Martov and the Anti Bolshevik Approach to Revolution

Socialist Thinkers:
People Who History Made
Martov and the Anti Bolshevik Approach to Revolution

26 December 1982, Opening remarks of Steve Coleman – The Socialist Party of Great Britain
Steve Coleman

Well thank you comrade chairman, comrades and friends. This is as you know the final lecture in the series and I also want to make it the concluding lecture in the series and I want to try and pull a few of the points together. During the course of it we have discussed history and we have discussed the dialectical principle and such discussion should enable us to be philosophically equipped to understand the past and perceive the historically possible options for the future. We have discussed the origins of religion and this has shown us how man made gods and how scientific thought must banish such imaginary beings from our rational consciousness. We have examined the relationship between capitalism and democracy and we have seen from the great Chartist struggles of the last century that the democratic society without removing capitalism is like an omelette without cracking eggs, you simply cannot produce one.
We discussed morality and concluded that socialism is not necessary because it is good, but it is good because it is necessary and we have examined the vision of socialism pointing out that what is proposed by socialists is not a radical rearrangement of capitalism but a new social system, quite unlike the one which we experience every day. A great step forward in the development of human interaction and in this lecture I want to discuss that step forward and what it entails – the revolution. To favour socialist transformation without revolution is like favouring steak and chips without favouring killing cows. You cannot create a socialist society without a fundamental upheaval, and a destruction of the system which exists at the moment.
But there are some people who are very much more in favour of the idea of socialism as a made to measure, ready to live in society than they are in favour of revolution. We have had revolutions before they say, and the results weren't very nice. They refer us to the French Revolution of 1789 and the 1848 upheavals all over Europe. They remind us of barricades and bloodshed and corpses and reigns of terror and they say this is what revolution produces. But these were not socialist revolutions, these were capitalist affairs where one privileged minority fought against another privileged minority for control of the state machine using the working class as a pawn in the game.
Well what about the Russian revolution say the anti revolutionaries, that was supposed to be socialist and look at the consequences of it in terms of human misery, well no socialist revolutionary would dispute for a moment that these consequences do exist. The so-called socialism of Russia and its empire manifests a form of dictatorial state capitalism which oppresses millions of people, locks them in prisons, throws them out of work, puts them in armies, involves them in wars, all of the hateful symptoms of an oppressive and exploitative society. To defend that state is to defend capitalism and to do so in the name of socialism is a distortion of the worst kind. It is to link together two fundamentally opposite conceptions, dictatorship and socialism. Now opponents of revolution who are usually quite glad to defend oppression in its openly capitalism form will be pleased to hear that revolutionary socialists oppose the Russian tyranny, we oppose it no less than Tory party and the SDP and President Reagan, the only difference perhaps between us is that we don’t do multi million dollar trade with them and they do but opposition to this is not sufficient. To come up with a recipe for a cake which poisons everyone who tastes it is a pretty serious mistake to make and to simply oppose the poisonous cake is to do nothing at all. To understand what is wrong with the recipe which in the case of the Russian revolution was the Bolshevik recipe is to go beyond the effects, the symptoms and to start looking at causes. Why did it end up like that?
Now unfortunately the vast majority of parties and groups and sects and individuals who call themselves revolutionary socialists have not rejected the Bolshevik recipe, they cling on to it in the belief, quite mistaken, that Leninism equals socialist revolution. And that if you’re not a Leninist, if you’re not a Bolshevik, and you do not want to re-enact the events of Petrograd and Moscow of October 1917, then you cease to have any entitlement to the label of revolutionary. Well this evening, I want to look at non Bolshevik indeed the anti Bolshevik approach to revolution and in doing so I will concentrate on three factors. Firstly Marx’s theory and experience in relation to working class revolution. Secondly Julius Martov’s critique of Blanquism as opposed to Lenin’s adoption of Blanquist ideas and thirdly the Russian revolution as an exercise in Blanquist strategy and as a defeat for socialist principles.
