IV. What Now?

PART I[edit source]

1. The Aim of This Letter[edit source]

The purpose of this letter is to achieve clarity without suppressing or exaggerating anything. Clarity is the indispensable condition for revolutionary policy.

This attempt to arrive at an understanding can have meaning only if it is free from all traces of reticence, duplicity, and diplomacy. This requires that all things be called by their names, including those which are most unpleasant and grievous for the party. It has been the custom in such cases to raise a hue and cry that the enemy will seize upon the criticism and use it. At the present moment, it would be maladroit to pose the question of whether the class enemy can glean the greatest profit from the policy of the leadership that has led the Chinese revolution to its cruel lest defeats, or from the stifled warnings of the Opposition that have disturbed the false prestige of infallibility.

The same thing might be said on the question of the Anglo-Russian Committee, the grain collections, the kulak in general, and the line followed by the leadership of any communist party. No, it is not the criticism of the Opposition that has retarded the growth of the Comintern during the last five years. The social democracy has no doubt attempted in a number of instances to glean a little profit from the criticisms of the Opposition. It still has enough sense and cunning for that. It would have been strange had it failed to do so. The social democracy at present is a parasitic party, in the broad historical sense of the term. Fulfilling the work of guaranteeing bourgeois society from below, that is to say, protecting it on the essential side, the social democracy during the post-war years, particularly after the year 1923, when it was obviously being reduced to a cipher, has thrived upon the mistakes and oversights of the communist parties, their capitulations at the decisive moments, or, on the other hand, their adventuristic attempts to resuscitate a revolutionary situation which has already passed. The capitulation of the Comintern in the Autumn of 1923, the subsequent stubborn failure of the leadership to understand the import of this colossal defeat, the adventuristic ultra-left line of 1924 to 1925, the gross opportunist policy of 1926 to 1927 – these are what caused the regeneration of the social democracy and enabled it to poll more than nine million votes in the last German elections. To argue, under these conditions, that the social democracy now and then pulls out of its context some critical remark or other of the Opposition, and after slobbering over it offers it to the workers, is really to waste time with bagatelles. The social democracy would not be what it is if it did not go even further, if in the guise of its Left wing – which is as necessary a safety valve in a social democratic party as the party itself is in bourgeois society – it did not express from time to time spurious “sympathies” for the Opposition, in so far as the latter remains a small and suppressed minority and inasmuch as such “sympathies” cost the social democrats nothing and at the same time arouse the responsive sympathies of the workers.

The present social democracy has not and cannot have a line of its own on the fundamental questions. In this domain, its line is dictated by the bourgeoisie. But if the social democracy simply repeated everything said by the bourgeois parties, it would cease to be useful to the bourgeoisie. Upon secondary, intangible, or remote questions, the social democracy not only may but must play with all the colors of the rainbow, including bright red. Moreover, by seizing upon this or that judgment of the Opposition, the social democracy hopes to provoke a split in the communist party. In the eyes of anyone who understands the workings of such a mechanism, the attempts to discredit the Opposition by referring to the fact that some Right wing grafter or Left wing stripling of the social democracy quotes approvingly a sentence from our criticism, must appear in a pitiable ideological light. Basically, however, in all questions of politics that are in the least serious, above all in the questions of China and of the Anglo-Russian Committee, the sympathies of the international social democracy have been on the side of the “realistic” policy of the leadership, and in no wise on ours.

But much more important is the general judgment which the bourgeoisie itself passes on the tendencies struggling within the framework of the Soviet Union and of the Comintern. The bourgeoisie has no reason to dodge or dissemble on this question, and here it must be said that all – even the least – serious, important, and authoritative organs of world imperialism, on both sides of the ocean, consider the Opposition their mortal enemy. Throughout the entire recent period, they have either directly expressed their qualified and prudent sympathy for a number of measures taken by the official leadership, or they have expressed themselves to the effect that the total liquidation of the Opposition, its complete physical annihilation (Austen Chamberlain even demanded the firing squad), is the necessary premise for the “normal evolution” of the Soviet power towards a bourgeois regime. Even from memory, without having any sources for reference at our disposal, we can point to numerous declarations of this type: the Information Bulletin of French heavy industry (Jan. 1927), the pronouncements of the London and New York Times, the declaration of Austen Chamberlain, which was reprinted by many publications, including the American weekly, The Nation, etc. The fact alone has been sufficient to compel our official party press, after its initial and not entirely successful attempts, to stop entirely reprinting the judgments passed by our class enemies upon the crisis which our party has undergone during the last months and is still undergoing. These declarations have emphasized much too sharply the revolutionary class nature of the Opposition.

We believe, therefore, that a great deal would be gained for the cause of clarity, if by the time the Sixth Congress convened two conscientiously collated books were published: a White Book containing the judgments of the serious capitalist press with regard to the controversies in the Comintern, and a Yellow Book with parallel judgments of the social democracy.

In any case, the fake bogey of the possible attempts on the part of the social democrats to involve themselves in our disputes will not keep us for a moment from pointing out clearly and precisely what we consider to be fatal for the policy of the Comintern, and what, in our opinion, is salutary. We will be able to crush it, not by resorting to diplomacy, not by playing hide-and-seek, but by means of that correct revolutionary policy which is still to be elaborated.

* * *

At this time, with the publication of the draft program, all the fundamental theoretical and practical problems of the international proletarian revolution must naturally be examined in the light of the new draft. In fact, the task of the latter consists in furnishing, along with a theoretic method of handling the problems to be considered, a generalized verification and appraisal of all the experience already acquired by the Comintern. It is only by viewing the problem in this way that me can succeed in checking up and in arriving at a healthy judgment of the draft itself, in establishing the extent of its accuracy with regard to principles and the degree of its completeness and viability. We have formulated this criticism, in so far as it could be done in the very limited amount of time at our disposal, in a special document devoted to the draft program. The fundamental problems which it seemed to us most essential to illumine in our criticism, we grouped into the three following chapters:

The Program of the International Revolution or the Program of Socialism in One Country?
The Strategy and Tactics of the Imperialist Epoch.
Balance and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution, Its Lessons for the Countries of the East and for the Communist International as a Whole.

We have endeavored to analyze these problems by examining the living experience of the international workers’ movement and more particularly that of the Comintern during the last five years. From it we drew the conclusion that the new draft is completely inconsistent, shot through with eclecticism in its principled theses, lacking in system, incomplete, and patchy in its exposition. The section dealing with strategy is primarily characterized by its tendency to avoid the profound and tragic questions of revolutionary experience in the last few years.

We shall not here return to the questions examined in the document already sent to the Congress. The aim of the present letter is altogether different, as can readily be seen from what has been said above. It has to do, let us say, with conjuncture and policy: in the general perspective, we must find what is the exact place occupied by the Leftward turn now officially effected, in order to make it a point of departure for the rapprochement of tendencies existing in the Communist Party of the USSR and in the Comintern, which up to yesterday were drawing further and further apart. Obviously, there can be no question of a rapprochement save on the basis of perfect clarity in ideas and not at all on that of flattery or of bureaucratic Byzantinism.

This turn has manifested itself most crassly by far in the internal problems of the USSR, whence came the impulsion which produced it. We therefore intend to devote this letter mainly to problems of the crisis in the CPSU, which is a result of the crisis in the Soviet revolution. But since, while examining the cardinal questions of the evolution of the workers’ state we cannot in any way “abstract ourselves from the international factor,” which is of decisive importance in all our internal developments and problems, we are compelled, in this letter also, to characterize briefly the conditions and methods of work of the Comintern, by repeating certain of our theses devoted to the draft program.

As a conclusion to these introductory observations, I wish to express my firm conviction that the criticism of the draft program, as well as the present letter to the congress, will be brought to the attention of all the members of the congress. I have an indefeasible right to that, if only because the Fifth Congress elected me an alternate on the Executive Committee. This letter, considered formally, is a statement of the reasons for my appeal against the unjust decisions that have deprived me of the rights and duties with which I was charged at the supreme order of the Comintern.

2. Why Has No Congress of the Comintern Been Convoked for More Than Four Years?[edit source]

More than four years have elapsed since the Fifth World Congress. During this period, the line of the leadership has been radically altered, together with the composition of the leadership of different sections, as well as of the Comintern as a whole. The chairman elected by the Fifth Congress has been not only deposed but even expelled from the party, and readmitted only on the eve of the Sixth Congress. All this was effected without the participation of a congress, although there were no objective obstacles to prevent its being convoked. In the most vital questions of the world working class movement and of the Soviet republic, the Congress of the Comintern proved to be superfluous; it was adjourned from year to veer as an obstacle and a dead weight. It was convoked only at a time when the conclusion was reached that the congress would be confronted with entirely accomplished facts.

According to the letter and spirit of democratic centralism, the congress should occupy a decisive place in the life of the party. This life has always found its supreme expression in the congresses, their preparation, and their work. At the present time, the congresses have become a dead weight and an onerous formality. The Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU was arbitrarily postponed for more than a year. The Congress of the Comintern has convened after a lapse of four years. And what years! In the course of these four years, filled with the greatest historical events and most profound differences in views, plenty of time was found for countless bureaucratic congresses and conferences, for the utterly rotten conferences of the Anglo-Russian Committee, for the congresses of the decorative League of Struggle Against Imperialism, for the jubilee theatrical congress of the Friends of the Soviet Union’the only time and place that could not be found was for the three regular congresses of the Communist International.

During the civil war and the blockade, when the foreign delegates had to overcome unprecedented difficulties, and when some of them lost their lives en route, the congresses of the CPSU and of the Comintern convened regularly in conformance with the statutes and the spirit of the proletarian party. Why is this not being done now? To pretend that we are now too busy with “practical” work is simply to recognize that the mind and the will of the party hinder the work of the leadership and that the congresses are a fetter in the most serious and important affairs. This is the road of the bureaucratic liquidation of the party.

Formally, during these last four years and more, all questions have been decided by the ECCI or by the Presidium; as a matter of fact, however, they were decided by the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or rather, to be more precise, by the Secretariat, basing itself upon the party apparatus that depends upon it. In question here is not, of course, the ideological influence of the CPSU This influence was infinitely greater under Lenin than it is today, and it had a mighty creative importance. No, what is in question here is the almighty Secretariat of the CEC of the CPSU, functioning purely behind the scenes – a phenomenon of which there was not even a sign under Lenin and against which Lenin strictly warned in the last advice he gave to the party.

The Comintern has been proclaimed the only international party to which all national sections are completely subordinated. In this question Lenin played the role of moderator to the end of his days. On more than one occasion he warned against centralist predilections on the part of the leadership, fearing that, if the political pre-conditions were lacking, centralism would degenerate into bureaucratism. The development of the political and ideological maturity of the communist parties has its own internal rhythm, based on their own experiences. The existence of the Comintern and the decisive role played in it by the CPSU can accelerate this rhythm. But this acceleration can be conceived only within certain imperative limits. When they are overstepped by attempts to substitute strictly administrative measures for independent activity, for self-criticism, for the capacity of self-orientation, directly opposite results may be attained, and in a whole series of cases such directly opposite results have been reached. Nevertheless, when Lenin ceased working, the ultra-centralist manner of handling questions was the one which triumphed. The Executive Committee was proclaimed as the central committee with full powers in the united world party, responsible only to the congresses of the world party. But what do we see in reality? The congresses were not called precisely when they were most needed: the Chinese revolution by itself would have justified the calling of two congresses. Theoretically, the Executive Committee is a powerful center of the world workers’ movement; in reality, during the past few years it has been repeatedly revamped in a ruthless fashion. Certain of its members, elected by the Fifth Congress, who played a leading role within it, were deposed. The same thing took place in all the sections of the Comintern, or at least in the most important ones. Who was it, then, that revamped the Executive Committee, which is responsible only to the congress, if the latter was not convoked? The answer is quite clear. The directing nucleus of the CPSU, whose personnel was changing, selected each time anew the members of the Executive Committee, in complete disregard of the statutes of the Comintern and the decisions of the Fifth Congress.

The changes effected in the directing nucleus of the CPSU itself were likewise always introduced in some unexpected fashion, behind the back not only of the Comintern, but of the CPSU itself, in the interval between congresses and independent of the latter, by means of physical force on the part of the apparatus.

The “art” of leadership consisted of confronting the party with a fait accompli. Then the congress, postponed in conformity with the workings of the mechanism operating behind the scenes, was selected in a manner corresponding rigorously with the new composition of the leadership. At the same time the directing nucleus of the preceding day, elected by the previous congress, was simply labeled as an “anti-party summit.”

It would take too long to enumerate all the most important stages of this process. I shall limit myself to citing a single fact, but one which is worth a dozen. The Fifth Congress, not only from the formal point of view, but in fact as well, was headed by the Zinoviev group. It is precisely this group that gave the fundamental tone to this congress, by its struggle against so-called “Trotskyism.” The needs engendered behind the scenes and the machinations of this struggle contributed in great measure to creating the deviation in the entire orientation of the congress. This became the source of tile greatest errors during the years that followed. They are discussed in detail elsewhere. Here we need only single out the fact that the leading faction of the Fifth Congress was unable to maintain itself until the Sixth Congress in any party of the Comintern. As for the central group of this faction, it affirmed, in the person of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, and others, in the declaration of July 1926, that “at the present time there can no longer be any doubt that the principal nucleus of the Opposition of 1923 correctly warned against the dangers of deviating from the proletarian line and against the menacing growth of the apparatus regime.”

But that is not all. At the time of the joint Plenum of the Central Committee and of the Central Control Commission (July 14-23, 1926), Zinoviev, the director and inspirer of the Fifth Congress, declared – and this stenographic declaration was published again by the Central Committee before the Fifteenth Party Congress – that he, Zinoviev, considered as “the principal errors committed during his life,” the following two: his mistake of 1917 and his struggle against the Opposition of 1923.

“I consider,” said Zinoviev, “the second error as being more dangerous, for the mistake of 1917, committed during Lenin’s life, was rectified by Lenin ... whereas my error of 1923 consisted in the fact that ...”

ORDJONIKIDZE: “Then why did you stuff the heads of everyone in the party? ...”

ZINOVIEV: “Yes, in the question of the deviation and in the question of bureaucratic oppression by the apparatus, Trotsky proved to be correct as against you.”

