II. Strategy and Tactics in the Imperialist Epoch

• 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

1. The Complete Bankruptcy of the Central Chapter of the Draft Program

THE DRAFT PROGRAM Of the Comintern contains a chapter devoted to the questions of revolutionary strategy. It must be acknowledged that its intention is quite correct and corresponds to the aim and spirit of an international program of the proletariat in the imperialist epoch.

The conception of revolutionary strategy took root only in the post-war years, and in the beginning undoubtedly under the influence of military terminology. But it did not by any means take root accidentally. Prior to the war we spoke only of the tactics of the proletarian party; this conception conformed adequately enough to the then prevailing trade union, parliamentary methods which did not transcend the limits of the day-to-day demands and tasks. By the conception of tactics is understood the system of measures that serves a single current task or a single branch of the class struggle. Revolutionary strategy on the contrary embraces a combined system of actions which by their association, consistency, and growth must lead the proletariat to the conquest of power.

The basic principles of revolutionary strategy were naturally formulated since the time when Marxism first put before the revolutionary parties of the proletariat the task of the conquest of power on the basis of the class struggle. The First International, however, succeeded in formulating these principles, properly speaking, only theoretically, and could test them only partially in the experience of various countries. The epoch of the Second International led to methods and views according to which, in the notorious expression of Bernstein, “the movement is everything, the ultimate goal nothing.” In other words, the strategical task disappeared, becoming dissolved in the day-to-day “movement” with its partial tactics devoted to the problems of the day. Only the Third International re-established the rights of the revolutionary strategy of communism and completely subordinated the tactical methods to it. Thanks to the invaluable experience of the first two Internationals, upon whose shoulders the Third rests, thanks to the revolutionary character of the present epoch and the colossal historic experience of the October Revolution, the strategy of the Third International immediately attained a full-blooded militancy and the widest historical scope. At the same time, the first decade of the new International reveals to us a panorama not only of great battles but also of the greatest defeats of the proletariat, beginning with 1918. That is why the questions of strategy and tactics should have constituted, in a certain sense, the central point in the program of the Comintern. As a matter of fact, however, the chapter in the draft program devoted to the strategy and tactics of the Comintern, bearing the sub-title The Road to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is one of the weakest chapters, almost devoid of meaning. The section of this chapter that deals with the East really consists only of a generalization of the mistakes made and the preparation of new ones.

The introductory section of this chapter is devoted to a criticism of anarchism, revolutionary syndicalism, constructive socialism, Guild socialism, etc. Here we have a purely literary imitation of the Communist Manifesto which in its time inaugurated the era of the scientifically established policy of the proletariat through an ingeniously terse characterization of the most important varieties of Utopian socialism. But to engage now, on the tenth anniversary of the Comintern, in a desultory and anemic criticism of the “theories” of Cornelissen, Arturo Labriola, Bernard Shaw, or lesser known Guild socialists, means that instead of answering political needs one becomes a victim of purely literary pedantry. This ballast could easily be transferred from the program to the field of propaganda literature.

So far as the strategical problems are concerned, in the proper sense of the word, the draft program limits itself to such ABC wisdom as:

“The extension of its influence over the majority of its own class ...

“The extension of its influence over the broad section of the toiling masses in general ...

“The day-to-day work of conquering the trade unions is of an especially high importance ...

“The winning of the broadest section of the poorest peasantry is also [?] of enormous importance ...”

All these commonplaces, indisputable enough in themselves, are merely set down in rotation here, that is to say, they are brought in without any connection with the character of the historical epoch and, therefore, in their present abstract, scholastic form, could be introduced without difficulty into a resolution of the Second International. Quite dryly and sketchily the central problem of the program is considered here in a single schematic passage which is much shorter than the passage dealing with “constructive” and “Guild” socialism. This means that the strategy of the revolutionary overturn, the conditions and the roads to the armed insurrection itself, and the seizure of power – all this is presented abstractly and pedantically, and without the slightest regard to the living experience of our epoch.

We find here mention made of the great struggles of the proletariat in Finland, Germany, Austria, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the September days in Italy, the events of 1923 in Germany, the general strike in England, and so forth, only in the form of a bald, chronological enumeration. Yet even this is to be found not in the sixth chapter, which deals with the strategy of the proletariat, but in the second on The General Crisis of Capitalism and the First Phase of Development of the World Revolution. In other words, the great struggles of the proletariat are approached here only as objective occurrences, as an expression of the “general crisis of capitalism” but not as strategical experiences of the proletariat. It is sufficient to refer to the fact that the rejection, necessary in itself, of revolutionary adventurism (putschism) is made in the program without any attempt to answer the question whether, for example, the uprising in Esthonia, or the bombing of the Sofia cathedral in 1924, or the last uprising in Canton were heroic manifestations of revolutionary adventurism or, on the contrary, planned actions of the revolutionary strategy of the proletariat. A draft program which in dealing with the problem of “putchism” gives no answer to this burning question is only a diplomatic office job and not a document of communist strategy.

Obviously, this abstract, supra-historical formulation of the questions of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is no accident for this draft. In addition to the Bukharinistic manner of treating questions in general in a literary, pedantic, didactic, and not in an actively revolutionary way, there is another reason for it: the authors of the draft program, for reasons easily understood, prefer generally not to deal too closely with the strategical lessons of the last five years.

But a program of revolutionary action naturally cannot he approached as a bare collection of abstract propositions without any relation to all that has occurred during these epoch-making years. A program cannot, of course, go into a description of the events of the past, but it must proceed from these events, base itself upon them, encompass them, and relate to them. A program, by tile position it takes, must make it possible to understand all the major facts of the struggle of the proletariat and all the important facto relating to the ideological struggle inside the Comintern. If this is true with regard to the program as a whole, then it is all the truer with regard to that part of it which is specifically devoted to the question of strategy and tactics. Here, in the words of Lenin, in addition to what has been conquered there must also be registered that which has been lost, that which can be transformed into a “conquest,” if it has been understood and assimilated. The proletarian vanguard needs not a catalog of truisms but a manual of action. We will, therefore, consider here the problems of the “strategic” chapter in closest connection with the experiences of the struggles of the post-war period, especially of the last five years, the years of tragic mistakes of the leadership.

2. The Fundamental Peculiarities Inherent in the Strategy of the Revolutionary Epoch and the Role of the Party

The chapter devoted to strategy and tactics does not so much as give a “strategical” characterization, coherent to any degree, of the imperialist epoch as an epoch of proletarian revolutions ia contradistinction to the pre-war epoch.

To be sure, the period of industrial capitalism as a whole is characterized in the first chapter of the draft program as a “period of relatively continuous evolution and propagation of capitalism over the whole terrestrial globe through the division of still unoccupied colonies and the armed seizure of them.”

This characterization is certainly quite contradictory and it obviously idealizes the whole epoch of industrial capitalism, which was an epoch of colossal convulsions, of wars and revolutions by far surpassing in this sphere the entire preceding history of mankind. This idyllic characterization was apparently necessary so as to provide at least a partial justification for the recent absurd contention of the authors of the draft program that at the time of Marx and Engels “there could not be any talk as yet” of the law of unequal development. But while it is false to characterize the entire history of industrial capitalism as a “continuous evolution,” it is extremely important to demarcate a special European epoch which comprises the years 1871 to 1914, or at least to 1905. This was an epoch of the organic accumulation of contradictions which, so far as the internal class relations of Europe are concerned, almost never overstepped the bounds of legal struggle and so far as international relations are concerned, adjusted themselves to the framework of an armed peace. This was the epoch of the origin, the development, and the ossification of the Second International, whose progressive historical role completely terminated with the outbreak of the imperialist war.

Politics, considered as a mass historical force, always lags behind economics. Thus, while the reign of finance capital and trust monopolies already began towards the end of the nineteenth century, the new epoch in international politics which reflects this fact, first begins in world politics with the imperialist war, with the October Revolution, and the founding of the Third International.

The explosive character of this new epoch, with its abrupt changes of the political flows and ebbs, with its constant spasmodic class struggle between Fascism and communism, is lodged in the fact that the international capitalist system has already spent itself and is no longer capable of progress as a whole. This does not mean to imply that individual branches of industry and individual countries are incapable of growing and will not grow any more, and even at an unprecedented tempo. Nevertheless, this development proceeds and will have to proceed to the detriment of the growth of other branches of industry and of other countries. The expenditures incurred by the productive system of world capitalism devour its world income to an ever increasing degree. And inasmuch as Europe, accustomed to world domination, with the inertia acquired from its rapid, almost uninterrupted growth in the pre-war period, now collides more sharply than the other continents with the new relation of forces, the new division of the world market, and the contradictions deepened by the war, it is precisely in Europe that the transition from the “organic” epoch to the revolutionary epoch was particularly precipitous.

Theoretically, to be sure, even a new chapter of a general capitalist progress in the most powerful, ruling, and leading countries is not excluded. But for this, capitalism would first have to overcome enormous barriers of a class as well as of an inter-state character. It would have to strangle the proletarian revolution for a long time; it would have to enslave China completely, overthrow the Soviet republic, and so forth. We are still a long way removed from all this. Theoretical eventualities correspond least of all to political probabilities. Naturally, a great deal also depends upon us, that is, upon the revolutionary strategy of the Comintern. In the final analysis, this question will be settled in the struggle of international forces. Still, in the present epoch for which the program was created, capitalist development as a whole is faced with insurmountable obstacles and contradictions and beats in frenzy against them. It is precisely this that invests our epoch with its revolutionary character and the revolution with its permanent character.

The revolutionary character of the epoch does not lie in that it permits of the accomplishment of the revolution, that is, the seizure of power at every given moment. Its revolutionary character consists in profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions from an immediately revolutionary situation; in other words, such as enables the communist party to strive for power, to a victory of the Fascist or semi-Fascist counter-revolution, and from the latter to a provisional regime of the golden mean (the “Left bloc,” the inclusion of the social democracy into the coalition, the passage of power to the party of MacDonald, and so forth), immediately thereafter to force the antagonisms to a head again and acutely raise the question of power.

What did we have in Europe in the course of the last decades before the war? In the sphere of economy – a mighty advance of productive forces with “normal” fluctuations of the conjuncture. In politics – the growth of social democracy at the expense of liberalism and “democracy” with quite insignificant fluctuations. In other words, a process of systematic intensification of economic and political contradictions, and in this sense, the creation of the prerequisites for the proletarian revolution.

What have we in Europe in the post-war period? In economy – irregular, spasmodic curtailments and expansions of production, which gravitate in general around the pre-war level despite great technical successes in certain branches of industry. In politics – frenzied oscillations of the political situation towards the Left and towards the Right. It is quite apparent that the sharp turns in the political situation in the course of one, two, or three years are not brought about by any changes in the basic economic factors, but by causes and impulses of a purely superstructural character, thereby indicating the extreme instability of the entire system, the foundation of which is corroded by irreconcilable contradictions.

This is the sole source from which flows the full significance of revolutionary strategy in contradistinction to tactics. Thence also flows the new significance of the party and the party leadership.

The draft confines itself to purely formal definitions of the party (vanguard, theory of Marxism, embodiment of experiences, and so forth) which might not have sounded badly in a program of the Left social democracy prior to the war. Today it is utterly inadequate.

In a period of growing capitalism even the best party leadership could do no more than only accelerate the formation of a workers’ party. Inversely, mistakes of the leadership could retard this process. The objective prerequisites of a proletarian revolution matured but slowly, and the work of the party retained a preparatory character.

Today, on the contrary, every new sharp change in the political situation to the Left places the decision in the hands of the revolutionary party. Should it miss the critical situation, the latter veers around to its opposite. Under these circumstances the role of the party leadership acquires exceptional importance. The words of Lenin to the effect that two or three days can decide the fate of the international revolution would have been almost incomprehensible in the epoch of the Second International. In our epoch, on the contrary, these words have only too often been confirmed and, with the exception of the October, always from the negative side. Only out of these general conditions does that exceptional position become understandable which the Comintern and its leadership occupy with respect to the whole mechanics of the present historical epoch.

One must understand clearly that the initial and basic cause – the so-called “stabilization” – lies in the contradiction between the general disorganization of the economic and social position of capitalist Europe and the colonial East on the one hand, and the weaknesses, unpreparedness, irresolution of the communist parties and the vicious errors of their leadership on the other.

It is not the so-called stabilization, arriving from nowhere, that checked the development of the revolutionary situation of 1918-1919, or of the recent years, but on the contrary, the unutilized revolutionary situation was transformed into its opposite and thus guaranteed to the bourgeoisie the opportunity to fight with relative success for stabilization. The sharpening contradictions of this struggle for “stabilization” or rather of the struggle for the further existence and development of capitalism prepare at each new stage the prerequisites for new international and class upheavals, that is, for new revolutionary situations, the development of which depends entirely upon the proletarian party.

The role of the subjective factor in a period of slow, organic development can remain quite a subordinate one. Then diverse proverbs of gradualism arise, as: “slow but sure,” and “one must not kick against the pricks,” and so forth, which epitomize all the tactical wisdom of an organic epoch that abhorred “leaping over stages.” But as soon as the objective prerequisites have matured, the key to the whole historical process passes into the hands of the subjective factor, that is, the party. Opportunism which consciously or unconsciously thrives upon the inspiration of the past epoch, always tends to underestimate the role of the subjective factor, that is, the importance of the party and of revolutionary leadership. All this was fully disclosed during the discussions on the lessons of the German October, on the Anglo-Russian Committee, and on the Chinese revolution. In all these cases, as well as in others of lesser importance, the opportunistic tendency evinced itself in the adoption of a course that relied solely upon the “masses” and therefore completely scorned the question of the “tops” of the revolutionary leadership. Such an attitude, which is false in general, operates with positively fatal effect in the imperialist epoch.

The October Revolution was the result of a particular relation of class forces in Russia and in the whole world and their particular development in the process of the imperialist war. This general proposition is ABC to a Marxist. Nevertheless, there is no contradiction whatever between Marxism and posing, for instance, such a question as: would we have seized power in October had not Lenin arrived in Russia in time? There is much to indicate that we might not have been able to seize power. The resistance of the party heads – for the most part, incidentally, they are the same people who determine policies today – was very strong even under Lenin. And without Lenin it would undoubtedly have been infinitely stronger. The party might have failed to adopt the necessary course in time, and there was very little time left at our disposal. During such periods, a few days sometimes decide. The working masses would indeed have pressed upwards from below with great heroism but without a leadership certain of itself and leading consciously to the goal, victory would have been little probable. In the meantime, however, the bourgeoisie could have surrendered Petrograd to the Germans and after a suppression of the proletarian uprising could have reconsolidated its power most probably in the form of Bonapartism, by means of a separate peace with Germany and through other measures. The entire course of events might have taken a different direction for a number of years.

In the German revolution of 1918, in the Hungarian revolution of 1919, in the September movement of the Italian proletariat in 1920, in the English general strike of 1926, in the Vienna uprising of 1927, and in the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927 – everywhere, one and the same political contradiction of the entire past decade, even if at different stages and in different forms, was manifested. In an objectively ripe revolutionary situation, ripe not only with regard to its social bases but not infrequently also with regard to the mood for struggle of the masses, the subjective factor, that is, a revolutionary mass party, was lacking or else this party lacked a farsighted and intrepid leadership.

Of course, the weaknesses of the communist parties and of their leadership did not fall from the sky, but are rather a product of the entire past of Europe. But the communist parties could develop at a swift pace in the present existing maturity of the objectively revolutionary contradictions provided, of course, there was a correct leadership on the part of the Comintern speeding up this process of development instead of retarding it. If contradiction is, in general, the most important mainspring of progress then the clear understanding of the contradiction between a general revolutionary maturity of the objective situation (despite ebbs and flows) and the immaturity of the international party of the proletariat ought now to constitute the mainspring for the forward movement of the Comintern, at least of its European section.

Without an extensive and generalized dialectical comprehension of the present epoch as an epoch of abrupt turns, a real education of the young parties, a correct strategical leadership of the class struggle, a correct combination of tactics, and, above all, a sharp and bold and decisive re-arming at each successive breaking point of the situation is impossible. And it is just at such an abrupt breaking point that two or three days sometimes decide the fate of the international revolution for years to come.

The chapter of the draft program devoted to strategy and tactics speaks of a struggle of the party for the proletariat in general, and of a general strike, and of the armed insurrection in general. But it does not at all dissect the peculiar character and the inner rhythm of the present epoch. Without comprehending these theoretically and “sensing” them politically, a real revolutionary leadership is impossible.