Now I’ll say at the outset that the need for brevity will require me to stick to the essential points, you’ll be able to find the non-essential points in most of the books written about this. Marx’s earliest formulation of revolutionary tactics was profoundly influenced by the experience of the French revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, this was event which proved to Marx and to other revolutionary thinkers the strength of a mass of people. For the first time in European politics it demonstrated that a crowd of people united however vaguely by a common aim could do something. They could get rid of a king, they could open up prisons, they could to some extent direct history. Now the name which was associated with conspiratorial revolutionary organisation in France, particularly in the 1840s was Auguste Blanqui.
He argued, that name is B-L-A-N-Q-U-I, he argued that an enlightened revolutionary vanguard, leadership could overthrow the coercive state by means of violent insurrection and that they could establish communism on behalf of the exploited class, the emphasis on ‘on behalf of’, to do it for them. Now Marx began by conceiving revolution in these conspiratorial terms. How else Marx argued could the semi feudal autocracies of Europe in his day be destroyed except by small groups of people gathering together, getting arms, and taking on the forces of the state. And Marx and Engels in their early thinking about revolution thought in these violent insurrectionary terms of street battles, barricades, peoples’ armies, and so on. Now it is unfortunate that for most people who call themselves Marxist, they never got any further than that, Marx and Engels did! And once you’ve not ignored the fact that Marx was writing at a time when the capitalist class was still struggling with the feudal aristocracy for control of the state, when the workers, in whose interests socialism would be, were still almost entirely excluded from voting or from having any real influence on political power. And that is why in the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels published in 1848 it stated that the first step of the socialist revolution, before anything else is and I quote ‘to raise the proletariat to the position of a ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.’ Now winning the battle for democracy meant being a position to control political power. It meant having access to the state, having access to government, local and national, to the armed forces to the law courts, having some working class accessibility to these areas of power. And once the workers could control political power Marx argued that they would control it in their own class interests. In other words they would use this democracy which would have been gained in order to dispossess the minority capitalist class, who within a democratic constitution could never outvote the working class majority, and then establish socialism.
And it was this ascendancy of the exploited majority to political power which is spoken about in clause 6 of the declaration of principles of the SPGB. It is this ascendancy to democratic control which Marx summed up by the term which has been so abused and distorted and confused, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Now in his book ‘Democracy or Dictatorship’ Karl Kautsky, when he was involved in a lengthy and very stimulating polemic with Lenin, Kautsky wrote that, I quote ‘at the beginning of their activity, Marx and Engels were greatly influenced by Blanquism. The dictatorship of the proletariat to which they aspired in their first writings still showed some Blanquist features. Now I would argue that Marx and Engels only accepted Blanquism and only accepted the old French revolutionary Jacobin idea, prior to their full understanding of the materialist conception of history.
It was at the point when Marx and Engels got to grips with the laws of historical motion with the materialist conception of history that they threw out the old ideas of conspiracy as advanced by Auguste Blanqui. Because when it comes to it, the belief that a minority can manipulate history by the strength of conviction is in complete opposition to the materialist recognition that socialism is an impossibility unless the conditions giving rise to it including mass working class political consciousness, unless they exist.
Now the proof of this was tragically demonstrated to Marx and his whole generation in 1871 when the war weary workers of Paris declared themselves autonomous, threw aside their government and established the commune of Paris. Now amongst those who had set up the commune and that is the subject of quite an independent lecture, I can’t do justice to the Paris commune here tonight, although it is a very very important subject, but amongst those in setting up in 1871 were workers, many of whom were influenced by Blanqui who genuinely wanted socialist revolution and saw it as the only alternative.
Consider for example a statement which is very rarely quoted for reasons that you’ll see when you hear it, because its frankly one of the people who took part in the Commune who had a lot more understanding than many of the others, the words written by Bouet, written in a newspaper called Le Draco in March 1871.