But the question of back-sliding, that is to say of the political line, and that of the party regime, completely comprise the sum total of the divergences. Zinoviev, in 1926, concluded that the Opposition of 1923 was right on these questions, and that the greatest error of his life, greater even than his resistance to the October overturn, was the struggle he conducted in 1923-1925 against “Trotskyism.” Nevertheless, in the course of the last few days, the newspapers have published a decision of the Central Control Commission re-admitting Zinoviev and Co. into the party, as they had “renounced their Trotskyist follies.” This whole, absolutely incredible episode, which will seem like the work of some satirist to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren – although it is completely attested by documents – would perhaps not warrant mention in this letter if it concerned only a person or a group, if the affair were not intimately bound up with the ideological struggle that has been waged in the Comintern for the past few years, if it had not grown organically from the same conditions that permitted dispensing with the congress for four years, that is to say, by virtue of the unrestricted power of bureaucratic methods.

At the present time, the ideology of the Comintern is not guided but manufactured to order. Theory, ceasing to be an instrument of knowledge and foresight, has become an administrative technical tool. Certain views are attributed to the Opposition and on the basis of these “views” the Opposition is judged. Certain individuals are associated with “Trotskyism” and are subsequently recalled as if it were a matter of functionaries constituting the personnel of a chancellery. The case of Zinoviev is not at all exceptional. It is simply more outstanding than the others, for after all no less a person than the ex-chairman of the Comintern is involved, the director and inspirer of the Fifth Congress.

Ideological upheavals of this type inevitably accompany organizational upheavals, which always come from above and which have already been constituted into a system, forming in a way the normal regime not only of the CPSU but also of other parties in the Comintern. The official reasons for deposing an undesirable leadership rarely coincide with the true motives. Duplicity in the domain of ideas is an inevitable consequence of the complete bureaucratization of the regime. More than once in the course of these years have the leading elements of the communist parties in Germany, France, England, America, Poland, etc., resorted to monstrous opportunist measures. But they went completely unpunished, for they were protected by the position they took on the internal questions of the CPSU To vote, and even more, to howl against the Opposition, is to insure oneself against any blows from above. As for the blows which might come from below, a guarantee against them is furnished by the fact that the apparatus is free from any control.

The latest instances are still very fresh in everybody’s mind. Up to very recently, the Chinese leadership of Chen Tu-hsiu, of Tang Ping-shan, and Co., completely Menshevik, enjoyed the full support of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, as against the criticism of the Opposition. There is nothing astonishing in that: at the time of the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, Tang Ping-shan swore that:

“... At the very first appearance of Trotskyism, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Communist Youth unanimously adopted a resolution against Trotskyism.”^[1]

An enormous role is played in the ECCI itself and within its apparatus by elements which resisted and hindered, in so far as they were able, the proletarian revolution in Russia, Finland, Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and other countries, but who, in good time, made up for this by presenting their credentials in the struggle against “Trotskyism.” Tang Ping-shan is only the disciple of these elements; if abuse is heaped on him, while his masters are able to evade it, it is because the irresponsible regime requires an occasional scapegoat.

It is unfortunately impossible not alone to dispute, but even to endeavor to soften the formal assertion that the most outstanding, the most general, and at the same time, the most perilous characteristic trait of the last five years has been the gradual and increasingly accelerated growth of bureaucratism and of the arbitrariness which is linked with it, not only in the CPSU but in the Comintern as a whole.

The ignoring of and trampling upon statutes, the continual creation of upheavals in the organization and in the domain of ideas, the postponement of congresses, and conferences which are each time confronted with accomplished facts, the growth of arbitrariness’all this can not be accidental, all this must have profound causes.

It would be unworthy of Marxism to explain these phenomena solely or principally on personal grounds, as the struggle of cliques for power, etc. It goes without saying that all factors of this kind play an important role (see the Testament of Lenin). But involved here is so profound and so prolonged a process that its causes must be not only psychological but political as well, and so indeed they are.

The principal source of the bureaucratization of the whole regime of the CPSU and the Comintern, lies in the ever increasing gap between the political line of the leadership and the historical line of the proletariat. The less these two lines have coincided, the more the line of the leadership has revealed itself refuted by events, the harder it has been to apply the line by resorting to party measures, by exposing it to criticism, and the more it has had to he imposed on the party from above, by measures of the apparatus and even of the state.

But the growth of the gap between the line of the leadership and the historical line of the proletariat, that is to say, the Bolshevik line, can occur only under the pressure of non-proletarian classes. This pressure, considered generally, has grown to extraordinary proportions in the course of the last five years, cutting across violent oscillations in both directions, throughout the world as well as inside the USSR. The more the apparatus freed itself from the criticism and control of its own party, so much the more did the leadership become susceptible and conciliatory to the aspirations and suggestions of non-proletarian classes, transmitted through the medium of the apparatus. This operated to shift the political line still further to the Right and consequently required even harsher bureaucratic measures in order to impose it on the proletarian vanguard.

The process of political back-sliding was thus inevitably completed by organizational repressive measures. Under these conditions the leadership refused absolutely to tolerate Marxian criticism any longer. The bureaucratic regime is “formalistic”; scholasticism is the ideology most suitable to it. The last five years constitute in their entirety a period devoted to the scholastic distortion of Marxism and Leninism, to their slavish adaptation to the requirements of political back-sliding and the spirit of bureaucratic usurpation. “Allow the kulak to grow into socialism,” “enrich yourselves!” the recommendations “not to leap over stages,” the “bloc of four classes,” the “two-class parties,” “socialism in one country"’all these ideas and slogans of Centrism sliding to the Right have inevitably engendered the application of articles of the Penal Code against the real disciples of Marx and of Lenin.

It goes without saying that the Marxian interpretation of the causes of scholastic impoverishment, of the progress of bureaucratism and arbitrariness, does not in the least absolve the leadership from personal responsibility, but on the contrary makes that responsibility even greater.

PART II[edit source]

3. The Policy of 1923-1927[edit source]

Unquestionably, one of the prime motives behind the repeated postponements of the call for the Sixth Congress was the desire to await some great international victory. In such cases, men are apt more easily to forget recent defeats. But no victories were forthcoming, nor is this accidental.

During this period, European and world capitalism found themselves granted a new and serious reprieve. The social democracy strengthened itself considerably after 1923. The communist parties grew insignificantly’in any case, infinitely less than was presaged in the prophecies which inspired the Fifth Congress. We must note that this applies both to the organizations of the Comintern and to their influence among the masses. Taken together, the latter followed a declining curve from the Autumn of 1923 and during the whole period under consideration. It is doubtful if anyone can be found bold enough to assert that the communist parties were able in these four or five years to maintain the continuity and stability of their leadership. On the contrary, these qualities were found to be completely impaired even in the party where they were formerly most guaranteed: in the Communist Party of the USSR.

The Soviet republic made serious progress from the standpoint of economy and culture in the course of the elapsed period, demonstrating to the world for the first time the power and importance of socialist methods of management and especially the great possibilities lodged in them. But these successes developed on the basis of the so-called stabilization of capitalism, which itself was the result of a whole series of defeats of the world revolution. Not only did that considerably worsen the external situation of the Soviet republic, but it exercised a great influence upon the internal relation of forces in a direction hostile to the proletariat.

The fact that the USSR continues to exist, according to Lenin’s expression, as an “isolated frontier in a completely capitalist world,” has led, by virtue of an erroneous leadership, to forms of development of the national economy in which capitalist forces and tendencies have acquired a serious, or, more exactly, an alarming scope. Contrary to optimistic assertions, the internal relation of forces in economy and politics has changed to the disadvantage of the proletariat. Hence, a series of painful crises from which the CPSU has failed to emerge.

The fundamental cause of the crisis of the October Revolution is the retardation of the world revolution, caused by a whole series of cruel defeats of the proletariat. Up to 1923, these were the defeats of post-war movements and insurrections confronted with the non-existence of the communist parties at the beginning, and their youth and weakness subsequently. From 1923 on, the situation changed sharply. The no longer have before us simply defeats of the proletariat, but routs of the policy of the Comintern. The blunders committed by this policy in Germany, England, China, and those of smaller scope which were perpetrated in a whole series of other countries, are of such a nature as cannot be duplicated in the history of the Bolshevik party; to duplicate them, one is forced to examine the history of Menshevism during the years 1905-1917, or the decades preceding.

The retardation in growth of the Comintern is the immediate result of its erroneous policy during the last five years. There is no holding that the “stabilization” is responsible for it, save by conceiving the nature of the latter in a purely scholastic way, and particularly by trying to dodge the responsibility. The stabilization did not fall from the sky; it is not the fruit of an automatic change in the living conditions of world capitalist economy. It is the result of an unfavorable change in the political relation of class forces. The proletariat saw its forces drained by the capitulation of the leadership in Germany in 1923; it was tricked and betrayed in England by a leadership with which the Comintern continued to maintain a bloc in 1926; in China, the policy of the Executive Committee of the Comintern drove the proletariat into the noose of the Kuomintang in 1925-1927. These are the immediate and indisputable causes of the defeats, and what is no less important, these are the reasons for the demoralizing character of these failures. To try to prove that the defeats were inevitable even if the policy followed had been correct, is to fall into depraved fatalism and to renounce the Bolshevik conception of the role and importance of a revolutionary leadership.

The rout of the proletariat, conditioned by a false policy, provided the bourgeoisie with a respite from the political point of view. The bourgeoisie utilized the respite to consolidate its economic positions. These are the causes which furnished the point of departure for the period of stabilization that began on the day in October 1923 when the German Communist Party capitulated. To be sure, the consolidation of its economic positions obtained by the bourgeoisie acts in its turn as a “stabilizing” factor upon the political environment. But the fundamental cause of the ascendancy of capitalism during the period of stabilization of the last five years lies in the fact that the leadership of the Comintern did not measure up to the events from any point of view. Revolutionary situations were not lacking. But the leaders were chronically incapable of taking advantage of them. This defect is not of a personal or accidental character; it is the inevitable consequence of the Centrist course, which may camouflage its inconsistency during a period of lull but ineluctably brings about catastrophes during the abrupt changes of a revolutionary period.

The internal evolution of the USSR and of the leading party reflected completely the shifts in the international situation, thus refuting by example the new reactionary theories of isolated development and of socialism in one country. Naturally, the course of the leadership within the USSR was the same as that of the ECCI: Centrism sliding to the Right. In the internal policy, as well as on the international arena, it caused the same profound harm, weakening the economic and political positions of the proletariat.

In order to understand the significance of the turn to the Left now being effected, it is necessary to become completely and clearly cognizant not only of the general line of conduct swerving into Right Centrism, which was completely unmasked in 1926-27, but also the course during the preceding period of ultra-leftism of 1923-25 which prepared the backsliding. It is thus a matter of passing judgement on the five years after Lenin’s death, during which, under the pressure of hostile class forces and because of the instability and short-sightedness of the leadership, there ensued a correction, a modification, and an actual revision of Leninism in the matter both of internal and international problems.

As early as the Twelfth Congress of the CPSU, in the Spring of 1923, two positions stood out clearly on the issue of the economic problems of the Soviet Union; they developed during the five following years and may be checked in the light of the crisis in grain collections during the past winter. The Central Committee held that the principal danger threatening the alliance with the peasantry arose from a premature development of industry; it found confirmation of this point of view in the supposed “selling crisis” of the Autumn of 1923. Despite the episodic character of this crisis, it left a deep impression on the economic policy of the official leadership. The point of view which I had developed at the Twelfth Congress (Spring of 1923) advanced tile contrary estimate, that the essential danger threatening the “smychka” and the dictatorship of the proletariat lay in the “scissors” symbolizing the divergence between the prices of agricultural and industrial products, reflecting the backwardness of industry; the continuation, and even more so the accentuation, of this disproportion, would inevitably bring about a differentiation in agriculture and handicrafts and a general growth of capitalist forces. I had already developed this point of view very clearly as early as the Twelfth Congress. At that time I also formulated the idea, among others, that if industry remained backward, good harvests would become a mainspring for capitalist and not socialist tendencies; they would deliver into the hands of capitalist elements an instrument for disorganizing socialist economy.

These fundamental formulas presented by the two sides subsequently cut across the struggle of the succeeding five years. During these years, accusations, absurd and reactionary in their essence, continually resounded against the Opposition, declaring that “it is afraid of the muzhik,” that “it fears a good crop,” that “it fears the enrichment of the village,” or better yet, that “it wishes to plunder the peasant.” Thus, as early as the Twelfth Congress, and especially during the discussion of Autumn 1923, the official faction rejected class criteria and operated with notions like “peasantry” in general, “good crop” in general, “enrichment” in general. In this manner of treating the question, there was already making itself felt the pressure of new bourgeois layers, which were forming on the base of the NEP, which were connecting themselves with the state apparatus, which resisted repression and sought to evade the rays of the Leninist searchlight.

Events of an international order acquired a decisive importance in this process. The second half of 1923 was a period of tense expectation of the proletarian revolution in Germany.

The situation was evaluated at too late a date and in a hesitant way. Great friction was generated within the official Stalin-Zinoviev leadership; true, it remained within the framework of the common Centrist line. Despite all warnings, a change in tempo was undertaken only at the last moment; everything ended in a frightful capitulation by the leadership of the German Communist Party, which surrendered the decisive positions to the enemy without a struggle.

This defeat was of an alarming character in itself. But it acquired even more painful significance because the leadership of the ECCI, which in a very large measure caused this defeat by its policy of lagging at the tail of events, did not understand the extent of the rout, did not comprehend its great depth, simply failed to recognize it.

The leadership obstinately insisted that the revolutionary situation was continuing to develop and that decisive battles were going to be waged shortly. It is on the basis of this radically false evaluation that the Fifth Congress established its orientation towards the middle of 1924.

As against this, the Opposition, during the second half of 1923, sounded the alarm on the political denouément which was approaching, demanded a course truly directed towards armed insurrection, and insistently warned that in such historic moments, a few weeks, and sometimes a few days, decide the fate of the revolution for many years to come. On the other hand, during the following six months which preceded the Fifth Congress, the Opposition persistently repeated that the revolutionary situation was already missed; that sail had to be taken in, in expectation of contrary and unfavorable winds, that it was not the insurrection that was on the agenda, but defensive battles against an enemy which has assumed the offensive’uniting the masses for partial demands, creating points of support in the trade unions, etc.

