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This is the first of three sections from the appendix to Where to Begin When We Already Started?: Revisionism and Organizational Strategy. We are posting these three sections as their own separate articles and audiobooks, because they each deal with a prominent revisionist trend that the comrades must understand if they are to struggle against revisionism effectively and win a principled and Marxist Communist movement. It is because this information is so desperately needed in our movement that we repeat ourselves. Reminder that the points in this section are supported and complemented by the organizational plan put forward in the pamphlet it's a part of, and we firmly suggest that you check out that whole work.
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In 1924, speaking of the “Communists” who rejected the true Marxist strategy of revolution put forward by the Bolsheviks, Stalin wrote:
>...the parties of the Second International are unfit for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat...they are not militant parties of the proletariat, leading the workers to power, but election machines adapted for parliamentary elections and parliamentary struggle. This, in fact, explains why, in the days when the opportunists of the Second International were in the ascendancy, it was not the party but its parliamentary group that was the chief political organisation of the proletariat. It is well known that the party at that time was really an appendage and subsidiary of the parliamentary group. It scarcely needs proof that under such circumstances and with such a party at the helm there could be no question of preparing the proletariat for revolution.[1]
Stalin’s depiction of the “parties of the Second International” here is a good example of an organization that belongs to the first revisionist trend we will discuss: reformism. Reformism is a very old trend of the revisionists that holds that the revolutionary seizure of the state and private property by the proletarian class is unnecessary, outdated, too violent, “authoritarian,” or otherwise outside the realm of proper tactics. Instead of the workers seizing power and organizing the state as the dictatorship of the proletarian class, they believe that “social activism” and the electoral process of bourgeois society can serve the workers’ revolution and should be the primary tactics used.
Many reformist “Marxists” deny the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie entirely, while others do not display their ignorance so boldly. They might even profess their allegiance to revolution in words, but they deny it by their actions. Though they think themselves different, they become energetic dues payers and laborers in parties of reform, or even outright liberal parties, but, in their own minds at least, they are all for a revolutionary overthrow of the oppressor, and are only engaging in the basest reformism as a temporary tactic until things “pick up;” a revolutionary in words only and a reformist in action. Whatever flavor, and disregarding any individual justifications, reformists of all varieties deny actual revolution, either outright in their theories or, like the deluded rearguardists just described, through their inability to understand how it may come about organizationally, and their subsequent bowing to unrevolutionary bourgeois politics as a “middle-ground.”
Liberal “Democracy,” the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie
Despite what the reformist “Marxists” say, the recognition of the limits of bourgeois democracy and the necessity of propagating revolution has always been a foundational tenet of Marxism. From this tenet, the demand for practical revolutionary preparedness on the part of the working class as a whole, and especially the Communists, follows. There really is no excuse on the part of the reformist “Marxists” for denying the “immediate aim of the Communists” that Marx and Engels themselves made clear in the Manifesto:
>The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.[2]
A huge portion of probably Lenin’s most famous work, The State and Revolution, is a critique of the reformists who deny the Marxist foundational truth that the proletariat must conquer political power and carry out the “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy.” We include a section of that work below, in which Lenin references Engels’ concerns about the limits of voting and “universal suffrage” within the bourgeois state.
>We must also note that Engels is most explicit in calling universal suffrage as well an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage, he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is “the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present day state.”
>The petty-bourgeois democrats, such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and also their twin brothers, all the social-chauvinists and opportunists of Western Europe, expect just this “more” from universal suffrage. They themselves share, and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage “in the present-day state” is really capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realisation.[3]
As it was in Lenin’s time, whatever passes for “democracy” within the class-rule of the capitalists is not capable of bringing about real societal change of the kind we desperately need — and the kind all Communists necessarily advocate for — meaning the overturning of bourgeois power and the empowering of the proletarian class. The democracy of capitalist society belongs to the capitalist system. It grew up as a way of solving the inter-class disputes between rival landowners, and as a way to justify the rule of the state post-feudalism. Those without capital are unable to have any real voice in this “democracy” in any meaningful way, and are, instead, led along and away from their own class interests by one bourgeoisie or another. In the following passage, Lenin elaborates on the “narrow limits” of capitalist democracy, showing how it can never be a substitution for a worker’s revolution, and, in fact, hardly includes the working class at all.