He says ‘yes for eighty two years we have struggled for nothing, we have taken the wrong route and have brought ourselves to a disaster. How ridiculous to have smashed the power of kings without destroying monarchy, to have abolished privileges without eliminating privileged classes, removing symbols while leaving intact the reality they represented. We have foolishly rid ourselves of the men and retained the institutions. Let’s do the job properly this time, ‘socialism!’, citizens, ‘socialism!’, let’s be socialists at last. That’s it, let’s change the foundations of the social order, let’s build a new world, let’s sow the seeds of freedom, let’s emancipate labour, let’s establish equality, war upon privilege, war upon exploitation, war upon ignorance, misery and servitude. Instead of removing the thorns of the brambles workers remove the roots!’
Now that was a very interesting statement made at the time of the Commune but these kind of powerful sentiments which inspired those heroic men and women who took part in the Paris Commune, they gave rise to a movement of workers who tried to organise democratically. They tried to organise without leaders but with delegates who had to report back if they weren’t doing their job properly, they were out, with tribunals so that if anyone did anything against the democratic will, a popular tribunal would hear the case and see what was going to happen. So that everything was organised as democratically as could be expected in that kind of a makeshift communistic set up.
Now as most of you will know, the Commune was crushed by the forces of capital. The French army went in, in what is arguably one of the most destructive and brutal attacks on working class self organisation of all time and thirty thousand communards were killed within a very short time. Hundreds of thousands were in prison. It was one of the greatest setbacks to the working class movement in Europe ever experienced. And the attempt to create an island of socialism where conditions could not allow it to exist ended in failure, heroic failure but failure is no more pleasant because it’s heroic.
Now Marx understood the reason for the communes defeat and he made this clear in a letter to a Dutch correspondent in February 1881. This Dutch so-called socialist had written to Marx saying why shouldn’t socialists take their part in capitalist governments. Marx said you can’t create a bit of socialism within a capitalist environment. And he went on to say perhaps you will refer me to the Paris Commune but apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a city under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in way socialist, nor could it be. With a modicum of common sense however, he could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people the only thing that could be reached at that time. In other words, Marx understood by the 1880s that socialist revolution involved necessary historical prerequisites which must exist and the absence of which could only allow the possibility of compromise.
Now after the Commune in 1874 Blanqui and thirty two of his comrades formed an organisation called the Revolutionary Commune Group. These called themselves the refugees from the Commune because they’d been moved from outside of Paris and they aimed to continue the tradition of the Commune by means of underground undemocratic means. Now Engels, Marx’s collaborator, replied to this declaration of principles written by the thirty three members of the Revolutionary Commune Group and Engels’ reply not frequently quoted in fact was directly repudiating the conspiratorial arguments of Blanqui’s group. Engels was saying you’ve got to take account of history, you’ve got to look at capitalism as at is and for that reason I’m going to ask Edward to quote from Engels’ reply at some length.
‘The Blanquists were not actually founded by Blanqui. Only a few of the thirty three signatories have ever spoken to Blanqui. They are so named because they wish to act in accordance with his spirit and tradition, Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionary and is a socialist only emotionally, feeling for the sufferings of the masses. He has no socialist theory nor has he any definite practical proposals for social redeem. In his political activity he has been essentially a man of action believing that a small well-organised minority launching a revolutionary attack at the correct moment can by a few early successes sweep the mass of the people along with it and thus accomplish a successful revolution. Blanqui’s conception of revolution as an attack by small revolutionary minority logically entails a necessity of dictatorship in the event of victory, a dictatorship it must be understood not of the whole revolutionary class of proletarians but of just those few who launch the attack and who are themselves subject to the dictatorship of one or a few individuals.’
‘Now our London Blanquists also believe in the principle that revolutions do not make themselves but are made, that revolutions are made by a comparatively small minority and according to a previously designed plan and finally that the moment is always right for action. Of course such principles expose one defencelessly to all the self deceptions to which political refugees are prone. And of course want to blanch from one foolish act to another. The refugee wants above all to act Blanqui ‘the man of action’ but good intentions can accomplish little here. Not everyone possesses Blanqui’s revolutionary instinct and his capacity for swift decisions, if anything is certain it is that the Paris proletariat needs a considerable period of rest to regain its strength after the exhausting war. The starving out of Paris and above all the frightful bloodshed in the main in 1871 and that every premature attempt to rise again can only result in another more frightful defeat.’
