SUBSERVIENCY TO THE BOURGEOISIE IN THE GUISE OF "ECONOMIC ANALYSIS
THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RENEGADE KAUTSKY
As has already been said, if the title of Kautsky's book were properly to reflect its contents, it should have been called, not The Dictatorship of the Proletariat but A Rehash of Bourgeois Attacks on the Bolsheviks.
The old Menshevik "theories" about the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution, i.e., the old distortion of Marxism by the Mensheviks (rejected by Kautsky in 1905!) are now once again being rehashed by our theoretician. We must deal with this question, however boring it may be for Russian Marxists.
The Russian revolution is a bourgeois revolution, said all the Marxists of Russia before 1905. The Mensheviks, substituting liberalism for Marxism, drew the conclusion from this that, hence, the proletariat must not go beyond what was acceptable to the bourgeoisie and must pursue a policy of compromise with it. The Bolsheviks said that this was a bourgeois liberal theory. The bourgeoisie was trying to bring about the reform of the state on bourgeois, reformist, not revolutionary lines, while preserving the monarchy, landlordism, etc., as far as possible. The proletariat must carry through the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the end, not allowing itself to be "bound" by the reformism of the bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks formulated the alignment of class forces in the bourgeois revolution as follows: the proletariat, joining to itself the peasantry, will neutralize the liberal bourgeoisie and utterly destroy the monarchy, medievalism and landlordism.
It is the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry in general that reveals the bourgeois character of the revolution, for the peasantry in general are small producers who exist on the basis of commodity production. Further, the Bolsheviks then added, the proletariat will join to itself the entire semi-proletariat (all the toilers and exploited), will neutralize the middle peasantry and overthrow the bourgeoisie; this will be a socialist revolution, as distinct from a bourgeois-democratic revolution. (See my pamphlet Two Tactics, published in 1905 and reprinted in Twelve Years, St. Petersburg, 1907.)
Kautsky took an indirect part in this controversy in 1905, when, in reply to an inquiry by the then Menshevik Plekhanov, he expressed an opinion that was essentially against Plekhanov, which provoked particular ridicule in the Bolshevik press at the time. But now Kautsky does not say a single word about the controversies of that time (for fear of being exposed by his own statements!), and thereby makes it utterly impossible for the German reader to understand the essence of the matter. Mr. Kautsky could not very well tell the German workers in 1918 that in 1905 he had been in favour of an alliance of the workers with the peasants and not with the liberal bourgeoisie, and on what conditions he had advocated this alliance, and what program he had out lined for it.
Backing out from his old position, Kautsky, under the guise of an "economic analysis," and talking proudly about "historical materialism," now advocates the subordination of the workers to the bourgeoisie, and, with the aid of quotations from the Menshevik Maslov, chews the cud of the old liberal views of the Mensheviks; quotations are used to prove the brand-new idea of the backwardness of Russia; but the deduction drawn from this new idea is the old one that in a bourgeois revolution one must not go further than the bourgeoisie! And this in spite of all that Marx and Engels said when comparing the bourgeois revolution of 1789-93 in France with the bourgeois revolution of 1848 in Germany! [36]
Before passing to the chief "argument" and the main content of Kautsky's "economic analysis," let us note that Kautsky's very first sentences reveal a curious confusion, or superficiality, of thought.
"Agriculture, and specifically small peasant farming," our "theoretician" announces, "to this day represents the economic foundation of Russia. About four-fifths, perhaps even five-sixths, of the population live by it." (P. 45.) First of all, my dear theoretician, have you considered how many exploiters there may be among this mass of small producers? Certainly not more than one-tenth of the total, and in the towns still less, for there large-scale production is more highly developed. Take even an incredibly high figure; assume that one-fifth of the small producers are exploiters who are deprived of the franchise. Even then you will find that the 66 per cent of the votes held by the Bolsheviks at the Fifth Congress of Soviets represented the majority of the population. To this it must be added that there was always a considerable section of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries which was in favour of the Soviet power -- in principle all the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were in favour of the Soviet power, and when a section of them, in July 1918, started an adventurous revolt, two new parties split away from their old party, viz., the "Narodnik-Communists" and the "Revolutionary Communists"[37] (of the prominent Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who had been nominated for important posts in the government by the old party, to the first-mentioned belongs Zaks, for instance, and to the second Kolegayev). Hence, Kautsky has himself -- inadvertently -- refuted the ridiculous fable that the Bolsheviks only have the backing of a minority of the population.
