I. The Program of the International Revolution or a Program of Socialism in One Country?

• I. The Program of the International Revolution or a Program of Socialism in One Country?
• II. Strategy and Tactics in the Imperialist Epoch
• III. Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution
• IV. What Now?

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PART I

THE DRAFT PROGRAM, that is, the fundamental document which is to determine the entire activity of the Comintern for many years to come, was published only a few weeks prior to the convocation of the Congress that is being held four years after the Fifth Congress. This tardiness in publication cannot be justified by reference to the fact that the first draft had been published even prior to the Fifth Congress, because several years have since elapsed. The second draft differs from the first in its entire structure and it endeavors to sum up the developments of the last few years. Nothing could be more rash and precipitate than to adopt this draft at the Sixth Congress, a draft which bears obvious traces of hasty, even slipshod work, without any preliminary serious and scientific criticism in the press or an extensive discussion in all parties of the Comintern [Communist International].

During the few days at our disposal between the receipt of the draft and the dispatch of this letter, we could dwell only upon a few of the most vital problems which must be treated in the program.

Due to lack of time, we have been compelled to leave entirely without consideration a number of the most important problems touched upon in the draft which are perhaps less burning today but which may become of exceptional importance tomorrow. This does not at all imply that it is less necessary to criticize them than those sections of the draft to which the present work is devoted.

We must also add that we are compelled to work on the new draft under conditions which make it impossible to obtain indispensable information. Enough to mention the fact that we were unable to procure even the first draft of the program, and in dealing with it, as well as in two or three other cases, we have had to rely upon our memory. It goes without saying that all quotations have been taken from the original sources and checked carefully.

1. The Program of the International Revolution or a Program of Socialism in One Country?

THE MOST important question on the agenda of the Sixth Congress is the adoption of a program. The nature of the latter may for a long time determine and fix the physiognomy of the International. The importance of a program does not lie so much in the manner in which it formulates general theoretical conceptions (in the last analysis, this boils down to a question of “codification,” i.e., a concise exposition of the truths and generalizations which have been firmly and decisively acquired); it is to a much greater degree a question of drawing up the balance of the world economic and political experiences of the last period, particularly of the revolutionary struggles of the last five years – so rich in events and mistakes. For the next few years, the fate of the Communist International – in the literal sense of the word – depends upon the manner in which these events, mistakes, and controversies are interpreted and judged in the program.

1. The General Structure of the Program

In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country. This also holds entirely for the party that wields the state power within the boundaries of the USSR. On August 4, 1914, the death knell sounded for national programs for all time. The revolutionary party of the proletariat can base itself only upon an international program corresponding to the character of the present epoch, the epoch of the highest development and collapse of capitalism. An international communist program is in no case the sum total of national programs or an amalgam of their common features. The international program must proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts. In the present epoch, to a much larger extent than in the past, the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world orientation and not vice versa. Herein lies the basic and primary difference between communist internationalism and all varieties of national socialism.

Basing ourselves upon these considerations, we wrote in January of this year: “We must begin work to draft a program of the Comintern (Bukharin’s program is a bad program of a national section of the Comintern and not a program of a world communist party).”

We have kept insisting upon these considerations since 1923 -1924 when the question of the United States of America arose in its full scope as a problem of world and, in the most direct sense of the term, of European politics.

In recommending the new draft, Pravda wrote that a communist program “differs radically from the program of the international social democracy not only in the substance of its central postulates but also in the characteristic internationalism of its structure.”

In this somewhat cloudy formulation is obviously expressed the idea which we stated above and which was formerly stubbornly rejected. One can only welcome the break with the first draft program presented by Bukharin, which did not even provoke a serious exchange of opinion; nor, for that matter, did it offer any grounds for one. Whereas the first draft gave a bald schematic description of the development of one abstract country towards socialism, the new draft seeks, unfortunately, and, as we shall see, without consistency or success, to take world economy as a whole as the basis for determining the fate of its individual parts.

Linking up countries and continents that stand on different levels of development into a system of mutual dependence and antagonism, leveling out the various stages of their development and at the same time immediately enhancing the differences between them, and ruthlessly counterposing one country to another, world economy has become a mighty reality which holds sway over the economic life of individual countries and continents. This basic fact alone invests the idea of a world communist party with a supreme reality. Bringing world economy as a whole to the highest phase of development generally attainable on the basis of private property, imperialism, as the draft states quite correctly in its introduction, “aggravates to an extreme tension the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces of world economy and the national-state barriers.”

Without grasping the meaning of this proposition, which was vividly revealed to mankind for the first time during the last imperialist war, we cannot take a single step towards the solution of the major problems of world politics and revolutionary struggle.

We could only welcome the radical shift of the very axis of the program in the new draft were it not for the fact that the effort to reconcile this, the only correct position, with tendencies of a directly contrary character has resulted in turning the draft into an arena of the cruelest contradictions, which entirely nullify the principled significance of the new manner of approaching the question in its fundamental aspects.

2. The United States of America and Europe

To characterize the first, fortunately discarded draft, it suffices to say that, so far as we recall, the name of the United States of America was not even mentioned in it. The essential problems of the imperialist epoch – which, because of the very character of this epoch, must be examined not only in their abstract and theoretical but also in their concrete and historical cross-section – were dissolved in the first draft into a lifeless schema of a capitalistic country “in general.” However, the new draft – and this, of course, is a serious step forward – now speaks of ”the shift of the economic center of the world to the United States of America”; and of “the transformation of the ‘Dollar Republic’ into a world exploiter”; and finally, that the rivalry (the draft loosely says “conflict”) between North American and European capitalism, primarily British capitalism, “is becoming the axis of the world conflicts.” It is already quite obvious today that a program which did not contain a clear and precise definition of these basic facts and factors of the world situation would have nothing in common with the program of the international revolutionary party.

Unfortunately, the essential facts and tendencies of world development in the modern epoch which we have just indicated are merely mentioned by name in the text of the draft, grafted on to it, as it were, by way of theoretical back-writing, without having any internal connection with its entire structure and without leading to any conclusions about perspective or strategy.

America’s new role in Europe since the capitulation of the German Communist Party, and the defeat of the German proletariat in 1923, has been left absolutely unevaluated. No attempt at all has been made to explain that the period of the “stabilization,” “normalization,” and “pacification” of Europe as well as the “regeneration” of the social democracy, has proceeded in close material and ideological connection with the first steps of American intervention in European affairs.

Moreover, it has not been shown that the inevitable further development of American expansion, the contraction of the markets of European capital, including the European market itself, entail the greatest military, economic, and revolutionary convulsions, beside which all those of the past fade into the background.

Again, neither has it been made clear that the further inexorable pressure of the United States will reduce capitalist Europe to constantly more limited rations in world economy; and this, of course, implies not a mitigation, but on the contrary, a monstrous sharpening of inter-state relations in Europe accompanied by furious paroxysms of military conflict, for states as well as classes fight even more fiercely for a meagre and a diminishing ration than for a lavish and growing one.

The draft does not explain that the internal chaos of the state antagonisms in Europe renders hopeless any sort of serious and successful resistance to the constantly more centralized North American republic; and that the resolution of the European chaos through the Soviet United States of Europe is one of the first tasks of the proletarian revolution. The latter (precisely because of the existence of barriers) is immeasurably closer in Europe than in America and will, therefore, most likely have to defend itself from the North American bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, no mention at all has been made of the fact (and this is just as important a phase of the same world problem) that it is precisely the international strength of the United States and her irresistible expansion arising from it, that compels her to include the powder magazines of the whole world into the foundations of her structure, i.e., all the antagonisms between the East and the West, the class struggle in Old Europe, the uprisings of the colonial masses, and all wars and revolutions. On the one hand, this transforms North American capitalism into the basic counter-revolutionary force of the modern epoch, constantly more interested in the maintenance of “order” in every corner of the terrestrial globe; and on the other hand, this prepares the ground for a gigantic revolutionary explosion in this already dominant and still expanding world imperialist power. The logic of world relations indicates that the time of this explosion cannot lag very far behind that of the proletarian revolution in Europe.

Our elucidation of the dialectics of the interrelations between America and Europe have made us the target in recent years of the most diversified accusations, charging us with the pacifist denial of the existence of European contradictions, with the acceptance of Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism, and many other sins. There is no need to dwell here upon these “accusations,” which are at best due to a complete ignorance of the real processes and of our attitude toward them. We cannot refrain from observing, however, that it would be hard to waste more effort in confusing and muddling up this most vital world problem than was wasted (incidentally, by the authors of the draft program) in their petty struggle against our formulation of the problem. Our formulation has, however, been entirely confirmed by the course of events.

Even recently, efforts have been made in leading communist organs to minimize – on paper – the significance of American hegemony by alluding to the impending commercial and industrial crisis in the United States. We cannot here enter into an examination of the special problem of the duration of the American crisis and its possible depth. This is a question of conjuncture and not of program. It goes without saying that in our opinion the inevitability of a crisis is entirely beyond doubt; nor, considering the present world scope of American capitalism, do we think it is out of the question that the very next crisis will attain extremely great depth and sharpness. But there is no justification whatsoever for the attempt to conclude from this that the hegemony of North America will be restricted or weakened. Such a conclusion can lead only to the grossest strategical errors.

Just the contrary is the case. In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom. The United States will seek to overcome and extricate herself from her difficulties and maladies primarily at the expense of Europe, regardless of whether this occurs in Asia, Canada, South America, Australia, or Europe itself, or whether this takes place peacefully or through war.

We must clearly understand that if the first period of American intervention had the effect of stabilization and pacification on Europe, which to a considerable extent still remains in force today, and may even recur episodically and become stronger (particularly in the event of new defeats of the proletariat), the general line of American policy, particularly in time of its own economic difficulties and crisis, will engender the deepest convulsions in Europe as well as over the entire world.

From this we draw the not unimportant conclusion that there will be no more lack of revolutionary situations in the next decade than in the past decade. That is why it is of utmost importance to understand correctly the mainsprings of development so that we may not be caught unawares by their action. If in the past decade the main source of revolutionary situations lay in the direct consequences of the imperialist war, in the second post-war decade the most important source of revolutionary upheavals will be the interrelations of Europe and America. A major crisis in the United States will strike the tocsin for new wars and revolutions. We repeat: there will be no lack of revolutionary situations. The entire question hinges upon the international party of the proletariat, the maturity and fighting ability of the Comintern, and the correctness of its strategical position and tactical methods.

In the draft program of the Comintern absolutely no expression is to be found of this trend of thought. A fact of such great importance, it would seem, as “the shifting of the world economic center to the United States,” is glossed over by a casual journalistic remark. It is, of course, utterly impossible to justify this on the ground of lack of space, for what should be allowed space in a program if not the fundamental questions? Besides, it should be added that too much space is devoted in the program to questions of secondary and tertiary importance, to say nothing of the general literary looseness and innumerable repetitions by elimination of which the program could be reduced at least one-third.

3. The Slogan of the Soviet United States of Europe

There is no justifying the omission of the slogan of the Soviet United States of Europe from the new draft program, a slogan which was accepted by the Comintern back in 1923, after a rather protracted internal struggle. Or is it, perhaps, that the authors want to “return” to Lenin’s position of 1915 precisely on this question? If that is the case, they must first understand it correctly.

Lenin, as is well known, was hesitant at the beginning of the war in regard to the slogan of the United States of Europe. The slogan was originally included in the theses of the Sotsial Demokrat (the central organ of the party at the time) and then rejected by Lenin. This in itself indicates that the question involved here was not that of the general acceptability of the slogan on principle, but merely a tactical appraisal of it, a question of weighing its positive and negative aspects from the standpoint of the given situation. Needless to say, Lenin rejected the possibility that a capitalist United States of Europe could be realized. That was also my approach to the question when I advanced the slogan of the United States of Europe exclusively as a prospective state form of the proletarian dictatorship in Europe.

I wrote at that time: “A more or less complete economic unification of Europe accomplished from above through an agreement between capitalist governments is a utopia. Along this road matters cannot proceed beyond partial compromises and half measures. But this alone, an economic unification of Europe, such as would entail colossal advantages both to the producer and consumer and to the development of culture in general, is becoming a revolutionary task of the European proletariat in its struggle against imperialist protectionism and its instrument – militarism.”