‘Communists are communists because they see past all the intermediate stages of compromises created not by themselves but by historical evolution to their ultimate goal which is the abolition of class, the building of a society, where private property and land and the means of production will no longer exist.’
‘The thirty three are communists because they imagine all will be settled as soon as they have the goodness to leap over the intermediate stations and compromises and that when the attack is launched in the course of the next few days as it is certain to be and they take over the helm, then communism can be introduced the very next day. If that is not immediately possible then they are not communists. What childish naivety to adduce impatience as a theoretically convincing reason.’
‘In every revolution a host of foolish acts occur just as at any other time and when one eventually finds time for criticism one is forced to come to this conclusion. We have done much that we should not have done and we have left undone much that we should have done and that is why things went wrong.’
‘But what a want of criticism to declare the Commune to be sacred and infallible and to a certain that every house that was burned down and every scapegoat who was shot received their just desserts, absolutely, down to the dot on the i’s. Is it not the same as claiming that in the first French Revolution every head met the fate it deserved? First the heads of those guillotined by Robespierre and then the head of Robespierre himself. Such are the juvenilities basically one intent should people fall into when they give free rein to their desire to appear strong’
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/mar...1874/06/26.htm)
So that’s what Engels had to say about people who attempted to continue this hopeless, though heroic, attempt at setting up an island of socialism and in the light of this it is perhaps understandable that in 1917 when news of the Bolshevik victory in Russia was received in Britain by the Socialist Party of Great Britain amongst others, Jack Fitzgerald wrote in the Socialist Standard that what had happened was likely to be just another Paris Commune. It was the immediate connection that was made. The Blanquists in the Russia of 1917 were of course the Bolsheviks because for all of his claims to be Marxist and a materialist Lenin was in fact an incorrigible philosophical idealist who believed that minority will could smash down the barriers which history imposes. For Lenin the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the monopoly of political power by a vanguard party apparently acting on behalf of the working class, exactly the same as Blanqui and his fellow conspirators in France.
Lenin argued that the dictatorship of one man was not even incompatible with Soviet democracy, he actually wrote this. He argued that a leadership who were more enlightened taking control of society were infinitely more progressive than a reactionary Tsarist autocracy which was also only a minority imposing itself on the majority.
Martov

Now it is interesting to bring in, the writings of Martov if you consider what Martov had to say about this connection which Lenin makes between democracy and dictatorship as being in some ways dialectically reconcilable when he speaks about this in his major pamphlet ‘the State and the Socialist Revolution’.
‘The completely democratic constitution of the Paris Commune based on universal suffrage, of the immediate recall of every office order by the simple decision of his electors, on the suppression of bureaucracy and the armed force as opposed to the people, on the electedness of all offices, that is what constitutes, according to Marx, the essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He never thinks of opposing such a dictatorship of democracy. Already in 1847 in his first draft of the Communist Manifesto Engels wrote ‘the proletariat revolution will establish first of all the democratic administration of the state and will thus install directly or indirectly the political domination of the proletariat. Directly in England where the proletariat forms the majority of the population, indirectly in France and in Germany where the majority of the population is not composed only of proletariats but also of small peasants and small bourgeois who are only now beginning to pass into the proletariat and whose political interests fall more and more under the influence of the proletariat.’’
‘The first step in the revolution, by the working class declares the Manifesto is to raise the proletariat to the position of a ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. Between the elevation of the proletariat to the position of a ruling class and the conquest of democracy Marx and Engels put an equals sign, they understood the application of this political power by proletariat only in the forms of a total democracy. In the measure that Marx and Engels became convinced that the socialist revolution could only be accomplished by support of the majority of the population, accepting knowingly the positive program of socialism - so their conception of a class dictatorship lost its Jacobin content.’