That is why this chapter is so pedantic, so thin, so bankrupt from beginning to end.

3. The Third Congress and the Question of the Permanence of the Revolutionary Process According to Lenin and According to Bukharin

Three periods can be established in the political development of Europe after the war. The first period runs from 1917 to 1921, the second from March 1921 to October 1923, and the third from October 1923 up to the English general strike, or even up to the present moment.

The post-war revolutionary movement of the masses was strong enough to overthrow the bourgeoisie. But there was no one to bring this to a consummation. The social democracy, which held the leadership of the traditional organizations of the working class, exerted all its efforts to save the bourgeois regime. When we looked forward at that time to an immediate seizure of power by the proletariat, we reckoned that a revolutionary party would mature rapidly in the fire of the civil war. But the two terms did not coincide. The revolutionary wave of the post-war period ebbed before the communist parties grew up and reached maturity in the struggle with the social democracy so as to assume the leadership of the insurrection.

In March 1921, the German Communist Party made the attempt to avail itself of the declining wave in order to overthrow the bourgeois state with a single blow. The guiding thought of the German Central Committee in this was to save the Soviet republic (the theory of socialism in one country had not yet been proclaimed at that time). But it turned out that the determination of the leadership and the dissatisfaction of the masses do not suffice for victory. There must obtain a number of other conditions, above all, a close bond between the leadership and the masses and the confidence of the latter in the leadership. This condition was lacking at that time.

The Third Congress of the Comintern was a milestone demarcating the first and second periods. It set down the fact that the resources of the communist parties, politically as well as organizationally, were not sufficient for the conquest of power. It advanced the slogan: “To the masses,” that is, to the conquest of power through a previous conquest of the masses, achieved on the basis of the daily life and struggles. For the mass also continues to live its daily life in a revolutionary epoch, even if in a somewhat different manner.

This formulation of the problem met with a furious resistance at the Congress which was inspired theoretically by Bukharin. At that time he held a viewpoint of his own permanent revolution and not that of Marx. “Since capitalism had exhausted itself, therefore the victory must be gained through an uninterrupted revolutionary offensive.” Bukharin’s position always reduces itself to syllogisms of this sort.

Naturally, I never shared the Bukharinist version of the theory of the “permanent” revolution, according to which no interruptions, periods of stagnation, retreats, transitional demands, or the like, are at all conceivable in the revolutionary process. On the contrary, from the first days of October, I fought against this caricature of the permanent revolution.

When I spoke as did Lenin of the incompatibility between Soviet Russia and the world of imperialism, I had in mind the great strategically curve and not its tactical windings. Bukharin, on the contrary, prior to his transformation into his own antipode, invariably expounded a scholastic caricature of the Marxian conception of a continuous revolution. Bukharin opined in the days of his “Left Communism,” that the revolution allows neither of retreats nor temporary compromises with the enemy. Long after the question of the Brest-Litovsk Peace, in which my position had nothing in common with Bukharin’s, the latter together with the entire ultra-Left wing of the Comintern of that time advocated the line of the March 1921 days in Germany, being of the opinion that unless the proletariat in Europe was “galvanized,” unless there were ever new revolutionary eruptions, the Soviet power was threatened with certain destruction. The consciousness that real dangers actually threatened the Soviet power did not prevent me from waging an irreconcilable struggle shoulder to shoulder with Lenin at the Third Congress against this putschistic parody of a Marxian conception of the permanent revolution. During the Third Congress, we declared tens of times to the impatient Leftists: “Don’t be in too great a hurry to save us. In that way you will only destroy yourselves and, therefore, also bring about our destruction; Follow systematically the path of the struggle for the masses in order thus to reach the struggle for power. We need your victory but not your readiness to fight under unfavorable conditions. We will manage to maintain ourselves in the Soviet republic with the help of the NEP and we will go forward. You will still have time to come to our aid at the right moment if you will have gathered your forces and will have utilized the favorable situation.”

Although this took place after the Tenth Party Congress which prohibited factions, Lenin nevertheless assumed the initiative at that time to create the top nucleus of a new faction for the struggle against the ultra-leftists who were strong at that time. In our intimate conferences, Lenin flatly put the question of how to carry on the subsequent struggle should the Third World Congress accept Bukharin’s viewpoint. Our “faction” of that time did not develop further only because our opponents “folded up” considerably during the Congress.

Bukharin, of course, swung further to the Left of Marxism than anybody else. At this same Third Congress and later, too, he led the fight against my view that the economic conjuncture in Europe would inevitably rise; and that despite a whole series of defeats of the proletariat I expected after this inevitable rise of the conjuncture not a blow at the revolution, but, on the contrary, a new impetus to revolutionary struggle. Bukharin, who held to his standpoint of the scholastic permanence of both the economic crisis and the revolution as a whole, waged a long struggle against me on this viewpoint, until facts finally forced him, as usual, to a very belated admission that he was in error.

At the Third and Fourth Congresses Bukharin fought against the policy of the united front and the transitional demands, proceeding from his mechanical understanding of the permanence of the revolutionary process.

The struggle between these two tendencies, the synthesized, Marxian conception of the continuous character of the proletarian revolution and the scholastic parody of Marxism which was by no means an individual quirk of Bukharin’s, can be followed through a whole series of other questions, big as well as small. But it is superfluous to do so. Bukharin’s position today is essentially the self-same ultra-left scholasticism of the “permanent revolution,” only, this time, turned inside out. If, for example, Bukharin was of the opinion until 1923 that without a permanent economic crisis and a permanent civil war in Europe the Soviet republic would perish, he has today discovered a recipe for building socialism without any international revolution at all. To be sure, the topsy-turvy Bukharinist permanency has not improved any by the fact that the present leaders of the Comintern far too frequently combine their adventurism of yesterday with their opportunist position of today, and vice versa.

The Third Congress was a great beacon. Its teachings are still vital and fruitful today. The Fourth Congress only concretized these teachings. The slogan of the Third Congress did not simply read: “To the masses!” but:“To power through a previous conquest of the masses!” After the faction led by Lenin (which he characterized demonstratively as the “Right” wing) had to curb intransigently the entire Congress throughout its duration, Lenin arranged a private conference toward the end of the Congress in which he warned prophetically: “Remember, it is only a question of getting a good running start for the revolutionary leap. The struggle for the masses is the struggle for power.”

The events of 1923 demonstrated that this Leninist position was not grasped, not only by “those who are led” but also by many of the leaders.

4. The German Events of 1923 and the Lessons of October

The German events of 1923 form the breaking point that inaugurates a new, post-Leninist period in the development of the Comintern. The occupation of the Ruhr by French troops early in 1923 signified Europe’s relapse into war chaos. Although the second attack of this disease was incomparably weaker than the first, violent revolutionary consequences were nevertheless to be expected from the outset, since it had seized the already completely debilitated organism of Germany. The leadership of the Comintern did not take this into consideration at the right time. The German Communist Party still continued to follow its one-sided interpretation of the slogan of the Third Congress which had firmly drawn it away from the threatening road to putschism. We have already stated above that in our epoch of abrupt turns the greatest difficulty for a revolutionary leadership lies in being able to feel the pulse of the political situation at the proper moment, so as to catch the abrupt contingency and to turn the helm in due time. Such qualities of a revolutionary leadership are not acquired simply by swearing fealty to the latest circular letter of the Comintern. They can be acquired, if the necessary theoretical prerequisites exist, by personally acquired experience and genuine self-criticism. It was not easy to achieve the sharp turn from the tactics of the March days of 1921 to a systematic revolutionary activity in the press, meetings, trade unions, and parliament. After the crisis of this turn had been weathered, there arose the danger of the development of a new one-sided deviation of a directly opposite character. The daily struggle for the masses absorbs all attention, creates its own tactical routine, and diverts attention away from the strategical tasks flowing from changes in the objective situation.

In the summer of 1923, the internal situation in Germany, especially in connection with the collapse of the tactic of passive resistance, assumed a catastrophic character. It became quite clear that the German bourgeoisie could extricate itself from this “hopeless” situation only if the communist party failed to understand in due time that the position of the bourgeoisie was “hopeless” and if the party failed to draw all the necessary revolutionary conclusions. Yet it was precisely the communist party, holding the key in its hands, that opened the door for the bourgeoisie with this key.

Why didn’t the German revolution lead to a victory? The reasons for it are all to be sought in the tactics, not in the existing conditions. Here we had a classic example of a missed revolutionary situation. After all the German proletariat had gone through in recent years, it could be led to a decisive struggle only if it were convinced that this time the question would be decisively resolved and that the communist party was ready for the struggle and capable of achieving the victory. But the communist party executed the turn very irresolutely and after st very long delay. Not only the Rights but also the Lefts, despite the fact that they had fought each other very bitterly, viewed rather fatalistically the process of revolutionary development up to September-October 1923.

Only a pedant and not a revolutionist would investigate now, after the event, how far the conquest of power would have been “assured” had there been a correct policy. We confine ourselves here to quoting a remarkable testimonial from Pravda bearing on this point, a testimonial which is purely accidental and unique because it is contradictory to all the other pronouncements of this organ:

“If in May 1923, when the mark was comparatively stabilized and the bourgeoisie had achieved a certain degree of consolidation, after the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie went over to the Nationalists, after a deep crisis in the party, and after a heavy defeat of the proletariat, if after all this the communists are able to rally 3,700,000 votes, then it is clear that in October 1923, during the unprecedented economic crisis, during the complete disintegration of the middle classes, during a frightful confusion in the ranks of the social democracy resulting from the powerful and sharp contradictions within the bourgeoisie itself and an unprecedented militant mood of the proletarian masses in the industrial centers, the communist party had the majority of the population on its side; it could and should have fought and had all the chances for success.”

And here are the words of a German delegate (name unknown) at the Fifth World Congress:

“There is not a single class conscious worker in Germany who is unaware that the party should have engaged in a battle and not have shunned it.

“The leaders of the CPG forgot all about the independent role of the party; this was one of the main reasons for the October defeat.”

A great deal has already been related in discussions concerning what took place in the upper leadership of the German party and the Comintern in 1923, particularly during the latter part of the year, even though many of the things said did not correspond by far to what really took place. Kuusinen in particular has brought much confusion into these questions; the same Kuusinen whose job from 1924 to 1926 was to prove that salvation lay only in the leadership of Zinoviev, just as he applied himself from a certain date in 1926 to prove that the leadership of Zinoviev was ruinous. The necessary authority to pass such responsible judgments is probably conferred upon Kuusinen by the fact that he himself in 1918 did everything that lay in his modest resources to doom the revolution of the Finnish proletariat to destruction.

There have been several attempts, after the event, to attribute to me a solidarity with the line of Brandler. In the USSR these attempts were camouflaged because too many of those on the scene knew the real state of affairs. In Germany this was done openly because no one knew anything there. Quite accidentally, I find in my possession a printed fragment of the ideological struggle that occurred at that time in our Central Committee over the question of the German revolution. In the documents of the January 1928 conference, I am directly accused by the Political Bureau of a hostile and distrustful attitude towards the German Central Committee in the period prior to its capitulation. Here is what we find said there:

“... Comrade Trotsky, before leaving the session of the Central Committee [September 1923 Plenum], made a speech which profoundly disturbed all the members of the Central Committee and in which he alleged that the leadership of the German Communist Party was worthless and that the Central Committee of the German CP was permeated with fatalism, sleepy-headedness, etc. Comrade Trotsky then declared that the German revolution was doomed to failure. This speech had a depressing effect on all those present. But the great majority of the comrades were of the opinion that this phillipic was called forth by an episode [?!], in no way connected with the German revolution, which occurred during the Plenum of the Central Committee and that this speech did not correspond to the objective state of affairs.”

No matter how the members of the Central Committee may have sought to explain my warning, which was not the first one, it was dictated only by concern over the fate of the German revolution. Unfortunately, events fully confirmed my position; in part because the majority of the Central Committee of the leading party, according to their own admission, did not grasp in time that my warning fully “corresponded to the objective state of affairs.” Of course, I did not propose hastily to replace Brandler’s Central Committee by some other (on the eve of decisive events such a change would have been sheerest adventurism), but I did propose from the summer of 1923 that a much more timely and resolute position be taken on the question of the preparation of the armed insurrection and of the necessary mobilization of forces for the support of the German Central Committee. The latter-day attempts to ascribe to me a solidarity with the line of the Brandlerite Central Committee, whose mistakes were only a reflection of the general mistakes of tile Comintern leadership, were chiefly due to the fact that after the capitulation of the German party, I was opposed to making a scapegoat of Brandler, although, or more correctly, because I judged the German defeat to be much more serious than did the majority of the Central Committee. In this case as in others, I fought against the inadmissible system which only seeks to maintain the infallibility of the central leadership by periodic removals of national leaderships, subjecting the latter to savage persecutions and even expulsions from the party.

In the Lessons of October, written by me under the influence of the capitulation of the German Central Committee, I developed the idea that under the conditions of the present epoch, a revolutionary situation can be lost for several years in the course of a few days. It may be hard to believe, but this opinion was stamped as “blacklist” and “individualism.” The innumerable articles written against the Lessons of October reveal how completely the experiences of the October Revolution have been forgotten and how little its lessons have penetrated the consciousness. It is a typical Menshevist dodge to shift responsibility for the mistakes of the leaders on the “masses” or to minimize the importance of leadership in general, in order thus to diminish its guilt. It arises from the total incapacity to arrive at the dialectic understanding of the “superstructure” in general, of the superstructure of the class which is the party, and the superstructure of the party in the shape of its central leadership. There are epochs during which even Marx and Engels could not drive historical development forward a single inch; there are other epochs during which men of much smaller caliber, standing at the helm, can check the development of the international revolution for a number of years.

The attempts made recently to represent the matter as though I had repudiated the Lessons of October are entirely absurd. To be sure, I have “admitted” one “mistake” of secondary importance. When I wrote my Lessons of October, that is, in the summer of 1924, it seemed to me that Stalin held a position further to the Left (i.e., Left-Centrist) than Zinoviev in the Autumn of 1923. I was not quite abreast of the inner life of the group that played the role of the secret center of the majority faction apparatus. The documents published after the split of this factional grouping, especially the purely Brandlerist letter of Stalin to Zinoviev and Bukharin, convinced me of the incorrectness of my estimation of these personal groupings, which, however, had nothing to do with the essence of the problems raised. But even this error as to personalities is not a major one. Centrism is quite capable, it is true, of making big zigzags to the Left but as the “evolution” of Zinoviev has once again demonstrated, it is utterly incapable of conducting a revolutionary line in the least systematic.

The ideas developed by me in the Lessons of October retain their full force today. Moreover, they have been confirmed over and over again since 1928.

Among the numerous difficulties in a proletarian revolution, there is a particular, concrete, and specific difficulty. It arises out of the position and tasks of the revolutionary party leadership during a sharp turn of events. Even the most revolutionary parties run the risk of lagging behind and of counterposing the slogans and measures of struggle of yesterday to the new tasks and new exigencies. And there cannot, generally, be a sharper turn of events than that which creates the necessity for the armed insurrection of the proletariat. It is here that the danger arises that the policy of the party leadership and of the party as a whole does not correspond to the conduct of the class and the exigencies of the situation. During a relatively languid course of political life, such incongruities are remedied, even if with losses, but without a catastrophe. But in periods of acute revolutionary crisis, it is precisely time that is lacking to eliminate the incongruity and to redress the front, as it were, under fire. The periods of the maximum sharpening of a revolutionary crisis are by their very nature transitory. The incongruity between a revolutionary leadership (hesitation, vacillation, temporizing in the face of the furious assault of the bourgeoisie) and the objective tasks, can lead in the course of a few weeks and even days to a catastrophe and to a loss of what took years of work to prepare.

Of course, the incongruity between the leadership and the party or between the party and the class can also be of an opposite character, that is to say, in cases when the leadership runs ahead of the development of the revolution and confounds the fifth month of pregnancy with the ninth. The dearest example of such an incongruity was to be observed in Germany in March 1921. There we had in the party the extreme manifestation of the “infantile disease of Leftism,” and as a consequence of it – putschism (revolutionary adventurism). This danger is quite actual for the future as well. That is why the teachings of the Third Congress of the Comintern retain their full force. But the German experience of 1923 brought before us the opposite danger in harsh reality: the situation is ripe and the leadership lags behind. By the time the leadership succeeds in accommodating itself to the situation, the latter has already changed; the masses are in retreat and the relationship of forces worsens abruptly.