Further: “The United States of Europe represents first of all a form – the only conceivable form – of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Europe.”

But even in this formulation of the question Lenin saw at that time a certain danger. In the absence of any experience of a proletarian dictatorship in a single country and of theoretical clarity on this question even in the Left wing of the social democracy of that period, the slogan of the United States of Europe might have given rise to the idea that the proletarian revolution must begin simultaneously, at least on the whole European continent. It was against this very danger that Lenin issued a warning, but on this point there was not a shade of difference between Lenin and myself. I wrote at the time: “Not a single country must ‘wait’ for the other countries in its struggle. It will be useful and necessary to repeat this elementary idea so that temporizing international inaction may not be substituted for parallel international action. Without waiting for the others, we must begin and continue the struggle on national grounds with the full conviction that our initiative will provide an impulse to the struggle in other countries.”

Then follow those words of mine which Stalin presented at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI as the most vicious expression of “Trotskyism,” i.e., as “lack of faith” in the inner forces of the revolution and the hope for aid from without. “And if this [the development of the revolution in other countries – L.T.] were not to occur, it would be hopeless to think (this is borne out both by historical experience and by theoretical considerations) that a revolutionary Russia, for instance, could hold out in face of conservative Europe, or that a socialist Germany could remain isolated in a capitalist world.”

On the basis of this and two or three similar quotations is founded the condemnation pronounced against “Trotskyism” by the Seventh Plenum as having allegedly held on this “fundamental question” a position “which has nothing in common with Leninism.” Let us, therefore, pause for a moment and listen to Lenin himself.

On March 7, 1918, he said a propos of the Brest-Litovsk peace: “This is a lesson to us because the absolute truth is that without a revolution in Germany, we shall perish.”

A week later he said: “World imperialism cannot live side by side with a victorious advancing social revolution.”

A few weeks later, on April 23, Lenin said: “Our backwardness has thrust us forward and we will perish if we are unable to hold out until we meet with the mighty support of the insurrectionary workers of other countries.” (Our emphasis)

But perhaps this was all said under the special influence of the Brest-Litovsk crisis? No ! In March 1919, Lenin again repeated: “We do not live merely in a state but in a system of states and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states for any length of time is inconceivable. In the end one or the other must triumph.”

A year later, on April 7, 1920, Lenin reiterates: “Capitalism, if taken on an international scale, is even now, not only in a military but also in an economic sense, stronger than the Soviet power. We must proceed from this fundamental consideration and never forget it.”

On November 27, 1920, Lenin, in dealing with the question of concessions, said: “We have now passed from the arena of war to the arena of peace and we have not forgotten that war will come again. As long as capitalism and socialism remain side by side we cannot live peacefully – the one or the other will be the victor in the end. An obituary will be sung either over the death of world capitalism or the death of the Soviet Republic. At present we have only a respite in the war.”

But perhaps the continued existence of the Soviet Republic impelled Lenin to “recognize his mistake” and renounce his “lack of faith in the inner force” of the October Revolution?

At the Third Congress of the Comintern in July 1921, Lenin declared in the theses on the tactics of the Communist Party of Russia: “An equilibrium has been created, which though extremely precarious and unstable, nevertheless enables the socialist republic to maintain its existence within capitalist surroundings, although of course not for any great length of time.”

Again, on July 5, 1921, Lenin stated point-blank at one of the sessions of the Congress: ‘It was clear to us that without aid from the international world revolution, a victory of the proletarian revolution is impossible. Even prior to the revolution, as well as after it, we thought that the revolution would also occur either immediately or at least very soon in other backward countries and in the more highly developed capitalist countries, otherwise we would perish. Notwithstanding this conviction, we did our utmost to preserve the Soviet system under any circumstances and at all costs, because we know that we are working not only for ourselves but also for the international revolution.”

How infinitely removed are these words, so superb in their simplicity and permeated with the spirit of internationalism, from the present smug fabrications of the epigones!

In any case, we have the right to ask: wherein do all these statements of Lenin differ from my conviction in the year 1915 that the coming revolution in Russia or the coming socialist Germany could not hold out alone if “isolated in a capitalist world”? The time factor proved to be different from that posited not only by myself but also in Lenin’s forecasts; but the underlying idea retains its full force even today – at the given moment perhaps more so than ever before. Instead of condemning this idea, as the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI has done on the basis of an incompetent and unscrupulous speech, it should be included in the program of the Communist International.

Defending the slogan of the Soviet United States of Europe, we pointed out in 1915, that the law of uneven development is in itself no argument against this slogan, because the unevenness of historical development of different countries and continents is in itself uneven. European countries develop unevenly in relation to one another. Nevertheless it can be maintained with absolute historical certainty that not a single one of these countries is fated, at least in the historical epoch under review, to run so far ahead in relation to other countries as America has run ahead of Europe. For America there is one scale of unevenness, for Europe there is another. Geographically and historically, conditions have predetermined such a close organic bond between the countries of Europe that there is no way for them to tear themselves out of it. The modern bourgeois governments of Europe are like murderers chained to a single cart. The revolution in Europe, as has already been said, will in the final analysis be of decisive importance for America as well. But directly, in the immediate course of history, a revolution in Germany will have an immeasurably greater significance for France than for the United States of America. It is precisely from this historically developed relationship that there flows the political vitality of the slogan of the European Soviet Federation. We speak of its relative vitality because it stands to reason that this Federation will extend, across the great bridge of the Soviet Union, to Asia, and will then effect a union of the World Socialist Republics. But this will constitute a second epoch or a subsequent great chapter of the imperialist epoch, and when we approach it more closely, we will also find the corresponding formulas for it.

It can be proven without any difficulty by further quotations that our difference with Lenin in 1915 over the question of the United States of Europe was of a restricted, tactical, and, by its very essence, temporary character; but it is best proven by the subsequent course of events. In 1923 the Communist International adopted the controversial slogan. Were it true that the slogan of the United States of Europe was inacceptable in 1915 on grounds of principle, as the authors of the draft program now seek to maintain, then the Communist International could not possibly have adopted it. The law of uneven development, one would think, had not lost its effectiveness during these years.

The entire formulation of the questions as outlined above flows from the dynamics of the revolutionary process taken as a whole. The international revolution is regarded as an interconnected process which cannot be predicted in all its concreteness, and, so to speak, its order of occurrence, but which is absolutely clearcut in its general historical outline. Unless the latter is understood, a correct political orientation is entirely out of the question.

However, matters appear quite differently if we proceed from the idea of a socialist development which is occurring and is even being completed in one country. We have today a “theory” which teaches that it is possible to build socialism completely in one country and that the correlations of that country with the capitalist world can be established on the basis of “neutralizing” the world bourgeoisie (Stalin). The necessity for the slogan of a United States of Europe falls away, or is at least diminished, if this essentially national-reformist and not revolutionary-internationalist point of view is adopted. But this slogan is, from our viewpoint, important and vitally necessary because there is lodged in it the condemnation of the idea of an isolated socialist development. For the proletariat of every European country, even to a larger measure than for the USSR. – the difference, however, is one of degree only – it will be most vitally necessary to spread the revolution to the neighboring countries and to support insurrections there with arms in hand, not out of any abstract considerations of international solidarity, which in themselves cannot set the classes in motion, but because of those vital considerations which Lenin formulated hundreds of times – namely, that without timely aid from the international revolution, we will be unable to hold out. The slogan of the Soviet United States corresponds to the dynamics of the proletarian revolution, which does not break out simultaneously in all countries, but which passes from country to country and requires the closest bond between them, especially on the European arena, both with a view to defense against the most powerful external enemies, and with a view to economic construction.

One may, to be sure, try to raise an objection by asserting that following the period of the Ruhr crisis, which provided the latest impulse for the adoption of that slogan, the latter has not played a major role in the agitation for the communist parties of Europe and has, so to speak, not taken root. But this is equally true of such slogans as the workers’ state, Soviets, and so forth, i.e., all the slogans of the directly pre-revolutionary period. The explanation for this lies in the fact that since the end of 1923, notwithstanding the erroneous political appraisals of the Fifth Congress, the revolutionary movement on the European continent has been on the decline. But that is just why it is fatal to base a program, in whole or in part, upon impressions received only during that period. It was no mere accident that, despite all prejudices, the slogan of a Soviet United States of Europe was adopted precisely in 1923, at a time when a revolutionary explosion was expected in Germany, and when the question of the state interrelationships in Europe assumed an extremely burning character. Every new aggravation, of the European and indeed of the world crisis is sufficiently sharp to bring to the fore the main political problems and to invest the slogan of the United States of Europe with attractive power. It is therefore fundamentally wrong to pass over this slogan in silence in the program without rejecting it, that is, to keep it somewhere in reserve, for use “in case of emergency.” When questions of principle are involved, the policy of making reservations is futile.

4. The Criterion of Internationalism

The draft, as we already know, seeks to proceed in its construction from the standpoint of world economy and its internal tendencies – an attempt which merits recognition. Pravda is absolutely correct in saying that herein lies the basic difference in principle between us and the national-patriotic social democracy. A program of the international party of the proletariat can be built only if world economy, which dominates its separate parts, is taken as the point of departure. But precisely in analyzing the main tendencies of world development, the draft not only reveals inadequacies which depreciate its value, as has already been pointed out above, but it also is grossly one-sided, which leads it to commit grave blunders.

The draft refers time and again, and not always in the proper place, to the law of uneven development of capitalism as the main and almost all-determining law of that development. A number of mistakes in the draft, including one fundamental error, are theoretically based on the one-sided and false non-Marxian and non-Leninist interpretation of the law of uneven development.

In its first chapter the draft states that “the unevenness of economic and political development is an unconditional law of capitalism. This unevenness becomes still more accentuated and aggravated in the epoch of imperialism.”

This is correct. This formulation in part condemns Stalin’s recent formulation of the question, according to which both Marx and Engels were ignorant of the law of uneven development which was allegedly first discovered by Lenin. On September 15, 1925, Stalin wrote that Trotsky has no reason whatever to refer to Engels because the latter wrote at a time “when there could be no talk [!!] about the knowledge of the law of uneven development of capitalist countries.” Unbelievable as these words may be, Stalin, one of the authors of the draft, has nevertheless repeated them more than once. The text of the draft, as we have seen, has taken a step forward in this respect. However, if we leave aside the correction of this elementary mistake, what the draft says about the law of uneven development remains in essence one-sided and inadequate.

In the first place, it would have been more correct to say that the entire history of mankind is governed by the law of uneven development. Capitalism finds various sections of mankind at different stages of development, each with its profound internal contradictions. The extreme diversity in the levels attained, and the extraordinary unevenness in the rate of development of the different sections of mankind during the various epochs, serve as the starting point of capitalism. Capitalism gains mastery only gradually over the inherited unevenness, breaking and altering it, employing therein its own means and methods. In contrast to the economic systems which preceded it, capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the surmounting of economic differences, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships. Thereby it brings about their rapprochement and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries. Without this main process, it would be impossible to conceive of the relative leveling out, first, of Europe with Great Britain, and then, of America with Europe; the industrialization of the colonies, the diminishing gap between India and Great Britain, and all the consequences arising from the enumerated processes upon which is based not only the program of the Communist International but also its very existence.

By drawing the countries economically closer to one another and leveling out their stages of development, capitalism, however, operates by methods of its own, that is to say, by anarchistic methods which constantly undermine its own work, set one country against another, and one branch of industry against another, developing some parts of world economy while hampering and throwing back the development of others. Only the correlation of these two fundamental tendencies – both of which arise from the nature of capitalism – explains to us the living texture of the historical process.

Imperialism, thanks to the universality, penetrability, and mobility and the break-neck speed of the formation of finance capital as the driving force of imperialism, lends vigor to both these tendencies. Imperialism links up incomparably more rapidly and more deeply the individual national and continental units into a single entity, bringing them into the closest and most vital dependence upon each other and rendering their economic methods, social forms, and levels of development more identical. At the same time, it attains this “goal” by such antagonistic methods, such tiger-leaps, and such raids upon backward countries and areas that the unification and leveling of world economy which it has effected, is upset by it even more violently and convulsively than in the preceding epochs. Only such a dialectical and not purely mechanical understanding of the law of uneven development can make possible the avoidance of the fundamental error which the draft program, submitted to the Sixth Congress, has failed to avoid.