>In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy”, “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.[4]
To believe, as many “Marxists” do today, that the work of the revolution is simply the work of a bourgeois political party — canvassing, raising awareness, currying favor with voters, promoting candidates, winning elections, passing legislation, etc. — is to commit a huge error. So long as our movement pursues elections and seats — so long as it pursues parliamentarianism — as its primary organizational tasks, we will be forever divorced from both the revolution (an event that will be occurring quite outside the established government and its elections), not to mention the working class, which is hardly political and won’t be made so by the Mormon-esque tactics of the “Democratic Socialites” in organizations like the DSA and CPUSA, who posture themselves as socialist working class parties but play the same bourgeois political games every even semi-conscious worker loathes.
The revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the conquest of political power — the seizure of their state — is the only foundation that allows for socialism to develop with any amount of success. Even under good conditions, all the energetic opportunists clamoring around the election cycles can bring about are “reforms,” legislation that, if it can even be implemented, may work in the favor of the proletariat for a time, but having been brought up within the government of the capitalists, is always liable to be overturned by their greater power; occurring when the mass tide of discontent which led to its being implemented in the first place gives way. In fact, the reform itself is at least partly to cause for the discontent fading away, because large sections of the mass movement hang up their hats and go back to their individual lives after the “victory” of passing reformist legislation. And what else could they do when the opportunists are portraying the petty struggle to gain reforms from the capitalist masters as the sum total of the people’s movement! The tide of discontent — a tide we revolutionaries depend on and foster the growth of — always will give way so long as the movement remains relegated to electoral actions. So long as the active revolutionary element and the masses’ discontent are consigned to the bourgeois election cycle, the revolution can be effectively defeated by opportunism, eaten up by the capitalists’ parliaments and government. We must unflinchingly instruct revolution as the only method that can guarantee actual peace, as Lenin writes in the below passages:
>...the theory of Marx and Engels of the inevitability of a violent revolution refers to the bourgeois state. The latter cannot be superseded by the proletarian state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) through the process of “withering away”, but, as a general rule, only through a violent revolution... The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of the entire theory of Marx and Engels.[5]
The Communists and Parliamentarianism
Imparting this proper view towards revolution does not mean that we should reject bourgeois parliamentary politics entirely, as a dogmatic rule. That would be to throw the problem out of one ditch and into the other one. It would be immensely foolish and impractical of our movement to reject an opportunity to run socialist candidates within the government of our enemies, which would allow us to put proletarian legislation in front of the whole society, carry out numerous reforms, and increase the tactical efficacy of our movement. But we should partake of this eventuality not out of some childish notion that doing so alone is capable of bringing about a revolution, or that winning votes and seats is always the best use of our resources. Additionally, the candidates themselves would certainly be members of a centralized and sound Communist Party of ideologically unified Marxists that possessed and propagated revolutionary aims and tactics outside the realm of bourgeois “government” (and, when needed, “legality” for that matter).
This is a stark contrast to the “socialist” politicians as they are now, willing members usually of liberal, bourgeois political parties, only “socialists” in the minds of the ignorant non-class “socialists,” and in the idealist and absurd mental schemas ignorant rearguard “Marxists” dream up and substitute for material dialectics, justifying their “theories” by mindlessly repeating the words “material conditions.” These rearguardists must have forgotten that winning reforms from the bourgeois government will be immensely more effective if we adhere to revolutionary preparedness and revolutionary aims; revolution serving as the material force pressurizing the establishment to bend to the demands of the working masses and enact reforms.
In The Foundations of Leninism, Stalin breaks down the difference between revolutionary and reformist tactics as follows:
>The revolutionary will accept a reform in order to use it as an aid in combining legal work with illegal work and to intensify, under its cover, the illegal work for the revolutionary preparation of the masses for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
>That is the essence of making revolutionary use of reforms and agreements under the conditions of imperialism.
>The reformist, on the contrary, will accept reforms in order to renounce all illegal work, to thwart the preparation of the masses for the revolution and to rest in the shade of “bestowed” reforms.
>That is the essence of reformist tactics.[6]
Revolutionary preparedness in conjunction with parliamentary work gives us the benefit of direct connections inside the establishment of the enemy, which is why it is not proper to reject parliamentarianism entirely but, as Stalin says, to “use it as an in aid” to “intensify” the movement’s “illegal work.” The proper orientation of the Communist towards parliamentarianism is to understand the very real limits of socialist electoral power under a capitalist government, and to subordinate parliamentarianism to the aims of revolutionary materialist dialectics and Marxist-Leninist science, which shows us a more profound path of political strategy than bourgeois “democracy” is capable of. We cannot reject parliamentary struggle, but we definitely cannot be like the reformists, accepting the high-sounding ideas of bourgeois parliamentarianism as a substitution for Marxist dialectics and the empowerment of the proletarian class. Rather, we must always subject parliamentarianism to “genuinely revolutionary proletarian criticism,” as Lenin says in the below passage. By doing so, we can understand parliamentarianism in a holistic way, and put it to actual revolutionary use.
