposes that the proletariat's political self-limitation should be supplemented with an objective antisocialist "safeguard" in the form of the muzhik as collaborator or co-dictator. If this means that the peasant party, which shares power with the social-democrats, will not allow the unemployed and the strikers to be maintained at state cost and will oppose the state's opening of factories and plants closed down by the capitalists, then it also means that on the first day of the coalition, that is, long before the fulfillment of its tasks, the proletariat will enter into conflict with the revolutionary government. This conflict can end either in the repression of the workers by the peasant party, or in the removal of that party from power. Neither solution has much to do with a "democratic" dictatorship by a coalition.[15]
In November 1915 in an article entitled "On the Two Lines in the Revolution," Lenin took up some of Trotsky's arguments:
To bring clarity into the alignment of classes in the impending revolution is the main task of a revolutionary party... .This task is being wrongly tackled in Nashe Slovo by Trotsky, who is repeating his "original" 1905 theory and refuses to give some thought to the reason why, in the course of ten years, life has been bypassing this splendid theory.
From the Bolsheviks Trotsky's original theory has borrowed their call for a decisive proletarian revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of power by the proletariat, while from the Mensheviks it has borrowed "repudiation" of the peasantry's role. The peasantry, he asserts, are divided into strata, have become differentiated; their potential revolutionary role has dwindled more and more; in Russia a "national" revolution is impossible; "we are living in the era of imperialism," says Trotsky, and "imperialism does not contrapose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation."
Here we have an amusing example of playing with the word "imperialism." If, in Russia, the proletariat already stands contraposed to the "bourgeois nation," then Russia is facing a socialist revolution(!)...[16]
I think the differences between the permanent revolution and democratic dictatorship theories are clearly established. Let us now examine whether, as Trotsky maintained, Lenin came over to his theory in the April 1917 crisis of leadership in the Bolshevik party. First let us see how Jenness treats this episode. Doug Jenness tells us:
Following the February 1917 revolution, many of the older Bolshevik leaders adapted to the Mensheviks who were carrying out a bourgeois-liberal line and supporting the Provisional Revolutionary Government.[17] This put these "old Bolsheviks" in the position of giving de facto critical support to the capitalist provisional government.
Lenin fought this tendency toward opportunism....
While many of the "old Bolsheviks" took opportunist positions, the majority of worker-Bolsheviks did not. It was this fact that made it possible for Lenin to win a majority for his line at the April 1917 party conference without a great deal of difficulty.
Reading these lines, one would never guess that Lenin's majority in the party was ever in doubt — or that the dispute hinged on whether or not socialist revolution was possible in Russia, with the "old Bolsheviks" defending the "democratic dictatorship" theory against Lenin's determined proposal to drop it.
Jenness does not report that until Lenin's return to Russia on April 3 what he describes as the position of "many of the older Bolshevik leaders" was the official position of the party and its press. When Lenin laid out his perspective at a meeting of the party leadership in Petrograd that night, calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government, virtually the whole party leadership stood against him. The Bolshevik Drabkina, who was present at the meeting, wrote in her reminiscences, published in Russia in 1927, that Lenin's speech "produced on everyone a stupefying impression. No one expected this."[18] Alexandra Kollontai, who was also there, later wrote: "I was the only one to stand up for Lenin's view against a whole series of hesitant Bolsheviks."[19]
Jenness reports that Lenin's line carried "without a great deal of difficulty" at the April party conference — which opened only on April 24. But in the three weeks preceding the conference a sharp struggle took place in the Bolshevik party in which Lenin was at the beginning almost completely isolated in the leadership. The first place his "April theses" was put to a vote — on April 8 in the Bolshevik Petrograd Committee, the party center in the nation's capital — Lenin was defeated by a vote of thirteen to two with one abstention. The "April theses" were similarly rejected by the party committees in Moscow and Kiev.[20] Even at the April conference, where Lenin had in effect appealed to the ranks against the leadership, the vote was not so much without difficulty as Jenness suggests. While Lenin's main proposals were by this time carried overwhelmingly, the foot-dragging was apparent in the vote on the main resolution, which was 71 to 39 with 8 abstentions — a 40 percent minority.[21]
As for the substance of the dispute, which Jenness also glosses over, it was indicated pretty clearly in a public attack on Lenin on April 8 in the official party newspaper Pravda, which declared:
As for the general scheme of Comrade Lenin, it seems to us unacceptable in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is ended, and counts upon an immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution.[22]
Jenness passes in silence over this controversy regarding the democratic dictatorship theory, which might raise questions about his assertion that this theory "gave an accurate portrayal of the line of march the Russian workers would follow and how the revolution would unfold." He fails to quote Lenin's many explicit repudiations of the old theory and formulas during the April crisis. Let us remind him of what Lenin said at that time.