Secondly, my dear theoretician, have you considered the fact that the small peasant producer inevitably vacillates between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie? This Marxian truth, which has been confirmed by the whole modern history of Europe, Kautsky very conveniently "forgot," for it just demolishes the Menshevik "theory" that he keeps repeating! Had Kautsky not "forgotten" this he could not have denied the need for a proletarian dictatorship in a country in which the small peasant producers predominate.---
Let us examine the main content of our theoretician's "economic analysis."
That the Soviet power is a dictatorship cannot be disputed, says Kautsky. "But is it a dictatorship of the proletariat?" (P. 34.)
"According to the Soviet Constitution, the peasants form the majority of the population entitled to participate in legislation and administration. What is presented to us as a dictatorship of the proletariat would prove to be -- if carried out consistently, and if, generally speaking, a class could directly exercise a dictatorship, which in reality can only be exercised by a party -- a dictatorship of the peasantry." (p. 35.)
And, highly elated over so profound and clever an argument, our good Kautsky tries to be witty and says: "It would appear, therefore, that the most painless achievement of Socialism is best assured when it is placed in the hands of the peasants." (P. 35.)
In the greatest detail, and citing a number of extremely learned quotations from the semi-liberal Maslov, our theoretician labours to prove the new idea that the peasants are interested in high grain prices, in low wages for the urban workers, etc., etc. Incidentally, the enunciation of these new ideas is the more tedious the less attention our author pays to the really new phenomena of the postwar period -- such as, for example, that the peasants demand for their grain, not money, but goods, and that they have not enough agricultural implements, which cannot be obtained in sufficient quantities for any amount of money. But of this more anon.
Thus, Kautsky charges the Bolsheviks, the party of the proletariat, with having surrendered the dictatorship, the work of achieving Socialism, to the petty-bourgeois peasantry. Excellent, Mr. Kautsky! But what, in your enlightened opinion, should have been the attitude of the proletarian party towards the petty-bourgeois peasantry?
Our theoretician preferred to say nothing on this score -- evidently bearing in mind the proverb: "Speech is silver, silence is gold." But he gives himself away by the following argument:
"In the beginning of the existence of the Soviet Republic the peasants' Soviets were organizations of the peasantry in general. Now this Republic proclaims that the Soviets are organizations of the proletarians and the poor peasants. The well-to-do peasants are deprived of the suffrage in the elections to the Soviets. The poor peasant is here recognized to be a permanent and mass product of the socialist agrarian reform under the 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' " (P. 48.)
What deadly irony! It is the kind that may be heard in Russia from the lips of any bourgeois: they all jeer and gloat over the fact that the Soviet Republic openly admits the existence of poor peasants. They ridicule Socialism. That is their right. But a "Socialist" who jeers at the fact that after four years of a most ruinous war there remain (and will remain for a long time) poor peasants in Russia -- such a "Socialist" could only have been born at a time of wholesale apostasy. Listen further:
". . . The Soviet Republic interferes in the relations between the rich and poor peasants, but not by redistributing the land. In order to relieve the bread shortage in the towns, detachments of armed workers are sent into the countryside to take away the rich peasants' surplus stocks of grain. Part of that stock is given to the urban population, another -- to the poorer peasants." (P. 48.)
Of course, Kautsky, the Socialist and Marxist, is profoundly indignant at the idea that such a measure should be extended beyond the environs of the large towns (and we have extended it to the whole of the country). With the matchless, incomparable and admirable coolness (or pig-headedness) of a philistine, Kautsky, the Socialist and Marxist, sermonizes: . . . "It (the expropriation of the well-to-do peasants) introduces a new element of unrest and civil war into the process of production" . . . (civil war introduced into the "process of production" -- that is something supernatural!) . . . "which stands in urgent need of peace and security for its recovery." (P. 49.)
Oh, yes, of course, Kautsky, the Marxist and Socialist, must sigh and shed tears over the subject of peace and security for the exploiters and grain profiteers who hoard their surplus stocks, sabotage the grain monopoly law, and reduce the urban population to famine. "We are all Socialists and Marxists and Internationalists," the Kautskys, Heinrich Webers[38] (Vienna), Longuet (Paris), MacDonald (London), etc., sing in chorus "we are all in favour of a working-class revolution. Only . . . only we would like a revolution that does not infringe upon peace and security of the grain profiteers! And we camouflage this sordid subservience to the capitalists by a 'Marxist' reference to the 'process of production.' . . ." If this is Marxism, what is servility to the bourgeoisie?