But the clear understanding of what had taken place and what was imminent was branded as “Trotskyism,” and condemned as “liquidationism.” The Fifth Congress demonstratively oriented towards insurrection in the presence of a political ebb-tide. With a single stroke it disoriented all the communist parties by sowing confusion among them.

The year 1924, the year of the abrupt and clear swing towards stabilization, became the year of adventures in Bulgaria and in Esthonia, of the ultra-left course in general, which ran counter to the march of events with increasingly greater force. From this time dates the beginning of the quest for ready-made revolutionary forces outside the proletariat, whence the idealization of pseudo-peasant parties in various countries, the flirtation with Radic and LaFollette, the exaggeration of the role of the Peasant International to the detriment of the Red Trade Union International, the false evaluation of the English trade union leadership, a friendship above classes with the Kuomintang, etc. All of these crutches upon which the ultra-left course adventurously sought to support itself, subsequently became the principal pillars of the obviously Rightward course, which replaced the former after the ultra-leftists no longer found themselves faced with the situations that crashed against the process of stabilization of 1924-25.

The defeat of the German proletariat was the shock which precipitated a discussion in the Autumn of 1923 that had as its task, according to the conception of the official leadership of the CPSU, to approve as an internal policy the course of passive adaptation to spontaneous economic developments (struggle against. “super-industrialization,” ridicule of the planning principle, etc.). So far as international problems were concerned, the most important thing was to conceal the fact that the most assured of revolutionary situations had been missed.

Nevertheless, the fact of the rout of the German proletariat had penetrated the consciousness of the masses, which had been brought to high tension by the anxious waiting of 1923. The capitulation of the German leadership introduced into the ranks of the workers, not only in Germany but in the USSR as well, and also in other countries, elements of bitter skepticism towards the world revolution in general. The defeats in Bulgaria and Esthonia then came to add to this. Towards the middle of 1925, it finally became necessary to admit officially the existence of the stabilization (a year and a half after it visibly began); that was done at a time when profound fissures were already being produced in it (in England, in China). A certain disappointment in the world revolution, which likewise partly seized the masses, pushed the Centrist leadership towards strictly national perspectives, which were soon wretchedly crowned by the theory of socialism in one country.

The ultra-Leftism of 1924-1925, incapable of understanding the situation, was all the more brutally supplanted by a shift to the Right, which under the star of the theory of “not leaping over stages,” brought the policy of adaptation to the colonial bourgeoisie, to the petty bourgeois democracy and the trade union bureaucracy, to the kulaks, baptized as “powerful middle peasants,” and to the functionaries, in the name of “order” and of “discipline.”

The Right-Centrist policy which kept up appearances of Bolshevism in secondary questions was carried away by the flood-tide of great events and found its strictly Menshevik and devastating coronation in the question of the Chinese revolution and the Anglo-Russian Committee. Never in the course of all revolutionary history had Centrism until then described the rising and declining curve to such perfection; it is to be doubted that it will ever again be able to describe a similar one, for in this case it had at its disposal the powerful resources of the Comintern in the material domain and in that of ideas; it could arm itself in advance against any resistance, and against all criticism, too, by means of all the resources which the proletarian state had at its disposal.

The objective consequences of the policy of the ECCI provided new mainsprings which fed the stabilization, still further postponed the revolution, and tremendously aggravated the international position of the USSR

* * *

It was in the course of the struggle of the two tendencies which began in 1923 that the question of the tempo of socialist construction which, from the standpoint of theory, bound into a solid knot the divergences of views in internal and international questions.

The official leadership, deceived by the illusions of the period of reconstruction (1923-1927) which was effected on the basis of capital ready to hand, taken from the bourgeoisie, slid further and further towards the position of isolated economic development as a goal in itself. And it is precisely upon this grossest of errors that, thanks to the blows dealt by the international defeats, there subsequently grew up the theory of socialism in a single country. Rupture with world economy was preached precisely at the moment when the conclusion of the period of reconstruction made the need of connection with world economy increasingly imperative.

The question of the tempo of our economic development was not posed at all by the official leadership. This leadership did not in the slightest understand that Soviet economy was regulated all the more rigidly by the world market in proportion as it was obliged to link up with this market through export and import trade.

When we insistently pointed out that the tempo of Soviet construction is conditioned by world economy and world politics, the directors and inspirers of the official line replied to us: “There is no need to inject the international factor into our socialist development” (Stalin), or on the other hand: “We will construct socialism if it be only at a snail’s pace” (Bukharin). If one is not afraid to follow this idea logically to its conclusion, that is to say, that there is “no need to inject the international factor” into the question of the tempo of our economic development, one will see that it means simply that there is no need to “inject” the Comintern into the fate of the October Revolution, for the Comintern is nothing else than the revolutionary expression of the “international factor.” But the point is that Centrism never pursues its ideas to their end.

The question of tempo is obviously of decisive importance not only in economics but especially in politics, which is “concentrated economics.”

If in internal affairs we were being retarded because of the wrong way of approaching economy, retarding it to an ever greater degree from fear of too great an advance, then, on the contrary, in the face of the problems of the international revolution, the systematic loss of tempo was due to Centrist incapacity to estimate in full the revolutionary situation and to take advantage of it at the critical moments. To be sure, it would be vain pedantry to state that the German proletariat, guided by a correct leadership, would certainly have conquered and held power; or that the English proletariat, if the leadership had seen correctly, would certainly have overthrown the General Council and thus considerably hastened the hour of proletarian victory; or that the Chinese proletariat, had it not been deceived by being forced under the banner of the Kuomintang, would have brought the agrarian revolution to a victorious conclusion and would certainly have seized the power by leading the poor peasants after it. But the door was open to these three eventualities, and in Germany – wide open. As against this, the leadership acted counter to the class struggle, strengthened the enemy at the expense of its own class and thus did everything to guarantee defeat.

The question of tempo is decisive in every struggle and all the more so in a struggle on a world scale. The fate of the Soviet republic cannot be separated from that of the world revolution. No one has placed centuries or even many decades at our disposal so that we may use them as we please. The question is settled by the dynamics of the struggle, in which the enemy profits by each blunder, each oversight, and occupies every inch of undefended territory. Without a correct economic policy, the proletarian dictatorship in the USSR will crumble, mill be unable to endure long enough to be saved from without, and will thereby inflict infinite damage upon the international proletariat. Without a correct policy of the Comintern, the world revolution will be delayed for an indefinite historical period; but it is time that decides. What is lost by the international revolution is gained by the bourgeoisie. The construction of socialism is a contest between the Soviet state and not only the internal bourgeoisie, but also the world bourgeoisie, a contest waged on the basis of the world-wide class struggle. If the bourgeoisie is able to wrest a new large historic period from the world proletariat, it will, by basing itself on the powerful preponderance of its technology, of its wealth, of its army and its navy, overthrow the Soviet dictatorship; the question whether it will attain this by economic, political, or military means, or a combination of the three, is of secondary importance.

Time is a decisive factor, not merely an important one. It is not true that we will be able to build “complete socialism,” if the Comintern continues the policy which found its expression in the capitulation of the German party in 1923, in the Esthonian putsch in 1924, in the ultra-left errors of 1924-1925, in the infamous comedy of the Angle-Russian Committee of 1926, in the uninterrupted series of blunders which doomed the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927. The theory of socialism in one country accustoms us to regard these errors with indulgence, as if we had all the time we want at our disposal. A profound error! Time is a decisive factor in politics, especially in periods of sharp historic turns, when a life-and-death struggle between two systems is unfolding. We must dispose of time with the greatest economy: the Comintern will not survive five years of mistakes like those which have been committed by its leadership since 1923. It holds, thanks to the attraction that the October Revolution exercises over the masses, the banner of Marx and Lenin; but it has been living during the course of the last period on its basic capital. The Communist International will not survive five more years of similar mistakes. But, if the Comintern crumbles, neither will the USSR long endure. The bureaucratic psalms announcing that socialism has been nine-tenths realized in our country (Stalin) will then appear as stupid verbiage. Certainly, even in this case the proletarian revolution would be able in the end to pioneer new roads to victory. But when? And at the price of what sacrifices and countless victims? The new generation of international revolutionists would have to tie up anew the broken threads of continuity and conquer anew the confidence of the masses in the greatest banner in history, which may be compromised by an uninterrupted chain of mistakes, upheavals, and falsifications in the domain of ideas.

These words must be said clearly and distinctly to the international proletarian vanguard, without in the least fearing the inevitable howlings, screechings, and persecutions on the part of those whose optimism survives only because they shut their eyes out of cowardice so as not to see the reality.

That is why, for us, the policy of the Comintern dominates all other questions. Without a correct international policy, all the possible economic successes in the USSR will not save the October Revolution and will not lead to socialism. To speak more exactly: without a correct international policy, there can be no correct policy in internal affairs either, for the line is one. The false way in which the chairman of a Soviet district committee approaches the kulak is only a small link in the chain whose largest links are constituted by the attitude of the Red trade unions towards the General Council, or of the Central Committee of the CPSU towards Chiang Kai-shek and Purcell.

The stabilization of the European bourgeoisie, the strengthening of the social democracy, the retardation in the growth of the communist parties, the strengthening of capitalist tendencies in the USSR, the shift to the Right of the policy of the leadership of the CPSU and of the Comintern, the bureaucratization of the entire regime, the rabid campaign against the Left wing, driven into the Opposition all these processes are indissolubly bound together, characterizing a period of weakening, certainly provisional, but deep-going, of the positions of the proletarian revolution, a period of pressure exerted by enemy forces upon the proletarian vanguard.

4. Radicalization of the Masses and Question of Leadership[edit source]

The February Plenum of the ECCI (1928) made an undeniable attempt at a Leftward turn, that is to say, towards the opinions defended by the Opposition, on two questions of paramount importance: the policy of the English and French Communist Parties. One might attribute a decisive importance, and not merely a symptomatic one, to this turn, despite all its incoherence, if it had been accompanied by the application of the fundamental rule of Lenin’s strategy: condemn a false policy in order to pave the way for a correct policy. The united front in France, in Germany, and in other countries was directed along the lines of the Anglo-Russian Committee. The course of the latter was almost as disastrous for the English Communist Party as was the course of the Kuomintang for the Chinese Communist Party.

As far as the resolution on the Chinese question is concerned, not only does it sanctify all the errors committed but it prepares for new ones which are no less cruel.

The resolution of the February Plenum on the Russian question is a far better mirror of the regime of the Comintern than any one political line. It will suffice to state that this resolution contains the following assertion:

“The Trotskyists, together with the social democracy, are banking on the overthrow of the power of the Soviets.”^[2]

Men who out of docility raise their hands to vote for such affirmations without believing a single word (for only a complete idiot can believe that the Opposition is banking on the overthrow of the power of the Soviets), such men do not always find the courage, as experience testifies, to raise their hands in a determined struggle against the class enemy.

Taken altogether, the February Plenum symbolizes a contradictory attempt at a Left turn. From the political point of view this attempt is conditioned upon an undeniable shift that is taking place in the mood of the great working class masses, principally in Europe and especially in Germany. There can be no talk of a correct leadership without a clear understanding of the character of this shift and the perspectives that it opens.

In his speech, or rather in the broadside of insults which he flung at the Opposition, Thalmann stated at the February Plenum of the ECCI:

“The Trotskyists fail to perceive the radicalization of the international working class and do not notice that the situation is becoming more and more revolutionary.”^[3]

Then he passes, as is customary, to the ritualistic demonstration which seeks to prove that together with Hilferding we are burying the world revolution. One might ignore these puerile tales, if what were involved here were not the second largest party of the Comintern, represented in the ECCI by Thälmann. What is this radicalization of the working class which the Opposition fails to perceive? It is what ThÄalmann and many others with him had likewise termed as “radicalization” in 1921, in 1925, in 1926, and in 1927. The decline in influence of the communist party after its capitulation in 1923 and the growth of the social democracy did not exist for them. They did not even ask themselves what were the causes of these phenomena. It is difficult to speak to a man who does not want to learn the first letters of the political alphabet. Unfortunately it is not solely a, question of ThÄlmann; he is not even of any importance by himself. Nor is Semard. The Third Congress was a real school of revolutionary strategy. It taught how to differentiate. That is the first condition, no matter what the job. There are periods of high-tide and periods of ebb-tide. But the former and the latter pass in turn through various phases of development. It is necessary from the point of view of tactic, to adapt the policy of each of these stages being experienced, while maintaining at the same time the general line of conduct in its orientation towards the conquest of power and being always prepared, so as not to be taken unawares by a sharp change in the situation. The Fifth Congress turned topsy-turvy the lessons of the Third. It turned its back to the objective situation; it substituted for analysis of events an agitational rubber-stamp: “The working class is becoming more and more radicalized, the situation is becoming more and more revolutionary.”

In reality, it is only during the past year that the German working class has begun to recover from the consequences of the 1923 defeat. The Opposition was the first to notice it. In a document published by us, from which Thälmann quoted, we state the following:

“An undeniable shift to the Left is occurring in the European working class. It is manifesting itself in a sharpening of the strike struggles and a growth in the number of communist votes. But this is only the first stage in the shift. The number of social democratic voters is increasing, parallel with the growth of the communist votes, and in part outstripping the latter. If this process develops and deepens, we will enter the following phase, when the shift will begin, from the social democracy to communism.^[4]

In so far as the data relating to the latest elections in Germany and in France permit us to judge, the above evaluation of the condition of the European working class, especially the German, can be regarded almost as beyond dispute. Unfortunately the press of the Comintern, including that of the CPSU, furnishes absolutely no analyses which are serious, thorough, documented, illustrated by figures, of the moods and tendencies existing in the proletariat. Statistics, in so far as they are presented, are simply adjusted to a particular tendency having as its aim the preservation of the leadership’s “prestige.” They continually pass in silence over the factual data of exceptional importance which determine the curve of the workers’ movement during the 1923-1928 period if these data refute false judgments and instructions. All this makes it extremely difficult to judge the dynamics of the radicalization of the masses, its tempo, its scope, its possibilities.