In the German defeat of 1923, there were, of course, many national peculiarities but there also were profoundly typical features which indicate a general danger. This danger may be termed as the crisis of the revolutionary leadership on the eve of the transition to the armed insurrection. The rank and file of the proletarian party are by their very nature far less susceptible to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion. But certain elements of the party tops and the middle stratum of the party will unfailingly succumb in larger or smaller measure to the material and ideological terror of the bourgeoisie at the decisive moment. To dismiss this danger is not to cope with it. To be sure, there is no panacea against it suitable for all cases. But the first necessary step in fighting a peril is to understand its source and its nature. The inevitable appearance or development of a Right wing grouping in every communist party during the “pre-October” period reflects on the one hand the immense objective difficulties and dangers inherent in this “leap” and on the other hand the furious pressure of bourgeois public opinion. Herein lies the gist and the import of the Right wing grouping. And this is precisely why hesitations and vacillations arise inevitably in the communist parties at the very moment when they are most dangerous. In our party, only a minority of the party tops was seized by vacillations in 1917, and they were overcome, thanks to the harsh energy of Lenin. In Germany, the leadership as a whole vacillated and this irresolution was transmitted to the party and through it to the class. The revolutionary situation was thereby missed. In China where the workers and poor peasants were fighting for the seizure of power, the central leadership worked against this struggle. All these, of course, are not the last crises of the leadership in the most decisive historical moments. To reduce these inevitable crises to a minimum is one of the most important tasks of each communist party and of the Comintern as a whole. This cannot be achieved except by arriving at a complete understanding of the experiences of October 1917 and the political content of the then Right opposition inside our party in contrast to the experiences of the German party in 1923.

Herein precisely is the gist of the Lessons of October.

PART II

5. The Basic Strategical Mistake of the Fifth Congress

We have had, beginning with the end of 1923, a whole series of documents of the Comintern as well as declarations of its leaders on the subject of the “mistake in tempo” committed in the Autumn of 1923, all accompanied by the invariable references to Marx, who, you see, also had miscalculated in his dates. At the same time, they passed in deliberate silence over the question whether the “mistake in tempo” of the Comintern consisted in underestimating or, on the contrary, overestimating the proximity of the critical moment of the seizure of power. In conformity with the regime of double bookkeeping that has become traditional for the leadership in recent years, a blank space was left for either the former or latter construction.

It is not difficult, however, to draw the conclusion from the entire policy of the Comintern during this period that throughout 1924 and for the greater part of 1925 the leadership of the Comintern held the view that the high point of the German crisis was still ahead. The reference to Marx was, therefore, hardly in place. For while Marx, owing to his foresight, occasionally perceived the impending revolution closer than it really was, he never had the occasion of failing to recognize the lineaments of revolution when it stood directly before him or of subsequently stubbornly accepting the backside for the face of the revolution, after the latter had already turned its rear.

At the Thirteenth Conference of the CPSU, Zinoviev, upon putting in circulation the equivocal formula on the “mistake in tempo,” declared:

“The Executive Committee of the Communist International must say to you that should similar events repeat themselves, we would do the very same thing in the very same situation.”

This promise had the earmarks of a threat.

On February 20, 1924, Zinoviev declared at a conference of the International Red Aid that the situation in the whole of Europe was such that “we must not expect there a period now, no matter how brief, of even an external pacification, any lull whatever; ... Europe is entering into the phase of decisive events. Germany is apparently marching towards a sharpened civil war ...”

Early in February 1924, the Presidium of the ECCI said in its resolution on the lessons of the German events:

“The Communist Party of Germany must not remove from the agenda the question of the uprising and the seizure of power. On the contrary [!] this question must stand before us in all its concreteness and urgency ...”

On March 26, 1924, the ECCI wrote to the German Communist Party:

“The mistake in the evaluation of the tempo of events [what kind of a mistake? – L.T.] made in October 1923, caused the party great difficulties. Nevertheless, it is only an episode. The fundamental estimate remains the same as before.”

From all this the ECCI drew the following conclusion:

“The German Communist Party must continue as hitherto to exert all its forces in the work to arm the working class ... .”

The great historical tragedy of 1923 – the surrender without a struggle of the great revolutionary position – was appraised six months later as an episode. “Only an episode!” Europe is still suffering today from the gravest consequences of this “episode.” The fact that the Comintern did not have to convoke a Congress for four years like the fact that the Left wing was crushed in one party of the Comintern after the other, is in the same measure a result of this “episode” of 1923.

The Fifth Congress met eight months after the defeat of the German proletariat, when all the consequences of this catastrophe were already manifest. Here it was not even the case of having to forecast something coming but to see that which is. The fundamental tasks of the Fifth Congress were: first, to call this defeat clearly and relentlessly by its name, and to lay bare its “subjective” cause, allowing no one to hide behind the pretext of objective conditions; secondly, to establish the beginning of a new stage during which the masses would temporarily drift away, the social democracy grow, and the communist party lose in influence; thirdly, to prepare the Comintern for all this so that it would not be caught unawares and to equip it with the necessary methods of defensive struggle and organizational consolidation until the arrival of a new change in the situation.

But in all these questions the Congress adopted a directly opposite attitude.

Zinoviev defined the import of the German events at the Congress in the following manner: “We expected the German revolution but it did not come.”

In reality, however, the revolution had the right to answer: “I did come but you, gentlemen, arrived too late at the rendezvous.”

The leaders of the Congress reckoned together with Brandler that we had “overestimated” the situation, when, in reality, “we” had estimated it far too lightly and too late. Zinoviev reconciled himself very easily with this so-called “overestimation” of his. He saw the chief evil elsewhere.

“Overestimating the situation was not the worst thing. What is much worse, as the example of Saxony showed, is the fact that there are still many social democratic survivals left in the ranks of our party.”

Zinoviev did not see the catastrophe, and he was not alone. Together with him the whole Fifth Congress simply passed over this greatest defeat of the world revolution. The German events were analyzed principally from the angle of the policies of the communists ... in the Saxon Landtag. In its resolution, the Congress lauded the ECCI for having

“... condemned the opportunistic conduct of the German Central Committee and, above all, its perverted application of the united front tactic during the Saxon government experiment.”

This is somewhat like condemning a murderer “above all” for failing to take off his hat upon entering the home of his victim.

“The Saxon experience,” insisted Zinoviev, “created a new situation. It carried a threat of beginning the liquidation of the revolutionary tactic of the Communist International.”

And inasmuch as the “Saxon experience” was condemned and Brandler deposed, nothing else remained except to pass on to the next business on the agenda.

“The general political perspectives,” said Zinoviev, and the Congress with him, “remain essentially as before. The situation is pregnant with revolution. New class struggles are already unfolding again. A gigantic struggle is on the march ...” etc.

How flimsy and unreliable is a “Leftism” that strains at a gnat and cooly swallows a camel.

Those who were wide awake to the situation and pushed the significance of the October defeat to the foreground, those who pointed out the inevitable subsequent lengthy period of revolutionary ebb and temporary consolidation (“stabilization”) of capitalism (with all the ensuing political consequences), the leadership of the Fifth Congress endeavored to brand as opportunists and liquidators of the revolution. This is what Zinoviev and Bukharin set as their main task. Ruth Fischer, who together with them underestimated the defeat of the previous year, saw in the Russian Opposition “the loss of the perspective of world revolution, the lack of faith in the proximity of the German and European revolution, a hopeless pessimism and the liquidation of the European revolution, etc.”

It is needless to explain that those who were most directly to blame for the defeat howled loudest against the “liquidators,” that is, against those who refused to label defeats as victories. Thus Kolarov thundered against Radek who had the audacity to consider the defeat of the Bulgarian party as a decisive one:

“The defeats of the party were decisive neither in June nor in September. The CP of Bulgaria stands firm and is preparing itself for new battles.”

Instead of a Marxian analysis of the defeats – irresponsible bureaucratic bluster triumphing all along the line. Yet Bolshevik strategy is incompatible with smug and soulless Kolarovism.

A good deal of the work of the Fifth World Congress was correct and necessary. The struggle against the Right tendencies, which sought to raise their head, was absolutely urgent. But this struggle was sidetracked, confused, and distorted by the radically false estimate of the situation, as a result of which everything was jumbled and those were classed in the camp of the Right who were able to see better and more clearly the events of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Had the Lefts of that time triumphed at the Third World Congress, Lenin would have been classed together with Levi, Clara Zetkin, and others in the Right wing on the same grounds. The ideological muddle engendered by the false political orientation of the Fifth Congress became subsequently the source of new great misfortunes.

The estimate adopted by the Congress in the political sphere was likewise carried over completely to the economic field. The symptoms of the economic consolidation of the German bourgeoisie, which were already manifest, were either denied or ignored. Varga, who always dishes up the economic facts to conform with the current reigning political tendency, brought in a report this time, too, that “... there are no perspectives of the recovery of capitalism.”

But a year later, after the “recovery” had been belatedly rechristened “stabilization,” Varga painstakingly made the discovery after the event. By that time, the Opposition had already to bear up under the accusation of not recognizing the stabilization because it had the audacity to establish the commencement of it a year and a half before, while in 1925 it already discerned tendencies undermining this stabilization.

The Fifth Congress perceived political processes and ideological groupings as they were reflected in the distorted mirror of a false orientation; and this also gave birth to its resolution classifying the Russian Opposition as a “petty bourgeois deviation.” History has corrected this mistake in its own fashion by forcing Zinoviev, the chief prosecuting attorney at the Fifth Congress, to admit publicly” two years later that the central nucleus of the Opposition in 1923 had been correct in all the fundamental questions at issue.

From the basic strategical mistake of the Fifth Congress necessarily had also to arise a lack of understanding of the processes occurring within the German and the international social democracy. At the Congress there were speeches only of its decay, disintegration, and collapse. Zinoviev had the following to say with regard to the last Reichstag elections in which the Communist Party of Germany received 3,700,000 votes:

“If on the parliamentary field in Germany, we have a proportion of 62 communists to 100 social democrats, then this should serve as proof to every one of how close we are to winning the majority of the German working class.”

Zinoviev understood absolutely nothing of the dynamics of the process; the influence of the CPG during that year and the following years did not grow but declined. The 3,700,000 votes represented only an impressive remnant of the decisive influence that the party had over the majority of the German proletariat towards the end of 1923. This number would undoubtedly diminish in the subsequent elections.

In the meantime, the social democracy which was going to pieces in 1923 like a rotted mat of straw, began to recover systematically after the defeat of the revolution at the end of 1923, to start up and to grow, and chiefly at the expense of communism. Inasmuch as we had foreseen this – and how could one have failed to foresee it? – our forecast was attributed to our “pessimism.” Is it still necessary now, after the last elections in May 1928 in which the social democrats received more than 9,000,000 votes, to prove that we were correct when at the beginning of 1924 we spoke and wrote that there must inevitably follow a revival of the social democracy for a certain period, while the “optimists” who were already chanting the requiem over the social democracy were grossly mistaken? Above all, the Fifth Congress of the Comintern was grossly mistaken.

The second youth of the social democracy, exhibiting all the traits of doddering senility, is naturally not lasting. The demise of the social democracy is inevitable. But how long it will be before it dies is nowhere established. This, too, depends on us. To bring it closer, we must be able to face the facts, to recognize in due time the turning points of a political situation, to call a defeat a defeat, and to learn to foresee the coming day.

If the German social democracy still represents a force of many millions today, and this, too, within the working class, then there are two immediate causes for it. First, the defeat of the German party which capitulated in the Fall of 1923, and second, the false strategical orientation of the Fifth Congress.

In January 1924 the ratio between the communists and the social democratic voters was almost 2 to 3, but four months later this proportion fell badly to slightly more than 1 to 3; in other words, during this period, taken as a whole, we did not draw closer to the conquest of the majority of the working class but drew further away from it. And this despite an indubitable strengthening of our party during the past year which, with a correct policy, can and must become the point of departure for a real conquest of the majority.

We shall take the occasion later to dwell on the political consequences of the position adopted by the Fifth Congress. But isn’t it already clear that there cannot be serious talk of Bolshevik strategy without the ability to survey both the basic curve of our epoch as a whole, and its individual segments which are at every given moment of the same importance for the party leadership as railway curves are for the locomotive engineer? To open wide the throttle on a steeply banked curve is surely to run the train over the embankment.

Yet, only a few months ago Pravda had to acknowledge more or less distinctly the correctness of the estimate we made as early as the end of 1923. On January 28, 1928, Pravda wrote:

“The phase of a certain [!] apathy and depression which set in after the defeat of 1923 and permitted German capital to strengthen its positions, is beginning to pass.”

A “certain” depression which set in the fall of 1923 is first beginning to pass only in 1928. These words published after a delay of four years are a ruthless condemnation of the false orientation established by the Fifth Congress and also of that system of leadership which does not lay bare and illumine the errors committed but covers them up and thereby extends the radius of the ideological confusion.

A draft program which passes by without evaluating either the events of 1923 or the basic mistake of the Fifth Congress simply turns its back on the real questions of a revolutionary strategy of the proletariat in the imperialist epoch.

6. The “Democratic-Pacifist Era” and Fascism

The capitulation of German communism in the Autumn of 1923, which removed the threatening proletarian danger with a minimum of civil war, inevitably had to weaken the position not only of the communist party but also of Fascism. For even a civil war in which the bourgeoisie is victorious undermines the conditions of capitalist exploitation. Already at that time, that is, at the end of 1923, we fought against the exaggeration of the strength and the danger of German Fascism. We insisted that Fascism would be relegated to the background while the political stage in the whole of Europe would be occupied for a certain period by the democratic and pacifist groupings: the Left bloc in France, the Labour party in England. And the strengthening. of these groupings would in turn provide an impetus for a new growth of the German social democracy. Instead of understanding this inevitable process and organizing the struggle against it along a n·ere, front, the official leadership continued to identify Fascism with the social democracy and to prophecy their joint collapse in an imminent civil war.

The problem of the interrelations between the United States and Europe was very intimately bound up with the question of Fascism and the social democracy. Only the defeat of the German revolution in 1923 made it possible for American capital to begin with the realization of its plans for the (momentarily) “peaceful” subjugation of Europe. Under these circumstances, the American problem should have been considered in its full magnitude. Instead, the leadership of the Fifth Congress simply passed it by. It proceeded entirely from the internal situation in Europe without even noticing that the long postponement of the European revolution had immediately shifted the axis of international relations towards the side of an American offensive upon Europe. This offensive assumed the shape of an economic “consolidation” of Europe, its normalization and pacification, and a “recovery” of democratic principles. Not only the ruined petty bourgeoisie but also the average worker said to himself: since the communist party failed to achieve victory, then maybe the social democracy will bring us not victory (nobody expects that of it), but a piece of bread through a revival of industry with the aid of American gold. It was necessary to understand that the vile fiction of American pacifism with the dollar lining – after the defeat of the German revolution – would and did become the most important factor in the life of Europe. Not only did the German social democracy rise again, thanks to this leaven, but to a great extent also the French Radicals and the English Labour Party.

As a counterpoise to this new enemy front, it should have been pointed out that bourgeois Europe will be able to exist and maintain itself only as a financial vassal of the United States and that the pacifism of the latter is tantamount to an endeavor to put Europe on hunger rations. Instead of making this very perspective the point of departure of the new struggle against the social democracy with its new religion of Americanism, the leadership of the Comintern turned its fire in the opposite direction. It imputed to us the asinine theory of a normalized imperialism, without wars and revolutions, placed on American rations.

During the very same February sessions at which the Presidium of the ECCI – four months prior to the Congress – declared that the armed insurrection “stood concretely and urgently” on the order of the day for the German party, it also gave the following estimation of the situation in France, which was just at that time approaching the “Left” parliamentary elections:

“This pre-election fever also affects only the most insignificant and weakest parties and dead political groupings. The socialist party has been aroused and stirred back to life under the rays of the approaching elections ...“

At a time when a wave of petty bourgeois pacifist Leftism was quite obviously ascending in France, carrying away broad sections of the workers and weakening both the party of the proletariat and the Fascist detachments of capital; in a word, in face of the victory of the “Left bloc,” the leadership of the Comintern proceeded from a directly opposite perspective. It flatly denied the possibility of a pacifist phase and, on the eve of the May 1924 elections, spoke of the French Socialist Party, the Left banner-bearer of petty bourgeois pacifism, as an already “dead political grouping.” At that time we protested against this light-minded estimation of the social-patriotic party in a special letter addressed to the delegation of the CPSU. But all in vain. The leadership of the Comintern stubbornly persisted in considering as “Leftism” its disregard of these facts. Hence arose that distorted and sordid polemic, as always in recent years, over democratic pacifism which brought so much confusion into the parties of the Comintern. The spokesmen of the Opposition were accused of pacifist prejudices only because they did not share the prejudices of the leadership of the Comintern and foresaw at the right time that the defeat suffered by the German proletariat without a struggle (after a brief strengthening of the Fascist tendencies), would inevitably bring the petty bourgeois parties to the fore and strengthen the social democracy.

