Comrades and other RevLefters, CHAPTER 5: SOCIAL PROLETOCRACY: THE REVOLUTIONARY MERGER OF MARXISM AND THE WORKERS' MOVEMENT is finally complete! CHAPTER 5: SOCIAL PROLETOCRACY: THE REVOLUTIONARY MERGER OF MARXISM AND THE WORKERS' MOVEMENT [Chapter Introduction and] Language and the Working Class Lenin: Proletocratic "State Socialist" Social Proletocracy: Labour Credit and the Critique of the Gotha Programme Revisited Bordiga: "Social-Abolitionist" Enemy of Proletarian Democracy The Mass Organization ("Party") of Social Proletocracy The title of this chapter section is misleading to at least some extent, for the discussion revolves not around the organization itself, but rather around the formation of it after the emergence of the initial mass organization, United Social Labour. It must be emphasized that Social Proletocracy - not so coincidentally abbreviated as “SPD” for Social-Abolitionism and Proletarian Democracy - as “the [mass] party of the militant proletariat” (Kautsky’s words) that excludes those who do not promote revolutionary Marxism (as defined earlier in this chapter and reiterated at the end) should not emerge until material conditions justify such emergence. For example, during the “Unity Congress” of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in 1906, Lenin himself realized the need for reconciliation, in spite of the utter foolishness and immaturity of the original split by the Mensheviks – not just the emergence of different tendencies – that occurred in 1903 (as quoted at the end of the Chapter 4 section “Program of a New Type”) as a result of differences over the composition of the party’s editorial board and, to a lesser extent, over the degree of party activism on the part of members. [Author’s Note: Not so coincidentally, if Social Proletocracy were to be abbreviated instead as “SAPD,” such initials would evoke the first name of the historical SPD, the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany).] How can transparent struggle between the tendencies – revolutionary (including the initial minority of revolutionary Marxists, the social-proletocrats) and and otherwise – lead to the emergence of the revolutionary-Marxist SPD as a mass organization? Consider the historical precedent of the RSDLP itself, as noted at great length by the Marxist historian Brian Pearce: Already, before 1906 was out, proposals began to be canvassed in Menshevik circles for dissolving the RSDLP in a “broad Labour congress” modelled on the British Labour Party of that time – a loose, comprehensive body which would embrace the trade unions, the co-operatives, petty-bourgeois radical groups, etc. Before continuing, it must be noted that the modern equivalents of such “broad labour congresses” come in the form of both “popular fronts” and, ironically, Trotsky’s own notion of “workers’ united fronts” (this is an advanced warning about certain Trotskyist circle-sects and other groups that may have a desire to “enter” United Social Labour for the sole purpose of transforming it into a mere “workers’ united front”). Continued: In Petersburg the local Mensheviks defied the views of their Bolshevik comrades in the “united” party organisations and linked up electorally with the liberals. Lenin's reply to this was to publish a pamphlet attacking the Mensheviks for treason to the common cause. [...] With the advance of reaction and dissipation of the rosy illusions of 1905 the Bolshevik proportion in the ranks of the party continued to grow. At the party conference held in November 1907, the Bolsheviks were able to secure the passing of resolutions which subordinated the Social-Democratic group in the Duma to the Central Committee and forbade party members to contribute articles to the bourgeois press on inner-party questions. At the party conference held in December 1908, in view of the now intense police terror in Russia, the elective principle in organisation was sharply modified and the party regime of before 1905 was in the main restored. This conference also passed a resolution condemning “liquidationism” (advocacy of dissolving the party in a broad Labour Congress), a political disease now spreading very rapidly in the upper circles of the Menshevik faction. [...] Many of the Menshevik rank and file [...] although they disagreed with the Bolsheviks on some important political points, shared with them the conviction that the workers must retain an independent party of their own, organised for illegal as well as legal activity. If the Bolsheviks played their cards properly they could win over a substantial section of this Menshevik rank and file; at this stage it would be wrong to take the initiative in splitting the party, although a split was inevitable in the not too distant future. A fight must be waged under the slogan of “preservation and consolidation of the RSDLP.” [...] The Bolsheviks’ striving to isolate and