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/mar.../xx/marxdp.htm)
Well I’m not going to spend irregular time this evening, again because time doesn’t permit, to go into the Blanquist political characteristics of Lenin’s thinking, although I would say for those of you who want to read about that there is an article about it in next months Socialist Standard [January 1983] but it is something which I do want to look at, far less often discussed, the Menshevik position in 1917.
Now it is very much harder to talk about what the Mensheviks stood for than it is to speak about what the Bolsheviks stood for because the Menshevik position was a very much less centralised one, it wasn’t dominated by a leadership, there were far more factions and currents and it was a freer intellectual environment. We can however speak about this, what I want to concentrate on, the position of the most prominent and the most intellectually advanced Menshevik Martov who as a historical materialist rejected the Bolshevik adventure.
Now Martov argued as Marx did in relation to the Paris Commune when the French workers had seized power that the only thing which could be reached at the time of the workers taking power when conditions were not yet right was compromise based upon political strength and historical reality, in other words, using all of the organisation that you have and recognising the historical limitations to your own strength. And Martov argued in the Russia of 1917 that the workers coming to power had to take account of these limitations now in ‘the State and Socialist Revolution’, Martov goes into greater detail on this Marxist position. Once again, a quote from Martov;
‘It appears that Marx admitted the possibility of a political victory in the proletariat over the bourgeoisie at a point of historic development when the previously necessary conditions for a socialist revolution were not yet mature but he stressed that such a victory would be transitory! And he predicted with the prescience of genius that a conquest of political power by the proletariat that is premature in historic viewpoint would only be a point in process of the bourgeois revolution itself.
We conclude that in the case of a notably premature conquest of power, Marx would consider it obligatory of the conscious elements of the proletariat to pursue a policy that takes into consideration the fact that such a conquest represents objectively only a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution itself and will serve the latter by aiding its further development. He would expect a policy leading the proletariat to limit voluntarily the position and the solution of the revolutionary problem. So the proletariat can score a victory over the bourgeoisie and not for the bourgeoisie only when the march of history will have elaborated the material factors that create the necessity of putting an end to the bourgeois methods of production.
The following words of Marx explain in one sense a passing victory of the proletariat can become a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution. ‘By its bludgeon blows the Reign of Terror cleansed the surface of France, as if by a miracle, of all the feudal ruins. With its timorous caution, the bourgeoisie would not have managed this task in several decades. Therefore, the bloody acts of the people merely served to level the route of the bourgeoisie.’ The Reign of Terror in France was the momentary domination of the democratic petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat over all the possessing classes, including the authentic bourgeoisie. Marx indicates very definitely that such a momentary domination cannot be the starting point of a socialist transformation, unless the material factors rendering this transformation indispensable will have first been worked out.’
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/mar.../xx/marxdp.htm)
Now to continue on this theme of Martov it’s a very important one, in 1846 year before he wrote the Manifesto, Marx wrote wrote a letter to the German utopian Weitling stating that quote ‘there could be no question now of realising communism in Germany. First the capitalist class must come to power!’ and it is absolutely important that we see that Marx non-utopianism consisted in the fact that these tremendous theoretical works explain how socialism could be possible were at the same accompanied by a recognition on his part that in his own historical condition it was not possible. He was talking about the need for the development of historical conditions which would give rise to the possibilities he spoke of.
Now Martov in Russia argued that the job of developing capital must be carried out by a capitalist class. The alternative would be, and in fact was, for the workers to take power and to be forced by historical conditions to act as the political representatives of capital. Now in his article entitled ‘Critical Morality and Moralising Criticism’ Marx explicitly states that and I quote ‘if the proletariat overthrows the political domination of the capitalist class, its victory will only be a point in the process of the capitalist revolution itself and will serve the cause of the latter by aiding its further development.’