We have already mentioned above that Zinoviev, at a conference of the International Red Aid some three or four months before the victory of the Labour party in England and the Left bloc in France, declared in an obvious polemic against me:

“In practically the whole of Europe the situation is such that we need expect no period now, no matter how brief, of even an external pacifism, or any kind of lull ... Europe is entering into the stage of decisive events ... Germany is apparently heading towards a violent civil war ...”

Zinoviev, to all appearances, had completely forgotten that back at the Fourth Congress in 1922 I was successful, despite rather stubborn opposition by Zinoviev himself and Bukharin, in introducing at a commission an amendment (considerably modified, it is true) to the resolution of the Congress; this amendment speaks of the impending approach of a “pacifist-democratic” era as a probable stage on the road of the political decline of the bourgeois state and as a first step to the rule of communism or – Fascism.

At the Fifth Congress, which met already after the rise of the “Left” governments in England and France, Zinoviev recalled – very appropriately – this amendment of mine and proclaimed loudly as follows:

“At the present moment the international situation is characterized by Fascism, by martial law, and by a rising wave of the white terror against the proletariat. But this does not exclude the possibility that in the near future the open reaction of the bourgeoisie will be replaced in the most important countries by a ’democratic-pacifist era.”

And Zinoviev went on to add with satisfaction:

“This was said in 1922. Thus the Comintern, a year and a half ago, definitely predicted a democratic-pacifist era.”

It’s the truth. The prognosis which had so long been held against me as a “pacifist” deviation (as my deviation and not that of the historical course of development) came in very handy at the Fifth Congress during the honeymoon weeks of the MacDonald and Herriot ministries. That is how, unfortunately, matters stood with prognoses in general.

We ought to add that Zinoviev and the majority of the Fifth Congress construed too literally the old perspective of the “democratic-pacifist era” as a stage on the road of capitalist decay. Thus Zinoviev declared at the Fifth Congress: “The democratic-pacifist era is a symptom of capitalist decay.”

And in his conclusion he said again: “I repeat that precisely the democratic-pacifist era is a symptom of the decay and the incurable crisis.” (

This would have been correct had there been no Ruhr crisis and if evolution had proceeded more smoothly without such an historical “leap.” This would have been doubly and trebly correct had the German proletariat achieved the victory in 1923. In that case, the regimes of MacDonald and Herriot would only have meant an English and French “Kerensky period.” But the Ruhr crisis did break out and posed point-blank the question of who was to be the master in the house. The German proletariat did not achieve the victory but suffered a decisive defeat and in such a way as was bound to encourage and consolidate the German bourgeoisie to the highest degree. Faith in the revolution was shattered throughout Europe for a number of years. Under such conditions the governments of MacDonald and Herriot by no means implied either a Kerensky period or generally the decay of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, they would and could become only the ephemeral precursors of more serious, more solid, and more self-assured bourgeois governments. The Fifth Congress failed to understand this because by failing to estimate the extent of the German catastrophe and by reducing the latter merely to a question of the comedy in the Saxon Landtag, it remained unaware of the fact that the proletariat of Europe was already in a political retreat all along the front, and that our task consisted not in an armed insurrection but in a new orientation, in rear-guard engagements, and in the strengthening of the party’s organizational positions, above all in the trade unions.

In connection with the question of the “era,” a polemic arose over Fascism, no less distorted and unscrupulous. The Opposition maintained that the bourgeoisie advances its Fascist shoulder only at the moment when an immediate revolutionary danger threatens the foundations of its regime and when the normal organs of the bourgeois state prove inadequate. In this sense active Fascism signifies a state of civil war on the part of capitalist society waged against the rebelling proletariat. Contrariwise, the bourgeoisie is forced to advance its Left, the social democratic shoulder, either in a period that precedes that of the civil war, so as to deceive, lull, and demoralize the proletariat, or in a period following upon a serious and lasting victory over the proletariat, i.e., when it is forced to lay hold of the broad masses of the people parliamentarily, among them also the workers disappointed by the revolution, in order to reestablish the normal regime. In opposition to this analysis, which is absolutely irrefutable theoretically and which was confirmed by the entire course of the struggle, the leadership of the Comintern set up the senseless and over-simplified contention of the identity of the social democracy with Fascism. Proceeding from the incontestable fact that the social democracy is no less servile towards the foundations of bourgeois society than Fascism and is always ready to volunteer its Noske at the moment of danger, the leadership of the Comintern entirely expunged the political difference between the social democracy and Fascism, and together with that also the difference between a period of open civil war and the period of the “normalization” of the class struggle. In a word, everything was turned on its head, entangled and muddled up, only in order to maintain the sham of an orientation upon the immediate development of the civil war. Just as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened in Germany and Europe in the Fall of 1923; an episode – and that was all!

In order to show the course and the level of this polemic we must quote from the article by Stalin On the International Situation:

“Many believe,” Stalin said, polemizing against me, “that the bourgeoisie came to ‘pacifism’ and ‘democracy’ not out of necessity but of its own free will, of free choice, so to speak.”

This basic historico-philosophical thesis which it is positively embarrassing to dwell upon, is followed by two principal conclusions:

“First, it is false that Fascism is only a combat organization of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not merely a military-technical category [?!].”

It is incomprehensible why the combat organization of bourgeois society must be considered a technical and not a political “category.” But what is Fascism? Stalin’s indirect answer reads: “The social democracy is objectively a moderate wing of Fascism.”

One might say that the social democracy is the Left wing of bourgeois society and this definition would be quite correct if one does not construe it so as to over-simplify it and thereby forget that the social democracy still leads millions of workers behind it and within certain limits is constrained to reckon not only with the will of its bourgeois master but also with the interests of its deluded proletarian constituency. But it is absolutely senseless to characterize the social democracy as the “moderate wing of Fascism.” What becomes of bourgeois society itself in that case? In order to orient oneself in the most elementary manner in politics, one must not throw everything into a single heap but instead distinguish between the social democracy and Fascism which represent two poles of the bourgeois front – united at the moment of danger – but two poles, nevertheless. Is it still necessary to emphasize this now, after the May 1928 elections, characterized at one and the same time by the decline of Fascism and the growth of the social democracy, to which, incidentally, the communist party in this case, too, proposed a united front of the working class?

“Secondly,” the article continues: “it is falser that the decisive battles have already occurred; that the proletariat has suffered a defeat in these battles; and the bourgeoisie has become consolidated as a result. The decisive struggles have not yet taken place at all, even if [?] only because there have not been real Bolshevik mass parties as yet.”

So, the bourgeoisie could not consolidate itself because there have been no struggles as yet, and there have been no struggles “even if only” because there has not yet been a Bolshevik party. Thus what hinders the bourgeoisie from consolidating itself is ... the absence of a Bolshevik party. In reality, however, it was precisely the absence – not so much of the party as of a Bolshevik leadership – that helped the bourgeoisie to consolidate itself. If an army capitulates to the enemy in a critical situation without a battle, then this capitulation completely takes the place of a “decisive battle,” in politics as in war. Back in 1850 Engels taught that a party which has missed a revolutionary situation disappears from the scene for a long time. But is there anybody still unaware that Engels, who lived “before imperialism,” is obsolete today? So, Stalin writes as follows: “Without such [Bolshevik] parties no struggles for the dictatorship are possible under the conditions of imperialism.”

One is, therefore, compelled to assume that such struggles were quite possible in the epoch of Engels, when the law of uneven development had not yet been discovered.

This whole chain of thought is crowned, appropriately enough, by a political prognosis:

“Finally, it is also false ... that out of this ‘pacifism’ must arise the consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie and a postponement of the revolution for an indeterminate period of time.”

Nevertheless, such a postponement did result, not according to Stalin, it is true, but according to Engels. A year later, when it became clear even to the blind that the position of the bourgeoisie had become stronger and that the revolution was adjourned for an indefinite time, Stalin set himself to accuse us of refusing to recognize stabilization. This accusation became particularly insistent in the period when the “stabilization” already began to crack anew, when a new revolutionary wave drew near in England and China. And this whole hopeless muddle served to fulfill the functions of a leading line ! It should be remarked that the definition of Fascism and its relations to the social democracy contained in the draft (Chapter 2), despite the ambiguities deliberately introduced (so as to tie up the past), is far more rational and correct than the schema of Stalin quoted above, which was essentially the schema of the Fifth Congress. But this insignificant step forward does not solve the question. A program of the Comintern, after the experiences of the last decade, cannot be left without a characterization of the revolutionary situation, of its origin and disappearance, without pointing out the classic mistakes committed in the evaluation of such a situation, without explaining how the locomotive engineer must act at the curves, and without inculcating into the parties the truth that there are such situations in which the success of the world revolution depends upon two or three days of struggle.

7. The Right Leaven of Ultra-Left Policy

After the period of turbulent high tide in 1923, began the period of a long-lasting ebb. In the language of strategy this meant an orderly retreat, rearguard battles, the strengthening of our positions within the mass organizations, the re-inspection of our own ranks, and the cleansing and sharpening of our theoretical and political weapons. This position was branded as liquidationism. The latter concept, as well as other concepts of the Bolshevik lexicon in late years, met with the grossest abuse; there was no longer any teaching and training but only the sowing of confusion and error. Liquidationism is the renunciation of the revolution, the attempt to substitute the roads and methods of reformism for the roads and methods of revolution. The Leninist policy has nothing in common with liquidationism; but it has just as little to do with a disregard of the changes in the objective situation and with maintaining verbally the course towards the armed insurrection after the revolution has already turned its back upon us, and when it is necessary to resume the road of long, stubborn, systematic, and laborious work among the masses in order to prepare the party for a new revolution ahead.

On ascending the stairs a different type of movement is required from that which is needed to descend. Most dangerous is such a situation as finds a man, with the lights out, raising his foot to ascend when the steps bkfore him lead downward. Falls, injuries, and dislocations are then inevitable. The leadership of the Comintern in 1924 did everything in its power to suppress both the criticism of the experiences of the German October and all criticism in general. And it kept stubbornly repeating: the workers are heading directly for the revolution – the stairs lead upward. Small wonder that the directives of the Fifth Congress, applied during the revolutionary ebb, led to cruel political falls and dislocations!

Number 5-6 of the Information Bulletin of the German Opposition, March 1, 1927, stated:

“The greatest mistakes of the Lefts at this party congress [the Frankfurt Congress in the spring of 1924, when they took over the leadership], consisted in their not speaking relentlessly enough to the party of the gravity of the defeat of 1923; in their not drawing the necessary conclusions, in not explaining to the party, soberly and without embellishment, the tendencies of relative stabilization of capitalism, and in not formulating a corresponding program for the impending period with its struggles and slogans. It was entirely possible to do this and to underscore sharply the theses of the program, as was correct and absolutely necessary.”

These lines were to us an indication at that time that a section of the German Left, who participated during the Fifth Congress in the struggle against our alleged “liquidationism,” had seriously understood the lessons of 1924-25. And this brought us subsequently closer on the basis of principle.

The key year of the sharp turn in the situation was the year 1924. Yet the recognition that this sharp turn had occurred (“stabilization”) followed only a year and a half later. It is hardly astonishing, therefore, that the years 1924-1925 were the years of Left mistakes and putschist experiments. The Bulgarian terrorist adventure, like the tragic history of the Esthonian armed uprising of December 1924, was an outburst of despair resulting from a false orientation. The fact that these attempts to rape the historical process by means of a putsch were left without a critical investigation led to a relapse in Canton towards the end of 1927. In politics not even the smallest mistakes pass unpunished, much less the big ones. And the greatest mistake is to cover up mistakes, seeking mechanically to suppress criticism and a correct Marxian evaluation of the mistakes.

We are not writing a history of the Comintern for the last five years. We bring here only a factual illustration of the two strategical lines at the fundamental stages of this period, and at the same time an illustration of the lifelessness of the draft program for which all these questions do not even exist. We cannot, therefore, give here a description, however general, of the inextricable contradictions which befell the parties of the Comintern, placed between the directives of the Fifth Congress on the one hand and political reality on the other. Of course, not everywhere were the contradictions resolved by such fatal convulsions as was the case in Bulgaria and Esthonia in 1924. But always and everywhere the parties felt themselves bound, failed to respond to the aspirations of the masses, went about with eye-flaps, and stumbled. In the purely party propaganda and agitation, in the work in the trade unions, on the parliamentary tribune – everywhere the communists had to drag the heavy ball and chain of the false position of the Fifth Congress. Each party, to a lesser or greater degree, fell a victim of the false points of departure. Each chased after phantoms, ignored the real processes, transformed revolutionary slogans into noisy phrases, compromised itself in the eyes of the masses and lost all the ground under its feet. To crown all this, the press of the Comintern was, then as now, deprived of every possibility of assembling, arranging, and publishing facts and figures on the work of the communist parties in recent years. After the defeats, mistakes, and failures, the epigone leadership prefers to execute the retreat and to deal with opponents with all lights turned out.

Finding itself in a cruel and constantly growing contradiction with real factors, the leadership has had to cling ever more to fictitious factors. Losing the ground under its feet the ECCI was constrained to discover revolutionary forces and signs where there were no traces of any. To maintain its balance, it had to clutch at rotten ropes.

In proportion as obvious and growing shifts to the night were going on in the proletariat, there began in the Comintern the phase of idealizing the peasantry, a wholly uncritical exaggeration of every symptom of its “break” with bourgeois society, an embellishment of every ephemeral peasant organization and a downright adulation of “peasant” demagogues.

The task of a long and stubborn struggle of the proletarian vanguard against the bourgeoisie and pseudo-peasant demagoguery for influence over the most disinherited strata of the peasant poor was being more and more displaced by the hope that the peasantry would play a direct and an independent revolutionary role on a national as well as on an international scale.

During 1924, i.e., in the course of the basic gear of the “stabilization,” the communist press was filled with absolutely fantastic data on the strength of the recently organized Peasants’ International. Dombal, its representative, reported that the Peasants’ International, six months after its formation, already embraced several million members.

Then there was enacted the scandalous incident with Radic, who was the leader of the Croatian Peasants” Party and who, en route from Green Zagreb, thought it advisable to show himself in Red Moscow in order to strengthen his chances to become minister in White Belgrade. On July 9, 1924, Zinoviev in his report to the Leningrad party workers on the results of the Fifth Congress, told of his new “victory”:

“At this moment important shifts are taking place within the peasantry. You have all probably heard of the Croatian Peasants’ party of Radic. Radic is now in Moscow. He – is a real leader of the people ... Behind Radic stands united the entire poor and middle peasantry of Croatia ... Radic now has decided in the name of his party to join the Peasants’ International. We consider this a very important event ... The formation of the Peasants’ International is an event of the greatest importance. Certain comrades did not believe that a large organization would grow out of it ... Now we are getting a great auxiliary mass – the peasantry ...”

And so forth and so on, and more of it.

The leader, LaFollette, corresponded, on the other side of the ocean, to the “genuine people’s leader,” Radic. The representative of the Comintern, Pepper, in order to set the “auxiliary mass” – the American farmers – into motion at an accelerated tempo, drew the young and weak American Communist Party onto the senseless and infamous adventure of creating a “Farmer-Labor party” around LaFollette in order to overthrow quickly American capitalism.

The glad tidings of the proximity of the revolution in the United States based on the farmers filled the speeches and articles of the official leaders of the ECCI at that time. At a session of the Fifth Congress, Kolarov reported:

“In the United States the small farmers have founded a Farmer-Labor party, which is becoming ever more radical, drawing closer to the communists, and becoming permeated with the idea of the creation of a workers’ and peasants’ government in the United States.”

No more, no less!

