"Beware the organization that sings; it is invincible" - IWW

George Hewison, 2004

Part One 

            Today is the anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. For most of the Twentieth Century, politics throughout the world was predicated on the existence of the Soviet Union, a seeming challenge to the capitalist world across the planet. Similarly, the demise of the Soviet Union had world historic consequences, leaving one hegemonic power increasingly at odds with the rest of the world, and in search of a new foe.

            For the international working class, the birth of the Soviet experiment initially represented hope for a world sick of world war. Ginger Goodwin, martyred labour leader whose funeral was the occasion for the first general strike in Canada in 1918, was an admirer of Soviet Russia. His grave (in Cumberland BC) has the hammer and sickle emblazoned on it. Winnipeg General Strikers of 1919 passed motions in support of the Russian Revolution, while the forces against the strike saw the fight for union conditions in Winnipeg, and throughout Canada, as incipient Bolshevism.

            The death of the Soviet Union eighty years later barely raised a ripple amongst Canada’s working class.  Nevertheless, that class now finds itself in a deeper hole than before because capitalism trumpets the end of history. Its apologists say we live in the best possible social system. Socialism doesn’t work they tell us! As capitalism leads the planet towards eco-destruction, the voice for social change within the labour movment in this country has softened to a whisper. This is hardly surprising given that labour and progressive humanity has had to shift three generations of strategy and tactics from the bi-polar world of two competing superpowers to one in which the survivor has been throwing its weight around the globe for the past decade.

            The response of labour and various popular movements has been impressive (given the hand that it has been dealt); but clearly not matched the ferocious assault by international capital. The international working class is having trouble shifting gears on the fly to deal with the new reality. Some forces of the Left still seem locked in a time warp and either awaiting the conditions for the comeback of the vanguard, or imprisoned in tactics and strategies appropriate to before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some who are initiating “innovative” tactics to deal with the new reality are in fact re-packaging myths that pre-date the rise of  modern trade unionism. The dangers to labour and the future of humanity are obvious.

Perhaps the greatest setback for international labour, as a result of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, was the body blow delivered to the works of Karl Marx, institutionalized by the Soviet Union and a world communist movement under the Marxism-Leninism rubric.

Did Marx, who discovered inherent contradictions within capitalism, deserve to suffer the same fate that history reserved for the Soviet Union; and can a revitalized Marxist methodology serve the working class in this great hour of need? Is the movement for social change and a new cadre of remarkable and talented leaders within labour to be forced to re-invent tactics that generations of fighters for fundamental change already used and/or discarded; will the modern, youthful followers of the anarchist Bakunin (who Marx debated with in building a powerful world-wide workers movement more than a century and a half ago) provide humanity with the way forward? Is it true, as some erstwhile students of Marx now believe, that the path to social change does not lie through the efforts of the working class at all? These are quintessential questions that need to be examined if the planet is indeed imperilled by capital and capitalism; and I for one believes that Marx deserves a serious look before the baby gets tossed with the bathwater.

            Ironically, there were fundamental revisions of Marx on the subject of social revolution that led to the historic October Revolution-the "Ten Days That Shook The World". That event alone, and its fate eighty years later, makes it fair comment to re-examine Marx' theories on social change in order to see whether or not his original theory was sound, or warranted the drastic revision that has now been tested by history and found wanting.

PART TWO

             By the time Soviet founder, Lenin, had emerged as a major theoretical force in the international social democratic movement, Marx was already undergoing a major revision by others in the movement. Edouard Bernstein, Fredrich Engel’s literary executor, had already drawn the ire of Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Kautsky and others in the German social democratic party for suggesting that while Marx had been right about the essentials of revolution, he had been wrong on the timetable. According to Bernstein, the objective and subjective conditions for revolution were not ripe. “It has been maintained in a certain quarter that the practical deductions from my treatises would be the abandonment of the conquest of political power by the proletariat organized politically and economically. That is quite an arbitrary deduction, the accuracy of which I altogether deny...I set myself against the notion that we have to expect shortly a collapse of the bourgeois economy, and that social democracy should be induced by the prospect of such imminent, great, social catastrophe to adapt its tactics to that assumption. That I maintain most emphatically.”[1]

Such an assertion coincided with a sharp turn in German capital’s approach to social democracy. From the severe Bismarckian anti-socialist laws, the expanding German capitalist state had started to pursue the “carrot and stick” approach to the working class, an approach long practiced in England. Marx and Engels had noted that the bourgeoisie always rules by alternating between concessions and rewards to the working class on the one hand and repressive measures on the other.

