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Lenin &Kautsky

Based on three lectures by Canadian historian Lars T Lih,delivered at Communist University 2009and first published in the Weekly Worker

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Picture the situation. It is Vladimir IlychLenin’s 50th birthday in April 1920. TheBolsheviks have been fighting the civil warand, although they are in a pretty desperatesituation in the spring, they can see victoryas pretty much assured, and they are cel-ebrating the occasion with their great heroand great leader, Lenin. He rather reluctantlycomes out onto the stage and says that hewould like to read out a rather long quota-tion by Karl Kautsky from a 1902 work,‘Slavs and revolution’. Lenin also insertedthe same page-and-a-half-long quote intoLeftwing communism: an infantile disorder.

He introduced it in this way: “I’d like tosay a few words about the present positionof the Bolshevik Party, and was led to thesethoughts by a passage from a certain writerwritten by him 18 years ago in 1902. Thiswriter is Karl Kautsky, who we have atpresent had to break away from and fight inan exceptionally sharp form [which isputting it rather politely!], but who earlierwas one of the vozhdi, the leaders of theproletarian party in the fight against Ger-man opportunism, and with whom we oncecollaborated. There were no Bolsheviksback then [before the 1903 congress of theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party],but all future Bolsheviks who collaboratedwith him valued him highly.”

So, on this great occasion, Lenin tells theaudience that the person they had been fight-ing and whom they had all been lookingdown upon really was a great guy. He readout the quotation which still thrilled him.That for me is significant. I wonder howshocked some of the people must have been.

A couple of weeks later the Second Con-gress of the Communist International metand Lenin did the same thing. He referredagain to the same long quote in Leftwingcommunism and repeated his appreciationof Kautsky: “When he was a Marxist, howwell he wrote!” I imagine a lot of the peo-ple in both audiences - those at his birthdayand those present at the Second Congress -were surprised to hear anything like that.

After all, following 1914 you could readtremendous polemics against Kautsky,where Lenin seemed unable to think ofenough bad names for him. But it is clear

VI Lenin and the influenceof Karl KautskyIn the first article, Canadian historian Lars T Lih discusses the relationshipbetween the two great Marxists in the period 1894-1914

that Lenin still had a soft spot for him - inhis heart and also in his thinking. People onthe left have all grown up with the idea ofthe “renegade Kautsky” - indeed, I gathermany actually think “renegade” is his firstname, as they have never heard him calledanything else! And there is a long list ofother things we have learnt about him - ie,that he was a passive and mechanical deter-minist, not very revolutionary, Darwinist,and so on and so forth.

We are told that in 1914 Lenin managedto see through not only Kautsky, the person(which he clearly did), but also what hestood for. Then we are told that this ledLenin to finally settle accounts withKautskyism root and branch, that there wasa massive rethinking of Marxism. Kautskywas associated with the Second Interna-tional and so that was also bad. That is howthe Kautsky-Lenin relationship is generallythought of. And, of course, there are peopleon the other side of the political spectrumwho have the same idea of Kautsky versusLenin - except that they like Kautsky!

Well, lately there has been a sort ofKautsky revival going on. Mike Macnair’sbook Revolutionary strategy is one exam-ple of it, and there are a lot of other articlesI could cite. There is another huge book inthe Historical Materialism series calledWitness to permanent revolution, which hasseveral hundred pages of Kautsky docu-ments from the 1904-06 period, which I willquote from later on.

I am proud to be part of this little revivaland I think I can describe myself as prob-ably the most extreme member of it, as Ihave probably gone further than anyone elsein saying that Lenin’s view on Kautsky washighly positive, never changed and contin-ued to play an important role in all pointsof his career, including in the last decade.My little epigram for the relationship is this:‘After 1914 Lenin hated Kautsky becausehe loved Kautsky’s books’. This is what Iam going to try and convey.

One reason I am confident about what Iam saying is that after publishing my bookLenin rediscovered, the reviews by somepeople on the left were complimentary, buta couple of them highlighted what they

thought was a weak point: that is, I saw theLenin-Kautsky relationship as closer thanit was - although Lenin might have consid-ered the relationship close before 1914, hedid not realise the real issues involved, thathe actually disagreed with Kautsky; but in1914 the scales fell from his eyes.