Just see what our theoretician arrives at. He accuses the Bolsheviks of presenting the dictatorship of the peasantry as the dictatorship of the proletariat. But at the same time he accuses us of introducing civil war into the rural districts (which we think is to our credit), of despatching into the countryside armed detachments of workers, who publicly proclaim that they are exercising the "dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry," assist the latter and confiscate from the profiteers and the rich peasants the surplus stocks of grain which they are hoarding in contravention of the grain monopoly law.
On the one hand our Marxist theoretician stands for pure democracy, for the subordination of the revolutionary class, the leader of the toilers and exploited, to the majority of the population (including, therefore, the exploiters). On the other hand, as an argument against us, he explains that the revolution must inevitably bear a bourgeois character -- bourgeois, because the life of the peasantry as a whole is based on bourgeois social relations -- and at the same time he pretends to uphold the proletarian, class, Marxian point of view!
Instead of an "economic analysis" we have a first-class hodgepodge and muddle. Instead of Marxism we have fragments of liberal doctrines and the preaching of servility to the bourgeoisie and the kulaks.
The question which Kautsky has so tangled up was fully explained by the Bolsheviks as far back as 1905. Yes, our revolution is a bourgeois revolution so long as we march with the peasantry as a whole. This has been as clear as clear can be to us, we have said it hundreds and thousands of times since 1905, and we have never attempted to skip this necessary stage of the historical process or abolish it by decrees. Kautsky's efforts to "expose" us on this point merely expose his own confusion of mind and his fear to recall what he wrote in 1905, when he was not yet a renegade.
But beginning with April 1917, long before the October Revolution, that is, long before we assumed power, we publicly declared and explained to the people: the revolution cannot now stop at this stage, for the country has marched forward, capitalism has advanced, ruin has reached unprecedented dimensions, which (whether one likes it or not) will demand steps forward, to Socialism. For there is no other way of advancing, of saving the country which is exhausted by war, and of alleviating the sufferings of the toilers and exploited.
Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the "whole" of the peasantry against the monarchy, against the landlords, against the medieval regime (and to that extent, the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese Wall between the first and second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants, means monstrously to distort Marxism, to vulgarize it, to substitute liberalism in its place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist proletariat by means of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie as compared with medievalism.
Incidentally, the Soviets represent an immensely higher form and type of democracy just because, by uniting and drawing the masses of workers and peasants into political life, they serve as a most sensitive barometer, the one closest to the "people" (in the sense in which Marx, in 1871, spoke of a real people's revolution),[39] of the growth and development of the political, class maturity of the masses. The Soviet Constitution was not drawn up according to some "plan"; it was not drawn up in a study, and was not foisted on the working people by bourgeois lawyers. No, this constitution grew up in the course of the development of the class struggle in proportion as class antagonisms matured. The very facts which Kautsky himself has to admit prove this.
At first, the Soviets embraced the peasantry as a whole. It was owing to the immaturity, the backwardness, the ignorance precisely of the poor peasants, that the leadership passed into the hands of the kulaks, the rich, the capitalists and the petty-bourgeois intellectuals. That was the period of the
domination of the petty bourgeoisie, of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries (only fools or renegades like Kautsky can regard either of these as Socialists). The petty bourgeoisie inevitably and unavoidably vacillated between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (Kerensky, Kornilov, Savinkov) and the dictatorship of the proletariat; for owing to the basic features of its economic position, the petty bourgeoisie is incapable of doing anything independently. By the way, Kautsky completely renounces Marxism by confining himself in his analysis of the Russian revolution to the legal and formal concept of "democracy," which serves the bourgeoisie as a screen to conceal its domination and as a means of deceiving the masses, and by forgetting that in practice "democracy" sometimes stands for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, sometimes for the impotent reformism of the petty bourgeoisie which submits to that dictatorship, and so on. According to Kautsky, in a capitalist country there were bourgeois parties and there was a proletarian party (the Bolsheviks), which led the majority, the mass of the proletariat, but there were no petty-bourgeois parties! The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had no class roots, no petty-bourgeois roots!