Immediately after its one-sided characterization of the law of uneven development pointed out by us, the draft program says:

“Hence it follows that the international proletarian revolution must not be regarded as a single, simultaneous, and universal act. Hence it follows that the victory of socialism is at first possible in a few, or even in one isolated capitalist country.”

That the international revolution of the proletariat cannot be a simultaneous act, of this there can of course be no dispute at all among grown-up people after the experience of the October Revolution, achieved by the proletariat of a backward country under pressure of historical necessity, without waiting in the least for the proletariat of the advanced countries “to even out the front.” Within these limits, the reference to the law of uneven development is absolutely correct and quite in place. But it is entirely otherwise with the second half of the conclusion – namely, the hollow assertion that the victory of socialism is possible “in one isolated capitalist country.” To prove its point the draft program simply says: “Hence it follows ...” One gets the impression that this follows from the law of uneven development. But this does not follow at all. “Hence follows” something quite the contrary. If the historical process were such that some countries developed not only unevenly but even independently of each other, isolated from each other, then from the law of uneven development would indubitably follow the possibility of building socialism in one capitalist country – at first in the most advanced country and then, as they mature, in the more backward ones. Such was the customary and, so to speak, average idea of the transition to socialism within the ranks of the pre-war social democracy. This is precisely the idea that formed the theoretical basis of social-patriotism. Of course, the draft program does not hold this view. But it inclines towards it.

The theoretical error of the draft lies in the fact that it seeks to deduce from the law of uneven development something which the law does not and cannot imply. Uneven or sporadic development of various countries acts constantly to upset but in no case to eliminate the growing economic bonds and interdependence between those countries which the very next day, after four years of hellish slaughter, were compelled to exchange coal, bread, oil, powder, and suspenders with each other. On this point, the draft posits the question as if historical development proceeds only on the basis of sporadic leaps, while the economic basis which gives rise to these leaps, and upon which they occur, is either left entirely out of sight by the authors of the draft, or is forcibly eliminated by them. This they do with the sole object of defending the indefensible theory of socialism in one country.

After what has been said it is not difficult to understand that the only correct formulation of the question should read that Marx and Engels, even prior to the imperialist epoch, had arrived at the conclusion that on the one hand, unevenness, i.e., sporadic historical development, stretches the proletarian revolution through an entire epoch in the course of which nations will enter the revolutionary flood one after another; while, on the other hand, the organic interdependence of the several countries, developing toward an international division of labor, excludes the possibility of building socialism in one country. This means that the Marxian doctrine, which posits that the socialist revolution can begin only on a national basis, while the building of socialism in one country is impossible, has been rendered doubly and trebly true, all the more so now, in the modern epoch when imperialism has developed, deepened, and sharpened both, of these antagonistic tendencies. On this point, Lenin merely developed and concretized Marx’s own formulation and Marx’s own answer to this question.

Our party program is based entirely upon the international conditions underlying the October Revolution and the socialist construction. To prove this, one need only transcribe the entire theoretical part of our program. Here we will confine ourselves merely to pointing out that when, during the Eighth Congress of our party, the late Podbelsky inferred that some formulations of the program had reference only to the revolution in Russia, Lenin replied as follows in his concluding speech on the question of the party program (March 19, 1919):

“Podbelsky has raised objections to a paragraph which speaks of the pending social revolution ... His argument is obviously unfounded because our program deals with the social revolution on a world scale.”

It will not be out of place here to point out that at about the same time Lenin suggested that our party should change its name from the Communist Party of Russia to the Communist Party, so as to emphasize still further that it is a party of international revolution. I was the only one voting for Lenin’s motion in the Central Committee. However, he did not bring the matter before the Congress in view of the foundation of the Third International. This position is proof of the fact that there was not even an inkling of socialism in one country at that time. That alone is the reason why the party program does not condemn this “theory” but merely excludes it.

But the program of the Young Communist League, adopted two years later, had to issue a direct warning against home-bred illusions and national narrow-mindedness on the question of the proletarian revolution, in order to train the youth in the spirit of internationalism. We will have more to say on this point later.

The new draft program of the Comintern puts the matter quite differently. In harmony with the revisionist evolution of its authors since 1924, the draft, as we have seen, chooses the directly opposite path. But the manner in which the question of socialism in one country is solved determines the nature of the entire draft as a Marxian or a revisionist document.

Of course, the draft program carefully, persistently, and severally presents, emphasizes, and explains the difference between the communist and reformist formulation of questions. But these assurances do not solve the problem. We have here a situation similar to that on board a ship which is equipped and even overloaded with numerous Marxian mechanisms and appliances, while its mainsail is so raised as to be purposely swelled by every revisionist and reformist wind.

Whoever has learned from the experiences of the last three decades and particularly from the extraordinary experience in China during the recent years, understands the powerful dialectical interdependence between the class struggle and the programmatic party documents and will understand our statement that the new revisionist sail can nullify all the safety appliances of Marxism and Leninism. That is why we are compelled to dwell in greater detail upon this cardinal question, which will for a long time determine the development and destiny of the Communist International.

PART II

5. The Theoretical Tradition of The Party

The draft program, in the foregoing quotation, deliberately uses the expression “victory of socialism in one country” so as to secure an external and purely verbal similarity between its text and Lenin’s article of 1915, which has been misused so ruthlessly, not to say criminally, during the discussion on the question of building a socialist society in one country. The draft resorts to the same method elsewhere by “referring” to Lenin’s words as a confirmation. Such is the scientific “methodology of the draft.”

Of the great wealth of Marxian literature and the treasure of Lenin’s works – directly ignoring everything Lenin said and wrote and everything he did, ignoring the party program and the program of the Young Communist League, ignoring the opinions expressed by all party leaders, without exception, during the epoch of the October Revolution, when the question was posed categorically (and how categorically!) ignoring what the authors of the program themselves, Stalin and Bukharin, said up to and including 1924 – two quotations all told from Lenin, one from his article on the United States of Europe, written in 1915, and another from his unfinished posthumous work on cooperation, written in 1923, have been used in defense of the theory of national socialism, which was created to meet the exigencies of the struggle against so-called “Trotskyism” at the end of 1924 or the beginning of 1925. Everything that contradicts these two quotations of a couple of lines each – the whole of Marxism and Leninism – has simply been set aside. These two artificially extracted, and grossly and epigonically misinterpreted quotations are taken as the basis of the new and purely revisionist theory which is unbounded from the viewpoint of its political consequences. We are witnessing the efforts to graft, by methods of scholasticism and sophistry, to the Marxian trunk an absolutely alien branch, which, if grafted, will inexorably poison and kill the whole tree.

At the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, Stalin declared (not for the first time): “The question of the construction of a socialist economy in one country was for the first time advanced in the party by Lenin back in 1915.”

Thus an admission is here made that prior to 1915 no mention was ever made of the question of socialism in one country. Ergo, Stalin and Bukharin do not venture to encroach upon the entire tradition of Marxism and of the party on the question of the international character of the proletarian revolution. Let us bear this in mind.

However, let us see what Lenin did say “for the first time” in 1915 in contradistinction to what Marx, Engels, and Lenin himself had said previously.

In 1915 Lenin said: “Uneven economic and political development is an unconditional law of capitalism. Hence it follows that the triumph of socialism is, to begin with, possible in a few, or even in a single capitalist country. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and having organized socialist production at home, would be up in arms against the rest of the capitalist world, attracting oppressed classes of other countries to its side, causing insurrections in those countries against the capitalists, and acting, in case of need, even with military power against the exploiting classes and their governments.”

What did Lenin have in mind? Only that the victory of socialism in the sense of the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat is possible at first in one country, which because of this very fact, will be counterposed to the capitalist world. The proletarian state, in order to be able to resist an attack and to assume a revolutionary offensive of its own, will first have to “organize socialist production at home,” i.e., it will have to organize the operation of the factories taken from the capitalists. That is all. Such a “victory of socialism” was, as is shown, first achieved in Russia, and the first workers’ state, in order to defend itself against world intervention, had first of all to “organize socialist production at home,” or to create trusts of “a consistently socialist type.” By the victory of socialism in one country, Lenin consequently did not cherish the fantasy of a self-sufficient socialist society, and in a backward country at that, but something much more realistic, namely, what the October Revolution had achieved in our country during the first period of its existence.

Does this, perhaps, require proof? So many proofs can be adduced that the only difficulty lies in making the best choice.

In his theses on war and peace (January 7, 1918) Lenin spoke of the “necessity of a certain period of time, at least several months, for the victory of socialism in Russia ...”

At the beginning of the same year, i.e., 1918, Lenin, in his article entitled “On Left Wing Childishness and Petty Bourgeois Tendencies,” directed against Bukharin, wrote the following: “ If, let us say, state capitalism could be established in our country within six months, that would be a tremendous achievement and the surest guarantee that within a year socialism will be definitely established and will have become invincible.”

How could Lenin have set so short a period for the “definite establishment of socialism”? What material-productive and social content did he put into these words?

This question will at once appear in a different light if we recall that on April 29, 1918, Lenin said in his report to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet government: “It is hardly to be expected that our next generation, which will be more highly developed, will effect a complete transition to socialism.”

On December 3, 1919, at the Congress of Communes and Artels, Lenin spoke even more bluntly, saying: “We know that we cannot establish a socialist order at the present time. It will be well if our children and perhaps our grandchildren will be able to establish it.”

In which of these two cases was Lenin right? Was it when he spoke of the “definite establishment of socialism” within twelve months, or when he left it not for our children but our grandchildren to “establish the socialist order”?

Lenin was right in both cases, for he had in mind two entirely different and incommensurable stages of socialist construction.

By the “definite establishment of socialism” in the first case, Lenin meant not the building of a socialist society within a year’s time or even “several months,” that is, he did not mean that the classes will be done away with, that the contradictions between city and country will be eliminated; he meant the restoration of production in mills and factories in the hands of the proletarian state, and thus the assuring of the possibility to exchange products between city and country. The very shortness of the term is in itself a sure key to an understanding of the whole perspective.

Of course, even for this elementary task, too short a term was set at the beginning of 1918. It was this purely practical “miscalculation” that Lenin derided at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern when he said “we were more foolish then than we are now.” But “we had a correct view of the general perspectives and did not for a moment believe that it is possible to set up a complete ’socialist order’ in the course of twelve months and in a backward country at that.” The attainment of this main and final goal – the construction of a socialist society – was left by Lenin to three whole generations – ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

Is it not clear that in his article of 1915, Lenin meant by the organization of “socialist production,” not the creation of a socialist society but an immeasurably more elementary task which has already been realized by us in the USSR? Otherwise, one would have to arrive at the absurd conclusion that, according to Lenin, the proletarian party, having captured power, “postpones” the revolutionary war until the third generation.

Such is the sorry position of the main stronghold of the new theory in so far as the 1915 quotation is concerned. However, what is sadder still is the fact that Lenin wrote this passage not in application to Russia. He was speaking of Europe in contrast to Russia. This follows not only from the content of the quoted article devoted to the question of the United States of Europe, but also from Lenin’s entire position at the time. A few months later, November 20, 1915, Lenin wrote specially on Russia, saying:

“The task of the proletariat follows obviously from this actual state of affairs. This task is a bold, heroic, revolutionary struggle against the monarchy (the slogans of the January conference of 1912 – the ’Three Whales’s), a struggle which would attract all democratic masses, that is, first and foremost the peasantry. At the same time, a relentless struggle must be waged against chauvinism, a struggle for the socialist revolution in Europe in alliance with its proletariat. The war crisis has strengthened the economic and political factors impelling the petty bourgeoisie, including the peasantry, towards the Left. Therein lies the objective basis of the absolute possibility of the victory of the democratic revolution in Russia. That the objective conditions for a socialist revolution have fully matured in Western Europe, was recognized before the war by all influential socialists of all advanced countries.”

