Lars T Lih: Letter on Old Bolshevism and Permanent Revolution

[Die Neue Zeit]

Vindication (http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1051/letters/)



By Lars T Lih

Jim Creegan’s letter (http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1048/letters/) on the Kamenev editorial from March 1917 brings up issues that demand further discussion (Letters, March 5). Before turning to these wider issues, however, let me challenge some of Creegan’s factual assertions.

I am not “oblivious” to the fact that the Provisional government of 1917 remained loyal to tsarist treaty commitments - and, more importantly, neither were the Bolsheviks! Articles in Pravda in March 1917 denounced the imperialist war and the government’s commitment to it. Creegan incorrectly states that mutiny and mass desertion were already taking place in February and March; this was not the case when Kamenev wrote his editorial (http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1047/bolshevism-was-fully-armed/), nor when Lenin returned in April, nor for a considerable time thereafter. The political problem that the Bolsheviks faced was the exact opposite: the soldier section of the Petrograd Soviet was so ‘defencist’ that they regarded the ‘defeatist’ Bolsheviks as traitors. Precisely for this reason, Lenin dropped all talk of ‘defeatism’ after his return.

Lenin did not call for armed insurrection as either a strategic or tactical goal in spring 1917. On the contrary, he called for “peaceful development” of the revolution, whereby a soviet majority (not necessarily a Bolshevik one) would reject coalition politics and create an all-socialist government. Only after the July days was this tactic/strategy rejected - and even then only provisionally.

There is no basis for claiming that the Petrograd Bolsheviks passively waited for an automatic process to unfold, thus “substituting process for agency”. On the contrary, they called for active organisation of soviet and party forces, campaigns to bring home the need for soviet power by exposing the counterrevolutionary nature of the Provisional government, arming the workers, etc, etc. On the other hand, Lenin also relied on an “automatically unfolding revolutionary dynamic” - namely, the objective reasons that would force the elite-based Provisional government to alienate the Russian workers and peasants. Creegan desperately wants to dig as deep a gulf as possible between Lenin and his closest associates, but he can do so only by systematically shuttering out the ‘active’ side of Kamenev and the ‘automatic’ side of Lenin.

Why is Creegan so fervidly anti-old Bolshevik? All for the greater glory of Lev Trotsky and his formula of “permanent revolution”. For some reason, many admirers of Trotsky don’t think he looks good unless the ‑old Bolsheviks look bad. This problem brings us to the wider issue of the profound nature of the Russian Revolution and the role of Bolshevism. Let us start by positing that any political strategy from the 1905-07 period would need substantial modification to fit a revolution that broke out in very different circumstances over a decade later. Creegan points out some of the changes required by the old Bolshevik outlook, but he and the Trotskyist tradition in general seem to be under the mistaken impression that their hero’s scenario from 1905-07 did not also require substantial modification in 1917 and years after. We can illustrate this by looking at the question of the peasantry.

Talking about the Russian Revolution without talking about the peasant is almost like talking about Hamlet without the prince. When Creegan discusses the old Bolshevik strategy, he explicitly mentions the peasant (the proletariat in power “could not transgress the bounds of bourgeois property due to Russia’s overwhelming peasant majority”). In contrast, when he discusses the “permanent revolution” strategy, the peasant is only vaguely implied (“a socialist regime in backward Russia could not sustain itself” in the absence of European revolution). Let us review the logic of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” and the role it assigned to the peasant.

The centrality of the peasant to the 1905 revolution was evident to all Social Democratic observers, and so they applied what I have termed the “axiom of the class ally”: the proletariat cannot go further in any revolution than the class interests of a necessary class ally. Attached to this major premise was a minor premise about Russia: the peasantry was not ready to move toward socialism. Conclusion: the upcoming Russian Revolution could not directly move to socialism and the proletariat could therefore not remain in power after the revolutionary period. Although Trotsky fully accepted both premises, he still thought that the proletariat could and should stay in power until forced out.

He pictured post-revolutionary relations with the peasantry as follows: the proletariat in power would carry out various democratic reforms that would win the loyalty of the peasant. But the class nature of the proletariat would compel it to take socialist measures that would inevitably alienate the peasant majority. The resulting clash would be “the beginning of the end … the conflict will end in civil war and the defeat of the proletariat. Within the confines of a national revolution, and given our social conditions, there is no other ‘way out’ for the proletariat’s political domination.”

