Permanent Revolution - THE MENSHEVIKS - Loizos Michael
Trotskyism Study Group CPGB
THE MENSHEVIKS
The Mensheviks believed
that because of the low level of development of the productive forces in Russia, and because of the continued existence of feudal economic
and political relations, the Russian revolution would be “bourgeois” in
its essence, leading to the
political dominance of the bourgeoisie in the state, along the lines
of the classic revolutions of Western
Europe. Martynov, a leading theorist
of the Menshevik faction, argued that:
The proletariat cannot
win political power in the state, either
wholly or in part, until it has made the socialist revolution. [11]
From this generally
held position, he went on to argue that:
...the coming revolution cannot
realize any political
forms against
the will of the entire
bourgeoisie, for the latter will be the master
tomorrow... [12]
At the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. in 1906, Ptitsyn, one of the Menshevik delegates, claimed
that:
...the revolution which Russia is expecting is, according to its content,
bourgeois! [13]
There was nothing controversial about this statement. It was a view shared by all Russian
Social- Democrats, including Trotsky.
Differences arose, however, on the interpretation of the thesis concerning the bourgeois
character of the revolution. According to Ptitsyn:
The Russian
revolution turmoil
will pass away, bourgeois life will return to its usual course, and unless a worker’s revolution takes
place in the West, the bourgeoisie will inevitably come to power in our country. [14]
Similar propositions were advanced by other Mensheviks. [15] If we compare
the Menshevik
position to the one elaborated by Trotsky, we have what appears,
on the surface at least, two starkly opposed ‘prognoses’.
Trotsky:
The victorious Russian revolution — bourgeois democratic in its immediate objective tasks — will inevitably lead directly
to the dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Menshevik: The Russian
revolution is, in its essence, bourgeois- democratic; it can only lead to the political dominance of the bourgeoisie.
LENIN
Lenin, like the Mensheviks, believed
that “the transformation of the economic
and political system in Russia
along bourgeois-democratic lines is inevitable and inescapable.” [16] By this, he meant that, concretely, Russia was undergoing a process
of transformation which did not:
...depart from the framework of the bourgeois, i.e., capitalist, socioeconomic system. A bourgeois revolution expresses the needs of capitalist development, and, far from destroying the foundations of capitalism, it effects
the contrary — it broadens
and deepens them. [17]
Lenin did not insist on this because
he was mechanically applying some supra-historical law of development to Russia,
but because, on the basis of a concrete study of the Russian
social formation [18] he saw that what was actually taking
place was a complex
transitional process involving
the elimination of the conditions of existence
of feudal social relations, and the creation of the conditions necessary for extended capitalist production.
The question that
Lenin posed, however,
in contrast to both Trotsky and the Mensheviks was:
what were the possible paths of capitalist development in the Russian social formation? Lenin believed that this was a fundamental question for Russian
Social-Democracy, and the fact that he posed it, set him apart from the other theorists
of the R.S.D.L.P. We shall see that this was not accidental, but rooted in the specificity of Lenin’s Marxism.
Lenin insisted that there were two concrete paths along which Russia could
travel in the process of transition from feudalism
to capitalism.
The
survivals of serfdom
may fall away either as a result of the transformation of landlord economy or as a result of the abolition of the landlord latifundia, i. e., either by reform or by revolution. Bourgeois development may proceed
by having big landlord
economies at the head, which will gradually
become more and more bourgeois
and gradually substitute bourgeois
for feudal methods
of exploitation. It may also proceed
by having small peasant economies at the head, which in a revolutionary
way, will remove the “excrescence” of the feudal
latifundia from the social
organism and then freely
develop without
them along the path of capitalist economy. [19]
Both these two paths were objectively possible, and in evidence,
in the Russian social formation. Lenin
believed that the 1861 “emancipation” reforms, and those introduced by Stolypin
after the defeat of the first Russian revolution, represented stages in the process of capitalist development along what he called the "Junker” or “Prussian” path; the 1905-07 revolution represented an attempt to push Russia onto the “American” or peasant path of capitalist development. This brings us to Lenin’s
crucial thesis concerning the Russian
revolution. In 1905, he declared that, objectively, there were “...two
possible courses and two possible outcomes of the revolution in Russia.” [20] That is, corresponding to the two possible paths of agrarian-capitalist development, were two possible
forms of bourgeois-democratic revolution:
the
combined action of the existing forces...
may result in either of two things, may bring about either of two forms of... transformation. Either i) matters
will end in-‘the
revolution’s decisive victory
over tsarism’, or ii) the forces will be inadequate for a decisive victory, and matters
will end in a deal between
tsarism and the most ‘inconsistent’ and most ‘self-seeking’ elements
of the bourgeoisie. [21]
The important thing to grasp, is
that from Lenin’s point of
view, the question of
which path of Russia’s capitalist development would ultimately prevail could not be answered from any teleological
conception of historical development or by the application
of a
‘general model’
derived from the experience of Western
Europe. The path taken by Russia
in the process of eliminating feudal social relations would be determined by the form of her bourgeois
revolution. However,
the outcome of the revolution — the form of the bourgeois-democratic revolution — was not pre-given; it could not be pre-determined by a specification of the character of the classes present in the Russian social formation; it would be determined by the struggles of the contending social
and political forces,
by the material means of struggle at their disposal,
by the forms assumed
by those struggles
— in fact by the outcome of extensive, mass class conflicts.
The Stolypin agrarian reforms,
which followed a line of capitalist evolution along the landlord,
“Junker” path, at the
expense of the mass of peasants,
had
as its political “condition of existence”, the defeat of the proletariat and the peasantry in the
first Russian revolution. Tsarism, and the classes whose interests it “represented”, survived the onslaught
of the “people” and initiated a series of reforms
designed to perpetuate its existence
by winning allies amongst sections of the urban and
rural bourgeoisie; this represented a stage in the transformation of the absolutist state into a bourgeois monarchy. The alternative to this line of “bourgeois-democratic”
development, was a “decisive victory
over tsarism”, which would create the political conditions necessary
for the rapid development of capitalist agriculture on nationalised land, and a consequent speeding up of the transformation of the peasantry
into a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. This decisive victory,
in Lenin’s
opinion, could only be carried out by the “people”
— the proletariat and the peasantry. He formulated the slogan of
the “Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry”, in order to conceptualise this alternative economic and political line of development. What function
did this slogan serve?
Its
most important
purpose was that of drawing
lines of demarcation between the positions of revolutionary Social-Democracy, and those
of other “revolutionary” and “oppositional” tendencies (the Mensheviks, the S-R’s, and the Cadets), on the crucial questions thrown up by the first Russian revolution. This slogan,
firstly, defined the class forces
which could perform a revolutionary function
in the class struggles of 1905-06 — the proletariat and the peasantry; secondly,
it defined the content
of the revolution — the creation
of a democratic political system
(a Republic), the elimination of feudal
social relations, the removal of the obstacles hindering
the development of the class struggle in the towns
and the countryside; thirdly, it specified
the forms and methods of the class struggle required to bring about these transformations
— it would have to be a revolution based on an armed insurrection leading to a dictatorship of classes
led by the proletariat. Lenin therefore used this
slogan to define what he meant by the “revolution’s decisive victory over
tsarism”.
Next ; BOLSHEVISM v. MENSHEVISM
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