Thus, in 1915, Lenin clearly spoke of a democratic revolution in Russia and of a socialist revolution in Western Europe. In passing, as if speaking of something which is self-evident, he mentions that in Western Europe, distinct from Russia, in contrast to Russia, the conditions for a socialist revolution have “fully matured.” But the authors of the new theory, the authors of the draft program, simply ignore this quotation – one of many – which squarely and directly refers to Russia, just as they ignore hundreds of other passages, as they ignore all of Lenin’s works. Instead of taking notice of this, they snatch, as we have seen, at another passage that refers to Western Europe, ascribe to it a meaning which it cannot and does not contain, attach this ascribed meaning to Russia, a country to which the passage has no reference, and on this “foundation” erect their new theory.

What was Lenin’s position on this question immediately before the October period? On leaving Switzerland after the February 1917 revolution, Lenin addressed a letter to the Swiss workers in which he declared:

“Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward countries of Europe. Socialism cannot be immediately triumphant there but the peasant character of the country with the huge tracts of land in the hands of the feudal aristocracy and landowners, can, on the basis of the experience of 1905, give a tremendous sweep to the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia and make our revolution a prelude to the world socialist revolution, a step towards it ... The Russian proletariat cannot by its own forces victoriously complete the socialist revolution. But it can give the Russian revolution dimensions such as will create the most favorable conditions for it, such as will in a certain sense begin it. It can facilitate matters for the entrance into a decisive battle on the part of its main and most reliable ally, the European and American socialist proletariat.”

All the elements of the question are contained in these few lines. If Lenin believed in 1915, in time of war and reaction, as they try to convince us now, that the proletariat of Russia can build socialism by itself so as to be able to declare war on the bourgeois states, after it will have accomplished this work, how could Lenin, at the beginning of 1917, after the February revolution, speak so categorically about the impossibility for backward peasant Russia to build socialism with its own forces? One must at least be somewhat logical and, to put it baldly, have some respect for Lenin.

It would be superfluous to add more quotations. To give an integral outline of Lenin’s economic and political views conditioned by the international character of the socialist revolution would require a separate work that would cover many subjects, but not the subject of building a self-sufficient socialist society in one country, because Lenin did not know this subject.

However, we feel obliged to dwell here on another article by Lenin – On Cooperation – since the draft program appears to quote this posthumous article extensively, i.e., utilizes some of its expressions for a purpose which is entirely alien to the article. We have in mind the fifth chapter of the draft program which states that the workers of the Soviet Republics “possess all the necessary and sufficient material prerequisites in the country ... for the complete construction of socialism”.

If the article dictated by Lenin during his illness and published after his death really did say that the Soviet state possesses all the necessary and material, that is, first of all, productive prerequisites for an independent construction of complete socialism, one would only have to surmise that either Lenin slipped in his dictation or that the stenographer made a mistake in transcribing her notes. Either conjecture is at any rate more probable than that Lenin abandoned Marxism and his own life-long teaching in two hasty strokes. Fortunately, however, there is not the slightest need for such an explanation. The remarkable, though unfinished article On Cooperation, which is bound up by unity of thought with other, no less remarkable articles of his last period, constituting, as it mere, a chapter of an unfinished book dealing with the place occupied by the October Revolution in the chain of revolutions in the West and East – this article On Cooperation does not at all speak of those things which the revisionists of Leninism so light-mindedly ascribe to it.

In this article Lenin explains that the “trading” cooperatives can and must entirely change their social role in the workers’ state and that by a correct policy they may direct the merger of private peasant interests with the general state interests along socialist channels. Lenin substantiates this irrefutable idea as follows:

“As a matter of fact, the state power over all large-scale means of production, state power in the hands of the proletariat, an alliance of that proletariat with the many millions of peasants with small and petty holdings, security of proletarian leadership in relationship to the peasant – is this not all that is necessary for the cooperatives, the cooperatives alone, which we have formerly treated as mere traders, and which, from a certain viewpoint, we still have the right to treat as such even now under the NEP, is this not all that is necessary for the construction of a complete socialist society? It is not yet the construction of a socialist society but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for this construction.”

The text of the passage which includes an unfinished phrase [“the cooperatives alone”(?)] irrefutably proves that we have before us an uncorrected draft which was dictated and written. It is all the more inadmissible to cling to a few isolated words of the text rather than to try to get a general idea of the article. Fortunately, however, even the letter of the cited passage and not only its spirit grants no one the right to misuse it as it is being misused by the authors of the draft program. Speaking of the “necessary and sufficient” prerequisites, Lenin strictly limits his subject in this article. In it he deals only with the question as to the ways and means by which we will reach socialism through the atomized and diffused peasant enterprises without new class upheavals, having the prerequisites of the Soviet regime as our basis. The article is entirely devoted to the socio-organizational forms of the transition from small private commodity economy to collective economy but not to the material-productive conditions of that: transition. Were the European proletariat to prove victorious today and come to our assistance with its technology, the question of cooperation raised by Lenin as a socio-organizational method of coordinating private and social interests would still fully retain its significance. Cooperation points the way through which advanced technology, including electricity, can reorganize and unite the millions of peasant enterprises, once a Soviet regime exists. But cooperation cannot be substituted for technology and does not create that technology. Lenin does not merely speak of the necessary and sufficient prerequisites in general, but as we have seen, he definitely enumerates them. They are: (1) “Power of the state over all large-scale means of production” (an uncorrected phrase); (2) “State power in the hands of the proletariat”; (3) “An alliance of that proletariat with millions of peasants”; (4) “Security of proletarian leadership in relation to the peasants.” It is only after enumerating these purely political conditions – nothing is said here about material conditions – that Lenin arrives at his conclusion, namely, that “this” (i.e., all the foregoing) “is all that is necessary and sufficient” for the building of a socialist society. “All that is necessary and sufficient” on the political plane, but no more. But, adds Lenin right there and then, “it is not yet the construction of a socialist society.” Why not? Because political conditions alone, although they be sufficient, do not solve the problem. The cultural question still remains. “Only” this, says Lenin, emphasizing the word “only” in order to show the tremendous importance of the prerequisites we lack. Lenin knew as well as we that culture is bound up with technology. “To be cultural” – he brings the revisionists back to earth – “a certain material basis is necessary.” Suffice to mention the problem of electrification which Lenin, incidentally, purposely linked up with the question of the international socialist revolution. The struggle for culture, given the “necessary and sufficient” political (but not material) prerequisites, would absorb all our efforts, were it not for the question of the uninterrupted and irreconcilable economic, political, military, and cultural struggle of the country engaged in the building of a socialist society on a backward basis against world capitalism which is in its decline but is technically powerful.

“I am ready to state [Lenin underscores with particular emphasis towards the end of this article] that the center of gravity for us would be transferred to cultural work were it not for our duty to fight for our position on an international scale.”

Such is Lenin’s real idea if we analyze the article on cooperation, even apart from all his other works. How else, if not as a falsification, can we style the formula of the authors of the draft program who deliberately take Lenin’s words about our possession of the “necessary and sufficient” prerequisites and add to them the basic material prerequisites, although Lenin definitely speaks of the material prerequisites in parentheses, saying that it is just what we do not have and what we must still gain in our struggle “for our position on an international scale,” that is, in connection with the international proletarian revolution? That is how matters stand with the second, and last stronghold of the theory.

We purposely did not deal here with innumerable articles and speeches from 1905 to 1923 in which Lenin asserts and repeats most categorically that without a victorious world revolution we are doomed to failure, that it is impossible to defeat the bourgeoisie economically in one country, particularly a backward country, that the task of building a socialist society is in its very essence an international task – from which Lenin drew conclusions which may be “pessimistic” to the promulgators of the new national reactionary utopia but which are sufficiently optimistic from the viewpoint of revolutionary internationalism. We concentrate our argument here only on the passages which the authors of the draft have themselves chosen in order to create the “necessary and sufficient” prerequisites for their utopia. And we see that their whole structure crumbles the moment it is touched.

However, we consider it in place to present at least one of Lenin’s direct statements on the controversial question which does not need any comment and will not permit any false interpretation.

“We have emphasized in many of our works; in all our speeches, and in our entire press that the situation in Russia is not the same as in the advanced capitalist countries, that we have in Russia a minority of industrial workers and an overwhelming majority of small agrarians. The social revolution in such a country can be finally successful only on two conditions: first, on the condition that it is given timely support by the social revolution in one or more advanced countries ... second, that there be an agreement between the proletariat which establishes the dictatorship or holds state power in its hands and the majority of the peasant population ...

“We know that only an agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia so long as the revolution in other countries has not arrived.”

We hope that this passage is sufficiently instructive. First, Lenin himself emphasizes in it that the ideas advanced by him have been developed “in many of our works, in all our speeches, and in our entire press”; secondly, this perspective was envisaged by Lenin not in 1915, two years prior to the October Revolution, but in 1921, the fourth year after the October Revolution.

So far as Lenin is concerned, we venture to think that the question is clear enough. There remains to inquire: what was formerly the opinion of the authors of the draft program on the basic question now before us?

On this point, Stalin said in November 1926: “The party always took as its starting point the idea that the victory of socialism in one country means the possibility to build socialism in that country, and that this task can be accomplished with the forces of a single country.”

We already know that the party never took this as its starting point. On the contrary, “in many of our works, in all our speeches, and in our entire press,” as Lenin said, the party proceeded from the opposite position, which found its highest expression in the program of the CPSU. But one would imagine that at least Stalin himself “always” proceeded from this false view that “ socialism can be built with the forces of one country.” Let us check up.

What Stalin’s views on this question were in 1905 or 1915 we have absolutely no means of knowing as there are no documents whatever on the subject. But in 1924, Stalin outlined Lenin’s views on the building of socialism, as follows:

“The overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a proletarian government in one country does not yet guarantee the complete victory of socialism. The main task of socialism – the organization of socialist production – still remains ahead. Can this task be accomplished, can the final victory of socialism in one country be attained, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible. To overthrow the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are sufficient – the history of our revolution bears this out. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia are insufficient. For this the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are necessary ...

“Such, on the whole, are the characteristic features of the Leninist theory of the proletarian revolution.”

One must concede that the “characteristic features of the Leninist theory” are outlined here quite correctly. In the later editions of Stalin’s book this passage was altered to read in just the opposite way and the “characteristic features of the Leninist theory” were proclaimed within a year as ... Trotskyism. The Seventh Plenum of the ECCI passed its decision, not on the basis of the 1924 edition but of the 1926 edition.

That is how the matter stands with Stalin. Nothing could be any sadder. To be sure, we might reconcile ourselves with this if matters were not just as sad with regard to the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI.

There is one hope left and that is that at least Bukharin, the real author of the draft program, “always proceeded” from the possibility of the realization of socialism in one country. Let us check up.

Here is what Bukharin wrote on the subject in 1917:

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history. Even in backward Russia, the irreplaceable engineer of that locomotive can be only the proletariat. But the proletariat can no longer remain within the framework of the property relations of bourgeois society. It marches to power and towards socialism. However, this task which is being ‘put on the order of the day’ in Russia cannot be accomplished ‘within national boundaries.’ Here the working class meets with an insurmountable wall [Observe: “an insurmountable wall.” – L.T.] which can be broken through only by the battering ram of the International Workers’ Revolution.”

He could not have expressed himself more clearly. Such were the views held by Bukharin in 1917, two years after Lenin’s alleged “ change” in 1915. But perhaps the October Revolution taught Bukharin differently? Again, let us check.

In 1919, Bukharin wrote on the subject of the Proletarian Dictatorship in Russia and the World Revolution in the theoretical organ of the Communist International, saying:

“Under existing world economy and the connection between its parts, with the mutual interdependence of the various national bourgeois groups, it is self-evident that the struggle in one country cannot end without a decisive victory of one or the other side in several civilized countries.”

At that time this was even “self-evident.” He goes on.

“In the Marxian and quasi-Marxian pre-war literature, the question was many times raised as to whether the victory of socialism is possible in one country. Most of the writers replied to this question in the negative [and what about Lenin in 1915? – L.T.] from which one does not at all conclude that it is impossible or impermissible to start the revolution and to seize the power in one country.”

Exactly! In the same article we read:

“The period of a rise in the productive forces can begin only with the victory of the proletariat in several major countries. Hence it follows that an all-round development of the world revolution and the formation of a strong economic alliance of the industrial countries with Soviet Russia is necessary.”