>The professional Cabinet Ministers and parliamentarians, the traitors to the proletariat and the “practical” socialists of our day, have left all criticism of parliamentarism to the anarchists, and, on this wonderfully reasonable ground, they denounce all criticism of parliamentarism as “anarchism”!! It is not surprising that the proletariat of the “advanced” parliamentary countries, disgusted with such “socialists” …has been with increasing frequency giving its sympathies to anarcho-syndicalism, in spite of the fact that the latter is merely the twin brother of opportunism.
>For Marx, however, revolutionary dialectics was never the empty fashionable phrase, the toy rattle, which Plekhanov, Kautsky and others have made of it. Marx knew how to break with anarchism ruthlessly for its inability to make use even of the “pigsty” of bourgeois parliamentarism, especially when the situation was obviously not revolutionary; but at the same time he knew how to subject parliamentarism to genuinely revolutionary proletarian criticism.
>To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament — this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarianism not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.[7]
The revolution is a process, one that will undoubtedly include elections and the winning of offices in governments (by representatives of the revolution, not representatives of the capitalists), but it also necessarily includes levels of organization that far exceed the parliamentary process, the typical tasks of political parties, and the current purview of governments, making the movement’s relegation to elections and parliamentary struggles by the reformists completely inappropriate.
Our organizational tasks are many and varied, and will be determined by the particular circumstances of the moment, but the point we emphasize here is that our tasks must be informed by our end goals. Our movement is doomed before it really even has gotten started if we obscure or downright deny the necessity of the ruling class’ vi0l3nt overthrow, as the reformists and all liberals do.
While the reformists are a dominating force for now, we should take heart in the fact that we, as principled Communists, stand with the revolutionary class, the proletariat. Even while they sleep in low class-consciousness, the workers are stirring, sometimes more and sometimes less, sometimes as workers and (more often these days) as something else, but they are still stirring, still expressing their discontent, and, in the final view, walking the path that can only lead to them seeing themselves as a global and revolutionary class of labor again. When they do, they will want nothing more than to separate themselves from the reformists and adopt a revolutionary stance. We Communists build the stage for the revolution now and we agitate among the workers that they may join us, standing at the movement’s head, educating the masses in its importance and where it is going. In the 1911 article, “Reformism in the Social-Democratic Movement,” Lenin explains our role in this regard as follows:
>The bourgeoisie (particularly since 1905) fears revolution and loathes it; the proletariat, on the other hand, educates the masses of the people in the spirit of devotion to the idea of revolution, explains its tasks, and prepares the masses for new revolutionary battles. Whether, when, and under what circumstances the revolution materialises, does not depend on the will of a particular class; but revolutionary work carried on among the masses is never wasted. This is the only kind of activity which prepares the masses for the victory of socialism.[8]
We must work to inspire revolutionary fervor in the people — “devotion to the idea of revolution,” as Lenin says — explaining why a vi0l3nt r3volut!@n is needed so that proper tasks towards its completion can be performed. If we continue to educate the people against the necessity of a v!@lent r3volut!0n, or against making appropriate preparations towards such an aim, as the reformists do, we make the people unprepared for the circumstances they are facing, and ultimately work against the people and their interest, not to mention Marxism.
[1] Stalin. The Foundations of Leninism. Pg. 176.
[2] Marx, Karl. Engels, Friedrich. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Feb 1848. Marx and Engels Collected Works. Vol 6. Lawrence & Wishart Electric Book. 2010. Pg. 498.
[3] Lenin, V. I. The State and Revolution. Written in 1917. Kommunist Publishers. 1919. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 25. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 399.
[4] Ibid. Pg. 465.
[5] Ibid. Pg. 405.
[6] Stalin. The Foundations of Leninism. Pg. 173.
[7]Lenin. The State and Revolution. Pg. 427-428.
[8] Lenin, V. I. “Reformism in the Russian Social-Democratic Movement.” Sotsial-Demokrat. No. 23. 14 Sep 1911. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 17. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 239.