In his "Letters on Tactics," written in the second week of April, Lenin declared:
The person who now speaks only of a "revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of the "Bolshevik" pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of "old Bolsheviks").[23]
When Kamenev and the other Bolshevik leaders objected that the socialist revolution could not be placed on the agenda because the "democratic dictatorship" had never yet come to power and the majority of tasks of the democratic revolution, such as land reform or the calling of a constituent assembly, had not even been begun, Lenin replied:
Is this reality covered by Comrade Kamenev's old-Bolshevik formula, which says that "the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed"?
It is not. The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it.[24]
Now, Doug Jenness, of course, is familiar with this material. Without mentioning these statements by Lenin, or the position held by Trotsky and, until now, by the Trotskyist movement, that these statements marked Lenin's break from the "democratic dictatorship" theory, Jenness offers us a quotation from Lenin that might seem to cast doubt on that interpretation. Lenin, in the quote adduced by Jenness, insists that the stage of the democratic dictatorship has not been bypassed altogether, but has been realized "in a highly original manner," in the form of the Soviets, which embody the alliance he foresaw. But the Soviets remain out of power. At best, they occupy a relationship of "dual power" with the bourgeois Provisional Government.
Let us examine Lenin's thinking on this more closely and see if it indicates continuity of his old theory, or the beginning of a radical break from it.
Lenin's actual governmental slogan in the April theses, it is true, was not for a socialist revolution, but for "All Power to the Soviets." It is also true, as the quote cited by Jenness shows, that Lenin did not initially conceive of a Soviet government as the dictatorship of the proletariat along the line of Trotsky's thinking, but as the realization of his old theory. To give Jenness a helping hand in building his case, let us quote Lenin's explicit denial that he advocated direct socialist revolution in Russia, from the same "Letters on Tactics" cited above:
But are we not in danger of falling into subjectivism, of wanting to arrive at the socialist revolution by "skipping" the bourgeois-democratic revolution—which is not yet completed and has not yet exhausted the peasant movement?
I might be incurring this danger if I said: "No Tsar, but a workers' government." [A slogan coined by Parvus in the 1905 period, generally believed by the Bolsheviks to represent Trotsky's position. — L.E.] But I did not say that, I said something else. I said that there can be no government (barring a bourgeois government) in Russia other than that of the Soviets of Workers', Agricultural Labourers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies.... And in these Soviets, as it happens, it is the peasants, the soldiers, i.e., petty bourgeoisie, who preponderate, to use a scientific, Marxist term, a class characterisation, and not a common, man-in-the-street, professional characterisation.[25]
If we were to take this at face value, the content of the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" would be for a government still within the "democratic" stage of the revolution, a "two-class dictatorship" with a petty-bourgeois majority — the original content of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." But it was not just a crude misunderstanding that led the majority of the Bolshevik leadership in Russia to conclude that Lenin was in fact calling for a socialist revolution, and to discount his qualifications of that fact. Lenin says something else in this same letter that shows that, while he has not yet formulated it theoretically, his actual tactics are to break up the "democratic dictatorship" alliance within the Soviets before, and as a prerequisite for, bringing the Soviets to power, transformed into proletarian, socialist organs of government. Here is how Lenin outlines the aim of the Bolsheviks in the Soviets in April:
"The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies" — there you have the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" already accomplished in reality.
