Weekly Worker 444 Thursday August 22 2002
Debate
Bloody revolution
One reaps what one sows, as they say; and indeed a rotten seed has borne a rotten fruit (‘Ban drugs’, Letters, July 25).
“... communists,” we are told (amidst the letter’s - distinctly reactionary - principal content), “should aim for a bloodless revolution.” Let comrade Debashis Dey be assured, communists who aim thus will always and in every circumstance, to a greater or lesser extent, fail to achieve their target. There is no possibility of such a revolution. The struggle between capital and labour, bourgeois and proletarian, more than any other, inscribes upon its banners the dictum: Battle or death; bloody struggle or extinction.
Whatever the intent of certain comrades’ recent (one-sided and therefore false) insistence on the peaceable nature of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 (which finds its formal expression in the inclusion of the “peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must” clause in the new ‘What we fight for’ column), it is clear that the result is the sort of barely concealed Kantian piety espoused by comrade Dey. It is hardly to be doubted that we should find such elements on the eve of insurrection - bleeding hearts of the Lunacharsky/Nogin type (and I am not too sure that I am not slandering these men by placing them in such a connection) - acting as ‘conciliators’, warning against ‘fratricide’: acting, that is, as the unwitting agents of the bourgeoisie.
As comrade Barry Biddulph correctly says, one can speak of the “peaceful” character of the Russian revolution only by mechanically separating the revolution from the counterrevolution (Letters, July 25). One must, as well, deliberately limit the scope of debate - emphasising Petrograd at the expense of Moscow most notably. If one did not know better, the advocates of “peacefully if we can” (most prominently, comrades Manson and Conrad) could be accused, at least, of a cheap, sleight-of-hand method of debate.
It is entirely false, as both comrades Manson and Conrad - to a greater or lesser extent - have done, to set up the Petrograd October days as some sort of definitive precedent. The conditions then obtaining in Petrograd were entirely unique. Never before, or since for that matter, has the collapse of a regime been so complete as that of Kerensky’s government. Not a single army regiment - not a single police division! Can we expect to see so favourable a set of conditions, or, for that matter, conditions even remotely similar? No. We cannot even dare to hope such things. It is, as such, a most contemptible folly to even imply the possibility.
We draw great lessons from the Bolshevik experience - in it there is much worthy of following (so far as this is at all possible). There is much, however, that should - and, indeed, must - be jettisoned.
It took the blood of many thousands of red workers - in Moscow, Finland (where, according to Serge, there were no less than 100,000 victims of the white terror in 1918: Year one of the Russian Revolution London 1992, p188) and, under the auspices of the Czech regiments, all along the Volga, in Samara, Kazan, etc - the assassinations of Volodarsky and Uritsky, the plots against Trotsky and, finally, the attempt on Lenin, to shake the mood of idealistic clemency from the minds of the Bolsheviks.
General Krasnov was freed on his “word of honour” (after leading his bands against red Petrograd!), the butchers of Moscow (with the blood of not less than 500 Red Guards on their hands) likewise. Are we to be so foolish? Comrade Dey can continue to hope (pray?) all he wishes; we, likewise, shall continue to prepare ourselves with complete honesty for the tasks that are our historic lot.
I am entirely aware that “Peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must” was a slogan of the left, physical-force Chartists grouped around George Harney, and has, as such, some historical resonance within the British workers’ movement. But crucially, comrades, it may be surprising to hear, this is not the 1840s (with the largely unmilitarised state that motivated Marx to suggest, in the 1870s, that the seizure of power by the proletariat in Britain could be affected peaceably), and we are not now talking merely of extending the franchise. The slogan is outdated, placed in a context entirely alien to that which was intended by its authors, and introduces a dangerous ambiguity into our formulation on the necessity of violent revolution. It should be excised at once.
Comrade Biddulph states that the inclusion of this slogan is a “concession to left reformism”. Striking confirmation that precisely this spirit motivates at least some of the changes to the WWFF column was provided, very recently, by comrade John Bridge during his contribution to the excellent ‘The CPGB and fighting for a Socialist Alliance paper’ session of this year’s Communist University: “If,” we were told, “you say to a Labourite raised on a cold war diet, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, they’ll be scared. If you say to them simply, ‘the rule of the working class with full democracy’, they won’t be.”