Thälmann did not have the slightest right to say to the February Plenum of the ECCI that “... The Trotskyists fail to perceive the radicalization of the international working class.” Not only had we perceived the radicalization of the European proletariat, but in that connection we had established, as early as last year, our evaluation of the conjuncture. The latter was completely confirmed by the May (1928) elections to the Reichstag. The radicalization is passing through its first phase, still directing the masses into the social democratic channels. In February, Thälmann refused to see this; he insisted: “The situation is becoming more and more revolutionary.” In such a general form, this statement is only a hollow phrase. Can one say that “the situation is becoming more and more [?] revolutionary” if the social democracy, the main prop of the bourgeois regime, is growing?

In order to approach a revolutionary situation the “radicalization” of the masses must in any case still pass through a preliminary phase in which the workers will flock from the social democracy to the communist party. Assuredly, as a partial phenomenon, this is already taking place now. But the principal direction of the flow is not yet that at all. To confound an initial stage of radicalization, which is still half-pacifist, half-collaborationist, with a revolutionary stage, is to head towards cruel blunders. It is necessary to learn how to differentiate. Anyone who merely repeats from year to year that “the masses are becoming radicalized, the situation is revolutionary,” is not a Bolshevik leader, but a tub-thumping agitator; it is certain that he will not recognize the revolution when it really approaches.

The social democracy is the chief prop of the bourgeois regime. But this prop contains contradictions within itself. If the workers were passing from the communist party to the social democracy, one could speak with perfect certainty of the consolidation of the bourgeois regime. It was so in 1924. At that time Thalmann and the other leaders of the Fifth Congress were unable to understand it: that is why they replied with insults to our arguments and advice. At present the situation is different. The communist party is growing alongside of the social democracy, but not yet directly at the expense of the latter. The masses are streaming in parallel lines to the two parties; up to now the flow towards the social democracy is the larger. The abandonment of the bourgeois parties by the workers and their awakening from political apathy, which lie at bottom of these processes, obviously do not constitute a strengthening of the bourgeoisie. But neither does the growth of the social democracy constitute a revolutionary situation. It is necessary to learn how to differentiate. How should the present situation be qualified then? It is a transitional situation, containing contradictions, not yet differentiated, still disclosing various possibilities. The subsequent development of this process must be vigilantly watched, without one’s getting drunk on cut and dried phrases, and holding oneself always ready for sharp turns in the situation.

The social democracy is not merely gratified by the growth of the number of its voters; it is following the flood of workers with great anxiety for it creates great difficulties for it. Before the workers begin to pass en masse from the social democracy to the communist party (and the arrival of such a moment is inevitable), we must expect new and great friction inside the social democracy itself, the formation of more deep-going groupings and splits, etc. That will very probably open up the field to active, offensive, tactical operations on the part of the communist party along the line of the “united front” in order to hasten the process of revolutionary differentiation of the masses, that is to say, primarily the pulling away of workers from the social democracy. But woe unto us if the “maneuvers” reduce themselves to the fact that the communist party will again look into the mouth of the “Left” social democrats (and they may still go far to the Left), while waiting for their wisdom teeth to grow. We saw “maneuvers” of this kind practiced on a small scale in Saxony in 1923, and on it large scale in England and China in 1925-1927. In all these cases they led to the missing of the revolutionary situation and to great defeats.

The judgment of Thälmann is not his own; this can be seen from the draft program which states:

“The process of radicalization of the masses which is sharpening, the growth of the influence and of the authority of the communist parties ... all this clearly shows that a new revolutionary wave is mounting in the imperialist centers.”

To the extent that this is a programmatic generalization, it is radically false. The epoch of imperialism and of proletarian revolutions has already known and will again know in the future not only a “process of radicalization which is sharpening,” but also periods when the masses move to the Right; not only of growth of the influence of the communist parties, but also of a temporary decline of that influence, especially in the event of errors, blunders, capitulations. If it is a question of judging from the standpoint of conjucture, more or less true for certain countries, in the given period, but not at all for the entire world, then the place for this judgment is in a resolution and not in a program. The program is written for the entire epoch of proletarian revolutions. Unfortunately, in the course of these five years, the leadership of the Comintern has given no proof of comprehension in matters of dialectic regarding the growth and the disappearance of revolutionary situations. On these subjects it has remained in a permanent scholasticism, treating of “radicalization” without studying in a fundamental way the living stages of the struggle of the world proletariat.

By reason of the defeat experienced by Germany in the course of the great war, the political life of the country was distinguished by the special character of its crises; this placed the German proletarian vanguard in the presence of situations fraught with responsibilities. The defeats of the German proletariat during the five post-war years were immediately due to the extraordinary weakness of the revolutionary party; in the course of the subsequent five years they were due to the errors of the leadership.

In 1918-1919, the revolutionary situation still completely lacked a revolutionary proletarian party. In 1921 when the ebb set in, the communist party which was already fairly strong, attempted to provoke a revolution despite the fact that the immediate premises for it were lacking. The preparatory work (“the struggle for the masses”) which then followed resulted in a Right deviation in the party. The leadership, deprived of revolutionary scope and initiative, suffered shipwreck in the sharp Leftward shift in the whole situation (Autumn of 1923). The Right wing was supplanted by the Left wing, whose domination nevertheless already coincided with the revolutionary ebb. But the Lefts refused to understand it and obstinately maintained “the course towards insurrection.” From that, new errors were born which weakened the party and brought about the overthrow of the Left leadership. The present Central Committee, leaning secretly upon a section of the “Rights,” mercilessly struggled all the time against the Left, repeating all the while mechanically that the masses were becoming radicalized, that the revolution was near.

The history of the evolution of the German Communist Party presents a picture of abrupt alternation of factions assuming power, depending upon the oscillations of the political curve: each directing group, at the time of each abrupt upward or downward turn of the political curve, that is, either towards a provisional “stabilization” or, on the contrary, towards a revolutionary crisis, suffers shipwreck and yields place to the competing group. It so happened that the Right group had as its weakness an incapacity for knowing how, in case of a change in the situation, to switch all activity on to the rails of the revolutionary struggle for the conquest of power. As against this, the weakness of the Left group was due to the fact that it could neither recognize nor understand the necessity of mobilizing the masses for transitional demands, springing from the objective situation during the preparatory period. The weak side of one group was supplemented by the weaknesses of the other. Since the leadership was replaced at the time of each break in the situation, the leading cadres of the party were unable to acquire a wider experience, extending through advance and decline, through flood and ebb, through retreat and attack. A truly revolutionary leadership cannot be educated unless it understands our epoch as an epoch of sudden shifts and sharp turns. The selection of leaders in random fashion, chosen by appointment, inevitably contains within itself the latent danger of a new bankruptcy of the leadership at the very first major social crisis.

To lead means to foresee. It is necessary, in a reasonable interval, to stop flattering Thalmann solely because he grubs in the gutter for the vilest epithets to fling at the Opposition, just as Tang Ping-shan was petted at the Seventh Plenum simply because he translated Thalmann’s insults into Chinese. The German party must be told that the judgment passed by Thalmann in February on the political situation is vulgar, arbitrary, and false. It is necessary to recognize openly the strategic and tactical blunders committed during the last five years and to study them conscientiously before the wounds they caused have had time to heal: strategic lessons can take root only when they follow events step by step. It is necessary to stop replacing party leaders in order to punish them for mistakes committed by the ECCI or because they do not approve of the GPU when it punishes proletarian revolutionists (Belgium). It is necessary to allow the young cadres to stand on their own feet, helping them, but not ordering them about. It is necessary to stop “appointing” heads simply on the basis of their certificates of good behavior (that is to say, if they are against the Opposition). It is necessary once and for all to give up the system of the Central Committees of protection.

5. How the Current Swing Toward the Left in the CPSU Was Prepared[edit source]

It is indispensable that we sketch in this summary the policy and regime of the Comintern in order to find the correct place which corresponds to the swing of the leadership to the Left. Since this swing issued directly from conditions which caused the economic crisis in the USSR, and since it is developing according to a line which particularly touches internal questions, it is indispensable that we examine more closely, and in greater detail, how these questions were presented in the past, up to recently, and what is new in the latest resolutions and measures of the Central Committee of the CPSU. It is only in this way that the correct line of the policy to follow subsequently will be outlined before us.

* * *

The altogether exceptional difficulties experienced this year (1928) in the grain collections have an enormous importance not only in the economic domain but likewise in that of politics and of the party. It is not accidental that these difficulties have unleashed the turn to the Left. On the other hand, by themselves these difficulties establish the balance sheet of a vast period of economic and general policy.

The transition from war communism to socialist economy could have been realized without being accompanied by great retreats only if the proletarian revolution had been immediately extended to the advanced countries. The fact that this extension was delayed for years led us to the great retreat of the NEP, a deep and lasting retreat, in the Spring of 1921. The proportions of the indispensable retreat were established not only theoretically but also by feeling out the ground in practice. In the Autumn of 1921 it was already necessary further to deepen the retreat.

On October 29, 1921, that is, seven months after the transition to the NEP, Lenin stated at the Moscow District Conference:

“This transition to the New Economic Policy which was effected in the Spring, this retreat on our part ... has it proved adequate so that we can stop retreating, so that we can prepare to take the offensive? No, it has still proved inadequate ... And we are now obliged to admit it, if we do not want to hide our heads in ostrich fashion, if we don’t want to appear like fellows who do not see their own defeat, if we are not afraid of seeing the danger that confronts us. We must recognize that the retreat has proved to be inadequate, that it is necessary to execute a supplementary retreat, a further retreat in the course of which we will pass from state capitalism to the creation of purchases, of sales, and of monetary circulation regulated by the state. That is why we are in the situation of men who still continue to be forced to retreat in order finally to pass to the offensive at a further stage.”^[5]

And later, in the same speech:

“To conceal from oneself, from the working class, from the masses, that in the economic domain, in the Spring of 1921 and at present, too, in the Autumn-Winter of 1921-1922, we are still continuing to retreat, is to condemn ourselves to complete unconsciousness, is to be devoid of the courage to face the situation squarely. Under such conditions, work and struggle would be impossible.”^[6]

It was only in the Spring of the following year, in 1922, that Lenin decided to give the signal to halt the retreat. He spoke of it for the first time on March 6, 1922, at a session of the fraction of the Metal Workers’ Congress:

“We can now say that this retreat, in the sense of concessions which we made to capitalists, is completed. And I hope, and L am certain, that the party congress will also state so officially in the name of the leading party of Russia.”^[7]

And immediately he added an explanation, frank and honest as always, truly Leninist:

“All talk of the cessation of the retreat must not be understood in the sense that we have already created the foundation of the new economy and that we can proceed tranquilly. No, the foundation has not yet been created.”^[8]

The Eleventh Congress, on the basis of Lenin’s report, adopted the following resolution on this question:

“The Congress takes note that the sum total of the measures applied and decided upon during the course of the past year exhausts the necessary concessions made by the party to private capitalism and considers that in this sense the retreat is completed.”^[9]

This resolution, deeply pondered, and, as we have seen, carefully prepared, presupposed consequently that the new points of departure occupied by the party would furnish the possibility of inaugurating the socialist offensive, slowly, but without new movements of retreat.

Nevertheless, the hopes of the last congress which Lenin led did not prove accurate on this point. In the Spring of 1925 there came the necessity of executing a new retreat: granting to the rich classes of the village the right to exploit lower strata by hiring labor and renting land.

The necessity for this new retreat, immense in its consequences, which had not been foreseen by the strategic plan of Lenin in 1922, was due not only to the fact that the limits of the retreat had been drawn “too short” (the most elementary prudence made that imperative) but also because during 1923-1924, the leadership understood neither the situation nor the tasks which devolved upon it, and lost time while under the delusion that it was “gaining” time.

But that is not all. The new painful retreat in April 1925 was not called, as Lenin would have called it, a profound defeat and retreat; it was presented as a victorious step of the smychka, as a mere link in the general mechanism of building socialism. It is precisely against such proceedings that Lenin had warned all his life, and especially in the Autumn of 1921 when it became necessary to continue and deepen the retreat begun in the Spring.

“It is not the defeat which is so dangerous,” said Lenin in the above quoted speech at the Moscow District Conference, “as the fear of admitting one’s defeat, the fear of drawing from it all the conclusions ... We must not be afraid of admitting defeats. We must learn from the experience of the defeats. If we adopt the opinion that by admitting defeats we induce despondency and a weakening of energy for the struggle, similar to a surrender of positions, me would have to say that such revolutionists are absolutely not worth a damn.... Our strength in the past was, as it will remain in the future, that we can take the heaviest defeats into account with perfect coolness, learning from their experience what must be modified in our activity. That is why it is necessary to speak candidly. This is vital and important not alone for the purpose of theoretical correctness, but also from the practical point of view. We cannot learn to solve the problems of today by new methods if yesterday’s experience has not made us open our eyes in order to see wherein the old methods were at fault.”^[10]

But this remarkable warning was completely forgotten the day after Lenin departed from leadership; it has not been really remembered a single time up to now.

Inasmuch as the decisions of April 1925 legalized the developing differentiation in the village and opened the floodgates to it, the smychka signified in the future an ever-growing commodity exchange between the workers’ state and the kulak. Instead of recognizing this terrible danger, the servile theory of integrating the kulak into socialism was immediately created. For the first time, this process in its entirety was presented to the party conference, in the name of the party, as the “building of socialism in one country” independent of world economy and world revolution. Thus the very appearance of this petty bourgeois, reactionary theory is due not to the real successes of socialist construction, which are indisputable, but precisely to the setbacks of the latter and to the need thereby engendered among the leaders to provide the proletariat a “moral” solace as a counterbalance to the new material concessions granted to capitalism.

The resolution of the Fourteenth Congress (January 1926) on industrialization voiced a whole series of correct theses, repeating almost word for word certain ideas that the Opposition had developed on this subject during 1923-1925. But alongside of this resolution a campaign was waged against the Left wing, labeled as “super-industrialists,” that is to say, against those who did not want the adopted decisions simply to remain on paper; our warnings about the kulak danger were presented under the absurd designation of “panic”; the positing of the fact that the differentiation of classes was taking place in the village was punished as anti-Soviet propaganda; the demand for the exercise of stronger pressure upon the kulak to the advantage of industry was labeled as a tendency to “plunder the peasants” (Stalin-Rykov-Kuibyshev manifesto); after all this the resolution on industrialization had as little influence on the real economic process as had been the case with certain other resolutions of the Fourteenth Congress on party democracy and on collective leadership in the Comintern.