This formula is already antiquated....
A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, "Communist" elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists, who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of "supporting" the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government).[26]
But this meant fighting for the creation of a workers' government, with a "Communist" majority, committed to socialism, before the "democratic dictatorship" as a whole had ever taken power. With the peasantry as a whole—but under a workers' government, not permitting the political representatives of the "small proprietor" to have a majority in the government that carried out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. The slogan of the commune, that is, of the dictatorship of the proletariat, has replaced the slogan of the democratic dictatorship as the central transitional demand for the whole period leading up to the October revolution. But didn't Lenin say in the same letter that this was just what he did not intend? Isn't there a gap here between Lenin's tactics, where he operates with absolute certainty as to what needs to be done to move the revolution forward, and his theoretical formulations?
Tactically, the situation Lenin faced was the existence of the long-awaited democratic dictatorship alliance of class forces in the Soviets, but, unexpectedly, an alliance that refused to take the power so long as the nonproletarian forces retained a majority. This "stage" had to be bypassed before it ever was consummated in the formation of a government. The "democratic dictatorship" never ruled in Russia for a single day. Nor were the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution solved, as Lenin had predicted for twelve years, in the course of a distinct "democratic" stage of the revolution. They were first undertaken and solved by the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Trotsky had predicted in 1905, and as Lenin came to agree must be done in 1917.
The most disturbing part of Doug Jenness's exposition, where he most flagrantly bends Lenin's views to conform to his own, newly arrived at, stagist thesis, is in his handling of Lenin's post-1917 writings. He draws on several sources here, most importantly Lenin's November 1918 pamphlet, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
Jenness cites many quotations from Lenin for this period that quite correctly outline the post-October strategy of the Bolsheviks to maintain the alliance with the Russian peasantry; their well-founded caution in the pace of the introduction of socialist measures, particularly in the countryside; and the necessary series of transitional stages needed to secure a solid base for the new Soviet government. He calls attention to Lenin's indisputable statement that "only when the October revolution began to spread to the rural districts and was consummated, in the summer of 1918, did we acquire a real proletarian base; only then did our revolution become a proletarian revolution in fact, and not merely in our proclamations, promises and declarations." (Emphasis in original.)
What Jenness inexcusably leaves out is that all of this was done under a government the Bolsheviks repeatedly described as the dictatorship of the proletariat, under an openly prosocialist workers' government, not, as the unwary reader might conclude, under the intermediate, indeterminate, multi-class government of a "democratic dictatorship" operating within the bounds of a capitalist bourgeois republic. But wasn't that the essential difference between Lenin's old democratic dictatorship theory and Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution? What Jenness refuses to say outright here is exactly Lenin's new position, that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the necessary instrument for carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, his radical break from the old, two-revolution formula. The fact that he will not say it naturally raises an important question about where Jenness stands today on the validity of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution as well.
Jenness quoted for us Lenin's April 1917 opinion that the Soviets were the embodiment of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." Why does he fail to cite Lenin's opinion, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, from which he takes so many other quotes, that "The Soviets are the Russian form of the proletarian dictatorship"?[27] Why does he fail to tell us that, looking back on the pre-October period in 1918, Lenin writes that the Bolsheviks "long before November (October) advanced the slogan of proletarian dictatorship"?[28] Why does he fail to cite Lenin's opinion that "the very first day of the proletarian socialist revolution" in Russia occurred, not in the summer of 1918, but "On October 26 (November 8), 1917."[29]
Do these clear and unambiguous statements by Lenin stand too sharply contrasted to his 1905 positions that direct socialist revolution was impossible in Russia? Do they indicate too clearly that Lenin has abandoned the "democratic dictatorship" theory that Jenness finds so central to "Leninism"? They do indeed. But the inevitable conclusion must be that Lenin changed his position on the basis of the experience of real life.