In other words Marx was saying take power as a working class when the conditions are right for capitalism and you will have to do the dirty work for the capitalist class. Now Marx was right and Martov was also right when he stated that the best course for the Russian working class was to let the small capitalist class which was represented in the Provisional Government of February 1917 by Lvov and Kerensky, let them undertake the work of building up capital. Meanwhile the organised workers could put pressure on them for whatever concessions are within reach, trade union concessions, democratic opportunities whatever they may be, while at the same time uniting with workers in other perhaps more advanced countries attempting to gain a worldwide movement which could actually bring about socialism. That’s what needed to be done and it is a fascinatingly prescient historical message, it applies to Islamic revolutions today, it applies to conditions in any area of Africa and Latin America where workers are being tempted to take control of capital, develop it and take responsibility for it.
Now Martov right warned that if those calling themselves socialists took power in the absence of developed capitalism and mass socialist understanding there would be two terrible consequences of this from a political point of view.
First of all, all of the iniquitous government action associated with the accumulation of capital would be regarded as the errors of socialism. This is precisely what has happened in Russia. In 1917 and of course after the late 1920s when Stalinist economic policies came into full effect, socialism was related in the popular mind with all of the state coercion, all of the oppression of the five year plans, in exactly the same as has happened in China, as happened in Albania and many areas of Eastern Europe, as is happening now of course in Africa and South Africa, in Zimbabwe where strikes are being banned in the name of socialism and the development of capital.
Now secondly Martov predicted that if socialists gave up their status as an opposition, if they gave up their right to stay outside of government and outside of the area of the control of capital at a time when they had no other historical option than to be in opposition then the democratic concessions which would be gained from capitalist government would not be gained. And this is exactly what has occurred in Russia. The myth that the proletariat is in a position of dictatorship has logically precluded the possibility of the proletariat, I say class with real material needs to oppose its own dictatorship which of course is defending the real material needs of capital. And this has put not only the Bolshevik party of Lenin right from the beginning, but the whole history of so called socialist control over capitalist development in a impossible position.
And interestingly enough, that position is one which was predicted by Engels writing many years before it even happened. Predicted the possibility which would happen if socialists took control in a capitalist economy and it is well worth hearing what Engels wrote on this in his Preface to the Peasant war in Germany;
‘The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extremist party is to be compelled to take over the government at a time when the moment is not yet right for the rule of the class he represents. He finds himself necessarily in an insoluble political dilemma. What he can do is in conflict with his entire political actions, his principles and the immediate interests of his party. What he is supposed to do cannot be done. He is compelled to represent not his party or his class but the class for which the rule of which at the moment here happens to be right. For the sake of that though he must act in the interests of an alien class and must feed his own class the phrases and promises along with assertion that the interests of that alien class are really their own. He who gets himself into that forced position is irredeemably lost’
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/mar...rmany/ch06.htm)
Well that was written of course by Frederick Engels and not Michael Foot although it could well apply to him very soon. Now of course like King Canute, Lenin deprecated Martov and the Mensheviks for having the audacity to claim that the impossible should not be attempted. If of course a small group of anarchists, let’s say around here in King’s Cross was to propose to form an army and to seize control of Islington town hall and to establish socialism and who knows probably wilder plots have been hatched in this very room. If they were to claim that public feeling was on their side because the rates in Islington are very high, if they urged those of us present to join them in this attempt and if we refused on the grounds that this adventure would not achieve socialism and if those things happen and this little band of anarchists accused us of being anti-socialists simply because we have a clear idea of what is historically possible, well then we would know what the Mensheviks felt like because that is exactly what happened to them.