In 1926 the Opposition formulated the discussion on the smychka, which began as far back as the Spring of 1923, in the following way:

“QUESTION: Is it true that the policy of the Opposition threatens to disrupt the smychka between the proletariat and the peasantry?

“ANSWER: This accusation is false to the core. The smychka is threatened at this moment by the lag in industry, on the one hand, and by the growth of the kulak, on the other. The lack of industrial products is driving a wedge between country and city. In the political and economic domains, the kulak is beginning to dominate the middle and poor peasants, opposing them to the proletariat. This development is still in it’s very first stages. It is precisely this that threatens the smychka. The underestimation of the lag in industry and of the growth of the kulak disrupts the correct, Leninist leadership of the alliance between the two classes, this basis of the dictatorship under the conditions in our country.”^[11]

Let us stress here that in this question also the Opposition exaggerated nothing, despite the bitterness of the struggle, when, rising in opposition to the renegade theory of integrating the kulak into socialism, good only for paving the way to our integration into capitalism, we stated in 1926 that the kulak danger was “still in its very first stages.” We had pointed out, from 1923 on, the direction from which the danger was coming. We had pictured its growth at each new stage. In what else does the art of leadership consist if not in being able to grasp a danger in time, that is to say, when it is still “in its first stages,” and to prevent the possibility of its further development? To lead is to foresee – not to persecute those who are able to foresee.

To the greatest misfortune of the party, it was impossible even to make public the above-quoted lines. For having propagated them, the best militants were expelled from the party by functionaries without an idea in their heads, who did not want to think of tomorrow, and who were, moreover, incapable of doing so.

On December 9, 1926, at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, Bukharin denounced the Opposition in the following terms, on the subject of the smychka and of the grain collections:

“What was the most powerful argument that our Opposition used against the Central Committee of the party (I have in mind here the Autumn of 1925)? They said then: the contradictions are growing monstrously, and the CC of the party fails to understand this. They said: the kulaks, in whose hands almost the entire grain surplus is concentrated, have organized ‘the grain strike’ against us. That is why the grains are coming in so poorly. We all heard this ... The Opposition estimated that all the rest was only the political expression of this fundamental phenomenon. Subsequently the same comrades intervened to state: the kulak has intrenched himself still further, the danger has still further increased. Comrades, if the first and second affirmations had been correct, we would have even a stronger ‘kulaks’ strike’ against the proletariat this year ... The Opposition slanders us by stating that we are contributing to the growth of the kulaks, that we are continually making concessions, that we are helping the kulaks to organize the grain strike; the real results are proof of just the contrary ...”^[12]

Does not this single quotation from Bukharin demonstrate by itself the complete blindness of the leadership on the key question of our economic policy?

Bukharin, however, was no exception. He only “generalized” theoretically the blindness of the leadership. The most responsible leaders of the party and of economy vied with each other in declaring that we had overcome crises (Rykov), that we were dominating the peasant market, and that the question of grain collections had become strictly a purely organizational question of the Soviet apparatus (Mikoyan). The resolution of the July Plenum of the Central Committee in 1927 announced that the development of economic activity during the course of that year had been, taken together, without any crises. At the same time, the official press affirmed in unison that the scarcity of goods in the country had, if not completely disappeared, at least been considerably ameliorated.

To counterbalance all this the Opposition wrote anew in its theses for the Fifteenth Congress:

“The decrease in the total amount of grains collected is, on the one hand, direct evidence of the profound disturbance existing in the relations between the city and the country and, on the other hand, it is a source of new difficulties which threaten us.”

Where is the root of our difficulties? The Opposition replied :

“In the course of recent years industry developed too slowly, lagging behind the development of national economy as a whole ... Owing to this, the dependence of state economy on kulak and capitalist elements is growing in the domain of raw materials, in export, and in foodstuffs.”

Let us recall also that the sharpest intervention of the Opposition was the one during the anniversary demonstration on November 7, 1927; the sharpest slogan formulated in this intervention was: “Let us turn our fire against the Right: against the kulak, the jober, and the bureaucrat; against the kulak and the jober sabotaging the grain collections; against the bureaucrat organizing or sleeping during the Donetz trial.” The controversy, which was no minor one, and wherein the head of the revolution was at stake, ended in the Winter of 1927-1928 accompanied by threats of GPU agents, while decisions were hurriedly signed punishing by exile, in conformity with Article 58, the “deviations” which varied from the general Centrist blindness, from that of Bukharin in particular.

Had it not been for the whole preceding work of the Opposition beginning with the theses of 1923 and ending with the placards of November 7, 1927; had not the Opposition established a correct prognosis in advance, and had it not raised a justified alarm in the party and working class ranks, the crisis in the grain collections would have only hastened the development of the Right wing course towards the further unleashing of capitalist forces.

More than once before in history has the proletarian vanguard, or even the vanguard of the vanguard, paid with its own destruction for a new step forward by its class or for checking an offensive by its enemies.

6. One Step Forward, Half a Step Backward[edit source]

It was the crisis in grain collections, unlike the Chinese, Anglo-Russian, and other crises, that could not be passed over in silence, that provided an impulse towards a new phase in policy. It had its immediate repercussions not only in the entire economy but also in the daily life of each worker. That is why the new political period dates from the grain collections.

Without any connection at all with the past, the party was treated on February 15, 1928, in Pravda, to a leading article which might have been taken for a restatement, and in part for an almost literal reproduction, of the Platform of the Opposition presented at the Fifteenth Congress.

This unexpected article, written under the direct pressure of the crisis in grain collections, announced:

“Among a whole number of causes which have determined the difficulties experienced in grain collections, it is necessary to single out the following. The village has expanded and enriched itself. Above all it is the kulak who has expanded and enriched himself. Three years of good crops have not passed without leaving their mark.”

Thus, the refusal of the village to give the city grain is due to the fact that the “village has enriched itself,” that is to say, that it has realized as best it could Bukharin’s slogan: “Enrich yourselves!” But why then does the enrichment of the village undermine the smychka instead of consolidating it? Because, the article replies, “Above all it is the kulak who has expanded and enriched himself.” Thus the theory affirming that the middle peasant had expanded during these years at the expense of the kulak and the poor peasant, was abruptly rejected as so much useless rubish. “Above all it is the kulak who has expanded and enriched himself.”

However, even the enrichment of the kulaks in the villages does not by itself explain the disorganization of the exchange between the city and the country. The alliance with the kulak is not a socialist alliance. But the grain crisis consists in the fact that even this smychka is non-existent. Ergo, not only has the kulak expanded and enriched himself but he does not even find it necessary to exchange his hoarded natural produce for the chervonetz; as for the goods that he wants and is able to get in town, he pays for them with a quantity of grain, which is absolutely inadequate for the city. Pravda also formulates the second cause, which is at bottom the fundamental reason of the grain crisis.

“The increase in the income of the peasantry ... in the presence of a relative backwardness in the supply of industrial products permits the peasants in general and the kulak in particular to hoard grain.”

Now the picture is clear. The fundamental cause is the lag in industry and the scarcity of industrial goods. Under these conditions, not only was there no socialist smychka established with the poor and middle peasants belonging to the cooperative, but there is not even a capitalist smychka with the kulak. If the two quotations from Pravda to which we have just referred are compared with those of the Opposition documents presented in the preceding chapter, then it must be admitted that Pravda repeats practically verbatim the expressions and ideas of my Questions and Answers, the penalty for typing which was expulsion from the party.

However, the Pravda article does not stop here. While still making the reservation that the kulak is not “the principal hoarder of grains” the article admits that he is the economic authority in the village, that “he has established a smychka with the city speculator who pays higher prices for grain,” that “he [the kulak] has the possibility of drawing the middle peasant behind him.” This description, which characterizes with precision the relations existing in the village, has nothing in common with the official legends of recent years on the dominant and continually increasing economic role of the middle peasant; but for that it coincides entirely with our platform which was considered as anti-party document. After eleven years of proletarian dictatorship it appears that the kulak is the “economic authority of the village,” that “he has the possibility of drawing the middle peasant behind him” – the middle peasant who, while continuing to be the central village figure from the numerical standpoint, finds himself held on the economic leash of the kulak. The reservation to the effect that the kulak is not “the principal hoarder of grain,” does not at all soften the picture but makes it more somber. If we accept the rather dubious figure of 20% as the share of the grain trade which is currently attributed to the kulak, the fact that the latter can “draw behind him” the middle peasant in the market, that is to say, lead him to sabotage the state grain collections, is made to stand out all the more sharply. The New York banks do not own the totality of goods in circulation either; Net they are the ones who dominate it. Whoever attempts to place this “modest” 20% in evidence, only emphasizes thereby that it is enough for the kulak to have a fifth of the grain in his hands for him to seize the dominant role on the grain market. That is how weak an influence the state exerts on the rural economy under conditions of a lagging industry.

Another inevitable reservation, to the effect that the “leading” role of the kulak has been recorded only in several regions and not in all of them, is no palliative either; on the contrary, it even sharpens the alarming meaning of what is happening. These “several” regions were already sufficient to shake the smychka between the city and the country to its very foundations. What would have happened had this process been extended in the same degree to all regions?

We are dealing here with a living economic process and not with a stable statistical mean. It is not at all a question of measuring, quantitatively and with precision, this most complex and extensive process as we march along, but it is necessary to determine its quality, that is to say, to show in what direction the phenomena are growing. Today, we have 20% ; tomorrow there may be a great deal more. Certain regions have gone ahead; others lag behind. In point of fact, the authority of the kulak in the village and the possibility he has of drawing the middle peasant behind him are not directly survivals from the past; no, in the latter we have new facts which have arisen on the groundwork of the NEP, following upon the kulak suppression; in this sense, the regions where the phenomenon is more sharply apparent are only pointing the way to the more “backward” ones, providing, naturally, that the course of the economic policy, which has ruled for five years, especially since April 1925, will be continued.

At whose expense has the new “Soviet” kulak gained in authority in the village? At the expense of the dominating workers’ state and its instruments, state industry and cooperation. If the kulak has obtained the possibility of drawing the middle peasant behind him, against whom will he lead him? Against the workers’ state! Therein lies the serious and profound break in the economic smychka, a premise of another, far greater danger, namely, the break in the political alliance.

It is no longer a question today, as was the case in the Spring of 1923, of anticipating events, nor one of theoretical considerations, but of rigorously verified facts. Despite the dictatorship of the proletariat, despite the nationalization of the land, despite state-protected cooperation, the retardation experienced by industry has in a few years placed the reins in the village in the hands of the mortal enemies of socialist construction. This was certified by Pravda for the first time on February 15, 1928.

From all this, despairing conclusions need not at all be drawn. But before everything else, the clear and complete truth must be presented to the party. Nothing must be underrated or embellished. That is why the article of Pravda, in spite of its petty, equivocal reservations, constitutes a serious step forward. By that alone, it considerably reduces the distance, on this question, separating the line of the Opposition from that followed by the leadership in the course of the past five years. All Oppositionists can only welcome this. But after this step forward there ensued at least half a step backward. As soon as the situation became less acute, from the standpoint of the grain collections, thanks to emergency administrative measures, the machine of official optimism was set into motion again.

The last programmatic manifesto of the Central Committee of June 3, 1928, states:

“The resistance of the kulaks grew on the basis of a general increase in the productive forces of the country, despite a still greater growth of the socialist sector of the economy.”

If that is the case, if that is true, there is no room for alarm. Then there remains only to keep calmly building “socialism in one country” without disrupting the line of activity. If the specific weight of capitalist elements, that is to say, the kulak especially, is annually declining within economy, then what is the occasion for so sudden a “panic” before the kulak? The question is resolved by the dynamic relationship between two struggling forces: socialism and capitalism – who will vanquish whom? The kulak is either “terrifying” or “harmless” depending solely upon the direction in which this relationship shifts. The manifesto of the CC vainly seeks to salvage, in this section, the resolution of the Fifteenth Congress, which proceeded from the alleged constantly growing preponderance of socialist elements in economy over the capitalist elements. But indeed the article in the February 15 issue of Pravda is a public refutation of this incorrect thesis which has been disproved in practice by the entire course of operations necessitated during the grain collections. How does this jibe logically?

Had the socialist sector grown more rapidly than the non-socialist during these three years of good harvests, we might perhaps have still had a commercial and industrial crisis, manifesting itself in a surplus of products of state industry that could not find agricultural equivalents. Instead, we have had a crisis in grain collections, which the February 15 issue of Pravda correctly explains as the result of the accumulation of the agricultural products on the part of the peasantry and especially the kulaks, products for which there were lacking equivalents in industrial goods. The aggravation of the crisis in grain collections, i.e., the crisis of the smychka, as a result of three good crops, can only imply that in the general dynamics of the economic process the socialist sector has become weaker as compared with the capitalist and private commodity sector in general.

The correction which has been introduced into this relationship by administrative pressure, absolutely inevitable once the leadership had proved blind, does not in any way change the fundamental conclusion. We are here dealing with a political force in which the kulak is already taking part, even if only partially. However, the very necessity of resorting to emergency methods from the arsenal of war communism is evidence precisely of an unfavorable change in the relationship of forces within the sphere of economic life.

But there is still another criterion which is equally decisive and even more important: the material condition of the working class. If it is true that the national economy is growing (and this is true); if it is true that socialist accumulation is growing more rapidly than private accumulation (as the CC declares, contrary to reality), then it is entirely incomprehensible why the condition of the working class has grown worse during the recent period, and why the recent collective contracts were the source of grave friction and bitter struggle. Not a single worker can posit a “predominance,” of this sort of socialist elements over those of growing capitalism, when the standard of living of the non-proletarian elements is rising while that of the proletarian elements is on the decline. This practical criterion, which affects the worker vitally, is completely in harmony with the theoretical criterion and is a refutation of the superficial and formal optimism of the CC.

In face of this objective verification, given by economy and life itself, all attempts to prove “statistically” the pre-dominance of the growth of the socialist sector are rendered absurd. This would be tantamount to an attempt on the part of the head of an army, forced to retreat with losses after a battle, after surrendering important positions, to prove with cunning statistical coefficients that the preponderance lay on his side. No, the kulak has proved (and his arguments are more convincing than statistical combinations, made to comply with optimism) that in this very important battle, to the extent that it was waged with economic weapons, the preponderance proved to be on the side of the kulak. The household budget of the working woman also bears witness to this. The question of who will vanquish whom is resolved by the living dynamics of economy. If figures contradict the incontrovertible results of the struggle, and the testimony of life itself, then the figures lie, or, at best, the answer they give refers to a totally different question.