In the same pamphlet on Kautsky's renegacy, from which Jenness quotes so selectively, Lenin goes beyond the mere substitution of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" for the old "democratic dictatorship" terminology and outlines a new theoretical and practical opinion on the relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry in the Russian Revolution. He now writes:
...the proletariat alone really has carried the bourgeois-democratic revolution to its logical conclusion, the proletariat alone has done something really important to bring nearer the world proletarian revolution, the proletariat alone has created the Soviet state, which, after the Paris Commune, is the second step in the direction of the socialist state.[30]
A month later, in December, 1918, Lenin prepared the second edition of his State and Revolution, written on the eve of October. The original of this work had already dropped the democratic dictatorship idea in favor of the idea of the commune state. (By the way, Lenin had by this time also radically altered his 1905 view of the character of the Paris Commune, which he had also in the past seen in the framework of his democratic dictatorship concept.) In the second edition, Lenin added only one thing on the basis of the experience of the Russian October: a section clarifying his view of Marx's theory of the state in the transition period after the revolution. Here Lenin writes:
The essence of Marx's theory of the state has been mastered only by those who realise that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from "classless society," from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat. [31]
But what happened here to the stage of a joint dictatorship with the peasantry? Isn't this a "'repudiation' of the peasantry's role" and a view of the working class as "contraposed to the 'bourgeois nation,'" as Lenin said of Trotsky's view as late as 1915?
Key to understanding Lenin's shift of position here is his abandonment, for the first time fully and completely, of the old economic-determinist conceptions shared by all of Russian Marxism until 1905. Central to this theoretical rethinking is a different view of the real social weight of the peasantry, no longer based, as was Plekhanov's conception, on raw numbers. Recall Lenin's insistence at the 1906 congress of the RSDLP that even a bourgeois republic could not avert a monarchist restoration without aid from a socialist revolution in Europe, because "the small commodity producers (including the peasants) will inevitably turn against the proletarians when they pass from freedom to socialism."
Lenin's new position is expressed most clearly and consistently in his lengthy address to the First All-Russian Congress on Adult Education on May 19,1919. There he states:
The science of political economy, if anybody has learned anything from it, the history of revolution, the history of political evolution throughout the whole of the nineteenth century show that the peasants follow the lead of either the workers or the bourgeoisie. Nor can they do otherwise. Some democrats may, of course, take exception to this, others may think that, being a malicious Marxist, I am slandering the peasants. They say the peasants constitute the majority, they are working people, and yet cannot follow their own road. Why?...
The economics of capitalist society are such that the ruling power can be only capital or the proletariat which has overthrown capital.
There ore no other forces in the economics of this society. [32]
Here Lenin defines what was left undecided in the democratic dictatorship theory, and does so in words that are virtually identical to those of Trotsky in 1906. This is his answer to the problem of socialist revolution in a country with a property-owning majority, and his solution, along the lines of permanent revolution, to the undeniable discrepancy between the advanced, proletarian state structure that issued from the October revolution and the backward, nonproletarian majority of the nation on which it rested. It was this agreement on the essentials of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, complemented, of course, by Trotsky's recognition of Lenin's overall superiority as a tactician, party builder, and, on most other questions, as a theorist, that provided the basis for their intimate political collaboration from the time Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 until Lenin's death, including their last great effort, the opening of the struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
The concept of "democratic dictatorship" was never explicitly repudiated by Lenin, but it was radically redefined and, for the most part, quietly dropped. It is not mentioned at all in Lenin's 1921 anniversary article published by the ISR along with the Jenness piece. Nor does it appear in most of Lenin's other postrevolutionary writings.
In its pre-1917 formulation, the "democratic dictatorship" theory proved to be a false start in the process of working out the strategy of revolutionary Marxism on the potential for socialist revolution in undeveloped countries. As an extenuating circumstance, this was at a time when no such revolution had ever taken place. This wrong theory was revived after Lenin's death by the Stalinist bureaucracy as a justification for class-collaborationist alliances with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces in the colonial world.