From Nebraska came Green – one of the leaders of LaFollette’s organization – to the Peasants’ Congress in Moscow. Green also “joined” something or other, and then, as is customary, he later assisted at the St. Paul conference in laying low the communist party when it made a feeble attempt to proceed to the realization of Pepper’s great plans – the same Pepper who was counsellor to Count Karolyi, an extreme Left winger at the Third Congress, a reformer of Marxism, one of those who slit the throat of the revolution in Hungary.

In its issue of August 29, 1929, Pravda complained:

“The American proletariat en masse has not even risen to the level of consciousness of the need for even so collaborationist a party as the English Labour Party is.”

And about a month and a half previously, Zinoviev reported to the Leningrad party workers:

“Several million farmers are being voluntarily or involuntarily pushed by the agrarian crisis all at once [!] to the side of the working class.”

“And to a workers’ and peasants’ government!” immediately added Kolarov.

The press kept repeating that a Farmer-Labor party would soon be formed in America, “not a purely proletarian, but a class” Farmer-Labor party for the overthrow of capitalism. What the “not a proletarian, but class” character was supposed to mean, no astrologist on either side of the ocean could possibly explain. In the long run it was only a Pepperized edition of the idea of a “two-class workers’ and peasants’ party,” of which we will have occasion to speak again in greater detail in connection with the lessons of the Chinese revolution. Suffice here to remark that this reactionary idea of non-proletarian but class parties arose entirely from the pseudo-“Left” policy of 1924 which, losing the ground from under its feet, clutched at Radic, LaFollette, and the inflated figures of the Peasants’ International.

“We are now witnessing,” retailed the academician of commonplaces, Miliutin, “an extraordinarily important and significant process of the splitting away of the peasant masses from the bourgeoisie, of the peasantry on march against the bourgeoisie, and of the increasing strengthening of the united front between the peasantry and the working class in the capitalist countries in struggle against the capitalist system.”

In the course of the whole year of 1924, the press of the Comintern did not weary of telling about the universal “radicalization of the peasant masses,” as though something independent could be expected from this, in most cases, only imaginary radicalization of the peasants in a period when the workers were obviously moving to the Right, when the social democracy grew in strength and the bourgeoisie consolidated its position!

We encounter the same failing in political vision towards the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928 with regard to China. After every great and deep-going revolutionary crisis, in which the proletariat suffers a decisive and long-lasting defeat, the spurts of ferment still continue for a long time among the semi-proletarian urban and rural masses, as the circles spread in the water after a stone has fallen in. Whenever a leadership ascribes an independent significance to these circles and, contrary to the processes within the working class, interprets them as symptoms of an approaching revolution, bear well in mind that this is an infallible sign that the leadership is heading towards adventures, similar to those in Esthonia, or Bulgaria in 1924 or Canton in 1927.

During the same period of ultra-Leftism, the Chinese Communist Party was driven for several years into the Kuomintang, which was characterized by the Fifth Congress as a “sympathizing party”, without any serious attempt to define its class character. As we proceed, we find that the idealization of “the national revolutionary bourgeoisie” became greater and greater. Thus, in the Orient, the false Left course, with its eyes shut and burning with impatience, laid the foundation for the subsequent opportunism. It was Martinov himself who was called upon to formulate the opportunist line. Martinov was all the more reliable a counsellor of the Chinese proletariat for having himself tailed behind the petty bourgeoisie during the three Russian revolutions.

In the hunt after an artificial acceleration of the periods, not only were Radical, LaFollette, the peasant millions of Dombal, and even Pepper clutched at, but a basically false perspective was also built up for England. The weaknesses of the English Communist Party gave birth at that time to the necessity of replacing it as quickly as possible with a more imposing factor. Precisely then was born the false estimate of the tendencies in English trade unionism. Zinoviev gave us to understand that he counted upon the revolution finding an entrance, not through the narrow gateway of the British Communist Party, but through the broad portals of the trade unions. The struggle to win the masses organized in the trade unions through the communist party was replaced by the hope for the swiftest possible utilization of the ready-made apparatus of the trade unions for the purposes of the revolution. Out of this false position sprang the later policy of the Anglo-Russian Committee, which dealt a blow to the Soviet Union, as well as to the English working class; a blow surpassed only by the defeat in China.

In the Lessons of October, written as early as the summer of 1929, the idea of an accelerated road – accelerated through friendship with Pummelled and Cook, as the further development of this idea showed – is refuted as follows:

“Without the party, independently of the party, skipping over the party, through a substitute for the party, the proletarian revolution can never triumph. That is the principal lesson of the last decade. To be sure, the English trade unions can become a powerful lever of the proletarian revolution. They can, for example, under certain conditions and for a certain period, even replace the workers’ Soviets. But they cannot play such a role without the communist party and certainly not against it, but only provided that communist influence in the trade unions becomes decisive. We have paid too dearly for this conclusion as to the role and significance of the party for the proletarian revolution to renounce it so lightly or even to have it weakened.“

The same problem is posed on a wider scale in my book Whither England? This book, from beginning to end, is devoted to proving the idea that the English revolution, too, cannot avoid the portals of communism and that with a correct, courageous, and intransigent policy which steers clear of any illusions with regard to detours, the English Communist Party can grow by leaps and bounds and mature so as to be equal in the course of a few years to the tasks before it.

The Left illusions of 1924 rose thanks to the Right leaven. In order to conceal the significance of the mistakes and defeats of 1923 from others as well as from oneself, the process of the swing to the Right that was taking place in the proletariat had to be denied and revolutionary processes within the other classes optimistically exaggerated. That was the beginning of the down-sliding from the proletarian line to the centrist, that is, to the petty bourgeois line which, in the course of the increasing stabilization, was to liberate itself from its ultra-left shell and reveal itself as a crude collaborationist line in the USSR, in China, in England, in Germany, and everywhere else.

PART III

8. The Period of Right-Centrist Down-Sliding

The policy of the most important communist parties, attuned to the Fifth Congress, very soon revealed its complete inefficacy. The mistakes of pseudo-"leftism" which hampered the development of the communist parties, later gave an impetus to new empirical zigzags: namely, to an accelerated sliding down to the Right. A cat burned by hot milk shies away from cold water. The “Left” Central Committees of a number of parties were deposed as violently as they had been constituted prior to the Fifth Congress. The adventurist Leftism gave way to an open opportunism of the Right-Centrist type. To comprehend the character and the tempo of this organizational Rightward swing, it must be recalled that Stalin, the director of this turn, back in September 1924 appraised the passing of party leadership to Maslow, Ruth Fischer, Treint, Suzanne Girault, and others, as the expression of the Bolshevization of the parties and an answer to the demands of the Bolshevik workers who are marching toward the revolution and “want revolutionary leaders.

Stalin wrote, “The last half year is remarkable in the sense that it presents a radical turning point in the life of the communist parties of the West, in the sense that the social democratic survivals were decisively liquidated, the party cadres Bolshevized, and the opportunist elements isolated.”

But ten months later the genuine “Bolsheviks” and “revolutionary leaders” were declared social democrats and renegades, ousted from leadership and driven out of the party.

Despite the panicky character of this change of leaders, frequently effected by resorting to rude and disloyal mechanical measures of the apparatus, it is impossible to draw any rigorous ideological line of demarcation between the phase of ultra-left policy and the period of opportunistic down-sliding that followed it.

In the questions of industry and the peasantry in the USSR, of the colonial bourgeoisie, of “peasant” parties in the capitalist countries, of socialism in one country, of the role of the party in the proletarian revolution, the revisionist tendencies already appeared in fullest bloom in 1924-25, cloaked with the banner of the struggle against “Trotskyism,” and they found their most distinctly opportunist expression in the resolutions of the conference of the CPSU in April 1925.

Taken as a whole, the course to the Right was the attempt at a half-blind, purely empirical, and belated adaptation to the set-back of revolutionary development caused by the defeat of 1923. Bukharin’s initial formulation, as has already been mentioned, was based on the “permanent” development of the revolution in the most literal and the most mechanical sense of the term. Bukharin granted no “breathing spaces,” interruptions, or retreats of any kind; he considered it a revolutionary duty to continue the “offensive” under all circumstances.

The above quoted article of Stalin, On the International Situation, which is a sort of program and which marks Stalin’s debut on international questions, demonstrates that the second author of the draft program also professed the very same purely mechanical “Left” conception during the initial period of the struggle against “Trotskyism.” For this conception there existed always and unalterably only the social democracy that was “disintegrating,” workers who were becoming “radicalized,” communist parties that were “growing,” and the revolution that was “approaching.” And anybody who looked around and tried to distinguish things was and is a “liquidator.”

This “tendency” required a year and a half to sense something new after the break in the situation in Europe in 1923 so as then to transform itself, panic-stricken, into its opposite. The leadership oriented itself without any synthesized understanding of our epoch and its inner tendencies, only by groping (Stalin) and by supplementing the fragmentary conclusions thus obtained with scholastic schemes renovated for each occasion (Bukharin). The political line as a whole, therefore, represents a chain of zigzags. The ideological line is a kaleidoscope of schemes tending to push to absurdity every segment of the Stalinist zigzag.

The Sixth Congress would act correctly if it decided to elect a special commission in order to compile all the theories created by Bukharin and intended by him to serve as a basis, say, for all the stages of the Anglo-Russian Committee; these theories would have to be compiled chronologically and arranged systematically so as to draw a fever chart of the ideas contained in them. It would be a most instructive strategical diagram. The same also holds for the Chinese revolution, the economic development of the USSR, and all other less important questions. Blind empiricism multiplied by scholasticism – such is the course that still awaits merciless condemnation.

The effects of this course showed themselves most fatally in the three most important questions: in the internal policy of the USSR; the Chinese revolution; and in the Anglo-Russian Committee. The effects were in the same direction, but less obvious and less fatal in their immediate consequences, in all the other questions of the policies of the Comintern in general.

As regards the internal questions of the USSR, a sufficiently exhaustive characterization of the policy of downsliding is given in the Platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition). We must limit ourselves here merely to this reference to the latter. The Platform, now receives an apparently most unexpected confirmation in the fact that all the attempts of the present leadership of the CPSU to escape from the consequences of the policy of the years 1923 to 1928 are based upon almost literal quotations from the Platform, the authors and adherents of which are dispersed in prisons and exile. The fact, however, that the present leaders have recourse to the Platform only in sections and bits, without putting two and two together, makes the new Left turn extremely unstable and uncertain; but at the same time it invests the Platform with a greater value than ever as the generalized expression of a real Leninist course.

In the Platform, the question of the Chinese revolution is dealt with very insufficiently, incompletely, and in part positively falsely by Zinoviev. Because of the decisive importance of this question for the Comintern, we are obliged to subject it to a more detailed investigation in a separate chapter. (See Section III.)

As to the Anglo-Russian Committee, the third most important question from the strategical experiences of the Comintern in recent years, there only remains for us, after all that has already been said by the Opposition in a series of articles, speeches, and theses, to make a brief summary.

The point of departure of the Anglo-Russian Committee, as we have already seen, was the impatient urge to leap over the young and too slowly developing communist party. This invested the entire experience with a false character even prior to the general strike.

The Anglo-Russian Committee was looked upon not as an episodic bloc at the tops which would have to be broken and which would inevitably and demonstratively be broken at the very first serious test in order to compromise the General Council. No, not only Stalin, Bukharin, Tomsky, and others, but also Zinoviev saw in it a long lasting “co-partnership” – an instrument for the systematic revolutionization of the English working masses, and if not the gate, at least an approach to the gate through which would stride the revolution of the English proletariat. The further it went, the more the Anglo-Russian Committee became transformed from an episodic alliance into an inviolable principle standing above the real class struggle. This became revealed at the time of the general strike.

The transition of the mass movement into the open revolutionary stage threw back into the camp of the bourgeois reaction those liberal labor politicians who had become somewhat Left. They betrayed the general strike openly and deliberately; after which they undermined and betrayed the miners’ strike. The possibility of betrayal is always contained in reformism. But this does not mean to say that reformism and betrayal are one and the same thing at every moment. Not quite. Temporary agreements may be made with the reformists whenever they take a step forward. But to maintain a bloc with them when, frightened by the development of a movement, they commit treason, is equivalent to criminal toleration of traitors and a veiling of betrayal.

The general strike had the task of exerting a united pressure upon the employers and the state with the power of the five million workers, for the question of the coal mining industry had become the most important question of state policy. Thanks to the betrayal of the leadership, the strike was broken in its first stage. It was a great illusion to continue in the belief that an isolated economic strike of the mine workers would alone achieve what the general strike did not achieve. That is precisely where the power of the General Council lay. It aimed with cold calculation at the defeat of the mine workers, as a result of which considerable sections of the workers would be convinced of the “correctness” and the “reasonableness” of the Judas directives of the General Council.

The maintenance of the amicable bloc with the General Council, and the simultaneous support of the protracted and isolated economic strike of the mine workers, which the General Council came out against, seemed, as it were, to be calculated beforehand to allow the heads of the trade unions to emerge from this heaviest test with the least possible losses.

The role of the Russian trade unions here, from the revolutionary standpoint, turned out to be very disadvantageous and positively pitiable. Certainly, support of an economic strike, even an isolated one, was absolutely necessary. There can be no two opinions on that among revolutionists. But this support should have borne not only a financial but also a revolutionary-political character. The All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions should have declared openly to the English mine workers’ union and the whole English working class that the mine workers’ strike could seriously count upon success only if by its stubornness, its tenacity, and its scope, it could prepare the way for a new outbreak of the general strike. That could have been achieved only by an open and direct struggle against the General Council, the agency of the government and the mine owners. The struggle to convert the economic strike into a political strike should have signified, therefore, a furious political and organizational war against the General Council. The first step to such a war had to be the break with the Anglo-Russian Committee. which had become a reactionary obstacle, a chain on the feet of the working class.

No revolutionist who weighs his words will contend that a victory would have been guaranteed by proceeding along this line. But a victory was possible only on this road. A defeat on this road was a defeat on a road that could lead later to victory. Such a defeat educates, that is, strengthens the revolutionary ideas in the working class. In the meantime, mere financial support of the lingering and hopeless trade union strike (trade union strike’in its methods; revolutionary-political’in its aims), only meant grist to the mill of the General Council, which was biding calmly until the strike collapsed from starvation and thereby proved its own “correctness.” Of course, the General Council could not easily bide its time for several months in the role of an open strike-breaker. It was precisely during this very critical period that the General Council required the Anglo-Russian Committee as its political screen from the masses. Thus, the questions of the mortal class struggle between English capital and the proletariat, between the General Council and the mine workers, were transformed, as it were, into questions of a friendly discussion between allies in the same bloc, the English General Council and the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, on the subject of which of the two roads was better at that moment: the road of an agreement, or the road of an isolated economic struggle. The inevitable outcome of the strike led to the agreement, that is, tragically settled the friendly “discussion” in favor of the General Council.

From beginning to end, the entire policy of the Anglo-Russian Committee, because of its false line, provided only aid to the General Council. Even the fact that the strike was long sustained financially by the great self-sacrifice on the part of the Russian working class, did not serve the mine workers or the English Communist Party, but the self-same General Council. As the upshot of the greatest revolutionary movement in England since the days of Chartism, the English Communist Party has hardly grown while the General Council sits in the saddle even more firmly than before the general strike.

Such are the results of this unique “strategical maneuver.”

The obstinacy evinced in retaining the bloc with the General Council, which led to downright servility at the disgraceful Berlin session in April 1927, was explained away by the ever recurring reference to the very same “stabilization.” If there is a setback in the development of the revolution, then, you see, one is forced to cling to Purcell. This argument, which appeared very profound to a Soviet functionary or to a trade unionist of the type of Melnichansky, is in reality a perfect example of blind empiricism’adulterated by scholasticism at that. What was the significance of “stabilization” in relation to English economy and politics, especially in the years 1926-1927? Did it signify the development of the productive forces? The improvement of the economic situation? Better hopes for the future? Not at all. The whole so-called stabilization of English capitalism is maintained only upon the conservative forces of the old labor organizations with all their currents and shadings in the face of the weakness and irresolutely of the English Communist Party. On the field of the economic and social relations of England, the revolution has already fully matured. The question stands purely politically. The basic props of the stabilization are the heads of the Labour Party and the trade unions, which, in England, constitute a single unit but which operate through a division of labor.