Bukharin’s assertion that a rise in the productive forces, that is, real socialist development, will begin in our country only after the victory of the proletariat in the advanced countries of Europe is indeed the very same statement that was used as a basis of all acts of indictment against “Trotskyism,” including the indictment at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI The only thing peculiar is that Bukharin, who owes his salvation to his short memory, stepped forward in the role of accuser. Side by side with this comical circumstance, there is another and a tragic one, namely, that among those indicted was also Lenin, who expressed dozens of times the very same elementary idea.

Finally, in 1921, six years after Lenin’s alleged change of 1915, and four years after the October Revolution, the Central Committee headed by Lenin approved the program of the Young Communist League, which was drawn up by a commission directed by Bukharin. Paragraph 4 of this program reads:

“In the USSR state power is already in the hands of the working class. In the course of three years of heroic struggle against world capitalism, the proletariat has maintained and strengthened its Soviet government. Russia, although it possesses enormous natural resources, is, nevertheless, from an industrial point of view, a backward country, in which a petty bourgeois population predominates. It can arrive at socialism only through the world proletarian revolution, which epoch of development we have now entered.”

This single paragraph from the program of the Young Communist League (not a chance article but a program!) renders ridiculous and really infamous the attempts of the authors of the draft to prove that the party “always” held the construction of a socialist society to be possible in one country and, moreover, precisely in Russia. If this was “ always” so, then why did Bukharin formulate such a paragraph in the program of the Young Communist League? Where was Stalin looking at the time? How could Lenin and the whole Central Committee have approved such a heresy? How was it that no one in the party noticed this “ trifle” or raised a voice against it? Doesn’t this look like a sinister joke which is turning into a downright mockery of the party, its history, and the Comintern? Is it not high time to put a stop to this? Is it not high time to tell the revisionists: don’t you dare hide behind Lenin and the theoretical tradition of the party!?

At the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, in order to provide the basis for the resolution condemning “Trotskyism,” Bukharin, whose safety lies in the shortness of his memory, made the following assertion:

“In comrade Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution – and comrade Trotsky propounds this theory even today – there is also to be found an assertion that because of our economic backwardness we must inevitably perish without the world revolution.”

At the Seventh Plenum I spoke about the gaps in the theory of the permanent revolution as I had formulated it in 1905-1906. But naturally it never even entered my mind to renounce anything in this theory which was fundamental, which tended to and which did bring me close to Lenin, and which made utterly inacceptable to me the present-day revision of Leninism.

There were two fundamental propositions in the theory of the permanent revolution. First, that despite the historical backwardness of Russia, the revolution can transfer the power into the hands of the Russian proletariat before the proletariat of advanced countries is able to attain it. Secondly, that the way out of those contradictions which will befall the proletarian dictatorship in a backward country, surrounded by a world of capitalist enemies, will be found on the arena of world revolution. The first proposition is based upon a correct understanding of the law of uneven development. The second depends upon a correct understanding of the indissolubility of the economic and political ties between capitalist countries. Bukharin is correct in saying that even today I still hold to these two basic propositions of the theory of the permanent revolution. Today, more than ever before. For, in my opinion, they have been completely verified and proven: in theory, by the works of Marx and Lenin; in practice, by the experience of the October Revolution.

6. Where is the “ Social Democratic Deviation”?

The quotations adduced are more than sufficient to characterize Stalin’s and Bukharin’s theoretical positions of yesterday and today. But in order to determine the character of their political methods one must recall that, having selected from the documents written by the Opposition those statements which are absolutely analogous with those which they themselves made up to 1925 (in this case in full agreement with Lenin), Stalin and Bukharin erected on the basis of these quotations the theory of our “social democratic deviation.” It appears that in the central question of the relations between the October Revolution and international revolution, the Opposition holds the same views as Otto Bauer, who does not admit the possibility of socialist construction in Russia. One might really think that the printing press was invented only in 1929 and that everything that occurred prior to this date is doomed to oblivion. The stakes are all put on short memory!

Yet, on the question of the nature of the October Revolution, the Comintern settled its accounts with Otto Bauer and other philistines of the Second International at the Fourth Congress. In my report on the New Economic Policys and the prospects of world revolution, authorized by the Central Committee, Otto Bauer’s position was appraised in a manner which expressed the views of our then Central Committee; it did not meet with any objections at the Congress and I think it fully holds good today. So far as Bukharin himself is concerned, he declined to clarify the political side of the problem since “many comrades, including Lenin and Trotsky, have already spoken on the subject”; in other words, Bukharin at that time agreed with my speech. Here is what I said at the Fourth Congress about Otto Bauer:

“The social democratic theoreticians, who, on the one hand recognize in their holiday articles that capitalism, particularly in Europe, has outlived its usefulness and has become a brake on historical development, and who on the other hand express the conviction that the evolution of Soviet Russia inevitably leads to the triumph of bourgeois democracy, fall into the most pitiful and banal contradiction of which these stupid and conceited confusionists are entirely worthy. The New Economic Policy is calculated for certain definite conditions of time and space. It is a maneuver of the workers’ state which exists in capitalist surroundings and definitely calculates on the revolutionary development of Europe ... Such a factor as time cannot be left out of consideration in political calculations. If we allow that capitalism will really be able to continue existing in Europe for another century or half a century and that Soviet Russia will have to adapt itself to it in its economic policy, then the question solves itself automatically because, by allowing this, we presuppose the collapse of the proletarian revolution in Europe and the rise of a new epoch of capitalist revival. On what grounds is this to be allowed? If Otto Bauer has discovered in the life of present-day Austria any miraculous signs of capitalist resurrection, then all that can be said is that the fate of Russia is predetermined. But thus far we do not see any miracles, nor do we believe in them. From our viewpoint, if the European bourgeoisie is able to maintain itself in power in the course of several decades, it will under the present world conditions signify not a new capitalist bloom, but economic stagnation and the cultural decline of Europe. Generally speaking it cannot be denied that such a process might draw Soviet Russia into the abyss. Whether she would have then to go through a stage of ’democracy,’ or decay in some other forms, is a question of secondary importance. But we see no reason whatever for adopting Spengler’s philosophy. We definitely count upon a revolutionary development in Europe. The New Economic Policy is merely an adaptation to the rate of that development.”

This formulation of the question brings us back to the point from which we started the evaluation of the draft program, namely, that in the epoch of imperialism it is impossible to approach the fate of one country in any other way but by taking as a starting point the tendencies of world development as a whole in which the individual country, with all its national peculiarities, is included and to which it is subordinated. The theoreticians of the Second International exclude the USSR from the world unit and from the imperialist epoch; they apply to the USSR, as an isolated country, the bald criterion of economic “maturity”; they declare that the USSR is not ripe for independent socialist’ construction and thence draw the conclusion of the inevitability of a capitalist degeneration of the workers’ state.

The authors of the draft program adopt the same theoretical ground and take over bag and baggage the metaphysical methodology of the social democratic theoreticians. They too “ abstract” from the world entity and from the imperialist epoch. They proceed from the fiction of isolated development. They apply to the national phase of the world revolution a bald economic criterion. But the “verdict” they bring in is different. The “ leftism” of the authors of the draft lies in the fact that they turn the social democratic evaluations inside out. Yet, the position of the theoreticians of the Second International, remodel it as you may, remains worthless. One must take Lenin’s position which simply eliminates Bauer’s evaluation and Bauer’s prognosis as kindergarten exercises.

That is how matters stand with the “social democratic deviation.” Not we but the authors of the draft should consider themselves related to Bauer.

7. The Dependence of the USSR on World Economy

The precursor of the present prophets of the national socialist society was no other than Herr Vollmar. Describing in his article entitled The Isolated Socialist State the prospect of independent socialist construction in Germany, the proletariat of which country was much further developed than that of advanced Britain, Vollmar, in 1878, refers definitely and quite clearly in several places to the law of uneven development with which, according to Stalin, Marx and Engels were unacquainted. On the basis of that law Vollmar arrived in 1878 at the irrefutable conclusion that:

“Under the prevailing conditions, which will retain their force also in the future, it can be foreseen that a simultaneous victory of socialism in all cultural countries is absolutely out of the question.”

Developing this idea still further, Vollmar says: “Thus we have come to the isolated socialist state which I hope I have proven to be the most probable, although not the only possible way.”

In so far as by the term “isolated state” we may here understand a state under a proletarian dictatorship, Vollmar expressed an irrefutable idea which was well known to Marx and Engels, and which Lenin expressed in the above quoted article of 1915.

But then follows something which is purely Vollmar’s own idea, which, by the way, is by a long; shot not so one-sided and wrongly formulated as the formulation of our sponsors of the theory of socialism in one country. In his construction, Vollmar took as a starting point the proposition that socialist Germany will have lively economic relations with world capitalist economy, having at the same time the advantage of possessing a much more highly developed technology and a much lower cost of production. This construction is based on the perspective of a peaceful coexistence of the socialist and capitalist systems. But inasmuch as socialism must, as it progresses, constantly reveal its colossal productive superiority, the necessity for a world revolution will fall away by itself: socialism will triumph over capitalism by selling goods more cheaply on the market.

Bukharin, the author of the first draft program and one of the authors of the second draft, proceeds in his construction of socialism in one country entirely from the idea of an isolated self-sufficing economy. In Bukharin’s article entitled On the Nature of our Revolution and the Possibility of Successful Socialist Construction in the USSR, which is the last word in scholasticism multiplied by sophistry, all the reasoning is done within the limits of isolated economy. The principal and only argument is the following:

“Since we have ‘all that is necessary and sufficient’ for the building of socialism, therefore, in the very process of building socialism there can be no such point at which its further construction would become impossible. If we have within our country such a combination of forces that, in relation to each past year, we are marching ahead with a greater preponderance of the socialist sector of our economy and the socialized sectors of our economy grow faster than the private capitalist sectors, then we are entering every subsequent new year with a preponderance of forces.”

This reasoning is irreproachable: “Since we have all that is necessary and sufficient,” therefore we have it. Starting out from a point which must be proved, Bukharin builds up a complete system of a self-sufficing socialist economy without any entrances to it or exits from it, As to the external milieu, that is, the whole world, Bukharin, as well as Stalin, reminds himself of it only from the angle of intervention. When Bukharin speaks in his article about the necessity of “abstracting” from the international factor, he has in mind not the world market but military intervention. Bukharin does not have to abstract from the world market because he simply forgets about it throughout his construction. In harmony with this schema Bukharin championed the idea at the Fourteenth Congress of the Russian party that if we are not hindered by intervention we will build socialism “even if at the speed of a tortoise.” The question of the uninterrupted struggle between the two systems, the fact that socialism can be based only on the highest productive forces; in a word, the Marxian dynamics of the displacement of one social formation by another on the basis of the growing productive forces – all this has been completely blotted out. Revolutionary and historical dialectic has been displaced by a skinflint reactionary utopia of self-sufficient socialism, built on a low technology, developing with the “speed of a tortoise” within national boundaries, connected with the external world only by its fear of intervention. The refusal to accept this miserable caricature of Marx’s and Lenin’s doctrine has been declared a “social democratic deviation.” In the quoted article by Bukharin, this characterization of our views was, for the first time, generally advanced and “substantiated.” History will take note that we fell into a “social democratic deviation” because we refused to accept an inferior rehash of Vollmar’s theory of socialism in one country.

The proletariat of Czarist Russia could not have taken power in October if Russia had not been a link – the weakest link, but a link, nevertheless – in the chain of world economy. The seizure of power by the proletariat has not at all excluded the Soviet republic from the system of the international division of labor created by capitalism.

Like the wise owl which comes flying only in the dusk, the theory of socialism in one country pops up at the moment when our industry, which exhausts ever greater proportions of the old fixed capital, in two-thirds of which there is crystallized the dependence of our industry on world industry, has given indication of its urgent need to renew and extend its ties with the world market, and at a moment when the problems of foreign trade have arisen in their full scope before our economic directors.

At the Eleventh Congress, that is, at the last Congress at which Lenin had the opportunity to speak to the party, he issued a timely warning that the party would have to undergo another test: “... a test to which we shall be put by the Russian and international market to which we are subordinated, with which we are connected and from which we cannot escape.