eliminate the liquidators was for a time complicated by the appearance in their own ranks of a “conciliationist” tendency which, demoralised by the shrinking in the size and influence of the RSDLP under the blows of reaction, and by the sneers of outsiders, including the spokesmen of the Second International, at the “faction-ridden” state of the Russian workers’ movement, wearily urged the dissolution of all factions, “mutual amnesty” and general brotherhood at the expense of all differences of principle. At a meeting of the Central Committee in January 1910, these “conciliationists” carried a resolution obliging everybody to dissolve their factions and close down their factional papers. The Bolsheviks fulfilled their obligations under this resolution, but the liquidators failed to do so. This open flouting of the party finally exposed the liquidators in the eyes of numerous Mensheviks [...] At the end of 1910 the Bolsheviks announced that they regarded themselves as released from the undertaking they had given in January, and launched a weekly paper, Zverzda, which was edited jointly with the pro-party Mensheviks. [...] The Bolsheviks were aided in their work now by the revival of the working-class movement, which was beginning, favoured by the boom that had started in 1909. With less danger of unemployment – and with the paralysing shock of the reaction of 1907 somewhat worn off – the workers began to recover their militant spirit. Strikes increased, and in 1912 the shooting down of some strikers in the Lena goldfields was to enable the Bolsheviks to infuse political consciousness into this militancy on a large scale. Pressed between the increasingly restive working class on the one hand and the grim wall of Tsarism on the other, the liquidators were obliged to move ever faster and show their full intentions without dallying any longer. In June 1911, Martov and Dan, leading liquidators, resigned from the editorial board of the official organ of the RSDLP and declared the latter to be no longer existent so far as they were concerned. [...] The moment had come to carry out the reconstitution of the party on new lines. In December 1911 Lenin was in a position to record that the Bolsheviks and pro-party Mensheviks had formed an Organisation Committee to prepare for a special party conference; that in the course of joint work these two factions had practically fused in such key centres as Baku and Kiev; and that “for the first time after four years of ruin and disintegration”, a Social Democratic leading centre had met inside Russia, issued a leaflet to the party, and begun the work of re-establishing the underground organisations that had broken up under the combined action of police terror and liquidationist propaganda. When the special party conference met in Prague in 1912 it was found to be the most representative party gathering since the Second Congress. Every faction in the RSDLP had been invited, but only the Bolsheviks and pro-party Mensheviks attended; the underground organisations on which the conference was based were now practically entirely in the hands of these two factions. The conference took to itself all the rights and functions of a party congress, and formally expelled the liquidators from the RSDLP. A new central committee was elected to replace the one elected in 1907, which had collapsed after the fiasco of 1910; this central committee was entirely Bolshevik in composition except for one pro-party Menshevik. The faction of pro-party Mensheviks disappeared soon afterwards; while Plekhanov and a few other leaders broke with the Bolsheviks, the bulk of the rank and file came over completely to the Bolshevik position, as Lenin had foreseen. On the other hand, the historical example of the German Social-Democratic Party needs to be considered, as well, since the real founder of “Marxism” himself, while siding with his most well-known disciple and the rest of the Bolsheviks on most Russian issues (including the question of liquidationism above), eventually turned renegade (or worse) on the home front when addressing the need for the class struggle to not “move forever in a circle” (in the form of yellow-trade-union reductionism). Observing the revolutionary upheaval in 1905 Russia, one Rosa Luxemburg noted in particular certain actions by Russian workers: mass strikes. A year later, this revolutionary Marxist wrote The Mass Strike, in which she related mass strikes to broader revolutionary processes in general: The mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the more highly developed the antagonism is between capital and labour, the more effective and decisive must mass strikes become. The chief form of previous bourgeois revolutions, the fight at the barricades, the open conflict with the armed power of the state, is in the revolution today only the culminating point, only a moment on the process of the