That was a valid criticism, as I did nottalk in the book about the later period. So Ithought I would do some research on this. Icompiled a rather odd little database whichI refer to as ‘Kautsky as Marxist’. I wentthrough Lenin’s works and pulled out allthe references I could find about Kautsky’swritings up to 1909, when Road to powercame out. Lenin considered this the cut-offpoint. Kautsky might not have become a fulltraitor until 1914, but after 1909 he is notso good.

The first surprise is that there is a lot ofit. The second is the picture that arose fromthis, which was almost entirely positive andalso had a wide range of issues and a lot ofreferences to specific writings and so forth.I am still working out the whole picture andtrying to get all the facts that came out of it.

But I am going to make a modest claimhere: I am not giving you Lars Lih’s viewof the Lenin-Kautsky relationship, I am giv-ing you Lenin’s view of the Lenin-Kautskyrelationship. He may be wrong, but this iswhat he thought. I have a summary here thatI wrote out of that guide. It is my guide, butit is an attempt to paraphrase what Leninsays about Kautsky after 1914. This is thepicture you would get of Kautsky, if youwere listening to Lenin:

“Karl Kautsky was an outstanding Marx-ist who is the most authoritative theoreti-cian in the Second International and teacherto a generation of Marxists. His populari-sation of Das Kapital back in the 1890s hascanonical status. He was one of the first torefute opportunism in detail, although per-sonally he somewhat hesitated beforelaunching his attack, and he continued tofight energetically against it, asserting eventhat a split would be necessary if opportun-ism ever became the official tendency ofthe German party. Marxists of Lenin’s gen-eration learned a dialectical approach totactics from him. Only vis-à-vis the state

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do we observe a tendency to restrict him-self to general truths and evade a concretediscussion.

“Kautsky was also a reliable guide to therevolutionary developments of the early20th century. His great work on the agrar-ian question is still valid. He correctly di-agnosed the national problem, as opposedto Rosa Luxemburg. He insisted that west-ern Europe was ripe for socialist revolutionand foretold the connection between warand revolution.

“Kautsky had a special relation to Rus-sia and to Bolshevism. On the one hand, hehimself took great interest in Russian de-velopments and endorsed the basic Bolshe-vik view of the 1905 revolution and thepeasant strategy which emerged from it. Onthe other hand, the Russian revolutionaryworkers read him eagerly and his writingsenjoyed greater influence in Russia thananywhere else. This enthusiastic interest inthe latest word of European Marxism is oneof the main reasons for Bolshevism’s laterrevolutionary prowess.”

That, as I say, is Lenin’s view of theLenin-Kautsky relationship. Of course, Ihave left out the angry irony of ‘Look athim now!’, ‘Look at what happened!’ andhow Kautsky had become a traitor or ren-egade in 1914 and so forth.

I want first to give the big picture andthen proceed to the first two decades of theirrelationship (1894-1904 and 1904-14). Iwill talk about the third decade in the nextsessions. The first decade I summarise un-der the title of ‘Lenin, the social democrat’and the second under ‘Lenin, the Bolshe-vik’. ‘Lenin, the communist’ comes in thethird decade. I have chosen these titlesmerely in order to identify the central themeof the particular decade - I am convincedof the continuity in Lenin’s thought and donot think he changed that much at all.

‘Lenin, the social democrat’ refers to hisdesire to initiate a social democratic partyin Russia. ‘Lenin, the Bolshevik’ is so calledas I regard Bolshevism as a Russian answerto a Russian question of how to defeat thetsar. You can call this classic Bolshevism,old Bolshevism or whatever, but that is whatpeople meant when the word was invented.‘Lenin, the communist’ obviously refers tothe Lenin of 1917 and the socialist revolu-tion.

By using this framework, the point Iwanted to make about the Lenin-Kautskyrelationship is the following: Kautsky’s in-fluence is continuing, complex and central.It is complex because it has different facetsthat are more important at particular times -not just one or another issue. It is centralbecause in the central concerns of each dec-ade of Lenin’s life you will find Kautsky.

In the first decade, Kautsky was the au-thoritative spokesman of ‘Erfurtianism’ - the

term I introduced in Lenin rediscovered. Itis my word, referring to the Erfurt pro-gramme, for the image of the German partythat inspired the Russians in this decade. Inaddition, it refers to Kautsky’s polemicsagainst opportunism, such as his bookagainst Bernstein.