Nothing deals the theory of an isolated “complete socialism” such a death-blow as the simple fact that our foreign trade figures have in most recent years become the keystone of the figures of our economic plans. The “tightest spot” in our economy, including our industry, is our import trade which depends entirely on our export. And inasmuch as the power of resistance of a chain is always measured by its weakest link, the dimensions of our economic plans are made to conform to the dimensions of our imports.

In the journal Planned Economy (the theoretical organ of the State Planning Commission) we read an article devoted to the system of planning, that “... in drawing up our control figures for the current year we had to take methodologically our export and import plans as a starting point for the entire plan; we had to orient ourselves on that in our plans for the various branches of industry and consequently for industry in general and particularly for the construction of new industrial enterprises,” etc., etc.

This methodological approach of the State Planning Commission states flatly, for all who have ears to hear, that the control figures determine the direction and tempo of our economic development, but that these control figures are already controlled by world economy; not because having become stronger we have broken free from the vicious circle of isolation.

The capitalist world shows us by its export and import figures that it has other instruments of persuasion than those of military intervention. To the extent that productivity of labor and the productivity of a social system as a whole are measured on the market by the correlation of prices, it is not so much military intervention as the intervention of cheaper capitalist commodities that constitutes perhaps the greatest immediate menace to Soviet economy. This alone shows that it is by no means merely a question of an isolated economic victory over “one’s own” bourgeoisie: “The socialist revolution which is impending for the whole world will by no means consist merely in a victory of the proletariat of each country over its own bourgeoisie.” Involved here is a rivalry and a life-and-death struggle between two social systems, one of which has only just begun building on backward productive forces, while the other still rests today on productive forces of immeasurably greater strength.

Anyone who sees “pessimism” in an admission of our dependence on the world market (Lenin spoke bluntly of our subordination to the world market) reveals thereby his own provincial petty bourgeois timorousness in the face of the world market, and the pitiful character of his homebred optimism which hopes to hide from world economy behind a bush and to manage somehow with its own resources.

The new theory has made a point of honor of the freakish idea that the USSR can perish from military intervention but never from its own economic backwardness. But inasmuch as in a socialist society the readiness of the toiling masses to defend their country must be much greater than the readiness of the slaves of capitalism to attack that country, the question arises: why should military intervention threaten us with disaster? Because the enemy is infinitely stronger in his technology. Bukharin concedes the preponderance of the productive forces only in their military technical aspect. He does not want to understand that a Ford tractor is just as dangerous as a Creusot gun, with the sole difference that while the gun can function only from time to time, the tractor brings its pressure to bear upon us constantly. Besides, the tractor knows that a gun stands behind it, as a last resort.

We are the first workers’ state, a section of the world proletariat, and together with the latter we depend upon world capital. The indifferent, neutral, and bureaucratically castrated word, “connections,” is put into circulation only with the object of concealing the extremely onerous and dangerous nature of these ’connections.” If we were producing at the prices of the world market, our dependence on the latter, without ceasing to be a dependence, would be of a much less severe character than it is now. But unfortunately this is not the case. Our monopoly of foreign trade itself is evidence of the severity and the dangerous character of our dependence. The decisive importance of the monopoly in our socialist construction is a result precisely of the existing correlation of forces which is unfavorable to us. But we must not forget for a moment that the monopoly of foreign trade only regulates our dependence upon the world market, but does not eliminate it.

“So long as our Soviet Republic [says Lenin] remains an isolated borderland surrounded by the entire capitalist world, so long will it be an absolutely ridiculous fantasy and utopianism to think of our complete economic independence and of the disappearance of any of our dangers.”

The chief dangers arise consequently from the objective position of the USSR as the “isolated borderland” in a capitalist economy which is hostile to us. These dangers may, however, diminish or increase. This depends on the action of two factors: our socialist construction on the one hand, and the development of capitalist economy on the other hand. In the last analysis, the second factor, that is, the fate of world economy as a whole, is, of course, of decisive significance.

Can it happen – and in what particular case – that the productivity of our socialist system will constantly lag behind that of the capitalist system – which would unfailingly lead in the end to the downfall of the socialist republic? If we ably manage our economy in this new phase when it becomes necessary to create independently an industrial basis with its incomparably higher demands upon the leadership, then our productivity of labor will grow. Is it, however, inconceivable that the productivity of labor in the capitalist countries, or more correctly, in the predominant capitalist countries, will grow faster than in our country? Without a clear answer to this question, there is no basis whatever for the vapid assertions that our tempo “ is in itself” sufficient (let alone the absurd philosophy of the “speed of a tortoise”). But the very attempt to provide an answer to the question of the rivalry of two systems leads us to the arena of world economy and world politics, that is, to the arena of action and decision of the revolutionary International which includes the Soviet republic, but not by any means a self-sufficing Soviet republic which from time to time secures the support of the International.

Speaking of the state economy of the USSR the draft program says that it “is developing large scale industry at a tempo surpassing the tempo of development in capitalist countries.” This attempt to juxtapose the two tempos represents, we must allow, a principled step forward in comparison to that period when the authors of the program categorically rejected the very question of the comparative coefficient between our development and world development. There is no need of “intruding the international factor,” said Stalin. Let us build socialism “even if at the speed of a tortoise,” said Bukharin. It was precisely along this line that the principled controversies occurred over a period of several years. Formally – we have won along this line. But if we do not merely insert into the text comparisons between the tempos of economic development, but penetrate to the root of the matter, it will become apparent that it is impermissible to speak in another section of the draft about “a sufficient minimum of industry,” without any relation to the capitalist world, taking as a starting point only the internal relations; and that it is equally impermissible not only to pass a decision on but even to pose the question of whether it is “possible or impossible” for any given country to build socialism independently. The question is decided by the dynamics of the struggle between the two systems, between the two world classes; and in this struggle, regardless of the high coefficients of growth of our restoration period, one incontestable and basic fact remains, namely, that:

“Capitalism, if taken on an international scale, is even now, not only in a military but also in an economic sense, stronger than the Soviet power. We must proceed front this fundamental consideration and never forget it.”

The question of the interrelation between the different tempos of development remains an open question for the future. It depends not only upon our capacity to really achieve the “smychka,” to assure the grain collections, and to increase our export and import; in other words, not only upon our internal successes which, of course, are extremely important factors in this struggle but also upon the fate of world capitalism, upon its stagnation, upsurge, or collapse, that is to say, upon the course of world economy and world revolution. Consequently, the question is decided not within the national framework but on the arena of world economic and political struggle.

PART III

8. The Contradiction Between The Productive Forces and the National Boundaries as the Cause of the Reactionary Utopian Theory of “Socialism in One Country”

The basis for the theory of socialism in one country, as we have seen, sums up to sophistic interpretations of several lines from Lenin on the one hand, and to a scholastic interpretation of the “law of uneven development” on the other. By giving a correct interpretation of the historic law as well as of the quotations in question we arrive at a directly opposite conclusion, that is, the conclusion that was reached by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and all of us, including Stalin and Bukharin, up to 1925.

From the uneven sporadic development of capitalism flows the non-simultaneous, uneven, and sporadic character of the socialist revolution; from the extreme tensity of the interdependence of the various countries upon each other flows not only the political but also the economic impossibility of building socialism in one country.

Let us examine once again from this angle the text of the program a little closer. We have already read in the introduction that:

“Imperialism ... aggravates to an exceptional degree the contradiction between the growth of the national productive forces of world economy and national state barriers.”

We have already stated that this proposition is, or rather was meant to be, the keystone of the international program. But it is precisely this proposition which excludes, rejects, and sweeps away a priori the theory of socialism in one country as a reactionary theory because it is irreconcilably opposed not only to the fundamental tendency of development of the productive forces but also to the material results which have already been attained by this development. The productive forces are incompatible with national boundaries. Hence flow not only foreign trade, the export of men and capital, the seizure of territories, the colonial policy, and the last imperialist war, but also the economic impossibility of a self-sufficient socialist society. The productive forces of capitalist countries have long since broken through the national boundaries. Socialist society, however, can be built only on the most advanced productive forces, on the application of electricity and chemistry to the processes of production including agriculture; on combining, generalizing, and bringing to maximum development the highest elements of modern technology. From Marx on, we have been constantly repeating that capitalism cannot cope with the spirit of new technology to which it has given rise and which tears asunder not only the integument of bourgeois private property rights but, as the war of 1914 has shown, also the national hoops of the bourgeois state. Socialism, however, must not only take over from capitalism the most highly developed productive forces but must immediately carry them onward, raise them to a higher level and give them a state of development such as has been unknown under capitalism. The question arises: how then can socialism drive the productive forces back into the boundaries of a national state which they have violently sought to break through under capitalism? Or, perhaps, we ought to abandon the idea of “unbridled” productive forces for which the national boundaries, and consequently also the boundaries of the theory of socialism in one country, are too narrow, and limit ourselves, let us say, to the curbed and domesticated productive forces, that is, to the technology of economic backwardness? If this is the case, then in many branches of industry we should stop making progress right now and decline to a level even lower than our present pitiful technical level which managed to link up bourgeois Russia with world economy in an inseparable bond and to bring it into the vortex of the imperialist mar for an expansion of its territory for the productive forces that had outgrown the state boundaries.

Having inherited and restored these productive forces the workers’ state is compelled to import and export.

The trouble is that the draft program injects mechanically into its text the thesis of the incompatibility of modern capitalist technology with the national boundaries, and then the argument proceeds as if there were no question at all of this incompatibility. Essentially the whole draft is a combination of ready-made revolutionary theses taken from Marx end Lenin and of opportunist or centrist conclusions which are absolutely incompatible with these revolutionary theses. That is why it is necessary without becoming allured by the isolated revolutionary formulas contained in the draft to watch closely whither its main tendencies lead.

We have already quoted that part of the first chapter which speaks of the possibility of the victory of socialism “in one isolated capitalist country.” This idea is still more crudely and sharply formulated in the fourth chapter, which says that:

“The dictatorship [?] of the world proletariat ... can be realized only as a result of the victory of socialism [?] in individual countries when the newly formed proletarian republics will establish a federation with those already in existence.”

If we are to interpret the words “victory of socialism” merely as another expression for the dictatorship of the proletariat, then we will arrive at a general statement which is irrefutable for all and which should be formulated less equivocally. But this is not what the authors of the draft have in mind. By a victory of socialism, they do not mean simply the capture of power and the nationalization of the means of production but the building of a socialist society in one country. If we were to accept this interpretation then we would obtain not a world socialist economy based on an international division of labor but a federation of self-sufficing socialist communes in the spirit of blissful anarchism, the only difference being that these communes would be enlarged to the size of the present national states.

In its uneasy urge to cover up eclectically the new formulation by means of old and customary formulas, the draft program resorts to the following thesis:

“Only after the complete world victory of the proletariat and the consolidation of its world power will there ensue a prolonged epoch of intense construction of world socialist economy.” (Ch.4)

Used as a theoretical shield, this postulate in reality only serves to expose the basic contradiction. If we are to interpret the thesis to mean that the epoch of genuine socialist construction can begin only after the victory of the proletariat, at least in several advanced countries, then it is simply a rejection of the theory of building socialism in one country, and a return to the position of Marx and Lenin. But if we are to take our point of departure from the new theory of Stalin and Bukharin which is lodged in the various sections of the draft program, then we obtain the following perspective: up to the complete world victory of the world proletariat a number of individual countries build complete socialism in their respective countries, and subsequently out of these socialist countries there will be built a world socialist economy, after the manner in which children erect structures with ready-made blocks. As a matter of fact, world socialist economy will not at all be a sum total of national socialist economies. It can take shape in its fundamental aspects only on the soil of the worldwide division of labor which has been created by the entire preceding development of capitalism. In its essentials, it will be constituted and built not after the building of “complete socialism” in a number of individual countries, but in the storms and tempests of the world proletarian revolution which will require a number of decades. The economic successes of the first countries of the proletarian dictatorship will be measured not by the degree of their approximation to a self-sufficing “complete socialism” but by the political stability of the dictatorship itself and by the successes achieved in preparing the elements of the future world socialist economy.