In other words, in the absence of European revolution, even an originally democratic revolution would inevitably end up in civil war between workers and peasants, leading to defeat (both political and moral, although Trotsky didn’t stress this point) for the proletariat. Trotsky was unfazed by this horrendous outcome, because he was so sure that the Russian Revolution would lead to a successful European revolution.

Let us now turn to the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. In 1917, Lenin did make an innovation (not a fundamental break) by proposing that meaningful “steps toward socialism” could be made in Russia with the peasants’ support (thus preserving the axiom of the class ally). After the October revolution, efforts were made to pursue this path by encouraging collective agricultural production. But the peasants did not take kindly to these efforts, and the Bolsheviks voluntarily called them off (long before the introduction of NEP in 1921, by the way). Of course, there was much conflict between the peasantry and ‘soviet power’ during the civil war, but these conflicts arose from the burdens of achieving a common goal: namely, defeating the anti-democratic counterrevolution. If the Bolsheviks had been compelled, à la Trotsky, to alienate the peasantry by forcing socialist measures on them, the revolution would have gone down the drain in short order. Luckily, the Bolsheviks - very much including Trotsky himself - refused to act out this logic.

We should not let ourselves get bogged down in some sort of contest over which 1905 strategy - old Bolshevism vs “permanent revolution” - had to be modified the most. Yet I believe that the heart of old Bolshevism was preserved.

This core can be stated as follows: the socialist proletariat will carry out a mighty “people’s revolution” (narodnaiarevoliutsiia) by providing political leadership to the peasantry, resisting “bourgeois liberal” attempts to cut short the revolution halfway, beating back the armed counterrevolution and carrying out a vast political and social transformation of Russia. The victorious Red Army - manned by peasant recruits, officered by politically-neutered ‘bourgeois specialists’, and guided by a party based in the socialist proletariat - was the incarnation and vindication of old Bolshevism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1052/letters/



Peasants

Comradely thanks are in order for Lars T Lih’s letter (March 26), explicitly outlining the contemptuous logic behind Trotsky’s ‘theory’ of permanent revolution, using the man’s own, extremely undemocratic words. The notion of a proletarian demographic minority staying in power by force against a majority population of by and large the urban and rural petit-bourgeoisie is contemptuous - not just by the standards of revolutionary social democracy back then, but by the standards of Marxist strategy for the Third World today!

The same Lenin, whom Trotskyists say was won over to Trotsky’s take on permanent revolution, wrote later On The Trade Unions, The Present Situation And Trotsky’s Mistakes (1920) for a very good reason. "Our state is in reality not a workers’ state, but a workers’ and peasants’ state" was Lenin’s definitive expression of opposition to Trotsky’s take on permanent revolution.

Also, having read the works by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev opposing Trotskyism after Lenin’s death, why these individuals didn’t use those same words against Trotsky comes as a surprise to me. "Civil War With The Peasantry Or Bolshevism?" would have been a more suitable title to critique Trotsky’s take on permanent revolution, starting off by juxtaposing Trotsky’s extremely undemocratic words (cited by Lih) with Lenin’s words above.

[John Nada]

Speaking of Hamlet.
In one point our French comrades are absolutely right: No lasting revolutionary transformation is possible in France against the will of the small peasant. Only, it seems to me, they have not got the right leverage if they mean to bring the peasant under their influence.
What, then, is our attitude towards the small peasantry? How shall we have to deal with it on the day of our accession to power?

To begin with, the French programme is absolutely correct in stating: that we foresee the inevitable doom of the small peasant, but that it is not our mission to hasten it by any interference on our part.

Secondly, it is just as evident that when we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to cooperative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose. And then, of course, we shall have ample means of showing to the small peasant prospective advantages that must be obvious to him even today.