The vacillations of the petty bourgeoisie, of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, helped to enlighten the masses and to repel the overwhelming majority of them, all the "lower strata," all the proletarians and semi-proletarians, from such "leaders." Predominance in the Soviets was secured by the Bolsheviks (in Petrograd and Moscow by October 1917); the split among the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks became more pronounced.
The victorious Bolshevik revolution meant the end of vacillation, it meant the complete destruction of the monarchy and of landlordism (which had not been destroyed before the October Revolution). We carried the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion. The peasantry supported us as a whole. Its antagonism to the socialist proletariat could not reveal itself all at once. The Soviets united the peasantry in general. The class divisions among the peasantry had not yet matured, had not yet come into the open.
That process took place in the summer and autumn of 1918. The Czechoslovak counter-revolutionary mutiny roused the kulaks. A wave of kulak revolts swept over Russia. The poor peasantry learned, not from books or newspapers, but from life itself that its interests were irreconcilably antagonistic to those of the kulaks, the rich, the rural bourgeoisie. Like every other petty-bourgeois party, the "Left Socialist-Revolutionaries" reflected the vacillation of the masses, and precisely in the summer of 1918 they split: one section joined forces with the Czechoslovaks (the rebellion in Moscow, when Proshyan, having seized the telegraph office -- for one hour! -- announced to Russia that the Bolsheviks had been overthrown; then the treachery of Muravyov, Commander-in-Chief of the army that was fighting the Czechoslovaks, etc.), while another section, that mentioned above, remained with the Bolsheviks.
The growing food shortage in the towns lent increasing urgency to the question of the grain monopoly (this Kautsky the theoretician completely "forgot" in his economic analysis, which is a mere repetition of platitudes gleaned from Maslov's writings of ten years ago!).
The old landlord and bourgeois, and even democratic republican, state had sent to the rural districts armed detachments which were practically at the beck and call of the bourgeoisie. Mr. Kautsky does not know this! He does not regard that as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" -- God forbid! That is "pure democracy," especially if endorsed by a bourgeois parliament! Nor has Kautsky "heard" that, in the summer and autumn of 1917, Avksentyev and S. Maslov, in company with the Kerenskys, the Tseretelis and other Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, arrested members of the Land Committee; he does not say a word about that!
The whole point is that a bourgeois state which is exercising the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through a democratic republic cannot confess to the people that it is serving the bourgeoisie; it cannot tell the truth, and is compelled to play the hypocrite.
But a state of the Paris Commune type, a Soviet state, openly and frankly tells the people the truth and declares that it is the dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry; and by this truth it wins over scores and scores of millions of new citizens who are kept down under any democratic republic, but who are drawn by the Soviets into political life, into democracy, into the administration of the state. The Soviet Republic sends into the rural districts detachments of armed workers, primarily the more advanced, from the capitals. These workers carry Socialism into the countryside, win over the poor, organize and enlighten them, and help them to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie.
All who are familiar with the situation and have been in the rural districts, declare that it is only now, in the summer and autumn of 1918, that the rural districts themselves are passing through the "October" (i.e., proletarian) revolution. A turn is coming. The wave of kulak revolts is giving way to a rise of the poor, to the growth of the "Committees of Poor Peasants." In the army, the number of workers who have become commissars, officers and commanders of divisions and armies is increasing. And at the very time that the imbecile Kautsky, frightened by the July (1918) crisis[40] and the lamentations of the bourgeoisie, was running after the latter like a "cockerel," and writing a whole pamphlet breathing the conviction that the Bolsheviks are on the eve of being overthrown by the peasantry; at the very time that this imbecile regarded the secession of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries as a "narrowing" (p. 37) of the circle of those who support the Bolsheviks -- at that very time the real circle of supporters of Bolshevism was expanding enormously, because scores and scores of millions of the village poor were freeing themselves from the tutelage and influence of the kulaks and village bourgeoisie and were awakening to independent political life.
We have lost hundreds of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, spineless peasant intellectuals and kulaks; but we have gained millions of representatives of the poor.[*]
A year after the proletarian revolution in the capitals, and under its influence and with its assistance, the proletarian revolution began in the remote rural districts, and this has finally consolidated the power of the Soviets and Bolshevism, and has finally proved that there is no force within the country that can withstand it.
Having completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution in conjunction with the peasantry as a whole, the Russian proletariat passed on definitely to the socialist revolution when it succeeded in splitting the rural population, in winning over the rural proletarians and semi-proletarians, and in uniting
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