Indeed, we have already had in 1927 instances not only of the entirely admissible administrative intervention into grain collections, but also entirely inadmissible intervention into statistics. On the eve of the Fourteenth Congress, the statistical data refurbished by the secretariat of the CC “absorbed” the kulak almost completely. Merely a few days were required for this socialist victory.

But even if we were to set aside the accommodating nature of statistics, which like all other things suffer from the arbitrariness of the apparatus, there still remains the fact that statistics, especially among us, given the extreme atomization of the most important processes, are always belated. Statistics provide a momentary cross-section of the processes, without catching their tendencies. Herein theory must come to our assistance. Our correct theoretical evaluation of the dynamics of the process predicted beforehand that the lag in industry will turn even the good crops against socialist construction and engender the growth of the kulak in the village and breadlines in the cities. The facts came and they gave their incontrovertible verification.

In the lessons of the crisis in grain collections, summarized in the February article of Pravda, we have a compulsory and therefore all the more indisputable confirmation of the increasing disproportion, with the deficit on the side of state economy, i.e., with the decrease of the specific weight of the economic foundations of the proletarian dictatorship. Along with this we have a confirmation of a differentiation in the peasantry already so profound as to place the fate of the grain collections, in other words, the fate of the smychka, under the immediate and direct control of the kulak, leading behind him the middle peasant.

If the disproportion between the city and the country has been inherited from the past; if a certain growth of capitalist forces flows inevitably from the very nature of our present economy, then the aggravation of the disproportion during the last year and the shift in the relation of forces to the side of the kulak is entirely the result of the false class policy of the leadership, which failed to regulate methodically the distribution of the national income, either permitting the reins to slip completely free or hysterically checking them.

In contradistinction to this, the Opposition, since 1923, has been insisting that only a firm planned course based upon a systematic year-to-year overcoming of the disproportion would enable us to endow state industry with a real leading role in relation to the village; and that, on the contrary, the lag of industry would inevitably engender the deepening of class contradictions in the country and the lowering of the specific weight of the economic summits of the proletarian dictatorship.

Consequently we approached the kulak, not as an isolated phenomenon, as Zinoviev and Kamenev attempted to do during the Fourteenth Congress, but on the basis of the decisive relationship between state industry and the private commodity form of rural economy as a whole. Within the confines of village economy we took the kulak, once again not as an isolated phenomenon, but in connection with his economic influence upon the more prosperous layers of the middle peasants and the village as a whole. Finally we took these two fundamental internal processes, not as isolated, but in their relation with the world market, which through export and import exerts an ever more determining influence upon the tempo of our economic development.

Taking all this as our starting point, we wrote in our theses submitted to the Fifteenth Congress:

“Inasmuch as we obtain the grain and the raw material surpluses for export trade primarily from the well-to-do layers of the village, and inasmuch as it is precisely these layers that are hoarding grain the most, it turns out that we are ‘regulated’ through export trade primarily by the kulak and the well-to-do peasant.”

But an objection may be raised that the Opposition was “premature” in posing questions for which the leadership had already set a date for some time in the future. After all that has been said, it is hardly necessary to dwell upon this puerile Stalinist argument which is fed to the party each time it becomes essential to make up for lost time. Let us present a single piece of telling evidence. On March 9, 1928, at a session of the Moscow Soviet, Rykov said the following on the subject of grain collections:

“This campaign indubitably bears all the distinctive traits of shock-brigade work. If I were asked whether it would not have been better to manage in a more normal way, that is to say, without resorting to such a shock-brigade campaign, in order to overcome the crisis in grain collections, I would give the candid reply that it would have been better. We must recognize that we have lost time, we were asleep at the beginning of the difficulties in grain collection, we failed to take a whole series of measures in time which were necessary for a successful development of the grain collections campaign.”^[13]

If the delay is recognized in these words primarily from the administrative standpoint, then it is not difficult to supplement them politically. In order to have applied the indispensable administrative measures in time, the party, inspiring and directing the state apparatus, should have been supplied in due time with at least the rough data for a general orientation, such as was given in the leading article of Pravda of February 15. The delay consequently bears not an administrative but a party-political character. The principled warnings of the Opposition should have been attentively listened to in time and the practical measures we proposed should have been discussed in a business-like manner.

Last year the Opposition proposed, in part, to enforce a compulsory loan to the amount of 150 to 200 million poods of grain from 10% of the peasant enterprises, i.e., the wealthiest. At that time this proposal was castigated as being a measure of war communism. The party was taught that it is impossible to squeeze the kulak without harming the middle peasant^[14], or that the kulak does not represent any danger since, you see, he is constrained a priori: within the framework of the proletarian dictatorship (Bukharin). But this year recourse had to be taken to article 107 (i.e., to repressive measures of collecting grain); after which, the CC had to explain that talk about war communism is counter-revolutionary slander, although the Committee itself had on the very eve labeled as war communism much more cautious and methodical proposals of the Opposition.

So long as white is called white and black is called black, the correct point of view will be the one which provides the possibility of understanding what is occurring and to foresee the future. The viewpoint of the Opposition comes under this definition, but that of the official leadership never does. In the last analysis, facts stand above the highest institutions. Only in a fit of hierarchic hysteria could anyone demand today, after the grain collection campaign of last Winter, and the resulting acute crisis in the official policy and ideology, that the Opposition admit its “error.” Such a condition has never yet brought anyone any good.

The question here is not who was right. This question has a meaning only in connection with the question which line was correct. To slur over this last question after the first signs of a turn on the part of the leadership would be the most contemptible and infamous crime against the party. The party has not yet had a chance to find out. All measures, controversies, and steps have real value depending only on whether the party has or has not clarified itself. A principled position has not get been won. The future has not been secured. For every step forward there follows a half-step back.

7. A Maneuver or a New Course?[edit source]

How should the present turn to the Left be evaluated? Are we to see in it a combinationist maneuver or a serious new course, i.e., the resurgence of a proletarian line and international policy? Distrust is entirely in order.

The mere adoption of a decision in order to distract the party’s attention – such has become the fundamental method of the present leadership. On the question of industrialization, the poor peasantry, the Chinese revolution, they adopted, one after another, resolutions intended not to clarify, explain, and lead, but, on the contrary, to dissimulate and camouflage what had occurred in reality. Lenin has said that in politics only idiots put faith in words. The post-Leninist period must teach even idiots to rid themselves of this gullibility.

The question whether this is a maneuver or a new course is a question that involves the class interrelations and their reflection in the CPSU, which, as the only party in the country, reacts differently to the pressure of various classes through the various groups within it.

The above-quoted “historical” article of Pravda of February 15, contains a remarkable admission relating to this question, that is to say,the reflection of new class groupings within our own party. This is perhaps the most striking section of this article. It reads as follows:

“In our organizations, both in the party and elsewhere, certain elements alien to the party have emerged during the recent period who do not see classes in the village, who do not understand the foundations of our class policy and who attempt to conduct the work in such a way as to offend nobody in the village, to live in peace with the kulak, and generally to maintain popularity among ‘all the layers’ of the village.”

Although reference is made here to members of the party, the above words provide a well-nigh finished portrait of the neo-bourgeois, Thermidorian politician-realist, in contrast to the communist. Pravda, however, doesn’t say a single word in explanation of how these elements got into the party. They have “emerged” – and that’s all! Whence have they come, through what gates did they enter? Did they penetrate into the party from the outside? And how did they wedge their way in? Or did they sprout inside, and upon what soil? And, mind you, all this has taken place under the conditions of an uninterrupted “Bolshevization” of the party along the line of the peasant question. The article does not go on to explain how the party, despite repeated warnings, could have overlooked the Oustrialovists and Thermidorians up to the very moment when they revealed their administrative power in the policy of grain collections, nor how the party allowed itself to lose sight of the kulak up to the very moment when he obtained authority, led the middle peasant behind him, and sabotaged the grain collections. Pravda explains none of this. Why bother! In February 1928, we heard for the first time from the central organ what we knew long ago and what we had expressed more than once, namely, that in the party of Lenin there has not only “emerged” but also taken shape a strong Right wing which is pulling toward a neo-NEP, i.e., to capitalism by gradations.

Towards the end of 1927, here is what I wrote on this subject:

“The official struggle against the Opposition is being waged under two basic slogans: Against Two Parties and Against ‘Trotskyism.’ The fake Stalinist struggle against two parties camouflaged the growth of dual power in the country and the formation of a bourgeois party at the Right wing of the CPSU, and under the cover of its banner. In a whole series of chancellories and in the cabinets of secretaries, secret conferences were being held between the party retainers of the apparatus and the specialists, Oustrialovist professors, for the purpose of elaborating methods and slogans of the struggle against the Opposition. This is the genuine formation of a second party, which seeks by might and main to subordinate to itself, and, in part, does subordinate, the proletarian core of our party and to exterminate its Left wing. While screening the formation of this second party, the apparatus accused the Opposition of striving to create a second party – precisely because the Opposition is seeking to tear the proletarian core of the party from under the growing bourgeois influence and pressure, failing which, it is altogether impossible to save the unity of a Bolshevik party. It is sheer illusion to think that the dictatorship of the proletariat can be preserved by spellbinding phrases about an indivisible party. The question of one party or two parties (in the materialistic, class, and not a verbal, agitational sense of the term) is decided precisely by the measure in which it will be possible to arouse and mobilize the forces of resistance inside the party and the proletariat.”^[15]

In June, Stalin gave the following explanation to the students of the highest institutes in Moscow on the subject of a second party:

“There are people who see a way out of the situation in a return to kulak economy, in a development and an unfolding of kulak economy. These people do not dare to speak of a return to landlord economy, since they apparently understand that it is dangerous to babble about such things in our time. But they speak all the more readily about the necessity of an all-sided development of kulak economy ... in the interest of the Soviet power. These people presuppose that Soviet power could base itself at one and the same time upon two opposite classes: the class of kulaks, whose economic principle is the exploitation of the working class, and the class of workers, whose economic principle is the destruction of all exploitation. This is a hocus-pocus worthy of reactionaries. It is not worth while to prove that these reactionary plans have nothing in common with the interests of the working class, with the principles of Marxism and the tasks of Leninism.”

These words represent a somewhat simplified exposition of a section of the introduction of the first chapter of the Platform of the Opposition. We do not keep this a secret only because in our opinion Stalin is not threatened with exile for it as yet. To be sure, there is no open mention of the formation of a second party in the Stalinist speech. But if, within the proletarian party there are “people” (which people?) who are steering a course toward a kulak capitalist economy and who refrain from speaking about large-scale landlord economy only out of caution; if these “people,” whose address is not given, are bound up with each other by this sort of platform, and are guided by it during grain collections, during the elaboration of industrial plans, wage scales, etc., etc., then this is precisely the cadre of a neo-bourgeois, i.e., Thermidorian party. It is possible to be in a Bolshevik party and not steer a course toward Chiang Kai-shek, Purcell, the kulak, and the bureaucrat; or rather, that is the only condition on which one call be in a Bolshevik party. But it is.impossible to be in a Bolshevik party and steer a course towards capitalist development. This is the simple idea expressed in our document, On the New Stage.

Thus, the Right wing “emerging” from an unknown cause was for the first time officially noticed during the grain collections. On the day following the Fifteenth Congress, which once again gave proof of 100% monolithism, it was discovered that the kulak does not bring his grain to market because, among other things, there are influential groupings in the party desirous of living in peace with all classes, in accordance with the teachings of Tao Tsi-tao, the court philosopher of Chiang Kai-shek. These internal Kuomintangists did not make themselves heard either during the so-called discussion or at the Congress. These valiant “party members” were of course the first to vote for the expulsion of the Opposition as a “social-democratic” deviation. They also voted for all the Left resolutions, for they have long since learned to understand the resolutions don’t count. The Thermidorians in the party are not phrasemongers but men of action. They establish their own special smychka with the new proprietors, the petty bourgeois intellectuals, and the bureaucracy; and they direct the most important branches of economic, cultural, and even party activity from the “national-state” standpoint. But can it be that the Rights are so weak that there is no need to struggle against them?

A clear reply to this question is of decisive importance for the fate of the entire present turn to the Left. The first impression is that the Rights are extremely weak. A shout from above proved sufficient to direct immediately along the “Left” channel the grain collections and, in part, the general peasant policy. But precisely this extraordinary ease with which results were obtained should serve as a warning against over-hasty conclusions about the weakness of the Rights.

The Right wing is a petty bourgeois, opportunistic, bureaucratic, Menshevik, conciliationist wing that pulls toward the bourgeoisie. It would be an absolutely inconceivable phenomenon, if, in a party containing the revolutionary cadres of Bolshevism and hundreds of thousands of workers, the Right wing could become, within a space of a few years, an independent force and openly apply its tendencies, mobilizing the working-class masses. Of course, such a situation does not exist. The Right wing is strong as a transmitting apparatus for the pressure of the non-proletarian classes on the working class. This implies that the strength of the Right wing of the party is located outside the party, beyond the confines of the latter. It is the force of the bureaucratic apparatus, of the new proprietors, of the world bourgeoisie. Consequently it is a colossal force. But precisely because the Right wing reflects the pressure of other classes within the party, it is incapable as yet of presenting its platform openly and mobilizing the public opinion of the party. It requires a cover; it must lull the vigilance of the proletarian core of the party. The regime of the apparatus provides it with both the former and the latter. Under the inflated monolithism of the party the apparatus conceals the Right wing from the view of the revolutionary workers and, at the same time, it terrorizes the workers by dealing blows to the Opposition, which is only the conscious expression of the alarm of the proletariat for the fate of its dictatorship.

The existing breach between the apparatus and the Right wing compels the latter to contract its front, strike while retreating, and provisionally bide its time. The Rights well understand that if the apparatus seriously invited the party to analyze the situation, to purge itself by eliminating the Thermidorians, the Right wing would find itself completely swept away by the rank and file, who would have no need of resorting to gangs of disrupters and thugs. Thus there would no longer be a lever inside the party upon which the internal bourgeoisie and that of the entire world could lean. To be sure, the onslaught of the bourgeoisie would not disappear immediately or even diminish. But it would have to exert itself directly against the party, which would then see its enemy face to face, and be able to judge coolly the forces and intentions of the latter. The clandestine and underground forms of the pressure of the bourgeoisie, operating through infiltration against the party and the Soviet power, would become impossible. That in itself would be half a victory.