Almost 20 years ago, the Danish Socialists, who have only one real city in their country — Copenhagen — and therefore have to rely almost exclusively on peasant propaganda outside of it, were already drawing up such plans. The peasants of a village or parish — there are many big individual homesteads in Denmark — were to pool their land to form a single big farm i order to cultivate it for common account and distribute the yield in proportion to the land, money, and labor contributed. In Denmark, small landed property plays only a secondary role. But, if we apply this idea to a region of small holdings, we shall find that if these are pooled and the aggregate area cultivated on a large scale, part of the labor power employed hitherto is rendered superfluous. It is precisely this saving of labor that represents one of the main advantages of large-scale farming. Employment can be found for this labor in two ways. Either additional land taken from big estates in the neighborhood is placed at the disposal of the peasant co-operative, or the peasants in question are provided with the means and the opportunity of engaging in industry as an accessory calling, primarily and as far as possible for their own use. In either case, their economic position is improved and simultaneously the general social directing agency is assured the necessary influence to transform the peasant co-operative to a higher form, and to equalize the rights and duties of the co-operative as a whole as well as of its individual members with those of the other departments of the entire community. How this is to be carried out in practice in each particular case will depend upon the circumstance of the case and the conditions under which we take possession of political power. We may, thus, possibly be in a position of offer these co-operatives yet further advantages: assumption of their entire mortgage indebtedness by the national bank with a simultaneous sharp reduction of the interest rate; advances from public funds for the establishment of large-scale production (to be made not necessarily or primarily in money but in the form of required products: machinery, artificial fertilizer, etc.), and other advantages.

The main point is, and will be, to make the peasants understand that we can save, preserve their houses and fields for them only by transforming them into co-operative property operated co-operatively. It is precisely the individual farming conditioned by individual ownership that drives the peasants to their doom. If they insist on individual operation, they will inevitably be driven from house and home and their antiquated mode of production superseded by capitalist large-scale production. That is how the matter stands. Now, we come along and offer the peasants the opportunity of introducing large-scale production themselves, not for account of the capitalists but for their own, common account. Should it really be impossible to make the peasants understand that this is in their own interest, that it is the sole means of their salvation?[quote]We, of course, are decidedly on the side of the small peasant; we shall do everything at all permissible to make his lot more bearable, to facilitate his transition to the co-operative should he decide to do so, and even to make it possible for him to remain on his small holding for a protracted length of time to think the matter over, should he still be unable to bring himself to this decision. We do this not only because we consider the small peasant living by his own labor as virtually belonging to us, but also in the direct interest of the Party. The greater the number of peasants whom we can save from being actually hurled down into the proletariat, whom we can win to our side while they are still peasants, the more quickly and easily the social transformation will be accomplished. It will serve us nought to wait with this transformation until capitalist production has developed everywhere to its utmost consequences, until the last small handicraftsman and the last small peasant have fallen victim to capitalist large-scale production. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/peasant-question/ch02.htm Bold mine.

Seems the Bolsheviks had the same line as Engels. It makes sense.

At the time, in many(most) countries the proletariat were the minority. Peasant were the majority. Yet colonialism and imperialism left much of the world underdeveloped. Places like China, where IIRC the proletariat only made up 10-20%, yet numerically, the Chinese proletariat was larger than the total populations of many countries in Europe, even if it was a tiny minority. This would mean that the majority of the proletariat would have to wait until a minority of the proletariat in Europe, North America and Japan was ready, and even those countries had a large percentage of other classes or until a sizable proletariat was produced by "their own" bourgeoisie.

[Rafiq]

One problem which isn't being taken account was the overwhelming destruction and death of the politically militant proletarian demographic minority which had actively brought out the revolution itself during the Russian civil war, during which the organs of state and military power independent of the industrial proletariat were forged. By the end of the war the problem was not how to defend a proletarian dictatorship in the midst of a hostile peasantry, but how to defend the carcass of the worker's movement in the absence of any substantial social base. This was a period wherein the Bolshevik government desperately attempted to "create" a new proletariat, in the process of which the systemic organs of de-classed state repression were formed.



Seems the Bolsheviks had the same line as Engels. It makes sense.

At the time, in many(most) countries the proletariat were the minority. Peasant were the majority. Yet colonialism and imperialism left much of the world underdeveloped. Places like China, where IIRC the proletariat only made up 10-20%, yet numerically, the Chinese proletariat was larger than the total populations of many countries in Europe, even if it was a tiny minority. This would mean that the majority of the proletariat would have to wait until a minority of the proletariat in Europe, North America and Japan was ready, and even those countries had a large percentage of other classes or until a sizable proletariat was produced by "their own" bourgeoisie.

This is true, but the Chinese totality of production still placed the proletariat into the position of a distinct minority - in other words, it doesn't matter if 1 billion Chinese were proletarian while 9 billion were of the agrarian classes, it is the relationship to production as a whole which designates class relations - and thereby the potential political relations, not numerical strength as such, but numerical strength in proportion to the productive process. The constitution of the Chinese proletariat was irrevocably bound by its position as a distinct minority, making its potential for social transformation absolutely inferior to the proletariat of advanced capitalist countries.