proletarian mass struggle. And therewith in the new form of the revolution there is reached that civilising and mitigating of the class struggle which was prophesied by the opportunists of German social democracy – the Bernsteins, Davids, etc. It is true that these men saw the desired civilising and mitigating of the class struggle in the light of petty bourgeois democratic illusions – they believed that the class struggle would shrink to an exclusively parliamentary contest that and that street fighting would simply be done away with. History has found the solution in a deeper and finer fashion: in the advent of revolutionary mass strikes, which, of course, in no way replaces brutal street fights or renders them unnecessary, but which reduces them to a moment in the long period of political struggle, and which at the same time unites with the revolutionary period and enormous cultural work in the most exact sense of the words: the material and intellectual elevation of the whole working class through the “civilising” of the barbaric forms of capitalist exploitation. [Author’s Note: In today’s world, armed “revolution” can easily take the form of mass strikes that are euphemistically “well-defended” against strike-breakers, riot control units, and so on.] Meanwhile, Karl Kautsky relapsed back into his parliamentary reductionism (after a brief flirtation with revolutionary Marxism itself, on the basis of being inspired by the revolutionary upheaval in 1905 Russia) and dismissed Luxemburg’s work, while the bureaucracies of the maverick, yellow trade unions on the one hand and of an increasingly accommodationist party on the other (due to opportunist, unrecallable-by-the-party legislators who did not subordinate themselves to party decisions) became more and more intertwined. There were no factional struggles after 1907 – after the supposed “revolutionary victory” in the Second International against the opportunists on the attitude towards the prevalent imperialism – to remove opportunists from the party and especially its Executive Committee. Only seven years later, the “Great War” broke out, and the party’s Executive Committee, in betraying the German proletariat, voted for war credits. Only at that point did factional struggles occur, culminating in the eventual formation of the centrist Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (which included Bernstein and the renegade) and of the revolutionary-Marxist Spartacist League (which included Luxemburg, her close friend Clara Zetkin, and Karl Liebknecht). Both examples revolved around questions of very “extralegal” (read: illegal) activity on the part of Marxist and revolutionary-Marxist militants. It is to be expected that similar questions will have as much of an impact, if not more (in today’s world), on the functioning of United Social Labour and on either the emergence of the revolutionary-Marxist SPD as its own mass organization or the transformation of United Social Labour itself into the organizational form for Social Proletocracy. After all that has been discussed, what is to be done? To echo the real founder of “Marxism” and even Grigory Zinoviev – both hypothetically standing on their feet – as well as the leading pioneer of revolutionary Marxism who was the most well-known disciple of the former: In order for “Marxism” and the workers' movement to become reconciled and to become merged once more, “Marxism,” in the process of becoming truly revolutionary, has to break out of reductionist, as well as revisionist and sectarian, ways of thinking. This is the world-historical deed of the revolutionary Marxists, who in turn must do ALL in their power to make possible the self-emancipation of the proletariat as a whole. To give this self-emancipation the most effective form (i.e. the simultaneously social-abolitionist and proletocratic form), this is the function not of the various ”Communists,” “Revolutionary Communists,” “Marxist-Leninists,” “Socialists,” “Socialist Workers,” etc. that have betrayed the banner of the working class in their own particular manner, but of the organizations of United Social Labour and [then] of Social Proletocracy! To illustrate both this purpose and revolutionary-Marxism-as-merger, “circles of class consciousness” will be used, based on Kautsky’s “Circles of Awareness” (Lars Lih’s illustrative summary in Lenin Rediscovered of the final chapter of Kautsky’s The Class Struggle). A “Marxism” purged of reductionism, revisionism, and sectarianism becomes practically revolutionary when all circles almost collapse into one gigantic circle of full class consciousness: REFERENCES (for this chapter section): Building the Bolshevik Party: Some organisational aspects by Brian Pearce [http://marxists.anu.edu.au/history/e...olsheviks.html] The Mass Strike by Rosa Luxemburg [http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxe...trike/ch07.htm]