The Rights understand the position they find themselves in. But they also take into account another fact, namely, that it is impossible to invite the party to make a serious purge of its ideas and ranks, that have become considerably encrusted during recent years, by adopting different slogans and pursuing different aims from those presented up to now by the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition). But it would then be necessary to change sharply the whole attitude towards the Opposition itself; otherwise the cynical lack of principles of the Centrist apparatus would stand crudely in the Open. The Right wing believes, and not without good cause, that the Center will not dare boldly to change its front. The Right wingers retreat, grinding their teeth, and they show thereby that they are not at all desirous of a struggle equally dangerous to themselves and to the Center. At the same time they put their demands to the latter: not to change the status quo within the party, that is to say, not to break the bloc between the Right and the Center against the Left; not to incline further to the Left than is absolutely required by the present exigency; in other words, to keep in reserve the possibility of returning to the old path and to pass from there onto the road of the neo-NEP.

The Right wingers understand that for the moment they must concede the turn to the Left as silently as possible. In any case, for them it is simply a maneuver. They keep quiet and make their preparations. They expect the Left experiment to fail, thanks to the class response from the outside, thanks to internal friction, the secret resistance of the bureaucratic apparatus, and above all, thanks to the innate inclination of Centrism to zigzags. The Right wing is well acquainted with its allies. Meanwhile, it zealously compromises the Center, demonstrating right and left that the latter has invented nothing but is simply repeating what the Opposition said from the very beginning.

So far as the Center is concerned, in order not to appear in an awkward position, it continues to clap the Oppositionists into jail. The Rights understand that the more blows the apparatus deals to the Left, the more it becomes dependent upon them. They aim to pass from the defensive to the offensive and to take their revenge when the Left experiment will be terminated by a defeat (and the Rights, under the present conditions, firmly count on that). Will this happen? Such an eventuality is not at all excluded. It can take place so long as the turn rests upon the status quo in the party. Not only can this happen, but it will probably take place, even more, it is inevitable.

Does this imply that the present zigzag excludes the possibility of its developing into a Left course? Let us be candid: not only the policy pursued by the leadership during the recent years but also its present conduct must impel us to give a skeptical reply to the above question, in so far as the matter depends upon the foresight and the consistency of the leadership. But the gist of the matter lies precisely in the fact that the initial maneuver has grown over into a profound political zigzag, seizing in its vise ever wider circles of the party and wider class strata. The latter are not interested in the mechanics of the maneuver, in the art of leadership practiced by the leadership for art’s sake, but rather in the objective economic and political results arising from the turn. Matters in this sphere have reached a point where the good will, consistency, and, in general, the very intentions of the initiators of the turn find themselves seriously altered by the will and interests of much vested circles. That is why it would be incorrect to deny the possibility of the present zigzag developing in a direction of a consistent proletarian course.

In any case, the Opposition, by virtue of its views and tendencies, must do all in its power to see that the present zigzag is extended into a serious turn onto the Leninist road. Such an outcome would be the healthiest one, that is to say, involving the least convulsions for the party and the dictatorship. This would be the road of a profound party reform, the indispensable promise of the reform of the Soviet state.

8. The Social Basis of the Present Crisis[edit source]

The sounds of the struggle within the party are only an echo of far more profound turmoils. Changes have accumulated within the classes which, if they are not translated in time into the language of Bolshevism, will place the October Revolution in its entirety before a painful crisis.

The haste with which, hardly two months after the Fifteenth Congress, the leadership broke with a course which was considered correct at the time of the congress, is in itself an unfailing symptom of the fact that the process of class shifts taking place in the country, in connection with the whole international situation, has reached a critical stage wherein economic quantities are changing into political qualities. A prognosis in this sense was propounded on several occasions since 1923; it was expressed in the following manner in the theses of the Opposition at the time of the Fifteenth Congress:

“In a country with an overwhelming majority of small and even dwarfish peasants and petty proprietors in general, the most important processes take place up to a certain moment in an atomized and subterranean manner, only in order subsequently to burst into the open in an ‘unexpected’ manner.”

“Unexpected,” obviously, only for those who are incapable of making a Marxist evaluation of processes taking place when these are still only at the beginning of their development.

The grain strike of the kulaks, who drew behind them the middle peasants; the collusion of the Shakhty specialists with capitalists; the protection or semi-protection of the kulak strike by an influential section of the State and party apparatus; the fact that communists were able to shut their eyes to the counter-revolutionary secret maneuvers of technicians and functionaries; the vile license of scoundrels in Smolensks and elsewhere, under the cover of “iron discipline” – all these are already incontrovertible facts of the utmost importance. No communist reasoning in a healthy way would dare affirm that these are casual phenomena which are not characteristic, which have not grown thanks to economic and political processes and thanks to the policy of the party leadership in the course of the last five years. These facts could and should have been foreseen. The theses published by the Opposition at the Fifteenth Congress, which are available to all, state:

“The amalgamation between the kulak, the proprietor, and the bourgeois intellectual, on the one hand, and numerous links of the bureaucracy not alone of the state but also of the party, on the other:hand, constitutes the most incontrovertible but at the same time most alarming process of our social life. Thence are being born the germs of dual power which is threatening the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The manifesto or circular letter issued by the CC on June 3, 1928, admitted the existence of the “most vicious bureaucratism” in the state apparatus as well as in the party and the trade unions. The circular letter attempts to explain this bureaucratism as follows:

survivals from the bureaucratic heritage of the past;
product of the backwardness and obscurantism of the masses;
their “inadequate knowledge of administration”;
failure to draw the masses rapidly enough into the state administration.

The above-cited four circumstances do in fact exist. They all serve to explain bureaucratism in some fashion. But none permits of understanding its wild and unrestrained growth. The cultural level of the masses should have risen during the past five years. The party apparatus should have learned how to draw the masses into administrative work with greater rapidity. A new generation, raised under Soviet conditions, should have been substituted in considerable proportion for the old functionaries. Bureaucratism should then have declined as a consequence. But the crux of the question lies precisely in the fact that it has grown monstrously; it has become “most vicious bureaucratism”; it has erected into a system such administrative methods as suppression by orders from above, intimidation, repression by economic measures, favoritism, collusion of functionaries through mutual agreement, concessions to the strong, oppression of the weak. The excessively rapid regeneration of these tendencies of the old class apparatus, despite the growth of Soviet economy and the cultural development of the masses, is due to class causes, namely, the social consolidation of proprietors, their interlacing with the state apparatus, and their pressure exercised upon the party through the apparatus. Unless one understands the class causes of the growing bureaucratization of the regime, the struggle against the evil resembles too of ten a windmill flapping its wings but not grinding any grain.

The retarded growth of industry has created.an intolerable “scissors” in prices. The bureaucratic struggle to lower prices has only convulsed the market, depriving the worker without giving anything to the peasant. The enormous advantages obtained by the peasantry from the agrarian revolution accomplished by the October are being devoured by the prices of the industrial goods. This corrodes the smychka, impelling wide strata in the village to the side of the kulak with his slogan of free trade, internally and externally. Under these conditions the trader in the interior finds favorable soil and cover, while the bourgeoisie abroad acquires a base.

The proletariat naturally marched to the revolution with by far the greatest hopes, and in its overwhelming mass, with great illusions. Hence, given a retarded tempo of development, and an extremely low material level of existence, there must inevitably flow a diminution of the hopes in the ability of the Soviet power to alter profoundly the entire social system within the more or less immediate future.

The defeats of the world revolution, particularly during the last few years, when the leadership was already in the hands of the Comintern, have tended in the same direction. They could not fail to introduce a new note into the attitude of the working class toward the world revolution: great reservations in hopes; skepticism among the tired elements; downright suspicion and even surly exasperation among the immature.

These new thoughts and new evaluations sought for their expression. Had they found it in the party, the most advanced layers might perhaps have adopted a different attitude towards the international revolution, and above all towards that in their own country; it might have been less naive and exalted and more critical but, in return, more balanced and stable. However, the new thoughts, judgments, aspirations, and anxieties were driven inward. For five years the proletariat lived under the old and well known slogan: “No thinking! Those at the top have more brains than you.” At first this engendered indignation, then passivity, and finally a circumscribed existence, compelling men to withdraw into a political shell. From all sides the worker was told, until he ended by saying himself, “You, there! This is not the year 1918.”

The classes and groups hostile or semi-hostile to the proletariat take into account the diminution in the latter’s specific weight which is felt not only through the state apparatus or the trade unions but also through the day-to-day economic life, and the daily existence. Hence flows an influx of self-confidence that has manifested itself among the politically active layers of the petty bourgeoisie and the growing middle bourgeoisie. The latter has reestablished its friendship, and reconstituted its intimate and family bonds with the entire “apparatus,” and it holds the firm opinion that its day is coming.

The worsening of the international position of the USSR, the growth of the hostile pressure on the part of world capitalism, under the leadership of the most experienced and rabid British bourgeoisie – all this enables the most intransigent elements of the internal bourgeoisie to raise their heads again.

These are the most important elements of the crisis of the October Revolution. It had its partial manifestation in the recent grain strike on the part of the kulaks and the bureaucrats. The crisis in the party is its most general and dangerous reflection.

It follows as a matter of course that it is impossible to forecast as yet, at any rate, from a distance, at what time and in what form these processes towards dual power, which are still semi-subterranean, will seek to assume an open political expression. This depends largely upon international conditions, and not only upon internal policy. One thing is clear: the revolutionary line does not consist in waiting and guessing until the ever-increasing enemy seizes a favorable moment to assume the offensive, but in assuming the offensive ourselves before the enemy, as the German saying goes, towers above the trees. There is no returning the lost years. It is a good thing that the CC has finally sounded the alarm about the ominous facts, which are in large measure due to its own policy. But it is not enough merely to sound the alarm, and to issue general appeals. Even prior to the Fifteenth Congress, at a time when the slogan of squeezing the kulak was still invested with a purely literary character by the leading faction, the Opposition wrote in its theses:

“The slogan of squeezing the kulak and the Nepman ... if taken seriously, presupposes a change in the entire policy, a new orientation for all the state organs. It is necessary to say this precisely and clearly. For, neither the kulak, on the one hand, nor the poor peasant, on tile otherB7, has forgotten that in the course of two years (between the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Congresses) the CC held a totally different policy. It is entirely obvious that by keeping mum about their former position, the authors of the theses proceed from the idea that it is presumably sufficient to issue a new decree in order to effect a change in the policy. Yet, it is impossible to realize the new slogan, not in words but in action, without overcoming the bitter resistance of some classes and without mobilizing the forces of other classes.”

These words retain their full force even at the present moment. It was no easy matter to turn the party from the Leninist road onto the Right-Centrist road. In order to create and consolidate within the Bolshevik party an influential wing that did not “recognize” classes; in order that the party should not take official notice of the existence of this wing and in order for the leadership to be able to deny its existence for years; in order for this wing, which was not exposed by the Fifteenth Congress, to reveal itself officially not through the party but through ... the Grain Exchange – all this took five years of incessant propaganda in favor of the new orientation, plus thousands of Stalinist and Bukharinist cribs on the integration of the kulak into socialism, and in mockery of the parasitic psychology of hungry men; plus pogroms of statistical bureaus simply because they took note of the existence of the kulak; plus the triumph of mindless functionaries all along the line; plus the formation of a new propagandist school of Katheder-Sozialisten , sophists in Marxism, and many other things. But above all it took a vicious, unreflecting, rude, disloyal, and arbitrary persecution of the proletarian left wing. Meanwhile, all the Thermidorian elements in the party (who “emerged” according to the winged expression of Pravda ) took form and consolidated themselves, invested themselves with connections, ties, and sympathies, and shot out their roots far beyond the confines of the party deeply into the soil of great classes. All this cannot be eliminated by means of a tiny circular letter, no matter how snappy its style. It is necessary to re-educate. It is necessary to revise. It is necessary to achieve regroupings. It is necessary to till the field overgrown with weeds with the deep plow of Marxism.

The attempt to lull oneself and the party with the notion the Opposition is weak and impotent cannot be reconciled with the rabid struggle against the latter. The Opposition has a program of action that has been tested in events and cadres that have been tempered in the fire of persecutions and did not waver in their loyalty to the party. Such cadres, expressing the mounting historical line, cannot be uprooted or destroyed. The Opposition is the cutting edge of the party sword. To break this edge is to dull the sword raised against the enemy. The question of the Opposition is the pivot point of the entire Left course.

Only a victorious development of the world revolution will bring a real and complete liberation not only from external but also internal crisis. This is ABC for a Marxist. But an unbridgeable abyss yawns between this and the hopeless fatalism dished up to us by Bukharinist scholasticism. There are crises and crises. Capitalist society, by its very nature, cannot free itself from crises. This does not at all mean to say that the policy of a ruling bourgeoisie is of no importance. A correct policy raised up bourgeois states, a false policy either ruined or retarded them.

Official scholasticism is utterly incapable of understanding that between mechanistic determinism (fatalism) and subjective self-will there stands the materialist dialectic. Fatalism says: “In the face of such backwardness, nothing will ever come.” Vulgar subjectivism says: “It’s a cinch! We have willed it, and we build socialism!” Marxism says: “If you are conscious of your dependency upon world conditions and upon the internal backwardness then, with a correct policy, you will rise, intrench yourself, and integrate yourself into the victorious world revolution.”

Crises are inevitable in a transitional Soviet regime, until the proletariat of advanced countries will have seized power firmly and decisively. But the task of the ruling policy lies in preventing crises within the Soviet regime from accumulating to the point when they become crises of the regime as a whole. The primary condition for this is: that the position and self-consciousness of the proletariat as the ruling class be preserved, developed, and strengthened. And the sole instrument for this is: a self-acting, flexible, and active proletarian party.

