Readings İn Leninism - 2 - Theory of Proletarian revolution

This volume is one of a series of "Readings in Leninism." Each book consists of a collection of articles and extracts-taken almost exclusively from the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin-dealing with a basic question of Leninist theory. 

The key passages included in these volumes are not designed to serve as a substitute for reading the fundamental works of Marxism-Leninism in their entirety. The purpose of the series is to assemble, within the covers of a single book, pertinent excerpts dealing with a specific problem of primary impor-tance, such as the theory of the proletarian revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, strategy and tactics of the pro-letarian revolution, the national and agrarian questions, etc. . 

Systematically compiled and arranged by V. Bystryansky and M. Mishin, this material should be extremely helpful as a guide to individual or group study of the fundamental prin-ciples of Leninism. 

The present volume deals with the contradictions of im-perialism and the forces of the proletarian revolution; the un-even development of capitalism, and the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country; the main types of revo-lution in the epoch of imperialism; the growing of the bour-geois-democratic revolution into the proletarian revolution, etc. 

THEORY OF THE PROLETARIAN  REVOLUTION
I. CONTRADICTIONS OF IMPERIALISM, PRECONDITIONS AND MOVING FORCES OF THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION 

1. Foundations of the Marxian Theory of the Proletarian Revolution 

A. Laws of Social Development

My investigation led to the result that legal relations such as forms of state are to be grasped neither from them-selves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material con-ditions of life, the- sum total of which Hegel, in accordance with the procedure of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, includes together under the name of "civil society," 1 but that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy. The investigation of the latter, which I began in Paris, I continued at Brussels, whither I had emi-grated in consequence of an expulsion order of M. Guizot. The general result at which I arrived and which, once won, served as a guiding thread for my studies, can be briefly for-mulated as follows: In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society-the real foundation, on which rises 'a legal and political super In erman burgerlich means both "civil" and "bourgeois." Hegel gives the name of "civil society" to the totality of economic relations (proprietory, cultural, every-day relationships) in contraposition to the structure and to which correspond definite forms of social con-sciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that de-termines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of produc-tion, or-what is but a legal expression for the same thing-with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of pro-duction these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material trans-formation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, esthetic or . philosophic-in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this con-flict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the rela-tions of production. No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore, mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, look-ing at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions neces-sary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production-antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagoni m, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation con-stitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society. 

Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 

B. Development of the Contradictions of Capitalism and  Inevitability of its Downfall 

As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and other means of pro-duction into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be ex-propriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. 

This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the cen-tralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing , of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transforma-tion, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degra-dation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capi-tal becomes a fetter upon tlie mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Centraliza-tion of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. 

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capi-talist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist pro-duction begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. 

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, nat-urally, a process incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private prop-erty, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropria-tion of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. 

Karl Marx, "Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation," Capital, Vol. I. 

C. Marx and Engels on the Inevitability of the Socialist Revolution and the Historical Role of the Proletariat 

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity-the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the develop-ment of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the con-trary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of. a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new mar-kets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. 

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. 

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons-the modern working class-the proletarians. 

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed-a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of com-merce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. 

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of sub-sistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work in-creases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by pro-longation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, etc. 

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more em-bittering it is. 

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes de-veloped, the more is the labor of men superseded by that _of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any dis-tinctive social validity for the working class. All are instru-ments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. 

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufac-turer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the  landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class-the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicrafts-men and peasants-all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly b cause their diminutive capital does not suffice for. the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. 

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the work people of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they smas.h to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the· Middle Ages. 

At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. 

But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in propor-tion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crisis, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots. 

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to rail-ways, achieve in a few years. 

This organization of the proletarians into a class, and con-sequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It com-pels legislative recognition of particular interests of the work-ers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hour bill in England was carried. 

Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in many ways the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those por-tions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena.. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education; in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. 

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their con-ditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. 

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 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. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of com-prehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. 

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie to-day, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. 

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shop-keeper, the, artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolu-tionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not . their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. 

The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. 

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capi-tal the same in England as in France, in America as in Ger-m ny, has stripped him of every trace of national characte:. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourge01s prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bour-geois interests. 

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of approp a-tion. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property. 

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, 

cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the  hole supe:-incumbent strata of official society being sprung mto the air. 

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. 

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we . traced the more or less veiled civil war raging within existing society, up to the point where that wa; breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent over-throw of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. 

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the  petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to  develop into_a_ bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class; in and to impose its conditions of existence upon society _society, as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. 

The essential condition for the existence and for the sway , of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bour-geoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competi-tion, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist Manifesto, Chap. L

2. Leninist Theory of Imperialism as the Last Stage of Capitalism and the Eve of the Proletarian Revolution

A Stalin on the Leninist Theory of Imperialism

The Leninist theory of the proletarian revolution is based on three fundamental theses. 

First Thesis: The domination of finance capital in the ad-vanced capitalist countries, the issue of stocks and bonds as the principal operation of finance capital; the export of capital to the sources of raw materials, which is one of the bases of imperialism; the omnipotence of a financial oligarchy, a con-sequence of the domination of finance capital-all these reveal the crudely parasitic character of monopolist capitalism, make the yoke of the capitalist trusts and syndicates a hundred times more burdensome, increase the growth of the indignation of the working class against the foundation of capitalism and drive the masses to the proletarian revolution as their only means of escape. (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.) 

Hence the first conclusion that is to be drawn: an intensifi-cation of the revolutionary crisis in the capitalist countries and the growth of the elements of an explosion on the internal, proletarian front in the "mother countries." 

Second Thesis: The growth of the export of capital to the colonies and dependent countries, the extension of "spheres of influence" and colonial possessions to the extent of seizing all the territory of the globe, the transformation of capitalism into a world system of financial bondage and of the colonial op-pression of the vast majority of mankind by a handful of "advanced" countries-these factors have, on the one hand, converted the sev«::ral national economic systems and national territories into links in a single chain called world economy and, on the other hand, have divided the population .of the world into two camps: a handful of "advanced" capitalist · countries which exploit and oppress vast colonies and de-pendencies, and the immense majority of the colonial and dependent countries, compelled to fight to liberate themselves from the imperialist yoke. (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.) 

Hence the second conclusion to be drawn: an intensification of the revolutionary crisis in the colonial countries · and an accumulation of the elements of discontent with imperialism on the external front, the colonial front. 

Third Thesis: The monopolistic possession of "spheres of influence" and colonies, the uneven development of the differ-ent capitalist countries which leads to a bitter struggle for the re-division of the world between the countries which have already seized the territories of the globe, and those countries which want to receive their "share"; imperialist wars, the only method of restoring the disturbed "equilibrium"-all these lead to the reinforcement of the third front, the inter-capitalist front--which weakens imperialism and facilitates the union of the first two fronts against imperialism-the front of the revolutionary proletariat and that of colonial emancipation. (Ibid.) 

Hence the third conclusion: the inevitability of wars under imperialism and the inevitability of a coalition between the proletarian revolution in Europe and the colonial revolution in the East, thus forming a united world front of the revolution as against the world front of imperialism; 

Lenin combines all these conclusions into the general con-clusion that "imperialism is the eve of the Socialist Revolu-tion." Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, Chap. III, Section 3. 

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