By the time of Engels death, German social democracy was already a major factor in German politics despite severe repression. The new policies of concession by the capitalists did have the desired effect. The electoral successes of German Social Democracy were tempered by subtle muting of its revolutionary rhetoric. Bernstein gave a theoretical legitimacy to this shift. Marxists began to split into two camps. Roughly speaking, one group abandoned revolution to a distant and unpredictable horizon and set its primary sights on winning concessions from capitalism. The other camp insisted that the objective conditions for socialism were already ripe and all that remained was a program to organize the workers to overthrow capitalism. The tactics and organizational forms of both wings flowed from these two estimations of history.

Kautsky, initially critical of Bernstein, held firmly to both the theory and the timetable of Marx for a period. He and Luxembourg saw nothing in the emergence of imperialism, as a stage of capitalism, which changed the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat.

Lenin’s theories, borrowing heavily from Kautsky, argued that the conditions for proletarian revolution were objectively ripe. To him, imperialism represented the final death agony of capitalism, and all that was required was the organization of the proletariat to seize power. Lenin’s early work centered on how this organization and the related and necessary fight against “opportunism” within the working class movement could be accomplished.

Lenin’s supporters have long suggested that Leninism is the application of Marx to the imperialist epoch, since Marx did not live long enough to see the growth of cartels and the fight for division of the world among the largest capitalist states. They maintain that Lenin also filled an important void in the theory of the Party to which Marx seemed to pay scant attention.

Thus the historical joining of Marx and Lenin, cemented from the October Revolution onward should hinge on these two broad and related categories: the objective and subjective conditions for revolution.

Marx summarizes a lifetime of study on the matter of social change in the preface to one of his classics, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. It is a long quote, but necessary to put the October Revolution of 1917 and what followed in context:

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men (sic) that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or-what is but a legal expression for the same thing-with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of these productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution…No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed (my emphasis); and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.[1] 

Students of Marx need to ask whether capitalism, even to this day, has exhausted its productive potentialities. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it is now obvious that in 1917, militant socialists misjudged history or that capitalism was acting as a brake on productive forces. Revolutionaries, backed by a powerful anti-war sentiment, abandoned the objectivity demanded by Marx for the subjective rhetoric of imminent revolution as the solution to war.

Since then, the class struggle, capitalist competition and all of the other laws discovered by Marx continued to operate and to force capitalism to innovate. The productive forces continued to develop, notwithstanding (or perhaps in good measure because of) World War One and Two.

           World War One was the most sanguine expression of capitalism to that point. There is little doubt that the pragmatic or social reform wing of social democracy largely bowed before social chauvinism, i.e. rejected internationalism in favour of the jingoism of their respective national capitalists. The abandonment of internationalism enabled the slaughter of millions of working people.

          World War I was also an historical catastrophe for the theory of working class revolution. 

           For those who argued that to end the war, it was necessary to end capitalism, the October Revolution became the supreme test. Up to his famous April 1917 Thesis, Lenin had argued against the possibilities of revolution breaking out in backward Russia for all of the reasons advanced by Marx. His Bolshevik Party was therefore taken by surprise when he made his now famous April announcement. Immediately before Lenin’s return to Russia, Stalin and Molotov (on behalf of the Bolsheviks) had been in unity talks with the Mensheviks to push the Provisional Government leftwards. Lenin’s “All Power to the Soviets” in April put an end to those discussions. He had a heated and protracted debate within the Bolshevik party upon his return from exile.