It is true that at the start of the seconddecade - ie, when the Bolsheviks andMensheviks split in 1904 - Kautsky sidedwith the Mensheviks. But this was just tem-porary. Actually on the more substantiveissues and for most of the time from 1906on, Kautsky was associated with the Bol-sheviks, and he more or less endorsed theBolshevik strategy. In fact both theMensheviks and the Bolsheviks sawKautsky as a sort of honorary Bolshevik.This seems to have been forgotten, but itdoes have to be said.

I would like to go into more detail onthree points: Firstly the role of Kautsky as amentor - the historical fact of the role thatKautsky played in the history of Russiansocial democracy. Secondly, Kautsky as anexpounder of the logic of the party and theRussian underground (which is mainly whatmy book is about). And, thirdly, Kautsky’ssupport for the explicitly Bolshevik strat-egy of hegemony.

Kautsky as mentorThe best account of this is given by Leninin State and revolution, which, as you know,is in many ways a polemic against Kautsky.But before he begins the polemic, Leningives the following generous and accurateaccount of Kautsky’s relationship to Bol-shevism and the Russian movement (Ishould say, by the way, that if you read Stateand revolution you will find a great deal ofpraise even in this highly polemical pam-phlet):

“Undoubtedly, an immeasurably largernumber of Kautsky’s works have been trans-lated into Russian than into any other lan-guage. It is not without justification thatsome German social democrats sometimessay jokingly that Kautsky is read more inRussia than in Germany. (We may say, inparentheses, that there is a deeper histori-cal significance to this joke than those whomade it first suspected. For the Russianworkers, having manifested in 1905 an unu-sually strong and unprecedented demand forthe best works of the best social democraticliterature in the world, and having been sup-plied with editions and translations of theseworks in quantities unheard of in other coun-tries, thereby transplanted, so to speak, withan accelerated tempo, the immense experi-ence of a neighbouring, more advancedcountry into the almost virgin soil of ourproletarian movement)”.

A somewhat similar comment can befound in Leftwing communism.

What Lenin is saying is that Kautsky wasthe main reference point of the Russianmovement and Russian workers, and thatthis continued not only during the under-ground period, but almost throughout the1920s - at least until 1929. For example, Ihave a long Bolshevik reading list for studyand propaganda circles in the underground.This one is from 1908. The first thing to besaid is that it is an extremely impressivereading list - if I had read all this stuff, thenI would know a lot more than I do! I counted23 works by Karl Kautsky, who dominatesthe list. Nobody else comes even close.There are only four articles by Lenin - noneof the famous books such as What is to bedone? or Two tactics.

But this continues for a long time. Theclassic Bolshevik textbook published in1919, The ABC of communism, also hasreading lists, from which you get the samepicture - Kautsky is by far the leading au-thor. Of Lenin’s pre-1909 works, the onlyones that are included are those on agrariandevelopment. Again, no trace of What is tobe done? or Two tactics. So workers andBolsheviks looking to educate and developthemselves are reading Kautsky! That is anhistorical fact.

Kautsky himself had more interest inRussia than any other non-Russian writer(ie, not Rosa Luxemburg, who was Russianin the sense that she grew up in the Russianempire). He gives specific support to Iskraand later to the Bolsheviks, and he toldGerman and European readers about theheroic struggles going on in Russia and theirimmense significance. I would just like toquote from the article ‘Slavs and revolu-tion’ from 1902, which was read out byLenin at his 50th birthday. You can see whyhe was so inspired by it. This is whatKautsky said about the Russian workers:

“We are entering a new epoch of revolu-tionary struggle in Russia, a struggle that isdeveloping on a much wider basis than aquarter of a century ago, but also one thatin terms of the zeal of its fighters, in termsof the meanness and cruelty of the oppres-sors, and in terms of the heroism and de-voted self-sacrifice of the revolutionaries isjust as impressive as the Russian struggleof earlier periods, and involves more thanphysics in pitting force against force. Therevolutionising of minds advances along-side the revolution of fists. The now awak-ening strata of the people are being seizedby a passionate thirst for knowledge and areattempting to clarify for themselves theirhistorical tasks, so that they might attemptto solve the most complex political prob-lems, rising above the small daily struggleto the great historical goals that it serves.”