They were told that by recognising the possibilities of history they were letting down the cause of socialism. In fact Martov’s socialist principles whilst not entirely those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and one wouldn’t expect them to be in the Russia of 1917 were in many ways far advanced of Lenin’s. At the beginning of the First World War the Mensheviks split between the defencists who supported the war, and the internationalists who opposed it. Martov who was abroad at the time took the internationalist position and maintained this all through the war. This internationalism was not of course unrelated to Martov’s long association with the Russian political revolutionary group called the Bundists. And the Bundists were Yiddish speaking Marxists mainly of Jewish in fact entirely of Jewish origin and whose particular political strength was in their outspoken hostility to the idea of national frontiers which is the kind of hostility you would expect from Yiddish speaking Marxists of Jewish origin to have because they were thrown out of one country and into another and the whole idea of frontiers and armies and nations appalled them and Martov had been intimately associated with the Bundists in his early political career.
Now in May 1917 Martov returned to Russia, a month after Lenin returned and he unequivocally opposed the war and in fact he won over large sections of the Menshevik party particularly the branches in Moscow and the Kharkov and the Donets basin and even though this left the majority of the Mensheviks especially those in the factories in Petrograd as defencists, it meant that the Menshevik party was split between those who opposed the war and those who in one way or another thought they should support it.
Now in late August 1917 many of the Menshevik internationalists, although not Martov himself, left the Menshevik party and they formed a new paper, a paper which was in fact edited for a time by Maxim Gorky. Now although Martov stayed within the Menshevik party he stopped writing for its official newspaper the Rabochaia gazeta (Workers' gazette) and he only wrote for the paper edited by Gorky and he associated himself with an organisation outside of his own party which stood unequivocally against any side in the war.
Now unfortunately the articles which were written by Martov are not generally available in English but they are major statements of anti militarism which are comparable only probably with those appearing at the same time in the Socialist Standard which was of course the only journal in Britain to oppose the first world war quite unequivocally. Now the victory of Lenin’s Blanquism in October 1917 did not put an immediate stop to the Mensheviks in Russia. For three years Martov attempted to organise a working class opposition against the Bolsheviks but in 1920 he found it impossible to continue to be freely active in Russia because he was frequently being harassed and knocked up and he had to leave the country never to return. And one year later in 1921 the Menshevik party was either totally fallen to pieces or else its main activists were rounded up and put into prison shortly after the Kronstadt revolt. One of the reasons for this curiously enough is because many of these activists who were not associated with Martov have as early as 1918 advocated the idea of the New Economic Policy and when Lenin did his u-turn and adopted the New Economic Policy in 1921 he had to lock up the Menshevik activists so that he wouldn’t be associated with having stolen their policy.
Now Martov’s prediction had of course come true. Here was the representative of what was called socialism acting with all of the rejection of democracy which is necessary for the efficient administration of capitalism. Now in the summer of 1919 Martov drafted a manifesto, it was published under the not uninteresting title of ‘What is to be done?’ which caused a little bit of embarrassment for Lenin and this put forward a number of demands, six demands, all of which the Bolsheviks would have supported before they came to power, all of which they had to reject after they came to power.
Firstly in Martov’s ‘What is to be done?’ universal franchise and free ballots in all soviet elections was demanded.
Now the Bolsheviks had been the main advocates of universal franchise for a constituent assembly before October 1917. After the revolution they rejected it, they had been rigging the ballots and of course they had so centralised soviet power that most people had no real influence over political decision making.
Secondly the manifesto demanded freedom of speech and freedom of the press for all working class parties in Russia. In November 1917 the Rabochaia gazeta was closed down allegedly because it was inspiring riots in Siberia although that wasn’t very convincing to the Mensheviks. Curiously enough it started up again the next day under a different title and remained in existence for six months without the Bolsheviks even knowing about it which goes to show that the underdog can sometimes score a point.
Thirdly the manifesto of Martov called for the free elections to the revolutionary tribunals which were being packed by members of the Bolshevik party so that if anyone was sent to court on a political charge the party which controlled the state was simply ensuring that they were sent to prison for a long period.
The fourth demand of the manifesto was for the abolition of the dreaded Cheka which was a secret police force which had been set up by the Bolsheviks and was the forerunner of course of the KGB.
Demand number five was to abolish the death penalty which the Bolsheviks like the Tories of today vigorously defended because it was in favour of law and order since you would have people rioting on the streets if you didn’t kill a few of them occasionally.