He had already anticipated his critics with “uneven development of capitalism” and “revolution breaking out in the weakest link in the capitalist chain” theories. The Russian proletarian revolution in Russia would be the spark to world revolution, he, and his new recruit, Trotsky asserted. Socialists were expected to take sides. Marxist debate was especially rancorous with charges of  “social chauvinism” being hurled by Bolsheviks, and "adventurism" by Mensheviks, some Bolsheviks and left socialists. Objectivity about the real state of capitalism’s inner contradictions (the War notwithstanding) and real possibilities for socialist revolution disappeared. Militant socialists, who insisted on a debate, were dubbed “armchair philosophers” or “renegades” who would be bypassed by the triumphant march of the proletariat by Lenin and his followers.

Bolshevik leaders Zinoviev and Kamenev were branded “scabs” on the eve of the October Revolution, because they publicly denounced Lenin’s planned October coup in Gorky’s newspaper “New Life”, insisting it would not lead to world proletarian revolution, nor would it unite the Russian working class.

The entire history of the Soviet Union, including the state apparatus set up by Lenin and “perfected” by Stalin in the name of the working class and socialism, flowed from consequences of substituting subjectivity for the real state of affairs, now obvious in hindsight.

Part 3

          Marx (and Engels) and his insights into the subjective factors for social change are just as compelling as his theory on the objective conditions for fundamental social change. Here again, Lenin’s theory and practice of revolution bear little similarity to Marx. Again a quote from the seminal working class primer Manifesto of the Communist Party is needed: 

"Finally in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of the old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.”[1]

          Under such a definition, the October Revolution of 1917 could never qualify as a working class, socialist revolution for it was not the ruling class that split, but the working class in Russia, and most important for the future, the international working class.

          Lenin’s view of the Party represents the other most telling revision of Marx. To Marx, “Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.”[2] The role of communists to Marx and Engels is to advance the universal and long term interests of the working class in immediate struggles of the day, i.e. to provide the essential linkage between reform and social transformation.

           Under Lenin’s insistence, the Bolshevik Party split organizationally from the rest of social democracy at the very time capital’s siren appeal to social democracy was at its greatest. The split virtually guaranteed capital’s seduction by moving the revolutionary voice to the sidelines apart from the main working class political organizations, handing leadership over to many non-working class forces and careerists who could be more heavily influenced by capitalist pressure.

          Marx viewed the working class as the leader and maker of history, and the role of the Party to facilitate that role. Lenin (and for that matter, reformist social democracy) viewed the Party as the leader (or vanguard) and the working class, the follower.

* * *

          From both the objective and subjective perspective, the Leninist adventure of 1917 was a great tragedy for both Marxism and the international working class and humanity as a whole.

          Nevertheless, it holds important lessons:

1.                          The first lesson is that capitalist contradictions need to mature and become unsolvable, save and except by the transfer of real power to the working class. No amount of political alchemy can substitute for objective processes at work.

2.                          The second lesson is that the working class needs to accumulate its own experience in the contradictions of capitalism in order to learn how to master the art of governance, and to determine the point at which the contradictions of capitalism make social revolution inevitable. This work cannot be contracted out to any political party or all-knowing leaders.

          Here the Russian Revolution is instructive. The working class of Russia did not have a wealth of experience in the class struggle. It was barely one generation removed from the peasantry. The working class was small numerically, and operating within a vast political sea of unstable petty bourgeois (eighty percent were peasants), which yearned only for peace, bread and land. The Bolsheviks seized power on the promise to deliver on these fundamentals. The history going forward from the first moments of the revolution indicated that fulfilling their promises proved problematic for the Bolsheviks, if not impossible in practice.

History notes that Lenin and his colleagues were able to convince the militant core of the working class, including most leading Bolsheviks, that their Revolution would be the spark to world revolution, and that their victory would be relatively easy, consisting of expropriating a handful of banks, and other exploiters. They maintained that imminent victory in the west, or part of the west, would guarantee the rapid development of Russia’s productive forces to overcome her backwardness.