Given such a condition of the working masses as was revealed by the general strike, the highest post in the mechanism of capitalist stabilization is no longer occupied by MacDonald and Thomas, but by Pugh, Purcell, Cook, and Co. They do the work and Thomas adds the finishing touches. Without Purcell, Thomas would be left hanging in mid-air and along with Thomas also Baldwin. The chief brake upon the English revolution is the false, diplomatic masquerade “Leftism” of Purcell which fraternizes sometimes in rotation, sometimes simultaneously with churchmen and Bolsheviks and which is always ready not only for retreats but also for betrayal. Stabilization is Purcellism. From this we see what depths of theoretical absurdity and blind opportunism are expressed in the reference to the existence of “stabilization” in order to justify the political bloc with Purcell. Yet, precisely in order to shatter the “stabilization,” Purcellism had first to be destroyed. In such a situation, even a shadow of solidarity with the General Council was the greatest crime and infamy against the working masses.

Even the most correct strategy cannot, by itself, always lead to victory. The correctness of a strategical plan is verified by whether it follows the line of the actual development of class forces and whether it estimates the elements of this development realistically. The gravest and most disgraceful defeat which has the most fatal consequences for the movement is the typically Menshevist defeat, due to a false estimate of the classes, an underestimation of the revolutionary factors, and an idealization of the enemy forces. Such were our defeats in China and in England.

What was expected from the Anglo-Russian Committee for the USSR?

In July 1926, Stalin lectured to us at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission as follows:

“The task of this bloc [the Anglo-Russian Committee] consists in organizing a broad movement of the working class against new imperialist wars and generally against an intervention in our country (especially) on the part of the mightiest of the imperialist powers of Europe, on the part of England in particular.”

While he was instructing us, Oppositionists, to the effect that “care must be taken to defend the first workers’ republic of the world against intervention” (we, naturally, are unaware of this), Stalin added:

“If the reactionary trade unions of England are ready to conclude a bloc with the revolutionary trade unions of our country against the counter-revolutionary imperialists of their own country, then why should we not hail such a bloc?”

If the “reactionary trade unions” were capable of conducting a struggle against their own imperialists they would not he reactionary. Stalin is incapable of distinguishing any longer between the conceptions reactionary and revolutionary. He characterizes the English trade unions as reactionary as a matter of routine but in reality he entertains miserable illusions with regard to their “revolutionary spirit.”

After Stalin, the Moscow Committee of our party lectured to the workers of Moscow:

“The Anglo-Russian Committee can, must, and will undoubtedly play an enormous role in the struggle against all possible interventions directed against the USSR It will become the organizing center of the international forces of the proletariat for the struggle against every attempt of the international bourgeoisie to provoke a new war.”

What did the Opposition reply? We said:

“The more acute the international situation becomes, the more the Anglo-Russian Committee will be transformed into a weapon of British and international imperialism.”

This criticism of the Stalinist hopes in Purcell as the guardian angel of the workers’ state was characterized by Stalin at the very same plenum as a deviation “from Leninism to Trotskyism.”

Voroshilov: “Correct.”

A Voice: “Voroshilov has affixed his seal to it.”

Trotsky: “Fortunately all this will be in the Minutes.”

Yes, all this is to be found in the Minutes of the July plenum at which the blind, rude, and disloyal opportunists dared to accuse the Opposition of “defeatism.”

This dialogue which I am compelled to quote briefly from my earlier article,”’ What We Gave and What We Got, is far more useful as a strategical lesson than the entire sophomoric chapter on strategy in the draft program. The question – what we gave (and expected) and what we got? – is in general the principal criterion in strategy. It must be applied at the Sixth Congress to all questions that have been on the agenda in recent years. It will then be revealed conclusively that the strategy of the ECCI, especially since the year 1926, was a strategy of imaginary sums, false calculations, illusions with regard to the enemy, and persecutions of the most reliable and unwavering militants. In a word, it was the rotten strategy of Right-Centrism.

9. The Maneuverist Character of Revolutionary Strategy

At first sight, it appears incomprehensible why the “maneuvering” and “flexibility” of Bolshevik strategy are passed over in complete silence in the draft. Out of this entire vast question only a single point is taken’the point on agreements with the colonial bourgeoisie.

Yet, the opportunism of the recent period, zigzagging ever more deeply to the Right, has advanced primarily under the banner of maneuver strategy. The refusal to concur with unprincipled compromises which, because of this very fact, were harmful in practise, was characterized as lack of “flexibility.” The majority declared its basic principle to be the maneuver. Zinoviev maneuvered back in 1925 with Radic and LaFollette. Stalin and Bukhrarin thereafter maneuvered with Chiang Kai-shek, with Purcell, and with the kulaks. The apparatus continually maneuvered with the party. Zinoviev and Ramenev are now maneuvering with the apparatus.

A whole corps of specialists in maneuvers for bureaucratic requirement arose which consists predominantly of people who never were revolutionary fighters, and who now bow all the more ardently before the revolution after it has already conquered power. Borodin maneuvers in Canton. Rafes in Peking, D. Petrovsky maneuvers around the English Channel, Pepper maneuvers in the United States, but Pepper can maneuver in Polynesia, too; Martinov maneuvers from a distance, but to make up for it he does it in every corner of the globe. Whole broods of young academicians in maneuvers have been brought up who approach Bolshevik flexibility mainly by the elasticity of their own spines. The task of this school of strategy consists in obtaining through maneuvers what can be won only through revolutionary class forces. Just as every alchemist of the Middle Ages hoped, in spite of the failure of others, to make gold, so the present-day strategists in maneuvers also hope, each in his place, to deceive history. In the nature of things, of course, they are not strategists but only bureaucratic combinationists of all statures, save the great. Some of them, having observed how the Master settled petty questions, imagine that they have mastered the secrets of strategy. That is precisely the essence of epigonism. Others, again, obtained the secrets of combinationism at second and third hand, and after becoming convinced that with them wonders are sometimes achieved in small matters, they concluded that these methods are all the more applicable to great matters. Yet, all attempts to apply the method of bureaucratic combinations as being “more economic” in comparison with the revolutionary struggles in order to solve great questions, have led invariably to disgraceful failures, in addition to which, combinationism, armed with the apparatus of the party and of the state, each time broke the spine of the young parties and the young revolutions. Chiang Kai-shek, Wang Ching-wei, Purcell, the kulaks’all these have up to now emerged as victors from the attempts to deal with them by means of “maneuvers.”

Naturally, this does not mean to say that maneuvers are impermissible in general, that is, incompatible with the revolutionary strategy of the working class. But it must be clearly understood that maneuvers can bear only a subordinated, auxiliary, and expedient character in relation to the basic methods of revolutionary struggle. Once and for all it must be grasped that a maneuver can never decide anything in great matters. If combinations appear to solve something in small affairs, it is always at the expense of great matters. A correct maneuver can only facilitate the solution by providing the possibility of gaining time or of attaining greater results with smaller forces. It is impossible to escape from fundamental difficulties by means of a maneuver.

The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a fundamental one. That is why the attempt to bridle the Chinese bourgeoisie by means of organizational and personal maneuvers and to compel it to submit to combinationist plans is not a maneuver but contemptible self-deception, even though it be colossal in scope. Classes cannot be tricked. This applies, considered historically, to all the classes and it is particularly and immediately true of the ruling, possessing, exploiting, and educated classes. The world experience of the latter is so great, their class instinct so refined, and their organs of espionage so varied that an attempt to deceive them by posing as somebody else must lead in reality to trapping, not the enemy, but one’s own friends.

The contradiction between the USSR and the capitalist world is a fundamental one. There is no escape from it by way of maneuvers. By means of clear and candidly acknowledged concessions to capital, and by utilizing the contradictions between its various sections, the breathing spell can be extended and time gained, but even this, only under certain historical conditions, and by no means under any and all circumstances. It is gross self-deception to believe that the international bourgeoisie can be “neutralized” until the construction of socialism, that is, that the fundamental contradictions can be overcome with the aid of a maneuver. Such self-deception may cost the Soviet republic its head. Only the international proletarian revolution can liberate us from the fundamental contradiction.

A maneuver can consist either of a concession to the enemy, or an agreement with a temporary and, therefore, always dubious ally, or a well-timed retreat calculated to keep the enenly from our throat, or, finally, the raising of partial demands and slogans in such succession as to split the enemy camp. These are the principal varieties of maneuvers. Others might be mentioned, secondary ones. But every maneuver is by its nature only an episode in relation to the fundamental strategical line of the struggle. In maneuvering with the Kuomintang and the Anglo-Russian Committee, these must always be kept in mind as the perfect examples of a Menshevik and not a Bolshevik maneuver. What occurred was just the reverse. What should have been only a tactical episode developed there into a strategical line and the real strategic task (the struggle against the bourgeoisie and the reformists) was atomized into a series of second-rate and petty tactical episodes which, moreover, were only decorative in character.

In a maneuver, one must always proceed from the worst and not the best assumptions with regard to the adversary to whom concessions are made, or the unreliable ally with whom an agreement is concluded. It must be constantly borne in mind that the ally can become an enemy on the morrow. This applies even to such an ally as the peasantry:

“We must be distrustful towards the peasantry, always organize ourselves separately from it, and be ready for a struggle against it, in so far as the peasantry shows itself to be reactionary or anti-proletarian.”

This does not at all contradict the great strategically task of the proletariat which Lenin worked out for the first time theoretically as well as practically with such gifted profundity, the task of tearing the exploited layers of poor peasants away from the influence of the bourgeoisie and Leading them after us. But the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is by no means given ready-made by history and it cannot be created by means of oily maneuvers, contemptible attempts at wheedling, and pathetic declamations. The alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is a question of the political relation of forces and consequently of the complete independence of the proletariat in relation to all other classes. The ally must first be educated. This can be achieved, on the one hand, by paying great attention to all its progressive and historical needs, and, on the other hand, by displaying an organized distrust towards the ally, and fighting tirelessly and relentlessly against its every anti-proletarian tendency and custom.

The import and the limits of a maneuver must always be clearly considered and demarcated. A concession must be called a concession, and a retreat a retreat. It is infinitely less dangerous to exaggerate one’s own concessions and retreats than to underestimate them. The vigilance of the class and the organized distrust of our own party must be maintained and not lulled.

The essential instrument of a maneuver, as in every historical action of the working class in general, is the party. But the party is not simply a tractable instrument in the hand of the “masters” of the maneuver, but a conscious and self-acting instrument, the highest expression of proletarian self-action in general. Therefore, every maneuver must be clearly grasped by the party itself throughout its application. In question here are, of course, not diplomatic, military, or conspiratorial secrets, that is, not the technique of the struggle of the proletarian state or of the proletarian party under capitalist conditions. In question here is the political content of the maneuver. That is why the whispered explanations to the effect that the course of 1924 to 1928 towards the kulaks was a great maneuver, are absurd and criminal. There is no deceiving the kulak. He does not judge by words but by deeds, by taxes, prices, and net profit. However, one’s own party’the working class and the peasant poor’can very well be deceived. Nothing is so calculated to disintegrate the revolutionary spirit of the proletarian party as unprincipled maneuvering and combinationism behind its back.

The most important, best established, and most unalterable rule to apply in every maneuver reads: you must never dare to merge, mix, or combine your own party organization with an alien one, even though the latter be most “sympathetic” today. Undertake no such steps as lead directly or indirectly, openly or maskedly, to the subordination of your party to other parties, or to organizations of other classes, or constrict the freedom of your own agitation, or your responsibility, even if only in part, for the political line of other parties. You shall not mix up the banners, let alone kneel before another banner.

It is the worst and most dangerous thing if a maneuver arises out of the impatient opportunistic endeavor to outstrip the development of one’s own party and to leap over the necessary stages of its development (it is precisely here that no stages must be leaped over), by binding, combining, and uniting superficially, fraudulently, diplomatically, through combinations and trickery, organizations and elements that pull in opposite directions. Such experiments, always dangerous, are fatal to young and weak parties.

In a maneuver, as in a battle, what decides is not strategical wisdom alone (still less, the cunning of combinationists), but the relationship of forces. Even a correctly contrived maneuver is, generally speaking, all the more dangerous for a revolutionary party, the younger and weaker the latter is in relation to its enemies, allies, and semi-allies. That is why’and we arrive here at a point which is of paramount importance for the Comintern’the Bolshevik party did not at all begin with maneuvering as a panacea but came to it, grew into it in the measure that it sunk its roots deeply into the working class, became strong politically and matured ideologically.

The misfortune lies precisely in the fact that the epigones of Bolshevik strategy extol maneuvers and flexibility to the young communist parties as the quintessence of this strategy, thereby tearing them away from their historical axis and principled foundation and turning them to unprincipled combinations which, only too often, resemble a squirrel whirling in its cage. It was not flexibility that served (nor should it serve today) as the basic trait of Bolshevism but rather granite hardness. It was precisely of this quality, for which its enemies and opponents reproached it, that Bolshevism was always justly proud. Not blissful “optimism” but intransigence, vigilance, revolutionary distrust, and the struggle for every hand’s breadth of independence’these are the essential traits of Bolshevism. This is what the communist parties of both the West and the East must begin with. They must first gain the right to carry out great maneuvers by preparing the political and material possibility for realizing them, that is, the strength, the solidity, the firmness of their own organization.

The Menshevik maneuvers with the Kuomintang and the General Council are tenfold criminal because they were flung upon the still frail shoulders of the Communist Parties of China and England. These maneuvers not only inflicted a defeat upon the revolution and the working class but also crushed, weakened, and undermined for a long time to come the fundamental instrument of future struggle, the young communist parties. At the same time they have also introduced elements of political demoralization into the ranks of the oldest party of the Comintern, the CPSU.

The chapter of the draft dealing with strategy remains obstinately silent about maneuvering’that hoby horse of late years’as if its mouth were filled with water. Indulgent critics may say: silence is good enough. But such rationalizing would be a great mistake. The misfortune lies in the fact that the draft program itself, as we have already shown in a number of examples and as we will show later on, also bears the character of a maneuver in the bad, that is, the combinational sense of the word. The draft maneuvers with its own party. Some of its weak spots it masks with the formula “according to Lenin”; others, it evades by silence. That is the manner in which it deals with the strategy of maneuvers today. It is impossible to speak on this subject without touching upon the fresh experiences in China and England. But the very mention of maneuvers would conjure up the figures of Chiang Kai-shek and Purcell. The authors do not want this. They prefer to remain silent on the favorite theme and to leave the leadership of the Comintern a free hand. And this is precisely what must not be permitted. It is necessary to tie the hands of the combinationists and their candidates. This is precisely the purpose the program should serve. Otherwise, it would be superfluous.

A place must be found in the chapter on strategy for the fundamental rules which determine and delimit maneuvering as an auxiliary method of the revolutionary struggle against the class enemy which can be only a life-and-death struggle. The rules noted above and based upon the teachings of Marx and Lenin can undoubtedly be presented in a more concise and precise form. But they must by all means be brought into the program of the Communist International.

10. The Strategy of Civil War

In connection with the question of the armed insurrection, the draft program remarks casually:

“This struggle is subject to the rules of the art of war. It presupposes a military plan, an offensive character of the fighting operations, and unlimited sacrifice and heroism on the part of the proletariat.”

Here the draft does not go beyond a terse repetition of a few casual remarks once made by Marx. In the meantime, we have had, on the one hand, the experiences of the October revolution, and on the other, the experiences of the defeat of the Hungarian and Bavarian revolutions, of the struggle in Italy in 1920, the uprising in Bulgaria in September 1923, the German movement of 1923, Esthonia in 1924, the English general strike of 1926, the uprising of the Viennese proletariat in 1927, and the second Chinese revolution of 1925-27. A program of the Comintern must contain an infinitely more lucid and concrete characterization of both the social and political prerequisites of the armed insurrection as well as of the military and strategical conditions and methods that can guarantee the victory. Nothing exposes the superficial and literary character of this document so much as the fact that the chapter devoted to revolutionary strategy occupies itself with Cornelissen and the Guild socialists (Orage, Hobson, G.D.H. Cole, all specified by name), but gives neither a general characterization of the strategy of the proletariat in the imperialist epoch nor a definitive exposition of the methods of the struggle for power on the basis of living historical material.

In 1924, after the tragic experiences in Germany, we raised that question anew, demanding that the Comintern place on the agenda and work out the questions of strategy and tactics of the armed insurrection and of civil war in general.