He then goes on to argue that in Marx’sday the Slavs were often seen as the forceof reaction against the revolution, but per-

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haps now we can rather see them as thespark that sets off western socialism, whichis becoming rather philistine.

Kautsky wrote a lot about Russia and it isalways in this vein - ie, that in terms of theirdevelopment the Russian workers are farabove and beyond the English workers, etc.

The merger formulaI now want to discuss the logic of the partyin Kautsky and Lenin. I refer to this as the‘merger formula’ and it comes up a lot inmy book because it is essential to this firstdecade - you do not read it much after thatbecause the issues have basically been re-solved.

The merger formula is this: social de-mocracy is the merger of socialism and theworker movement. Lenin quotes this in theearly 1890s and writes that this is howKautsky sums up the essential message ofthe Communist manifesto - I do not thinkyou can find higher praise than that. He alsothought that it summed up the logic of Ger-man social democracy - the SPD. So themerger formula is the definition of‘Erfurtianism’. It is seen as the predictionof the Communist manifesto, which, accord-ing to Lenin, is being confirmed before oureyes by the German SPD. So we haveKautsky formulating the link between theCommunist manifesto and the party. Notonly Lenin thought this - a whole genera-tion of Marxists and activists of the 1890sdid too.

What was this party logic? First of all, itis both a vanguard and a mass party - thoseare not opposed, because first of all bring-ing what Kautsky called the “good news”of socialism to the workers requires a van-guard who know about socialism, becausethe masses do not yet know about it. At the

same time it requires a mass party, becauseyou are trying to attract as many people aspossible to this message and because theparty is a large and open organisation thatis going to argue for this message day andnight. That is one aspect that results fromthis formula.

The second is what I call ‘campaignism’,which is the large array of jewels that theSPD came up with for getting the messageacross. This was very innovative stuff backthen. I do not think we can appreciate allthe things that - although familiar to us -were pioneered by the SPD: rallies, peti-tion campaigns, a huge press, a large rangeof societies. These are all the things that theSoviet system based itself on and which allgroups on the left use to some extent. Thisis due to the idea of merging. The workerswill protest, but, if socialism is the real andfinal answer, then the only way to get so-cialism is to merge the two: the workers’movement must adopt socialism as its goal.

Finally, the third implication of this is‘political freedom’. That was the term usedback then which is not used so much anymore. It might be referred to today as ‘civilliberties’ perhaps, but this was the term thatreferred to the freedom of the press, free-dom of association, strikes - ie, a basic ar-ray of organisational freedoms that allowthis kind of party to exist. Particularly, ofcourse, political freedom is needed in or-der to get the papers out, to hold rallies andto organise meetings in order to get themessage across.

Most explicitly in his commentary on theErfurt programme, Kautsky argues that any-body who does not want political freedomis an objective enemy of the proletariat -even if they are sincere in their desire tohelp the workers. Back then of course, a lot

of socialists were either dubious on the ques-tion of political freedom or even hostile to-wards it, because they saw it as a sort ofbourgeois-liberal toy. The best news forpolitical freedom as a cause in the 19th cen-tury was the fact that the logic of Marxismmeant arguing for political freedoms for theparty.

That is what the merger formula meant.Let us now look at it from the point of viewof what I call the ‘social democraticwannabes’ in the 1890s - these young ac-tivists either in Petersburg or in some iso-lated town in Russia. In illegal literature theyread about this great party which is bothpopular and revolutionary and is run by theworkers themselves. What an inspiringparty! But, they asked, what does it meanfor us today? We cannot do anything likethat at all because we will be hauled off forspeaking out in public.

So what could be done? First of all, theycould adopt political freedom as their goal.This was not an obvious choice for revolu-tionaries in Russia because first of all theyhad to go through a long period of internaldevelopment in order to understand theimportance of political freedom. The assas-sination of the tsar in 1881, for example,was a step forward towards this understand-ing. Whereas they previously rejected itssignificance, they now realised it was im-portant.

This brings me to the next problem - is itpossible to have something like politicalfreedom under absolutism? Some peoplesaid that they were for political freedom,but that the only way to get it was the oldterrorist way - ie, to throw bombs and forcethe government to do what they wantedbecause it was simply not possible to usenewspapers and rallies, etc. That made a lotof sense. Others thought that the liberalswould do it for them.