          The rosy picture painted by Lenin and Trotsky never materialized. In the first place, seizing power was the easiest of the tasks. Building socialism was not. To get to socialism from feudalism meant satisying the demands of the mass of the population. Elections to the Duma two months after the seizure of power illustrated the depth of the problem for the Bolsheviks. They enjoyed only one-quarter support of the electorate. Using their support in the soviets, the Duma was dissolved and the Bolsheviks proclaimed the soviets “a thousand times more democratic” than any bourgeois parliament. But alliances that had dissolved in the Duma also began to wither within the soviets almost from the beginning.

          The revolution did not break out in the West. In fact, Germany, on the verge of military defeat, still managed to exact a terrible price for peace from the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, a price that cost the alliance with many Left allies of the Bolsheviks inside Russia, and strengthened German reaction against the German Left as Rosa Luxembourg had warned. Abortive uprisings in Hungary and Germany made it clear that the Soviet Revolution was on its own.

          Blame for the failure of the world revolution was then assigned to working class “traitors” (a recurring theme in Communist/Trotskyist agitation ever since). The formation of the Communist International in March of 1919 was based on the need for a guiding hand for the "forthcoming" world revolution, to coordinate the final world-wide assault on capitalism and to root out the main impediment to that assault-"opportunism". It was in fact a tacit admission of the terrible state of the world revolution, and the Comintern increasingly acted as an international force to defend the first and only “proletarian” beachhead, until conditions improved. The formation of the Comintern must be seen as a failure in the initial Lenin/Trotsky estimation of the objective state of capitalism and, flowing from that, the subjective preparedness of the working class. This failure to properly assess the balance of forces had catastrohic long term effects on the working class in Canada and elsewhere in the developed capitalist world.

          With the formation of the Communist International, the call became clear. All revolutionaries, everywhere, had to, not only sever ideological ties to social democracy ( which was the reality anyway) but also, sever organizational ties as well. Over the next fifteen years, to drive the split home as deeply as possible, the main political fire of the Comintern was not just directed at social democrats in general, but especially left social democrats, such as J.S. Woodsworth in Canada ( who had up to that point been a frequent writer in the Communist press ), because they were more “cunning” adversaries on behalf of capital. In the unlikely event that revolution had ever been on the order paper in the west, the organizational split within social democracy spelled finish to any possibility that history would move in that direction.

          Increasingly, as capitalism stabilized, expanded and developed, reform sentiment in the working class grew and revolutionary sentiment waned. The communist tendency had to abandon its infantile rhetoric and increasingly adjust and limit itself to the angriest edge of the proletariat and move to a more reformist strategy. The organizational break in the working class, inspired by Lenin and the Comintern, rather than helping the revolutionary forces in countries like Canada, led to their increasing isolation.

Part 4

The tragedy of the October Revolution goes well beyond the peoples of the former Soviet Union. The peoples of the world have paid and will continue to pay for a long time to come for a colossal misstep of history. The working class, as the gravedigger of capitalism (if Marx is correct) paid the biggest price. Its reputation as gravedigger of capitalism lies wounded, alongside the great works of Marx and Engels, tarnished by the debacle of Marxism-Leninism.

The powerful and distorting magnet of the Soviet Union is off the street. The international working class, including here in Canada, can now sift the evidence of capitalism all around it, and find fitting responses. Marxists within the working class can take comfort that the fundamental laws of capitalism, and its inner contradictions, discovered by Marx, continue to operate and develop. They can study the rich lessons, both positive and negative, from the past century, and use these lessons to chart the future, a future that belongs to the working class.

           But there is much ground to make up.

           Perhaps the greatest positive legacy of the Communists in the western world was to recognize the strategic necessity of organizing the unorganized working class as a precursor to fundamental social change. As a result, the modern trade union movement bears a certain communist imprint. But here too, the Leninist model has warped perspective. The formation of the mass unions took place in the backdrop of a struggle between sharp ideological foes within the working class: a fiercely anti-communist right wing of the social democratic movement and the Communist Party.