This revisionist idea is still more definitely and therefore still more grossly expressed, if that is possible, in the fifth chapter where, hiding behind one and a half lines of Lenin’s posthumous article they have distorted, the authors of the draft declare that the USSR

“... possesses the necessary and sufficient material prerequisites within the country not only for the overthrow of the feudal landlords and the bourgeoisie but also for the complete construction of socialism.”

Thanks to what circumstances have we obtained such extraordinary historical advantages? On this point we find a reply in the second chapter of the draft:

“The imperialist front was broken at its weakest link, Czarist Russia.”

This is Lenin’s splendid formula. Its meaning is that Russia was the most backward and economically weakest of all the imperialist states. That is precisely why her ruling classes were the first to collapse as they had loaded an unbearable burden on the insufficient productive forces of the country. Uneven, sporadic development thus compelled the proletariat of the most backward imperialist country to be the first to seize power. Formerly we were taught that it is precisely for this reason that the working class of the “weakest link” will encounter the greatest difficulties in its progress towards socialism as compared with the proletariat of the advanced countries, who will find it more difficult to seize power but who, having seized power long before we have overcome our backwardness, will not only surpass us but will carry us along so as to bring us towards the point of real socialist construction on the basis of the highest world technology and international division of labor. This was our idea when we ventured upon the October Revolution. The party has formulated this idea tens, nay, hundreds and thousands of times in the press and at meetings, but since 1925 attempts have been made to substitute just the opposite idea. Now we learn that the fact that the former Czarist Russia was “the weakest link” gives the proletariat of the USSR, the inheritor of Czarist Russia with all its weaknesses, an inestimable advantage, to wit, of possessing no more and no less than its own national prerequisites for the “complete construction of socialism.”

Unfortunate Britain does not possess this advantage because of the excessive development of her productive forces which require almost the whole world to furnish the necessary raw materials and to dispose of her products. Were the productive forces of Great Britain more “moderate” and had they maintained a relative equilibrium between industry and agriculture, then the British proletariat would apparently be able to build complete socialism on its own “isolated” island, protected from foreign intervention by its navy.

The draft program, in its fourth chapter, divides the capitalist states into three groups:

1. “Countries of highly developed capitalism (United States, Germany, Great Britain, etc.)”;
2. “Countries of a middle level of capitalist development (Russia prior to 1917, Poland, etc.)”;
3. “Colonial and semi-colonial countries (China, India, etc.).”

Despite the fact that “Russia prior to 1917” was far closer to present-day China than to present-day United States, one might refrain from any serious objections to this schematic division were it not for the fact that, in relation to other parts of the draft, it serves as a source of false conclusions. Inasmuch as the countries “of middle level” are declared in the draft to possess “sufficient industrial minimums” for independent socialist construction, this is all the more true of countries of high capitalist development. It is only the colonial and semi-colonial countries that need outside assistance. As we shall see later, that is precisely how they are characterized in another chapter of the draft program.

If, however, we approach the problems of socialist construction only with this criterion, abstracting from other conditions, such as the natural resources of the country, the correlation between industry and agriculture within it, its place in the world economic system, then we will fall into new, no less gross errors and contradictions. We have just spoken about Great Britain. Being no doubt a highly developed capitalist country, it has precisely because of that no chance for successful socialist construction within the limits of its own island. Great Britain, if blockaded, would simply be strangled in the course of a few months.

To be sure, all other conditions being equal, the more highly developed productive forces are of enormous advantage for the purposes of socialist construction. They endow economic life with an exceptional flexibility even when the latter is hemmed in by a blockading ring, as was evidenced by bourgeois Germany during the war. But the building of socialism on a national basis would imply for these advanced countries a general decline, a wholesale cutting down of productive forces, that is to say, something directly opposed to the tasks of socialism.

The draft program forgets the fundamental thesis of the incompatibility between the present productive forces and the national boundaries, from which it follows that highly developed productive forces are by no means a lesser obstacle to the construction of socialism in one country than low productive forces, although for the reverse reason, namely, that while the latter are insufficient to serve as the basis, it is the basis which will prove inadequate for the former. The law of uneven development is forgotten precisely at the point where it is most needed and most important.

The problem of building socialism is not settled merely by the industrial “maturity” or “immaturity” of a country. This immaturity is itself uneven. In the USSR, some branches of industry are extremely inadequate to satisfy the most elementary domestic requirements (particularly machine construction), other branches on the contrary cannot develop under present conditions without extensive and increasing exports. Among the latter are such branches of major importance as timber, oil, and manganese, let alone agriculture. On the other hand, even the “inadequate” branches cannot seriously develop if the “super-abundant” (relatively) are unable to export. The impossibility of building an isolated socialist society, not in a Utopia or an Atlantis but in the concrete geographical and historical conditions of our terrestrial economy, is determined for various countries in different ways—by the insufficient development of some branches as well as by the “excessive” development of others. On the whole, this means that the modern productive forces are incompatible with national boundaries.

“What was the imperialist war? It was the revolt of the productive forces not only against the bourgeois forms of property, but also against the boundaries of capitalist states. The imperialist war expressed the fact that the productive forces are unbearably constrained within the confines of national states. We have always maintained that capitalism is incapable of controlling the productive forces it itself develops and that only socialism is capable of incorporating the productive forces which have outgrown the boundaries of capitalist states within a higher economic entity. All roads that lead back to the isolated state have been blocked ...”

Endeavoring to prove the theory of socialism in one country the draft program commits a double, triple, and quadruple mistake: it exaggerates the productive forces in the USSR; it shuts its eyes to the law of uneven development of the various branches of industry; it ignores the international division of labor, and, finally, it forgets the most important contradiction inherent in the imperialist epoch, the contradiction between the productive forces and the national barriers.

In order not to leave a single argument unanalyzed, there remains for us to recall another and, moreover, a generalized proposition of Bukharin’s in defense of the new theory.

On a world scale, says Bukharin, the correlation between the proletariat and the peasantry is not any more favorable than that existing in the USSR. Consequently, if due to reasons of backwardness it is impossible to build socialism in the USSR, then it would be equally impossible of realization on the scale of world economy.

This argument deserves being included in all the textbooks on the dialectic, as a classic example of scholastic thinking.

In the first place, it is quite probable that the correlation of forces between the proletariat and the peasantry on the world scale is not very much different from the correlation within the USSR. But the world revolution is not at all accomplished in accordance with the method of the arithmetical mean, and, incidentally, neither is the national revolution. Thus the October Revolution occurred and intrenched itself first of all in the proletarian Petrograd, instead of choosing such a region where the correlation between the workers and peasants would correspond to the average for the whole of Russia. After Petrograd and later Moscow had created the revolutionary government and the revolutionary army, they had to overthrow the bourgeoisie in the outlying country, in the course of several years; and only as a result of this process, called revolution, was there established within the boundaries of the USSR the present correlation between the proletariat and the peasantry. The revolution does not occur in accordance with the method of the arithmetical mean. It can begin in a less favorable sector, but until it intrenches itself in the decisive sectors of both the national and the world frontiers, it is impermissible to speak about its complete victory.

Secondly, the correlation between the proletariat and the peasantry, given an “average” level of technology, is not the only factor for the solution of the problem. There exists in addition the class war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The USSR is surrounded not by a workers’ and peasants’ world but by a capitalist world. If the bourgeoisie were overthrown throughout the entire world, then this fact, by itself, would still change neither the correlation between the proletariat and the peasantry, nor the average level of technology within the USSR and in the entire world. But, nevertheless, the socialist construction in the USSR would immediately acquire entirely different possibilities and different proportions, which are absolutely incomparable with the present possibilities and proportions.

Thirdly, if the productive forces of every advanced country have to some degree outgrown national boundaries, then according to Bukharin, it should hence follow that the productive forces of all countries taken together have outgrown the limits of our planet, and that consequently socialism must be built not otherwise than on the scale of the solar system.

We repeat that the Bukharinistic argument from the average proportion of workers and peasants must be included in all political primers, naturally not as it is now included in order to defend the theory of socialism in one country, but as proof of the utter incompatibility between scholastic casuistry and Marxist dialectics.

9. The Question Can Be Solved Only on the Arena of World Revolution

The new doctrine proclaims that socialism can be built on the basis of a national state if only there is no intervention. From this there can and must follow (notwithstanding all pompous declarations in the draft program) a collaborationist policy towards the foreign bourgeoisie with the object of averting intervention, as this will guarantee the construction of socialism, that is to say, will solve the main historical question. The task of the parties in the Comintern assumes, therefore, an auxiliary character; their mission is to protect the USSR from intervention and not to fight for the conquest of power. It is, of course, not a question of the subjective intentions but of the objective logic of political thought.

“The difference in views lies in the fact,” says Stalin, “that the party considers that these [internal] contradictions and possible conflicts can be entirely overcome on the basis of the inner forces of our revolution, whereas comrade Trotsky and the Opposition think that these contradictions and conflicts can be overcome ‘only on an international scale, on the arena of the world-wide proletarian revolution’.”

Yes, this is precisely the difference. One could not express better and more correctly the difference between national reformism and revolutionary internationalism. If our internal difficulties, obstacles, and contradictions, which are fundamentally a reflection of world contradictions, can be settled merely by “the inner forces of our revolution” without entering “the arena of the world-wide proletarian revolution” then the International is partly a subsidiary and partly a decorative institution, the Congress of which can be convoked once every four years, once every ten years, or perhaps not at all. Even if we were to add that the proletariat of the other countries must protect our construction from military interventions, the International according to this schema must play the role of a pacifist instrument. Its main role, the role of an instrument of world revolution, is then inevitably relegated to the background. And this, we repeat, does not flow from anyone’s deliberate intentions (on the contrary, a number of points in the program testify to the very best intentions of its authors), but it does flow from the internal logic of the new theoretical position which is a thousand times more dangerous than the worst subjective intentions.

As a matter of fact, even at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, Stalin became so bold as to develop and defend the following idea:

“Our party has no right to fool [!] the working class; it should declare openly that the lack of assurance [!] in the possibility of building socialism in our country leads to the abdication of power and to the passing of our party from its position as a ruling party to the position of an opposition party.”

This means that we have only the right to place assurance on the scanty resources of national economy but that we must not dare to place any assurance upon the inexhaustible resources of the international proletariat. If we cannot get along without an international revolution, then give up the power, give up that October power which we conquered in the interests of the international revolution. Here is the sort of ideological debacle we arrive at if we proceed from a formulation which is false to the core!

The draft program expresses an incontrovertible idea when it says that the economic successes of the USSR constitute an inseparable part of the world-wide proletarian revolution. But the political danger of the new theory lies in the false comparative evaluation of the two levers of world socialism—the lever of our economic achievements and the lever of the world-wide proletarian revolution. Without a victorious proletarian revolution, we will not be able to build socialism. The European workers and the workers the world over must clearly understand this. The lever of economic construction is of tremendous significance. Without a correct leadership, the dictatorship of the proletariat would be weakened; and its downfall would deal a blow to the international revolution from which the latter would not recover for a good many years. But the conclusion of the main historical struggle between the socialist world and the world of capitalism depends on the second lever, that is, the world proletarian revolution. The colossal importance of the Soviet Union lies in that it is the disputed base of the world revolution and not at all in the presumption that it is able to build socialism independently of the world revolution.

In a tone of supreme superiority, entirely unfounded, Bukharin has asked us more than once:

“If there already exist pre-conditions, and starting points, and a sufficient base, and even certain successes in the work of building socialism, then where is the limit beyond which everything ‘turns topsy-turvy’? There is no such limit.”

This is bad geometry but not historical dialectics. There can be such a “limit.” There can be several such limits, internal as well as international, political as well as economic, as well as military. The most important and dire “limit” could turn out to be a serious and prolonged stabilization of world capitalism and a new boom. Consequently, the question shifts politically and economically over to the world arena. Will the bourgeoisie be able to secure for itself a new epoch of capitalist growth and power? Merely to deny such a possibility, counting on the “hopeless position” in which capitalism finds itself would be mere revolutionary verbiage. “There are no absolutely hopeless situations” (Lenin). The present unstable class equilibrium in the European countries cannot continue indefinitely precisely because of its instability.

When Stalin and Bukharin maintain that the USSR can get along without the “state” aid of the proletariat of the other countries, that is, without its victory over the bourgeoisie, because the present active sympathy of the working masses protects us from intervention, they betray the same blindness as is revealed in the entire ramification of their principled mistake.