There was, however, another view heldby people who had read Kautsky (in thissense Kautsky must be seen as the father, orgodfather, of Russian social democracy).These people who had read Kautsky turnedto the German party and started experiment-ing to see whether it was possible to carryout agitation and campaigns amongst theworkers without getting arrested. The Rus-sian word for this is konspiratsia,which doesnot mean ‘conspiracy’ (the word for that iszagovor). Konspiratsia has a specific mean-ing (or at least it did back in those days) of aset of operating rules which I call the fine artof not getting arrested. I did not use thisphrase in Lenin rediscovered, but I now re-fer to this as the ‘konspiratsia underground’- a new type of underground. Not one whereyou sit in a small room and plot to throw abomb which will overthrow the tsar, but anunderground that manages to keep its mem-bers safe from arrest. They form a national

For Lenin, KarlKautsky mightnot have becomea full traitor until1914, but 1909already markeda turning pointfor the leader ofthe Bolsheviks.

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party with local roots, trying to get the wordout to the workers à la SPD.

What is to be done? is therefore not Leninsaying, ‘Here is my great idea of a party - goand do likewise’. It was the summation andcodification of what had been worked outby this underground. For that reason I wouldmake the further argument that a lot, if notmost, of what he is saying there became thecommon property of the underground - notjust the Bolsheviks. For example, the termand actuality of ‘professional revolutionary’were common to all parties - not at all a Bol-shevik trick. The Mensheviks, the SocialistRevolutionaries and even the Liberals (to theextent that they were underground) had pro-fessional revolutionaries.

I therefore sum up Lenin’s slogan for thisperiod as: ‘Let us build a party as much likethe German party as possible under tsaristconditions. Then we can overthrow the tsarand build a party which is even more likethe German one.’

Kautsky and Bolshevik strategyI now wish to discuss Kautsky and the Bol-shevik strategy that developed and becameclear after the 1905 revolution.

Let us put it like this. You have a goal:political freedom. You have an institutionin the form of the underground. But whatabout strategy? What sort of reading of classforces do you have that will achieve thispolitical freedom? The Bolshevik strategyis one of hegemony.

Now the word ‘hegemony’ is a very fa-mous one for a variety of reasons. What itmeant back then was that the peasants werenot only a discontented or destructive force,but by this time they were genuinely radi-cal democrats whose interest it was to havea democratic, anti-tsarist revolution - partlybecause they wanted the land, but for otherreasons too. They also needed leadership,so they had to choose between the mainclasses. One of these was the liberal bour-geoisie, who were anti-tsarist for their ownreasons, and the other was the proletariat.The bourgeois liberals were already becom-ing counterrevolutionary because they wereafraid of revolution, and they could moreor less put up with what they got in 1905.Therefore the proletariat should aim to win,and has a very good chance of winning, classleadership over the peasants by promisingthem land and by being an uncompromis-ing revolutionary force.

The way I summarise it is that the bour-geois revolution is too important to be leftto the bourgeoisie - in fact the bourgeoisieis not going to carry out the bourgeois revo-lution. What follows from this is that theproletariat has a duty to lead the revolutionand the mass of the people as a whole - ie,in the first instance the peasantry. Wheredid this hegemony strategy come from?

One common view is that Lenin inventedit in 1905 when he realised that orthodoxMarxism was insufficient, because it saysthat the bourgeoisie will lead the bourgeoisrevolution. So this view bases itself on Leninrepudiating German textbooks. But actuallythis is not so.

After 1905 Lenin wrote that the Bolshe-viks had always been in favour of the he-gemony scenario and it was the Menshevikswho were falling away from it. It is hard tolocate just when the term ‘hegemony’ cameabout, but he was arguing that the Bolshe-viks had always fought for it and that theystill were. The idea goes back to Plekhanovin the 1880s, when he said that the Russianrevolution can only succeed as a workerrevolution. What he meant by revolutionwas a democratic and anti-tsarist revolution.