           The newly-forming trade union movement was a battleground in a much bigger struggle, the struggle for the hearts and minds of the workers. As capitalism expanded and grew, the revolutionary edge grew weaker and Communists adopted an increasingly reformist tone also an acknowledgement that while objective conditions for revolution were ripe, subjective possibilities were much more remote, and required a strategic plan to lead the working class to socialism. But the strategic plan was flawed, because the objective conditions for revolution had not matured. Thus, as the revolutionary edge of the working class grew weaker, Communist activists within the trade unions had to carry on a fight on a number of fronts simultaneously: to continue advocating for class struggle policies; to build revolutionary consciousness among the workers in non-revolutionary conditions; and defend an image of socialism that was indefensible, sick and dying.

           The caucuses, and other organizational forms, within the trade union movement that reflected the fight for hegemony by the major contending groups, are testimony to a dispute that has passed into history. Today, power structures inside the labour movement that were built and rationalized in the battle for the hearts and minds of workers assault the democratic instincts of workers, and prevent them from playing their full role in their own institutions. The paternalism of both the Communists and their anti-communist adversaries at the heart of the caucus/slate system has given way to a paternalism rooted in the narrowest form of opportunism--careerism.

           Where to begin? Where to pick up threads dropped so many decades ago? Where and how to revisit Marx? Surely the debate among working class activists must go beyond replacing this or that leader or how to win this or that battle. If it is the working class that is the leading force for social change, then those who seek to advance the working class must acknowledge that the missing ingredient these many years must be back on the agenda. The working class, as it fights for reforms and to resist the assault of capital, must be trained train for governance. Real empowerment of the working class must be put back on the agenda. The working class must offer society a vision superior to capitalism in every way. A revolutionary and internationalist perspective is needed, if only to gauge working class progress. Serious theoretical work needs to be done to bring Marx up to date in conditions of rapid globalization, militarization, and eco-disaster. The decades-old bugaboo of finding the right link between reform and social change in non-revolutionary times remains a strategic necessity.

           While the trade unions have enormous potential power, the large mass of the organized working class is increasingly frustrated by labour’s seeming impotence in face of capital’s unyielding assault. Labour conventions are largely rhetorical, because real decision-making appears to take place safely behind the scenes.

           A percentage of workers see unions as another form of control over their lives. If the problems facing the labour movement of hostile governments, union density and organizing are to be seriously addressed, this must change. All of the impediments to the working class asserting itself, learning and growing must be removed. It means turning the already organized workers loose to defend not only themselves and others in their workplace, but also to defend and re-build the shrinking trade union base and density. Empowerment of the workers means risk-taking by leadership; it means trusting the workers to make mistakes to find their own pitfalls (pratfalls), and get over them. Leadership has a powerful role to play in this empowerment.

           Those who know the path we have come, must also know the direction we must travel. The good leader needs to know how to use every ounce of talent, and most important how to develop new leaders and to know when to step back and move on so that new leaders can grow, and the base of leadership can broaden and deepen. They are not threatened by dissent and disagreement, but encourage debate. We need a leadership that is not concerned with a career or scoring debating points, but is concerned for the long term health of the entire labour movement.

            It means more transparency and accountability of those elected to lead. Unions need to be seen as schools where workers learn how to govern themselves and society, i.e. how to replace the capitalists. They never learned that in the Soviet Union; they haven’t learned that it in the paradigms of social democracy, Great Britain, Sweden, or anywhere else.

            Empowerment means changing the culture, especially the culture of dissent, within our working class institutions. If we are to defeat the boss, we must defeat his ideas within our own ranks. We cannot do this by running from debate.

           If Marx is correct, and I believe that he is, the working class in all of its diversity, in the crucible of action and debate, will learn how to govern, and be in a position to offer humanity a superior, more rational society than capitalism. Humanity will eventually appreciate and trust the working class as the main force on the horizon capable of delivering the human race from the path of destruction it is currently on.