And finally Martov’s manifesto demanded that all state officials must be accountable to the soviet consisting of workers and peasants and not simply to the Bolshevik party.
Now every one of these demands was rejected.
Interestingly enough, every one of these demands applied to the Paris Commune of 1871. So when Marx made his famous remark ‘that look at the Paris Commune, there you have the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ what he meant was you have free elections, you have accountable delegates, you don’t have a secret police force you have people accountable to the Commune and not to the party. Every one of these in the so called ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ of the Bolsheviks did not exist, not under Stalin but under Lenin as early as 1919. So Martov saw that it was not Lenin who defended the ideas of Marx but it was in fact Lenin who in rejecting democracy declared himself and his ideology as an enemy of the socialist revolution. And the lesson to be learned from this is not simply one about the pious superiority of democracy over dictatorship although in experience there is a great deal to be said for democracy over dictatorship, the lesson to be learned is that historical conditions, the possibilities of the age must at all times dictate what one’s political strategy is going to be.
Now let me conclude not just this lecture but the series of lectures by making two points. Firstly in speaking about the noble principles of 1871 in Paris and the cynical Blanquist tactics of 1917 in Petrograd we should turn our attention to something much more recent which I at least, here I’m not speaking officially on behalf of the Socialist party but on behalf of myself, I regard as the greatest working class spontaneous movement to have taken place in recent years which the events in Poland. Now like the Communards our fellow workers in Solidarity trade union in Poland were fuelled by a passion for democracy but their oppressors this time were neither a Tsarist autocracy nor were they the old kings and queens or merchant governments of Europe, they were the direct descendants of the Bolshevik tradition. They were people with pictures of Lenin and of course of Marx hanging on their wall. Now what can socialists say to those workers, what can we say not only to the workers in Poland but to the workers who are being rounded up by the thousand for the most terrible tortures in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran or in Iraq or in Chile or in El Salvador or in South Africa, what should we say to them.
Should we, as certain foolish dogmatists would like it, tell them that we are hostile to any attempt on their part to do anything unless they are carrying all three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital under their arms and are fully committed socialists? Or should we urge them to undertake the political adventure of setting up a so called socialist society there and then without there being the material conditions either in economic terms or in terms of political consciousness for it to exist. That would be idealism of the Bolshevik variety which would only lead to disaster as we said at a meeting in this room at the time when Solidarity was going, to tell the members of Solidarity, ten million of them, to rise up against the state and shoot the Politbureau is very nice if you are sitting in a room in London but it is a lot harder if you are sitting in a shipyard in Gdansk with secret policeman following you around. It is neither to the idealism of Lenin nor to the rigidity of dogmatism that we have to seek an answer, it is to historical materialism as applied by Marx and as explained by Martov and that has been the theme running through this whole series of talks.
The role of socialists is not to say what should be done by the Victorian nanny standing over the working class but is to say what can be done from a working class point of view, what can be done! Now what then can we conclude by saying in the broadest terms of the world working class can be done. We should be guided by the simple experience of our own activities and also by the pressures, which are always uncomfortable pressures of political logic. Let me pose the question. How can we establish socialism without leaders and governments and vanguards? The answer is not to do away with leaders, to do away with followers. Well how can you have a movement without followers, the answer, by having a movement were everyone knows where they’re going. And if everyone knows where they’re going there is no need to follow the one in front. But how do you establish such a movement? The answer to that by spreading political knowledge, ideas. Well that’s easier said than done, but nobody wants to sit around in rooms forever discussing theory, so what are you going to do about that? The answer is no, not everyone does want to sit around in rooms forever discussing political theory and that is why it is time to take our theory and our knowledge and to pass it on to other workers, not packaged up in books, but related to day to day working class experiences so that people where they live, where they work, wherever they go are in touch with idea which are not buried in the past but related to the future and when the majority of the workers understand and want the new system of society, then and only then, there will be a revolution the likes of which the world has never before seen.