From the very beginning, Kautsky wasagain an influence, a conduit, for the he-gemony strategy. The logic of it can betraced back to his writings in the 1890s, andit is based on three things. Firstly, that thebourgeoisie is unreliable. Marx and Engelsrealised this as soon as the ink was dry onthe Communist manifesto in 1848. Anotherthing Kautsky says is that the bourgeoisiebecomes weaker and feebler the further eastwe get, something which was picked up onby other writers. Then the idea of socialdemocracy as the leader of the people - dasVolk in German or narod in Russian. Thismeans that the social democrats were notmerely leading the workers, but were alsothe consistent champions of the wide massesof the non-proletarians and could also counton their support - the peasants above all,but the urban petty bourgeoisie too.

Finally, there is what I sometimes callthe Kautsky hypothesis or theory. He saysat one point that the social democrats arebetter defenders of democracy than thedemocrats, and what he means by that isthat - in Germany especially - the demo-crats are to the left of the liberals, but theyare starting to compromise, so the force thatwas really fighting for democracy was theworkers’ party.

I read an American writer from this pe-riod who drew a comparison between the USand Germany. When something happened tothe workers in the US then it would be ig-nored, but in Germany the party would kickoff a big fuss about it in the Reichstag. Thisis the background to the hegemony strategy.

When applied to Russia, Kautsky spe-cifically endorsed it and might have evenhelped to formulate it. Writing in February1904, he says: “More than anywhere else,the proletariat in Russia today is the advo-cate of the vital interests of the whole na-tion - ie, the struggle against the govern-ment. That is to say, it is the proletariat whichis the defender of national interests that theother classes are letting down. And particu-

larly the peasantry is a source of possiblesupport. Until the 1880s, Russian absolut-ism found its support in the peasantry. Thisno longer exists. The Russian peasant isruined, starved and rebellious.”

By December 1905 Kautsky had takenthe argument further by comparing the Rus-sian revolution with the French revolution.He says that he expects “the disappearanceof today’s great landed estates throughoutthe whole Russian kingdom and their trans-formation into peasant possessions. Next totsarism, it is the large landed estates thatwill pay the bill of the revolution. We donot know what the result will be in terms ofthe mode of production, but we will say thatthe peasants will fight tooth and nail againstanybody trying to restore the old aristocraticlanded regime - even by foreign interven-tion.” This obviously says something notonly about 1905, but also about 1917.

Then, in 1906, Kautsky specifically en-dorsed Bolshevik strategy - something thatcame out of a logic of Kautsky’s particularway of looking at social democracy (I willnot say that this is something coming fromsocial democracy in general - this is Kautskyindividually - but he and Lenin were on thesame wave length on this vital question).

To sum up, we have to understand thatpolitical freedom as a goal really was thecentral theme of Lenin’s first two decades -why it was important and how to get it. Po-litical freedom also has a political logic -both in the ideal party that would be possi-ble when political freedom was achievedand in the underground as a sort of ray ofpolitical freedom in the gloom of absolut-ism. Finally the strategy for winning politi-cal freedom was to get the peasants on boardand to win leadership and hegemony overthe peasants away from the liberals.

At each step we find Kautsky is a centralinfluence and active mentor and educator. IfI were speaking merely as a Russian histo-rian I would have to say that Kautsky was avery important figure in Russian social de-mocracy. He was a figure in Russian history.

The Kautsky-Lenin relationship is, forme, one of the most fascinating individualrelationships in Lenin’s life. It is full of apassion and emotion that is hard to find else-where, but also it tells us about Lenin’s re-lationship to the Marxism of his day and tothe Second International.

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We all know the famous anecdote aboutLenin when he received the news that theGermany Social Democratic Party’s delega-tion to the Reichstag had voted for war cred-its - he initially believed it was a forgeryput out by the bourgeoisie in order to whipup support for the war. I would like to putthis and other such shocks into a more ex-act context.

On August 1 1914 Germany declaredwar on Russia, and at that time Lenin wasliving in a village in Poland which was un-der Austrian control. It was on August 5 thathe discovered the SPD delegation had votedfor war credits. They could have abstained,but they did not even do this and that com-pletely floored him.

But then he had another problem to dealwith, because the Austrian authorities werewondering about this suspicious characterwho spoke Russian, had French money andwent for walks in the hills. Lenin was jailedon suspicion of spying and held from Au-gust 8 to August 19. One of the reasons hemanaged to get out so quickly (as opposedto his arrest 10 years earlier) was that henow had friends in high places: namely Vic-tor Adler, the leader of Austrian Social De-mocracy, who called on the minister of theinterior to release Lenin, who was, after all,one of the biggest opponents of the tsar.