“It is necessary to say bluntly that the question of the duration of the armed insurrection frequently has the character of litmus paper with which to test the revolutionary consciousness of very many Western European communists who have not liberated themselves to this day from their passive, fatalistic approach to the fundamental tasks of the revolution. Such an approach found its most profound and talented expression in Rosa Luxemburg. Psychologically, this is perfectly comprehensible. Her formative period was spent mainly in struggle against the bureaucratic apparatus of the German social democracy and the trade unions. She demonstrated tirelessly that this apparatus stifled the initiative of the masses and she saw the way out and salvation in a spontaneous movement from below that was to overthrow all social democratic obstructions and barriers. A revolutionary general strike that inundates all the banks of bourgeois society became for Luxemburg a synonym for the proletarian revolution. But a general strike, be it ever so distinguished by mass strength, does not decide the question of power as yet, but only raises it. For the seizure of power, it is necessary to organize the armed insurrection on the basis of the general strike. To be sure, the entire development of Rosa Luxemburg tended in this direction: she departed from the stage before she had said her last words, or even her penultimate words. However, up to the very latest period, very strong tendencies towards revolutionary fatalism have prevailed within the German Communist Party. The revolution is on the way, the revolution is nigh, the revolution will bring with it the armed insurrection and give us power and the party ... will, in the meantime, carry on revolutionary agitation and await the results. Under such conditions, to put point blank the question of the date of the insurrection is to awake the party out of fatalistic passivity and to turn it towards the basic revolutionary task, that is, to the conscious organization of the armed insurrection in order to tear the power out of the hands of the enemy.”

“We devote considerable time and theoretical labor to the Paris Commune of 1871 but completely neglect the struggle of the German proletariat which has already acquired precious experiences in civil war; for example, we hardly occupy ourselves at all with the experience of the Bulgarian uprising of last September; and finally, what is most astonishing, we have completely relegated the experiences of October to the archives....

“The experiences of the October revolution, the only victorious proletarian revolution up to now, must be painstakingly studied. A strategical and tactical calendar of the October must be compiled. It must be shown, wave by wave, how events developed and how they were reflected in the party, the Soviets, the Central Committee, and the military organization. What did the vacillations inside the party mean? What was their specific weight in the general sweep of events? What was the role of the military organization? That would be a work of inestimable importance. To defer it still further would be positively criminal.”

“What then is the task properly speaking? The task is to compile a universal reference book, or a guide book, or a manual, or a book of statutes on the question of the civil war and, therefore, above all on the armed insurrection as the highest point of the revolution. A balance must be drawn from the experiences, the preliminary conditions thoroughly analyzed, the mistakes examined, the most correct operations selected, and the necessary conclusions drawn. Will we thereby enrich science, that is, the knowledge of the laws of historical development, or art as the totality of rules of action drawn from experience? The one as well as the other, I believe. For our aim is a strictly practical one; namely, to enrich the military art of revolution.”

“Such ‘statutes’ will necessarily be very complex in structure. First of all, there must be given a characterization of the fundamental premises for the seizure of power by the proletariat. Here we still remain on the field of revolutionary politics; for the uprising is the continuation of politics – only by special means. The analysis of the premises for the armed uprising must be adapted to the varying types of countries. There are countries with a proletarian majority of the population and also countries with an insignificant minority of the proletariat and with an absolute predominance of the peasantry. Between these two extremes lie the countries of the transitional type. As a basis for the analysis, therefore, at least three ‘typical’ countries must be taken: the industrial country; the agrarian country; and the intermediate country. The introduction (treating the premises and the conditions for the revolution) must contain the characterization of the peculiarities of each of these types from the standpoint of the civil war. We consider the insurrection from a twofold angle. On the one hand, as a definite stage of the historical process, as a definite reflection of the objective laws of the class struggle; and on the other, from the subjective or active standpoint: how to prepare and carry out the insurrection in order best to guarantee its victory.”

In 1924, a collective work on the elaboration of the directives of civil war, that is, a Marxian guide to the questions of the open clashes of the classes and the armed struggle for the dictatorship, was begun by a large circle of individuals grouped around the Military Science Society. But this work soon encountered opposition on the part of the Comintern – this opposition was a part of the general system of the struggle against so-called Trotskyism; and the work was later liquidated altogether. A more lightminded and criminal step can hardly be imagined. In an epoch of abrupt turns, the rules of the civil war in the sense presented above must be part of the iron inventory of the entire revolutionary cadre, let alone the leaders of the party. These “statutes” would have to be studied constantly and augmented from the fresh experiences in one’s own country. Only such a study can provide a certain guarantee against steps of panic and capitulation at moments when supreme courage and decisiveness are required, as well as against adventurist leaps in periods which require prudence and patience.

Had such regulations been incorporated in a number of books, the serious study of which is as much the duty of every communist as the knowledge of the basic ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, we might well have avoided such defeats as were suffered during recent years, and which were by no means inevitable, especially the Canton uprising contrived with such puerile lightmindedness. The draft program treats these questions in a few lines, almost as charily as it speaks of Gandhiism in India. Of course, a program cannot become engrossed in details. But it must pose a problem in its full scope and give its basic formulas, citing the most important achievements and mistakes.

Quite independently of this, the Sixth Congress, in our opinion, must instruct the ECCI in a special resolution to elaborate the rules of the civil war into a manual based on the past experiences of victory and defeat.

PART IV

11. The Question of the Internal Party Regime

The organizational questions of Bolshevism are inseparably bound up with questions of program and tactics. The draft program touches this subject only in passing by referring to the necessity of “maintaining the strictest revolutionary order of democratic centralism.” This is the sole formula defining the internal party regime, and, besides, it is quite a new formula. We were aware that the party regime rests upon the principles of democratic centralism. This presupposed in theory (and was also carried out in practice) that the regime of democratic centralism implied a full opportunity for the party to discuss, criticize, express dissatisfaction, elect, and depose, just as it involved an iron discipline in action under the fully empowered leadership of the elective and removable directing organs. If, by democracy was understood the sovereignty of the party over all its organs, then centralism meant a correctly established, conscious discipline that guaranteed the fighting ability of the party. Now, however, to this formula of the internal party regime which has stood the tests in the whole past, an entirely new criterion has been added, that of “the strictest revolutionary order.” It appears that mere democratic centralism no longer suffices for the party but that it now requires a certain revolutionary order of democratic centralism. This formula simply puts the new self-sufficing idea of “revolutionary order” above democratic centralism, i.e., above the party.

What is the meaning of this idea of revolutionary order’and a “strictest” order at that’which stands above the ideas of democracy and centralism? It implies a party apparatus completely independent of the party or aspires to such an independence’a self-sufficing bureaucracy which is supposed to preserve “order” independently of the party masses and able to suspend or violate the will of the party, trample its statutes under foot, postpone party conventions or turn them into mere fictions whenever “order” requires it.

The apparatus has aimed for a long time and by devious routes for such a formula as a “revolutionary order” raised above democracy and centralism. During the last two years we have had offered us a whole series of definitions of party democracy by the most responsible representatives of the party leadership which in essence reduced it to mean that democracy and centralism are simply submission to higher organs. Everything done in practice went far in this direction. But centralism accompanied by strangled and hollow democracy is bureaucratic centralism. Of course, such an “order” must, of necessity, be camouflaged by the forms and rites of democracy; it must be whipped by means of circular letters emanating from above, and commanded to “self-criticize” under the threat of Article 58; and it must continually prove that violations of democracy proceed not from the leading center but from the so-called “executants,” but there is no proceeding against the latter because every “executant?” turns out to be a leader of all his inferiors.

Thus, the new formula is theoretically completely absurd. It demonstrates by its newness and absurdity that it was engendered only in order to satisfy certain matured wants. It sanctifies the bureaucratic apparatus that created it.

This question is indissolubly bound up with the question of factions and groupings. In every controversial question and every difference of opinion, the leadership and the official press, not only of the CPSU but also of the Comintern and all its sections, has immediately shifted the debate over to the question of factions and groupings. Without temporary ideological groupings, the ideological life of the party is unthinkable. Nobody has yet discovered any other procedure. And those who have sought to discover it have only shown that their remedy was tantamount to strangling the ideological life of the party.

Naturally, groupings as well as differences of opinion are an “evil.” But this evil constitutes as necessary an integral part of the dialectic of party development as do toxins in the life of the human organism.

The transformation of groupings into organized and, moreover, closed factions is a much greater evil. The art of party leadership consists precisely in preventing such a development. It is impossible to achieve this by a mere prohibition. The experience of the CPSU testifies best to it.

At the Tenth Party Congress, under the reverberations of the Kronstadt uprising and the kulak mutinies, Lenin had a resolution adopted prohibiting factions and groupings. By groupings were understood not temporary tendencies that inevitably arise in the process of party life, but those self-same factions that passed themselves off as groupings. The party masses understood clearly the mortal danger of the moment and supported their leader by adopting the resolution, harsh and inflexible in its form: the prohibition of factions and factionalism. But the party also knew very well that this formula would be interpreted by the Central Committee under the leadership of Lenin; that there would be neither rode nor disloyal interpretation, and still less, any abuse of power (see the “Testament” of Lenin). The party knew that, exactly one year later, or, should one-third of the party request it, even a month later, it could examine the experiences at a new party congress and introduce any necessary qualifications. The decision of the Tenth Party Congress was a very severe measure, evoked by the critical position of the ruling party at the most dangerous turn from War Communism to the NEP. This severe measure proved to be fully justified for it only supplemented a correct and farsighted policy and cut the ground from under the groupings that had arisen prior to the transition to the New Economic Policy.

But the decision of the Tenth Party Congress on factions and groupings, which even then required judicious interpretation and application, is in no case an absolute principle that stands above all other requirements of the party development, independent of the country, the situation, and the time.

In so far as the party leadership after the departure of Lenin, in order to protect itself from all criticism, based itself formally upon the decisions of the Tenth Party Congress on factions and groupings, it did so in order to stifle party democracy ever more and at the same time was less able to accomplish its real purpose, i.e., the elimination of factionalism. For the task does not consist of prohibiting factions but of doing away with them. Meanwhile, never have factions so devastated the party and disintegrated its unity as has been the case since Lenin’s departure from leadership. At the same time, never before has there prevailed in the party such a hundred percent monolithism, utterly fraudulent and serving only to cover up the methods of strangling the party life.

An apparatus faction kept secret from the party arose in the CPSU even before the Twelfth Party Congress. Later it assumed the character of a conspirative organization with its own illegal Central Committee (“the Septumvirate”), with its own circular letters, agents, codes, and so forth. The party apparatus handpicks from its ranks a closed order which is uncontrolled and which disposes of the extraordinary resources not only of the party but also of the state apparatus and transforms the party masses into a mere cover and an auxiliary instrument for its combinatory maneuvers.

But the more boldly this closed intra-apparatus faction detaches itself from the control of the party masses – ever more diluted by all sorts of “drives” – the deeper and more sharply does the process of faction division proceed, not only below but also within the apparatus itself. Under the complete and unlimited domination of the apparatus over the party, already accomplished at the time of the Thirteenth Party Congress, the differences arising within the apparatus itself find no way out, for to appeal to the party for a real decision would mean to subject the apparatus to it again. Only that apparatus grouping which is assured of a majority in advance is inclined to decide a disputed question by resorting to the methods of apparatus democracy, that is, to balloting the members of the secret faction. The result is that inside the ruling apparatus faction, antagonistic factions arise that do not strive so much to capture the majority within the common faction as to seek for support in the institutions of the state apparatus. As regards the majority at the party congress, the latter is automatically assured, for the Congress can be convoked whenever it is most convenient and prepared to suit. That is how the usurpation of the apparatus develops which constitutes the most terrible danger both to the party and to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

After the first “anti-Trotskyist” campaign in 1923-24 was carried through with the aid of this apparatus faction, a deep schism took place within the underground faction headed by the Septumvirate. The fundamental reason for this was the class dissatisfaction of the Leningrad proletarian vanguard with the incipient down-sliding in questions of internal as well as international policy. The advanced Leningrad workers continued in 1925 the work begun by the advanced workers of Moscow in 1923. But these deep class tendencies could not manifest themselves openly in the party. They were reflected in the muffled struggle within the apparatus faction.

In April 1925, the Central Committee sent out a circular letter to the whole party which denied the rumors allegedly spread by the “Trotskyists” (!!) that differences of opinion on the peasantry existed within the nucleus of the “Leninists,” that is, within the factional Septumvirate. It was only from this circular letter that broader party cadres learned that such differences of opinion actually existed; but this did not at all prevent the leading cadre from continuing to deceive the party membership with the assertion that the “Opposition” was allegedly disrupting the monolithism of the “Leninist Guard.” This propaganda was pounding away at full speed when the Fourteenth Party Congress precipitated upon the party the amorphous and confused differences between the two sections of the reigning faction, differences that were, nevertheless, profound in their class sources. At the very last moment before the Party Congress, the Moscow and the Leningrad organizations, that is, the two main fortresses of the party, adopted resolutions at their district conferences of a directly opposite character. It is self-understood that both were adopted unanimously. Moscow explained this miracle of “revolutionary order” by charging use of force by the apparatus in Leningrad, and Leningrad reciprocated by accusing Moscow. As though there existed some sort of impenetrable wall between the Moscow and Leningrad organizations! In both cases the party apparatus always decided, demonstrating with its hundred percent monolithism that in all the fundamental questions of party life there is no party.

The Fourteenth Party Congress found itself compelled to settle new differences of opinion on various basic questions and to determine a new composition of the leadership behind the back of the unconsulted party. The Congress was left no alternative other than to leave this decision immediately to a scrupulously handpicked hierarchy of party secretaries. The Fourteenth Party Congress was a new milestone on the road to the liquidation of party democracy by the methods of “order,” that is, the arbitrary power of the masked apparatus faction. The next stage of the struggle took place only a little while ago. The art of the reigning faction consisted of always confronting the party with an already adopted decision, an irreparable situation, an accomplished fact.

This new and higher stage of “revolutionary order,” however, did not by any means signify the liquidation of factions and groups. On the contrary, they attained an extreme development and sharpness within the party masses as well as within the party apparatus. So far as the party was concerned, the bureaucratic chastisement of the “groupings” became ever sharper and here demonstrated its impotence, descending to the infamy of the Wrangel officer and Article 58. At the same time, a process of a new split within the reigning faction itself took place and this process is even now developing further. Certainly, even now there is no lack of mendacious demonstrations of monolithism and of circular letters vouching for the complete unanimity of the tops. As a matter of fact, all indications are that the muffled struggle within the closed apparatus faction, violent because of its impassability, has assumed an extremely tense character and is driving the party to some new explosion.

Such is the theory and practice of “revolutionary order” which is being inevitably transformed into the theory and practice of usurpation.

These things, however, have not been confined to the Soviet Union. In 1923, the campaign against factionalism proceeded mainly from the argument that factions represent the embryos of new parties; and that in a country with an overwhelming peasant majority and surrounded by capitalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot allow freedom of parties. In itself, this postulate is absolutely correct. But it also requires a correct policy and a correct regime. It is clear, however, that such a formulation of the question signified the discarding of any extension to the communist parties in the bourgeois states of the resolution adopted at the Tenth Congress of the ruling CPSU But a bureaucratic regime has a devouring logic of its own. If it tolerates no democratic control within the Soviet party, then it tolerates it all the less within the Comintern which stands formally above the CPSU That is why the leadership made a universal principle out of its rude and disloyal interpretation and application of the resolution of the Tenth Party Congress – which met the specific requirements at the time in the USSR – and extended it over all the communist organizations on the terrestrial globe.

Bolshevism was always strong because of its historical concreteness in elaborating organizational forms. No arid schemes. The Bolsheviks changed their organizational structure radically at every transition from one stage to the next. Yet, today, one and the same principle of “revolutionary order” is applied to the powerful party of the proletarian dictatorship as well as to the German Communist Party which represents a serious political force, to the young Chinese party which was immediately drawn into the vortex of revolutionary struggles, and to the party of the USA which is only a small propaganda society. In the latter, no sooner did doubts arise as to the correctness of the methods foisted upon it by a Pepper, in command at the time, than the “doubters” were subjected to chastisement for factionalism. A young party representing a political organism in a completely embryonic stage, without any real contact with the masses, without the experience of a revolutionary leadership, and without theoretical schooling, has already been armed from head to foot with all the attributes of a “revolutionary order,” fitted with which it resembles a six-year-old boy wearing his father’s accoutrement.

The CPSU has the greatest wealth of experience in the domain of ideology and revolution. But as the last five years showed, even the CPSU has been unable to live with impunity for a single day on the interest of its capital alone, but is obliged to renew and expand it constantly, and this is possible only through a collective working of the party mind. And what, then, need be said of the communist parties in other countries which were formed a few years ago and are just passing through the initial stage of accumulating theoretical knowledge and practical ability? Without a real freedom of party life, freedom of discussion, and freedom of establishing their course collectively, and by means of groupings, these parties will never become a decisive revolutionary force.