It is absolutely incontestable that after the social democracy had sabotaged the post-war insurrections of the European proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the active sympathy of the working masses saved the Soviet republic. During these years, the European bourgeoisie proved unable to wage war against the workers’ state on a large scale. But to think that this correlation of forces will continue for many years, say, until socialism is built in the USSR, is to be so utterly shortsighted as to judge the entire curve of development by one of its tiny segments. A situation so unstable that the proletariat cannot take power while the bourgeoisie does not feel firmly enough the master of its own home, must sooner or later be abruptly resolved in one way or another, either in favor of the proletarian dictatorship or in favor of a serious and prolonged capitalist stabilization on the backs of the popular masses, on the bones of the colonial peoples and perhaps on our own bones. “There are no absolutely hopeless situations!” The European bourgeoisie can find a lasting way out its grave contradictions only through the defeats of the proletariat and the mistakes of the revolutionary leadership. But the converse is equally true. There will be no new boom of world capitalism (of course, with the prospect of a new epoch of great upheavals) only in the event that the proletariat will be able to find a way out of the present unstable equilibrium on the revolutionary road.

“It is necessary to ‘prove’ now by the practical work of the revolutionary parties,” said Lenin on July 19, 1920 at the Second World Congress, “that they are sufficiently conscious and organized, and that they have sufficient contact with the exploited masses, and determination and ability to utilize the crisis for a successful and victorious revolution.”

Our internal contradictions, however, which depend directly on the trend of the European and world struggle, may be rationally regulated and abated by a correct internal policy based on Marxian foresight. But they can be finally overcome only when the class contradictions will be overcome, which is out of the question without a victorious revolution in Europe. Stalin is right. The difference lies precisely on this point and this is the fundamental difference between national reformism and revolutionary internationalism.

10. The Theory of Socialism in One Country as a Series of Social Patriotic Blunders

The theory of socialism in one country inexorably leads to an underestimation of the difficulties which must be overcome and to an exaggeration of the achievements gained. One could not find a more anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary assertion than Stalin’s statement to the effect that “socialism has already been 90 percent realized in the USSR” This statement seems to be especially meant for a smug bureaucrat. In this way one can hopelessly discredit the idea of a socialist society in the eyes of the toiling masses. The Soviet proletariat has achieved grandiose successes, if we take into consideration the conditions under which they have been attained and the low cultural level inherited from the past. But these achievements constitute an extremely small magnitude on the scales of the socialist ideal. Harsh truth and not sugary falsehood is needed to fortify the worker, the agricultural laborer, and the poor peasant, who see that in the eleventh year of the revolution, poverty, misery, unemployment, bread lines, illiteracy, homeless children, drunkenness, and prostitution have not abated around them. Instead of telling them fibs about having realized 90% socialism, we must say to them that our economic level, our social and cultural conditions, approximate today much closer to capitalism, and a backward and uncultured capitalism at that, than to socialism. We must tell them that we will enter on the path of real socialist construction only when the proletariat of the most advanced countries will have captured power; that it is necessary to work unremittingly for this, using both levers—the short lever of our internal economic efforts and the long lever of the international proletarian struggle.

In short, instead of the Stalinist phrases about socialism which has already been 90% accomplished, we must speak to them the words of Lenin:

“Russia (the land of poverty) will become such a land (the land of plenty) if we cast away all pessimism and phrasemongering; if clenching our teeth, we gather all our might, strain every nerve and muscle, if we understand that salvation is possible only along the road of international socialist revolution that we have entered.”

From prominent leaders of the Comintern we have had to hear such an argument as: the theory of socialism in one country, of course, is unfounded, but it provides the Russian workers with a perspective in the difficult conditions under which. they labor and thus gives them courage. It is difficult to plumb the depths of the theoretical debacle of those who seek in a program not for a scientific basis for their class orientation but for moral consolation. Consoling theories which contradict facts pertain to the sphere of religion and not science; and religion is opium for the people.

Our party has passed through its heroic period with a program which was entirely oriented on the international revolution and not on socialism in one country. Under a programmatic banner on which was inscribed that backward Russia alone, with her own forces, will not build socialism, the YCL has passed through the most strenuous years of civil war, hunger, cold, hard Saturday-ings and Sunday-ings, epidemics, studies on hunger rations, and the numberless sacrifices which were paid for every forward step taken. The members of the party and the YCL fought at the front or lugged logs to the railroad stations, not because they hoped to build national socialism out of those logs, but because they served in the cause of international revolution which made it essential that the Soviet fortress hold out—and every additional log is important for the Soviet fortress. That is how we used to approach the question. Times have changed, things have altered (yet, not so very radically), but the principled approach retains its full force even now. The worker, the poor peasant and partisan, and the young communist, have previously shown by their entire conduct up to 1925, when the new gospel was for the first time proclaimed, that they have no need of it. But in need of it is the functionary who looks down on the masses from above; the petty administrator who does not want to be disturbed; the apparatus retainer who seeks to dominate under cover of an all-saving and consoling formula. It is they who think that the ignorant people need the “good tidings,” and that there is no dealing with the people without consoling doctrines. It is they who catch up the false words about “90% socialism,” for this formula sanctions their privileged position, their right to dominate and command, their need to be rid of criticisms on the part of “skeptics” and men of “little faith.”

Complaints and accusations to the effect that the denial of the possibility of building socialism in one country dampens the spirit and kills enthusiasm are theoretically and psychologically closely related to those accusations which the reformists have always hurled at the revolutionists, notwithstanding the entirely different conditions under which they originate. Said the reformists: “You are telling the workers that they cannot really improve their lot within the framework of capitalist society; and by this alone you kill their incentive to fight.” It was, indeed, only under the leadership of revolutionists that the workers really fought for economic gains and for parliamentary reforms.

The worker who understands that it is impossible to build a socialist paradise, like an oasis in the hell of world capitalism; that the fate of the Soviet Republic and therefore his own fate depend entirely on the international revolution, will fulfill his duties toward the USSR much more energetically than the worker who is told that what we already possess is presumably 90% socialism. “If so, is it worth while to strive toward socialism?” Here, too, the reformist orientation works as always not only against revolution but also against reform.

In the article written in 1915 dealing with the slogan of the United States of Europe, which has already been quoted, we wrote:

“To approach the prospects of a social revolution within national boundaries is to fall victim to the same national narrowness which constitutes the substance of social-patriotism. Vaillant to his dying day considered France the promised land of social revolution; and it is precisely from this standpoint that he stood for national defense to the end. Lensch and Co. (some hypocritically and others sincerely) consider that Germany’s defeat means first of all the destruction of the basis of social revolution ... In general it should not be forgotten that in social-patriotism there is, along-side of the most vulgar reformism, a national revolutionary Messianism which deems that its own national state, whether because of its industrial level or because of its ‘democratic’ form and revolutionary conquests, is called upon to lead humanity towards socialism or towards ‘democracy.’ If the victorious revolution mere really conceivable within the boundaries of a single more developed nation, this Messianism together with the program of national defense would have some relative historical justification. But as a matter of fact this is inconceivable. To fight for the preservation of a national basis of revolution by such methods as undermine the international ties of the proletariat, actually means to undermine the revolution itself, which can begin on a national basis but which cannot be completed on that basis under the present economic, military, and political interdependence of the European states, which was never before revealed so forcefully as during the present war. This interdependence which will directly and immediately condition the concerted action on the part of the European proletariat in the revolution is expressed by the slogan of the United States of Europe.”

Proceeding from a false interpretation of the polemics of 1915, Stalin has many times endeavored to show that under “national narrowness” I was here alluding to Lenin. No greater absurdity could be imagined. In my polemic with Lenin I always argued openly because I was guided only by ideological considerations. In the given case Lenin was not involved at all. The article mentions by name the people against whom these accusations were hurled—Vaillant, Lensch, and others. One must recall that the year 1915 was a year of social-patriotic orgy and the crushing of our struggle against it. This was our touchstone for every question.

The fundamental question raised in the foregoing passage was undoubtedly formulated correctly: the conception of the building of socialism in one country is a social-patriotic conception.

The patriotism of the German social democrats began as a legitimate patriotism to their own party, the most powerful party of the Second International. On the basis of the highly developed German technology and the superior organizational qualities of the German people, the German social democracy prepared to build its “own” socialist society. If we leave aside the hardened bureaucrats, careerists, parliamentary sharpers, and political crooks in general, the social-patriotism of the rank and file social democrat was derived precisely from the belief in building German socialism. It is impossible to think that hundreds of thousands of rank and file social democrats (let alone the millions of rank and file workers) wanted to defend the Hohenzollerns or the bourgeoisie. No. They wanted to protect German industry, the German railways and highways, German technology and culture, and especially the organizations of the German working class, as the “necessary and sufficient” national prerequisites for socialism.

A similar process also took place in France. Guesde, Vaillant, and thousands of the best rank and file party members with them, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers believed that precisely France with her revolutionary traditions, her heroic proletariat, her highly cultured, flexible, and talented people, was the promised land of socialism. Old Guesde and the Communard Vaillant, and with them hundreds of thousands of sincere workers, did not fight to protect the bankers or the rentiers. They sincerely believed that they were defending the soil and the creative power of the future socialist society. They proceeded entirely from the theory of socialism in one country and in the name of this idea they sacrificed international solidarity, believing this sacrifice to be “temporary.”

This comparison with the social-patriots will, of course, be answered by the argument that patriotism to the Soviet state is a revolutionary duty whereas patriotism to a bourgeois state is treachery. Very true. Can there be any dispute on this question among grown-up revolutionists? But, as we proceed, this incontrovertible postulate is turned more and more into a scholastic screen for a deliberate falsehood.

Revolutionary patriotism can only have a class character. It begins as patriotism to the party organization, to the trade union, and rises to state patriotism when the proletariat seizes power. Whenever the power is in the hands of the workers, patriotism is a revolutionary duty. But this patriotism must be, an inseparable part of revolutionary internationalism. Marxism has always taught the workers that even their struggle for higher wages and shorter hours cannot be successful unless waged as an international struggle. And now it suddenly appears that the ideal of the socialist society may be achieved with the national forces alone. This is a mortal blow to the International.

The invincible conviction that the fundamental class aim, even more so than the partial objectives, cannot be realized by national means or within national boundaries, constitutes the very heart of revolutionary internationalism. If, however, the ultimate aim is realizable within national boundaries through the efforts of a national proletariat, then the backbone of internationalism has been broken. The theory of the possibility of realizing socialism in one country destroys the inner connection between the patriotism of the victorious proletariat and the defeatism of the proletariat of the bourgeois countries. The proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries is still traveling on the road to power. How and in what manner it marches towards it depends entirely upon whether it considers the task of building the socialist society a national or an international task.

If it is at all possible to realize socialism in one country, then one can believe in that theory not only after but also before the conquest of power. If socialism can be realized within the national boundaries of backward Russia, then there is all the more reason to believe that it can be realized in advanced Germany. Tomorrow the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany will undertake to propound this theory. The draft program empowers them to do so. The day after tomorrow the French party will have its turn. It will be the beginning of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism. The communist party of any capitalist country, which will have become imbued with the idea that its particular country possesses the “necessary and sufficient” prerequisites for the independent construction of a “complete socialist society,” will not differ in any substantial manner from the revolutionary social democracy which also did not begin with a Noske but which stumbled decisively on August 4, 1914, over this very same question.

When the statement is made that the very existence of the USSR is a guarantee against social-patriotism because in relation to a workers’ republic patriotism is a revolutionary duty, then in this one-sided application of a correct idea there is expressed national narrow-mindedness, Those who say so have in mind only the USSR, closing their eyes to the entire world proletariat. It is possible to lead the proletariat to the position of defeatism in relation to the bourgeois state only by means of an international orientation in the program on this central question and by means of a ruthless rejection of the social-patriotic contraband which is masked as yet but which seeks to build a theoretical nest for itself in the program of Lenin’s International.

It is not yet too late to return to the path of Marx and Lenin. It is this return that opens up the only conceivable road to progress. We address this criticism of the draft program to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, in order to make possible the realization of this turn in which salvation lies.