But before he finally got out he receivedyet another shock: a French leaflet had beenissued under the title, ‘Declaration of Rus-sian socialists joining the French army asvolunteers’. The war fervour was such thateven some Bolsheviks had become sweptup in it. I would like to emphasise just howtough these weeks were for Lenin - he hadall this to think about combined with theill-health of his mother-in-law, who wasdying.

He arrived in Bern on September 5 for ameeting with the local Bolsheviks and pre-sented to them the principles of his pro-gramme for the next two to three years. Ei-ther he had managed to undertake some sortof rethink in this short time or he did not haveto do so. By outlining these dates and detailsI am trying to suggest that it was the latter.

But actually the shocks were not over.The most personally upsetting one relatedto Karl Kautsky - the mentor whose writ-ings Lenin had unreservedly admired.Kautsky was now writing articles thatwibbled, wobbled and wavered and did notlive up to what Lenin thought he should be

Lenin, Kautsky, and 1914Lars T Lih takes a closer look at Lenin’s reaction to the betrayal of German socialdemocracy at the outbreak of World War I

saying. Lenin was devastated.In September 1914 but before these

Kautsky articles came out, Lenin had writ-ten that the dangers of opportunism had longbeen pointed out by the greatest representa-tives of the workers’ movement of all coun-tries, and it is pretty clear that it was pre-dominantly Kautsky and Luxemburg he hadin mind. But now one of these two finestrepresentatives was writing articles that es-sentially justified what the Reichstag depu-ties did. A famous account in a letter to oneof his comrades says: ‘I hate more than any-body else this dirty, vile, self-satisfied, smughypocrisy of Kautsky’.1 I may have left outa term or two, but his strong, emotional re-sponse was evident.

Another of Lenin’s letter to the sameaddressee, Shlapnikov, a week later con-tained the line: “Obtain without fail and re-read Kautsky’s The road to power and seewhat he says there about the tasks of ourtime. And now how he acts the toady anddisavows all that!”2 The reason he is so an-gry and upset is because this book, alongwith Kautsky’s views, were so right. Whatwas in that book and what did it mean totalk about “the tasks of our times”?

Aggressive unoriginalityThere are two ways of looking at this. Thetraditional way on the left is to say that theReichstag vote and other shocks led Leninto a process of rethinking Marxism - hecame to understand the fallacious nature ofthe Second International’s version and ei-ther returned to the roots of Marxism orcame up with new theories.

One story is that he read Hegel, redis-covered the dialectic, and then applied thatto the tasks of his time (he did, of course,read Hegel, but that was not the reason forhis platform at the time). Another story isthat Nikolai Bukharin was a big influenceon him, and so on. I refer to this as the ‘re-thinking’ way of looking at Lenin in 1914.

I have my term for what I think is hap-pening, and that is aggressive unoriginality.Why? If you read Lenin’s writings in theperiod between 1914 and 1916 he sort ofgrabs you by the throat and says, ‘I am notoriginal, OK? I am just saying what every-body else was saying. This was the educatedMarxist consensus which is now being be-trayed.’ Now, this could just be rhetoric, butit could also neatly express what is goingon. And I think it could also lead us to Len-

in’s platform, outlook and definition of thesituation in these years and, secondly, to acloser look at the ideological backgroundand historical context of those ideas.

I refer to 1914-1916 as the ‘leftZimmerwald’ years. Zimmerwald is the lit-tle village in Switzerland, where in Septem-ber 1915 a three-day conference was held ofthe movement’s representatives from vari-ous countries who opposed the war. ‘LeftZimmerwald’ came to be known as the fac-tion that Lenin led within that movement. Itwas more revolutionary and wanted a moreradical, defeatist and non-pacifist position,which marked them out from many of theothers. This is significant in that it marks thefirst time that Lenin was a leader on a Euro-pean scale, staking a leadership claim over avery small but well-known grouping.

Lenin made the point that all leftZimmerwaldians were saying what Kautskyhad been saying before 1914: namely thatrevolution will come from war and that wewill be faced with a new revolutionary situ-ation - an example of this ‘aggressiveunoriginality’. Lenin insisted that it was hisgrouping that had the strongest connectionswith what Kautsky had been saying in Theroad to power.