9. The Party Crisis[edit source]

A correct economic policy, as well as a general policy, is not assured by merely a correct formulation, which has not obtained since 1923. The policy of the proletarian dictatorship is conceivable only on the basis of continually feeling out all the class strata in society. Moreover, this cannot be done through the medium of a bureaucratic apparatus which is tardy, inadequate on many points, inflexible, and insensitive. It must be effected through a living and active proletarian party, through communist scouts, pioneers, and builders of socialism. Before the growing role of, the kulaks can be registered statistically, before theoreticians can generalize it, and politicians translate it into the language of directives, the party must be able to sense it through its countless tentacles, and sound the alarm. But for all this, the party in its entire mass must be sensitive and flexible, and above all it must not be afraid to look, to understand, and speak up.

The socialist character of our state industry – considerably atomized as it is: with the competition between the various trusts and factories; with the onerous material position of the working masses; with the inadequate cultural level of important circles of the toilers – the socialist character of industry is determined and secured in a decisive measure by the role of the party, the voluntary internal cohesion of the proletarian vanguard, the conscious discipline of the administrators, trade union functionaries, members of the shop nuclei, etc. If we allow that this web is weakening, disintegrating, and ripping, then it becomes absolutely self-evident that within a brief period nothing will remain of the socialist character of state industry, transport, etc. The trusts and individual factories mill begin living an independent life. Not a trace will be left of the planned beginnings, so weak at the present time. The economic struggle of the workers will acquire a scope unrestricted save by the relation of forces. The state ownership of the means of production will be first transformed into a juridical fiction, and later on, even the latter will be swept away. Thus, here, too, the question reduces itself to the conscious cohesiveness of the proletarian vanguard, to the protection of the latter from the rust of bureaucratism and the pus of Oustrialovism.

A correct political line, as a system, is entirely inconceivable without correct methods for elaborating and applying it in the party. While on this or another question, under the influence of certain impulsions, the bureaucratic leadership might stumble upon the traces of a correct line, there are absolutely no guarantees that this line will be actually followed up, and will not be broken anew tomorrow.

Under the conditions of the dictatorship of the party, such a great power is concentrated in the hands of the leadership as was wielded by no single political organization in the history of mankind. Under these conditions, more than ever before, is it vitally necessary to maintain proletarian, communist methods of leadership. Each bureaucratic distortion, each false step has its immediate repercussion in the entire working class. Meanwhile, the post-Leninist leadership has gradually accustomed itself to extend the hostility of the proletarian dictatorship toward bourgeois pseudo-democracy over to the vital guarantees of the conscious proletarian democracy, upon which the party thrives, and by means of which it is alone possible to lead the working class and the workers’ state.

This was one of the cardinal cares in Lenin’s mind during the last period of his life. He pondered over it in its full historic scope, and all its concrete day-to-day aspects. Returning to work after his first illness, Lenin was horrified by the growth of bureaucratism, especially within the party. This is why he proposed the Central Control Commission; naturally, not the one now existing which represents the direct opposite of what Lenin had in view. Lenin reminded the party that there were no few cases in history of conquerors degenerating, and adopting the morals of the vanquished. He burned with indignation at every piece of news about deliberate injustice, or brutal behavior on the part of a communist in the post of power toward his subordinates (the episode of Ordjonikidze’s fist-work). He warned the party against Stalin’s rudeness and against internal moral brutality which is the blood-sister of perfidy, and which becomes, when wielding all power, a terrible instrument for destroying the party. This is also the reason for Lenin’s impassioned appeals for culture and cultural development – not in the sense of Bukharin’s present cheap little schemes, but in the sense of a communist struggle against Asiatic morals, against the legacy of feudalism and boorishness, and against the exploitation by functionaries of the innocence and ignorance of the masses.

Meanwhile, during the last five years, the party apparatus has pursued just the opposite course; it has become utterly permeated with the bureaucratic deformations of the state apparatus, superimposing upon the latter the specific distortions – fraud, camouflage, duplicity – elaborated by the bourgeois parliamentary “democracy.” As a consequence, a leadership has been formed which, instead of the conscious party democracy, provides: a falsification and an adaptation of Leninism designed to strengthen the party bureaucracy; a monstrous and an intolerable abuse of power in relation to communists and workers; a fraudulent operation of the entire electoral machinery of the party; an application of methods during discussion which might be the boast of a bourgeois-Fascist power, but never of a proletarian party (picked gangs of thugs, whistling and jeering to order, throwing speakers from the platform, and similar abominations); and last but not least, an absence of comradely cohesiveness and conscientiousness all along the line in the relations between the apparatus and the party.

The party press has made public the Artemovsk, Smolensk, and other cases in the guise of sensational exposures. The CC has issued appeals to struggle against corruption. And this seems to have exhausted the question. As a matter of fact, it has not even been broached as yet.

In the first place, wide party circles could not but be aware that only a small part has been made public – not dealing with what is generally taking place, but only with what has been exposed. Almost every province has its own “Smolensk” affair of greater or lesser proportions, and, moreover, not for the first day, or even the first year. Long before the epoch of “self-criticism” the affairs in Chita, Khersonsk, Vladimirsk, and many other places flared up, only to be immediately extinguished; 100% secretaries of district committees were exposed who secretly and without any supervision wasted enormous sums on the upkeep of their family retinue. Each time such an affair was exposed, it was incontrovertibly established that the crimes were known quite well to hundreds of people, sometimes by a thousand men, a thousand party members who kept mum. Often they kept silent for a year, two, and even three. This circumstance was even mentioned in the papers. But no conclusions were drawn. For it would have been necessary simply to repeat what had been stated very discreetly and mildly in the documents of the Opposition. Without drawing the necessary conclusions, the Smolensk and other exposures remain sensations which arouse the party, do not teach it, but rather, distract its attention.

The crux of the matter lies in the fact that the more independent the apparatus becomes from the party, the more do the apparatus retainers depend upon one another. Mutual insurance is no local “detail” but the basic trait of the bureaucratic regime. Some apparatus retainers indulge in abominations, while the rest keep quiet. And what about the party mass? The party mass is terrorized. Yes, in the party of Lenin that achieved the October Revolution, worker-communists are afraid to sag out loud that such and such a 100% apparatus retainer is a scoundrel, an embezzler, a bully. This is the fundamental lesson of the “Smolensk” exposures. And he is no revolutionist who does not blush with shame at this lesson.

Who is the hero, in the social sense of the term, of the Artemovsk, Smolensk, etc., affairs? He is a bureaucrat who has freed himself from the active control of the party and who has ceased to be the banner-bearer of the proletarian dictatorship. Ideologically, he has become drained; morally, he is unrestrained. He is a privileged and an irresponsible functionary, in most cases very uncultured, a drunkard, a wastrel, and a bully, in short, the old familiar type of Derjimorda (see Lenin’s letter on the national question kept hidden from the party). But our hero has his own “peculiarities”: showering kicks and wallops, wasting national resources or taking bribes, the Soviet Derjimorda swears not by the “Will of God” but by the “construction of socialism.” When any attempt is made from below to point him out, instead of the old cry “Mutiny!” he raises the howl, “Trotskyist!” – and emerges victorious.

An article of one of the leaders of the CCC printed in the May 16 issue of Pravda contains the following moral drawn from the Smolensk affair:

“We must decisively change our attitude toward those members of the party and class-conscious workers who are aware of the abuses and keep quiet.”

“Change our attitude?” Is it then possible to have two different attitudes on the matter? Yes. This is admitted by Yakovlev, a member of the Presidium of the CCC, the alternate of the People’s Commissar of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. People who know about crimes and keep quiet are considered criminals themselves. The only mitigating circumstance for their guilt lies in their own ignorance, or in their being terrorized. Yet Yakovlev refers not to ignorant people but to “members of the party and class-conscious workers.” What sort of pressure and what sort of terror is it that compels worker-party members to keep silent ignominiously about the crimes of individuals whom they themselves presumably elect and who are presumably responsible to them? Can this really be the terror of the proletarian dictatorship? No, because it is directed against the party, against the interests of the proletariat. Does this mean to say then that this is the pressure and the terror of other classes? Obviously it is, for there is no supra-class social pressure. We have already defined the class character of the oppression that weighs down upon our party: the collusion of the retainers of the party apparatus; the amalgamation of many links in the party apparatus with the state bureaucracy, with the bourgeois intelligentsia, with the petty bourgeoisie, and the kulaks in the villages; the pressure of the world bourgeoisie upon the internal mechanics of forces – all this together creates the elements of social dual power, which exerts pressure on the party through tile party apparatus. It is precisely this social pressure, which has grown during the recent years, and which has been utilized by the apparatus to terrorize the proletarian core of the party, to hound the Opposition, and to exterminate it physically by organizational methods. This process is one and indivisible.

Within certain limits, the alien class pressure raised the apparatus above the party, reinforced it, and instilled it with confidence. The apparatus did not bother to give itself an accounting of the mainsprings of its own “power.” Its victories over the party, over the Leninist line, were smugly attributed by it to its own sagacity. But the pressure, increasing because it has encountered no resistance, has passed beyond the limit where it merely threatens the domination of the apparatus. It threatens something a great deal more important. The tail is beginning to deal blows to the head.

A situation such as makes party members and class conscious workers in their overwhelming mass afraid to talk about the crimes of the retainers of the party apparatus has not arisen accidentally, nor overnight, nor can it be eliminated by a single stroke of the pen. We are confronted not only with the powerful routine of bureaucratism in the apparatus but also with great encrustations of interests and connections around the apparatus. And we have a leadership that is powerless before its own apparatus . Here we have also something in the nature of a historical law: the less the leadership depends upon the party, the more it is a captive of the apparatus. All talk to the effect that the Opposition is allegedly desirous of weakening the centralized leadership is absurd and fantastic. A proletarian line is inconceivable without iron centralism. But the misfortune lies precisely in the fact that the present leadership is all-powerful only by reason of its bureaucratic force, that is to say, it is powerful in relation to an artificially atomized party mass, but it is impotent in relation to its own apparatus.

Seeking to escape from the consequences of their own policy the Centrists have pushed to the fore the homeopathy of “self-criticism.” Stalin unexpectedly referred himself to Marx who had spoken of “self-criticism as a method of strengthening the proletarian revolution.” But in this quotation Stalin approaches a boundary which he is forbidden to trespass. For Marx in reality meant by self-criticism above all a complete destruction by the proletariat of the false illusions from which it must liberate itself, such as the “bloc of four classes”; socialism in one country; the conservative trade union leaders; the slogans: “We must not frighten the bourgeoisie”; the “two-class” parties for the East; and other reactionary rubbish imposed by Stalin and Bukharin during the last period in which, for three years, they slashed away at the Chinese revolution with the scythe of Menshevism until they finally slaughtered it. That is where the scalpel of Marxian self-criticism should really be applied!

But it is precisely here that it is forbidden to apply it, as heretofore. Stalin threatens once again to fight self-criticism of this sort “with all our might and all the means at our disposal.” He is unable to understand that there do not exist such forces or means as could prevent Marxian criticism from triumphing in the ranks of the international proletarian vanguard.

* * *

During one of the plenums in the year 1927, in reply to an Opposition speech which stated that the Opposition had the right to appeal to the party against the leadership, Monotone said, “This is mutiny!” and Stalin made himself clear by saying, “These cadres can be removed only by a civil war.” This was the most consummate and candid formulation made in the heat of the struggle of the “supra-party,” “supra-class,” and self-sufficing character of the ruling apparatus. This idea is directly opposite to the idea lodged in the foundations of our party and of the Soviet system. The idea of bureaucratic supermen is the source of the present usurpation on a retail scale and of the unconscious preparation of a possible usurpation wholesale. This ideology has taken shape during the last five years in the process of the interminable fake “re-evaluations,” tightening up from above, appointments from above, hounding from above, faking elections, brushing Congresses and Conventions aside for a year, two, or four ... in short, a struggle “with all our might and all the means at our disposal.”

At the summits this was a desperate struggle of views that came into an ever greater conflict with life itself; at the base, in the majority of cases this was a furious gamble for posts, for the right to command, for privileged positions. But the enemy is one and the same in either case: the Opposition. The arguments and the methods are the same: “with all our might and all the means at our disposal.” Needless to say, the majority of the retainers of the party apparatus are honest and devoted men, capable of self-sacrifice. But the whole thing lies in the system. And the system is such as makes Smolensk affairs its inevitable fruits.

Well-meaning functionaries see the solution of the greatest historical task in the formula: “We must decisively change.” The party must say in answer: “It is not you who must do the changing, but it is yourselves who must be decisively changed, and in the majority of cases – removed and replaced.”

↑ Minutes, p.805.
↑ Pravda, February 19, 1928.
↑ Pravda, February l7, 1928.
↑ Trotsky, On the New Stage.
↑ Works, Vol.XVIII, pp.397f.
↑ Ibid., pp.399f.
↑ Works, Vol.XVIII, part 2, p.13.
↑ Works, Vol.XVIII, part 2, p.13.
↑ Minutes, p.143.
↑ Works, Vol.XVIII, part 1, p.396.
↑ Questions and Answers.
↑ Minutes, Vol.II, p.118.
↑ Pravda, March 11, 1928.
↑ Stalin at the Fourteenth Congress.
↑ On the New Stage.

[1] Minutes, p.805.

[2] Pravda, February 19, 1928.

[3] Pravda, February l7, 1928.

[4] Trotsky, On the New Stage.

[5] Works, Vol.XVIII, pp.397f.

[6] Ibid., pp.399f.

[7] Works, Vol.XVIII, part 2, p.13.

[8] Works, Vol.XVIII, part 2, p.13.

[9] Minutes, p.143.

[10] Works, Vol.XVIII, part 1, p.396.

[11] Questions and Answers.

[12] Minutes, Vol.II, p.118.

[13] Pravda, March 11, 1928.

[14] Stalin at the Fourteenth Congress.

[15] On the New Stage.

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IV. What Now?

Contents

PART I[edit source]

1. The Aim of This Letter[edit source]

2. Why Has No Congress of the Comintern Been Convoked for More Than Four Years?[edit source]

PART II[edit source]

3. The Policy of 1923-1927[edit source]

4. Radicalization of the Masses and Question of Leadership[edit source]

5. How the Current Swing Toward the Left in the CPSU Was Prepared[edit source]

6. One Step Forward, Half a Step Backward[edit source]

7. A Maneuver or a New Course?[edit source]

8. The Social Basis of the Present Crisis[edit source]

9. The Party Crisis[edit source]

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