Reformism in the workers' movement frequently seeks to ground itself on partial, erroneous, or outmoded formulations and concepts employed for a time but later discarded by the great leaders of the Marxist movement as Marxism as a science evolves. The "democratic dictatorship" theory has shared this fate. Since all of Lenin's pre-1917 writings on this question denied the possibility of the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat in a backward country, and Lenin himself had to break from the formula and its theoretical underpinnings in order to go forward, it readily lent itself to agreements to subordinate the working class and its party to alliances with "anti-imperialist" bourgeois and petty-bourgeois formations. By convincing the workers in advance that the struggle for socialism could not be initiated before the completion of the anti-imperialist fight, the workers were taught to fear responding to attacks from their nonproletarian allies, on the grounds that to fight back would isolate them from the "democratic revolution" with no way to move forward through their own class forces or to assert their class leadership directly over the peasant masses. Such assumptions could be bolstered by citations from Lenin's old theory of the social weight of the peasantry, which he had inherited in turn from Plekhanov.
Under Stalin's rule, the democratic dictatorship theory was revived and adopted by the Comintern as a programmatic norm for Communist parties in the colonial world. Trotsky, continuing the fight against the. bureaucracy he had begun in collaboration with Lenin, strongly opposed this move. In his 1928 work, Permanent Revolution, he wrote:
The Comintern's endeavour to foist upon the Eastern countries the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, finally and long ago exhausted by history, can have only a reactionary effect. Insofar as this slogan is counterposed to the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it contributes politically to the dissolution of the proletariat in the petty-bourgeois masses and thus creates the most favourable conditions for the hegemony of the national bourgeoisie and consequently for the collapse of the democratic revolution. The introduction of this slogan into the programme of the Comintern is a direct betrayal of Marxism and of the October tradition of Bolshevism.[33]
The Comintern under Stalin employed this theory, bent, of course, toward stressing the "two-stage" aspect of it at the expense of the "uninterrupted" side, to derail and destroy the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 and the Spanish revolution of the 1930s. It should be recalled that in both cases the bourgeois allies of the Comintern stood to the left of the Russian "revolutionary democrats" of 1917, a point that Stalin's supporters never tired of making in reply to Trotsky's criticism: both Chiang Kai-shek and the Spanish Popular Front fought the imperialists and their domestic agents arms in hand, and for a number of years. But, despite Stalin's predictions, in neither case did the nonproletarian "anti-imperialists" wait for the conclusion of the democratic revolution before they savagely turned on their working class allies and crushed them.
Doug Jenness, already under the influence of a two-stage, two-class dictatorship concept, has begun to rewrite the history of the Russian October revolution, giving greater weight to Lenin's prognosis made twelve years in advance than to Lenin's actual writings during and after the real event. This, if I may say so, is a historical schematism. It also appears to be a break from Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution — which means from the essential content of Lenin's post-October writings as well, where the same ideas are expressed.
Lenin states categorically in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky that the Bolsheviks in October 1917 instituted the "dictatorship of the proletariat," not a multiclass regime, and that it was the openly prosocialist workers' government that carried out the tasks of the democratic revolution, forged an alliance with the peasantry under the auspices of the workers revolutionary party and its program, and, by the late summer of 1918, consolidated a workers' state in Russia in the full sociological meaning of the term. Trotsky anticipated Lenin by twelve years in predicting this course of development.
But from 1917 onward there were no differences of significance between Lenin and Trotsky, and we have always regarded the Trotskyist movement as nothing more than the continuation of orthodox Leninism. If, as Jenness claims, the democratic dictatorship theory was correct after all, it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that he also believes Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution to be to one degree or another wrong, that Trotsky was mistaken in his belief that he had reached agreement with Lenin on this in 1917, that Trotsky's lifelong opposition to reviving and revalidating the democratic dictatorship slogan was misguided, and that our movement since Lenin's death has, because of Trotsky's misunderstanding of Lenin's politics, followed a wrong policy.