Prior to the Tenth Party Congress which prohibited the formation of factions, the CPSU had existed two decades without such a prohibition. And precisely these two decades so trained and prepared it that it was able to accept and endure the harsh decisions of the Tenth Party Congress at the time of a most difficult turn. The communist parties of the West, however, proceed from this point at the very outset.

Together with Lenin, we feared most of all that the CPSU, armed with the mighty resources of the state, would exert an excessive and crushing influence upon the young parties of the West that were just being organized. Lenin warned tirelessly against premature strides along the road of centralism, against the excessive tendencies of the ECCI and the Presidium in this direction and, especially, against such forms and methods of assistance as transform themselves into direct commands from which there is no appeal.

The change began in 1924 under the name of “Bolshevization.” If by Bolshevization is understood the purging of the party of alien elements and habits, of social democratic functionaries clinging to their posts, of freemasons, pacifist-democrats, idealistic muddleheads, etc., then this work was being performed from the very first day of the Comintern’s existence; at the Fourth Congress, this work with regard to the French party even assumed extremely sharp combat forms. But previously this genuine Bolshevization was inseparably connected with the individual experiences of the national sections of the Comintern, grew out of these experiences, and had as its touchstone questions of national policy which grew to the point of becoming international tasks. The “Bolshevization” of 1924 assumed completely the character of a caricature. A revolver was held at the temples of the leading organs of the communist parties with the demand that they adopt immediately a, final position on the internal disputes in the CPSU without any information and any discussion; and besides they were aware in advance that on the position they took depended whether or not they could remain in the Comintern. Yet, the European communist parties were in no sense equipped in 1924 for a rapid-fire decision on the questions under discussion in Russia where, just at that time, two principled tendencies were in the formative stage, growing out of the new stage of the proletarian dictatorship. Of course, the work of purging was also necessary after 1924 and alien elements were quite correctly removed from many sections. But taken as a whole, the “Bolshevization” consisted in this: that with the wedge of the Russian disputes, driven from above with the hammer blows of the state apparatus, the leaderships being formed at the moment in the communist parties of the West were disorganized over and over again. All this went on under the banner of struggle against factionalism.

If a faction which threatens to paralyze its fighting ability for a long time does crystallize inside the party of the proletarian vanguard, the party will then naturally always be confronted with the necessity to decide whether to allot more time for a supplementary re-examination or to recognize immediately that the split is unavoidable. A fighting party can never be the sum of factions that pull in opposite directions. This is incontestably true, if taken in this general form. But to employ the split as a preventive measure against differences of opinion and to lop off every group and grouping that raises a voice of criticism, is to transform the internal life of the party into a chain of organizational abortions. Such methods do not promote the continuation and the development of the species but only exhaust the maternal organism, that is, the party. The struggle against factionalism becomes infinitely more dangerous than the formation of factions itself.

At the present time, we have a situation in which the actual initiators and founders of almost all the communist parties of the world have been placed outside of the International, not excepting even its former chairman. The leading groups of the two consecutive stages in party development are either expelled or removed from leadership in almost all the parties. In Germany the Brandler group today still finds itself in the position of semi-party membership. The Maslow group is outside the party. In France are expelled the old groups of Rosmer, Monatte, Loriot, Souvarine, as well as the leading group of the subsequent period, Girault-Treint. In Belgium, the basic group of Van Overstraeten has been expelled. If the Bordiga group, the founder of the Communist Party in Italy, is only half expelled that is to be accounted for by the conditions of the Fascist regime. In Czechoslovakia, in Sweden, in Norway, in the United States, in a word, in almost all the parties of the world we perceive more or less similar phenomena which arose in the post-Leninist period.

It is incontestable that many of the expelled committed the greatest mistakes; and we have not been behindhand in pointing them out. It is equally true that many of the expelled, after they were cut off from the Comintern, have to a great extent returned to their former points of departure, to the Left social democracy or syndicalism. But the task of the leadership of the Comintern by no means consists in driving the young leaderships of the national parties into a blind alley every time, and thus dooming their individual representatives to ideological degeneration. The “revolutionary order” of the bureaucratic leadership stands as a terrible obstacle in the path of the development of all the parties of the Communist International.

Organizational questions are inseparable from questions of program and tactics. We must take clearly into account the fact that one of the most important sources of opportunism in the Comintern is the bureaucratic regime of the apparatus in the Comintern itself as well as in its leading party. There cannot be any doubt after the experience of the years 1923-1928 that bureaucratism in the Soviet Union is the expression and the instrument of the pressure exerted by the non-proletarian classes upon the proletariat. The draft program of the Comintern contains a correct formulation on this score when it says that bureaucratic perversions “arise inevitably on the soil of an insufficient cultural level of the masses and of class influences alien to the proletariat.” Here we have the key to the understanding not only of bureaucratism in general but also of its extraordinary growth in the last five years. The cultural level of the masses, while remaining insufficient, has been rising constantly in this period (and this is incontestable); therefore, the cause for the growth of bureaucratism is to be sought only in the growth of class influences alien to the proletariat. In proportion as the European communist parties, i.e., primarily their directing bodies, aligned themselves organizationally with the shifts and regroupings in the apparatus of the CPSU, the bureaucratism of the communist parties abroad was for the most part only a reflection and a supplement of the bureaucratism within the CPSU.

The selection of the leading elements in the communist parties has proceeded and still proceeds mainly from the standpoint of their readiness to accept and approve the very latest apparatus grouping in the CPSU The more independent and responsible elements in the leadership of the parties abroad who refused to submit to shuffling and reshuffling in a purely administrative manner, were either expelled from the party altogether or they were driven into the Right (often the pseudo-Right) wing, or, finally, they entered the ranks of the Left Opposition. In this manner, the organic process of the selection and welding together of the revolutionary cadres, on the basis of the proletarian struggle under the leadership of the Comintern was cut short, altered, distorted, and in part even directly replaced by the administrative and bureaucratic sifting from above. Quite naturally, those leading communists who were the readiest to adopt the ready-made decisions and to countersign any and all resolutions, frequently gained the upper hand over those party elements who were imbued with the feeling of revolutionary responsibility. Instead of a selection of tested and unwavering revolutionists, we have frequently had a selection of the best adapted bureaucrats.

All questions of internal and international policy invariably lead us back to the question of the internal party regime. Assuredly, deviations away from the class line in the questions of the Chinese revolution and the English labor movement, in the questions of the economy of the USSR, of wages, of taxes, etc., constitute in themselves a grave danger. But this danger is increased tenfold because the bureaucratic regime binds the party hand and foot and deprives it of any opportunity to correct the line of the leading party tops in a normal manner. The same applies to the Comintern as well. The resolution of the Fourteenth Party Congress of the CPSU on the necessity of a more democratic and more collective leadership in the Comintern has been transformed in practice into its antithesis. A change in the internal regime of the Comintern is becoming a life and death question for the international revolutionary movement. This change can be achieved in two ways: either hand in hand with a change in the internal regime in the CPSU or in the struggle against the leading role of the CPSU in the Comintern. Every effort must be made to assure the adoption of the first way. The struggle for the change of the internal regime in the CPSU is a struggle for regenerating the regime in the Comintern and for the preservation of the leading ideological role of our party in the Comintern.

For this reason, it is necessary to expunge ruthlessly from the program the very idea that living, active parties can be subordinated to the control of the “revolutionary order” of an irremovable governmental party bureaucracy. The party itself must be restored its rights. The party must once again become a party. This must be affirmed in the program in such words as will leave no room for the theoretical justification of bureaucratism and usurpatory tendencies.

12. The Causes of the Defeat of the Opposition and Its Perspectives

The Left proletarian wing of the party which set down its views in a number of documents, the principal of which is the Platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition), has been subjected, beginning with the Fall of 1923 to systematic, organizational campaigns of extermination. The methods of repression were conditioned upon the character of the internal party regime which became more bureaucratic to the degree that the pressure exerted by the non-proletarian classes upon the proletariat grew stronger. The possibilities for the success of such methods were created by the general political character of the period in which the proletariat suffered the greatest defeats, the social democracy came to life again, while in the communist parties the Centrist-opportunist tendencies grew stronger, in addition to which Centrist systematically slid to the Right up to the recent months. The first onslaught against the Opposition was perpetrated immediately after the defeat of the German revolution and served, as it were, as a supplement of this defeat. This onslaught would have been utterly impossible with a victory of the German proletariat which would have raised extraordinarily the self-confidence of the proletariat of the USSR and therefore also its power of resistance to the pressure of the bourgeois classes, internally as well as externally, and to the party bureaucracy which transmits this pressure.

To render clearer the meaning of the regroupings that took place in the Comintern since the end of 1923 it would be highly important to examine step by step how the leading group explained its organizational “victories” over the Opposition at the various stages of its down-sliding. We are not in a position to do so within the framework of a criticism of the draft program. But it is sufficient for our purposes to examine how the first “victory” over the Opposition in September 1924 was viewed and explained. In his debut article on the question of international policy, Stalin said the following:

“The decisive victory of the revolutionary wing in the communist parties is the surest indication of the deepest revolutionary processes that are now, taking place within the working class ...”

And in another place in the same article:

“If we add to this the fact of the complete isolation of the opportunist currents in the CPSU, the picture is complete. The Fifth Congress only consolidated the victory of the revolutionary wing in the basic sections of the Communist International.”

Thus, the defeat of the Opposition in the CPSU was proclaimed to be the result of the fact that the European proletariat was going to the Left, was marching directly towards the revolution and was giving the revolutionary wing the ascendancy over the opportunists in all the sections of the Comintern. Today, some five years later, after the greatest defeat of the international proletariat in the Fall of 1923, Pravda finds itself compelled to admit that “the wave of a certain apathy and dejection which set in after the defeat of 1923 and which permitted German capital to consolidate its position” is only now beginning to disappear.

But, in that case, a question arises which is new for the present leadership of the Comintern but not for us: should not, then, the defeat of the Opposition in 1923 and the years that followed be explained not by a Leftward swing, but by a Rightward swing of the working class? The answer to this question is all-decisive.

The answer given at the Fifth Congress in 1924 and later on in various articles and speeches was clear and categorical: the strengthening of the revolutionary elements within the labor movement of Europe, the new rising wave, the approaching proletarian revolution’all these brought about the “debacle” of the Opposition.

Now, however, the sharp and prolonged turn of the political conjuncture after 1923 towards the Right and not towards the Left has already become a well established, generally recognized, and incontrovertible fact. Consequently, the other fact is equally incontrovertible, to wit, that the inception and intensification of the struggle against the Opposition and the accentuation of this struggle up to the point of expulsions and exile is most closely connected with the political process of bourgeois stabilization in Europe. To be sure, this process was interrupted during the last four years by major revolutionary events. But new mistakes of the leadership, even more grievous than those of 1923 in Germany, gave the victory to the enemy each time under the worst possible conditions for the proletariat and the communist party and thereby created new sources of sustenance for bourgeois stabilization. The international revolutionary movement suffered defeats and together with it the Left, proletarian Leninist wing of the CPSU and the Comintern went down in defeat.

This explanation would be incomplete were we to overlook the internal process in the economic and political life of the USSR arising out of this world situation; namely, that the contradictions on the basis of the NEP were growing while the leadership did not correctly understand the problem of the economic “smychka” between the city and the country, underestimated the disproportions and the tasks of industrialization, did not grasp the significance of a planned economy, etc.

The growth of the economic and political pressure of the bureaucratic and petty bourgeois strata within the country on the basis of defeats of the proletarian revolution in Europe and Asia’that was the historical chain which tightened around the neck of the Opposition during these four years. Whoever fails to understand this will understand nothing at all.

In this analysis we have been compelled at almost every single important stage to oppose the line which was rejected under the name of Trotskyism to the line that was actually carried through. The meaning of this struggle in its generalized aspects is distinctly clear to every Marxist. If the occasional and partial charges of “Trotskyism” corroborated by adducing a mass of actual and imaginary quotations of the last twenty-five years could temporarily confuse, then the cohesive and generalized evaluation of the ideological struggle of the last five years is proof of the fact that two lines were at hand here. One of them was a conscious and consistent line; it was a continuation and development of the theoretical and strategical principles of Lenin in their application to the internal questions of the USSR and the questions of the world revolution; it was the line of the Opposition. The second line was an unconscious, contradictory, and vacillating line, sliding down in zigzags from Leninism under the pressure of hostile class forces in the period of the international political reflux; this was the line of the official leadership. At great turning points men frequently find it easier to abandon their conceptions than the habitual phraseology. That is a general law of all those whose ideological colors fade. While revising Lenin in almost all essential points, the leadership passed off this revisionism as a development of Leninism and at the same time characterized the international revolutionary essence of Leninism as Trotskyism. It did this not only in order to mask itself both outwardly and inwardly but also in order to adapt itself more easily to the process of its own down-sliding.

Whoever wants to understand this will not fling at us the cheap reproach that we have connected the criticism of the draft program with an exposure of the legend of Trotskyism. The present draft program is the product of an ideological epoch that was permeated with this legend. The authors of the draft were the ones who fed this legend the most, who always proceeded from it and utilized it as the measuring rod of all things. The whole draft is a reflection of precisely this epoch.

Political history has been enriched by a new and extraordinarily instructive chapter. It might be entitled the chapter on the Power of Mythology, or more simply, Ideological Calumny as a Political Weapon. Experience teaches us that it is impermissible to underestimate this weapon. We have still far from accomplished “the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom,” and we still live in a class society which is unthinkable without obscurantism, prejudices, and superstitions. A myth that corresponds to certain interests or traditional customs can always wield a great power in a class society. But on the basis of a myth alone, even if it is planfully organized and has at its disposal all the resources of state power, no great policy can be carried on, least of all a revolutionary policy, especially in our epoch of abrupt changes. Mythology must inevitably become entangled in the web of its own contradictions. We have already mentioned a small part, though perhaps the most important part of these contradictions. Quite independently of whether external circumstances will permit us to carry out our analysis to the end, we firmly take into consideration that our subjective analysis will be supported by the objective analysis which historical events will provide.

The radicalization of the working masses of Europe which found its expression in the last parliamentary elections is an indisputable fact. But this radicalization is now passing only through its initial stages. Such factors as the recent defeat of the Chinese revolution militate against the radicalization and drive for the most part into social democratic channels. We do not at all intend to predict here the tempo at which this process will proceed in the near future. But in any case it is clear that this radicalization will be the harbinger of a new revolutionary situation only from the moment that the gravitation toward the communist party begins to grow at the expense of the great reserves of the social democracy. Such is not the case as yet. But this must take place with iron necessity.

The present indefinite orientation of the Comintern leadership, with its internally discordant endeavors to turn the helm to the Left without changing the whole regime and putting a stop to the organizational struggle against the most tested revolutionary elements’this contradictory orientation has arisen not only under the blows of the internal economic difficulties of the USSR which fully confirmed the prognosis of the Opposition; but it also corresponds fully to the first stage of the radicalization of the European working masses. The eclecticism of the policy of the Comintern leadership, the eclecticism of the draft program represent, as it were, a snapshot of the present condition of the international working class, which is driven to the Left by the course of development but has not yet fixed its course, giving more than nine million votes to the German social democracy.

The further genuine revolutionary upsurge will signify a colossal regrouping within the working class, in all its organizations, including the Comintern. The tempo of this process is still unclear but the lines along which the crystallization will occur are clearly discernible. The working masses will pass from the social democracy to the communist party, section by section. The axis of communist policy will shift over more from Right to Left. Concurrently, a demand will increasingly rise for the consistent Bolshevik line of the group that was able to swim against the stream despite the hailstorm of accusations and persecutions since the defeat of the German proletariat at the end of 1923.

The organizational methods by which the ideas of genuine, unfalsified Leninism will triumph in the Comintern and consequently in the whole international proletariat depend very largely upon the present leadership of the Comintern and consequently directly upon the Sixth Congress.

However, whatever he the decisions of this Congress – we are prepared for the worst – the general estimate of the present epoch and its inner tendencies and especially the evaluation of the experiences of the last five years indicate to us that the Opposition needs no other channel than that of the Comintern. No one will succeed in tearing us away from it. The ideas we defend will become its ideas. They will find their expression in the program of the Communist International.