Is it so the same social democratic philistines won’t “be scared” that the “peacefully if we can” slogan has been included? (Can it be a case of, ‘If you say to a Labourite, raised on a cold war diet, “We can arrive at socialism only through the violent, forcible overthrow of the capitalist class”, they’ll be scared. If you say to them, “Make love, not (civil) war”, they won’t be’?)
Is it so the priests - or whatever peddlers of bunk and mysticism you care to mention - won’t “be scared” that any reference to materialism has been removed? Is it so the academic Marxists, the armchair Leninists, won’t “be scared” that the obligations of a Communist Party supporter - not yet even those of a member - have been removed? It is difficult to think of another reason.
Are we not entitled to ask, further, as to whether it is not this same spirit that motivates the decision to excise any reference to Leninism from the WWFF column? Or, even - whether or not this is the end of the process - whether we should expect the abandonment of the hammer and sickle, or the (scientifically exact) name of the Communist Party of Great Britain, to be proposed next week? In any case, let us now turn to comrade Bridge’s formulation itself.
Does the dictatorship of the proletariat mean “full democracy”? It does not. In no way and in no circumstance can the regime of proletarian dictatorship seriously be thought compatible with “full democracy”. On the contrary, the proletarian dictatorship is the abolition of democracy for the exploiters, and the destruction of bourgeois democracy as a whole. It is a period of radical, more or less violent, revolutionary alteration of the political landscape: where even formal democratic rights are denied the bourgeoisie; where the working class, having expropriated the printing presses, meeting halls and television media, feels first the political privileges formerly enjoyed by the capitalist class.
It is certainly true to say that the dictatorship of the proletariat inaugurates the widest extension of democracy that is possible in class society (the epoch of workers’ democracy), and that it prepares the way for full democracy - under socialism and, later, communism - to say it already is “full democracy” (something that is possible only after the withering away of classes) is little more than lies and subterfuge.
The dictatorship of the proletariat obliges us to suppress, forcibly and in their every manifestation, all the enemies of the workers’ state - it is a regime “won and maintained by the use of violence ... unrestrained by any laws” (VI Lenin, ‘The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky’ Against revisionism Moscow 1959, p392).
The conditions of ‘our’ bourgeoisie, today, and those of their Russian counterparts in 1917-21, hardly bear comparison at all (since the Bolshevik revolution has been the main point of reference, to preserve some continuity I shall use the Russians as an example). The quite pathetic dependence of the white counterrevolution on foreign aid was the direct result of the Russian bourgeoisie’s general weakness, a reflection of the semi-colonial nature of Russian capitalism (dependent, particularly, on French capital). Whatever the weakness of the British bourgeoisie vis-à-vis foreign capital (particularly American), that it draws on an incomparably more vast reservoir of moral, spiritual and above all financial strength is surely obvious to even the most casual observer. Its internal strength, its capacity to resist even by itself, is exponentially greater than that of the Russians. All the more necessary, then, is our own use of the revolutionary sword.
The degree to which the workers’ dictatorship assumes a dictatorial character toward persons (in every case it acts dictatorially with regard to private property), depends, first and foremost, on the level of development of the European revolution as a whole. The extent to which we shall be obliged to take up terroristic methods rises and declines in direct proportion as to the development of this latter.
Allowing, even, for the most favourable circumstances (say, the revolution breaks out here after the seizure of power by the proletariat in one, or more, of the other major European nations - France and/or Germany, for example), the resistance of the bourgeoisie, though greatly reduced, will be such as to make any possibility of full democracy during the epoch of proletarian dictatorship - with it the prospect of ‘bloodless revolution’, one may add - the rank illusions of Kautskianism and treacherous social democracy in general.
As a final point, I will take the opportunity to say I am slightly confused by the argument that, despite our assertion in the WWFF column that the socialism we fight for is the opposite of Stalin’s USSR, it remains possible for those who admire it or even, as our comrade editor put it, “those who uphold it as ... paradise on earth” to join the CPGB (Weekly Worker July 18). Certainly this is true. Any such individual could openly propagandise their views in the hope of bringing the Party to their position (a quixotic hope, I’m certain). But - and herein lies my confusion - wasn’t the exact opposite argument employed to justify the last significant change to the WWFF column? It was said, then, no reference could be made to atheism in the column as this would make it impossible for ‘believers’ to join the CPGB (an argument, as can be seen above, I consider false).
Quite how the two positions can be reconciled is hard to imagine.
David Moran
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