In his initial presentation of this thesis in the ISR, Jenness's efforts to enlist Lenin as a witness for his new position have fallen rather flat. I would urge Doug Jenness to reconsider the implications of what he writes and to retreat from the direction in which he seems to be headed.
January 1982
Notes
1. Che Guevara, "Message to the Executive Secretariat of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America," Prensa Latina, April 17,1967, translated in World Outlook , April 28,1967, p. 435.
2. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (New York: Pathfinder Press, second edition, 1973), p. 73.
3. George Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, no date), vol. 1, p. 327. Emphasis added.
4. Jenness succeeds in muddying the waters a bit on Lenin's actual perspective by mixing up together quotations written many years apart at different stages of Lenin's thought For example, the main citation from Lenin he uses on the correctness of the Bolsheviks' pre-1917 perspective is taken from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written in November 1918. The words Jenness cites are these:
"The alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry in general reveals the bourgeois character of the revolution, for the peasantry in general are small producers who stand on the basis of commodity production. Further, the Bolsheviks then added, the proletariat will join to itself the entire semiproletariat (all the toilers and exploited), will neutralize the middle peasantry and overthrow the bourgeoisie; this will be a Socialist revolution, as distinct from a bourgeois-democratic revolution."
Note carefully that this quotation does not mention the idea of a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" as an intermediate governmental form, as Lenin advocated in the 1905 period. It also is taken from a stage in Lenin's life, after the October revolution, when he had become convinced that the working class could dispense with both the multiclass regime and the extended economic transformation of the country in the democratic revolution, both of which he had considered to be prerequisites for the move onward to the socialist revolution in the 1905 period.
5. Writings, 1939-40, p. 59. Emphasis in original.
6. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960-70), vol. 9, pp. 236-37. Emphasis in original.
7. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Monad Press, 1980), vol. 3, p. 382.
8. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 9, pp. 48-49. Emphasis added.
9. Ibid., p. 50. Emphasis added.
10. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 10, pp. 333-34. Emphasis in original.
11. Marx and Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1978), vol. 10, pp. 277-87.
12. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969, third edition), pp. 62-63.
13. Ibid., p. 69. Emphasis in original.
14. Ibid., pp. 72-73. Emphasis in original.
15. Trotsky, 1905 (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), pp. 315-16.
16. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 419. Emphasis in original.
17. The government created by the February revolution was called the Provisional Government, not the Provisional Revolutionary Government.
18. Cited by Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin (London: Merlin Press, 1980), p. 129.
19. Ibid., p. 131.
20. Ibid., p. 132.
21. Ibid., p. 152.
22. Cited by Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1, p. 312.
23. Lenin, Between the Two Revolutions (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), p. 64. Emphasis in original. (Also in CW, vol. 24.)
24. Ibid., p. 69.
25. Ibid., p. 67. Emphasis in original.
26. Ibid., pp. 63-64. Emphasis in original.
27. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (New York: International Publishers, 1934), p. 38.
28. Ibid., p. 52.
29. ibid., p. 92.
30. Ibid., p. 83.
31. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 25, p. 413. Emphasis in original.
32. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 29, pp. 367-68. First emphasis added.
33. Trotsky distinguished the democratic dictatorship slogan from the Bolsheviks' and the early Comintern's use of the call for a "workers' and fanners' government," which did not imply a special, bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution. In the Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, written by Trotsky in 1938, he said:
"The slogan, 'workers' and fanners' government,' is thus acceptable to us only in the sense that it had in 1917 with the Bolsheviks, i.e., as an antibourgeois and anticapitalist slogan, but in no case in the 'democratic' sense which the epigones later gave it, transforming it from a bridge to socialist revolution into the chief barrier upon its path." (Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution [New York: Pathfinder Press, third edition, 1977], p. 134.)
Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, p. 278.
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