So let me say a few words about thisbook, which is not very long - more like apamphlet of 80-90 pages. It came out in1909 and it is the end part of a develop-ment that began in 1902 with a book calledThe social revolution.Against the revision-ists, both these books were adamant that notonly is revolution necessary, but that it isbecoming more necessary - the contradic-tions are sharpening and we are entering intoa revolutionary era.

Actually, the experience of trying to getthis book published told Kautsky that some-thing was wrong with the party, because theleadership said that they would not produceit under the party name - under the pretextthat this would risk prosecution for hightreason. This excuse was not quite pluckedout of thin air, but its basis was pretty thin.So Kautsky had to fight behind closed doorsand the compromise was that the bookwould be published if he would agree tochange the odd word or two. He did notchange anything significant though.

Almost before it was published in Ger-many under the auspices of the party, it wasalready being translated and published else-where - including in Russia. Oddly enough,

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there is no record of Lenin commenting onit until 1914, when he started making thesepleas to reread it. I think he took his ownadvice to Shlapnikov, because he wrote anarticle in which he literally went throughThe road to power pulling out quotes alongthe way, pointing out what Kautsky had saidbefore.

He began: “For decades, German socialdemocracy was a model to the social demo-crats of Russia - even more so than for anyother country in the world. It is therefore clearthat there can be no intelligent attitude to-wards the new social chauvinism without aprecise definition of one’s attitude towardsGerman social democracy. What was it inthe past? What is it today? What will it be inthe future? Part of the first of these questionscan be found in The road to power - a pam-phlet written by Kautsky in 1909 and trans-lated into many different languages [a pointmade in order to highlight just how authori-tative this international work is] containing amost complete exposition of the tasks of ourtimes. I am going to go into this in some de-tail, since it now these ideals are sobarefacedly cast aside.”3

Lenin concludes by arguing: “This isGerman social democracy at its finest. Thisis the German social democracy that hadpromise and this is the German social de-mocracy that one can and must respect.”4 Iam trying to get across not only how stronglyhe felt, but his belief that this “social de-mocracy at its finest” was still valid.

Neither did Lenin change his mind onthis. He kept repeating the same thingsthroughout this period - I think the last suchreference is in 1918 or 1919. In State andrevolution he criticises The road to powerfor not mentioning the state, but still saysthat it is the best of Kautsky’s books. Hedoes not actually criticise anything thatKautsky says: merely what he does not sayon the state. Even then he still agrees withthe arguments.

SummaryI am going to do a little summary of thebook to clarify things. This summary willonly consist of quotes that Lenin himselfpulled out when reading it again. So in asense this is Lenin’s summary of the book.

“We are entering a new age of revolu-tions”. “In particular ... a world war is immi-nent and war also means revolution.” “Thisrevolutionary situation will lead to an accel-eration of social polarisation”, since “the rateof advance becomes very rapid as soon asthe time of revolutionary fervour comes”.“For one thing, petty bourgeois forces suchas the peasantry are capable of coming overto our side en masse”. “Western Europe isripe for socialism ... therefore the proletariatcan no longer speak of a premature revolu-tion.” “In fact, the long-awaited dictatorship

of the proletariat is a real possibility in thenear future.” The duty of the socialist partyis therefore to remain “consistent, unshake-able and irreconcilable”.

I should also mention that there is a sce-nario of global revolution in this book whichwas picked up and used by Lenin.

In good dialectical fashion I am going tomove from the abstract to the concrete. Themost abstract thing concerns the idea of arevolutionary situation: we alternate betweenperiods of peaceful development and peri-ods that are revolutionary - utterly dissimi-lar. Peaceful and revolutionary situations aredifferent in their logic and everything aboutthem - including the tactics that are calledforth. One such difference relates to thetempo of development. This is what Kautskysaid (I think this is interesting because it helpsto explain why Lenin and many other revo-lutionaries admired Kautsky):

“When times of revolutionary fermentcome, the tempo of development at oncebecomes rapid. It is quite incredible howquickly the masses of the population learn insuch times and achieve clarity about theirown class interests - not only their courageand their desire to fight, but also their politi-cal interest is spurred on in the most power-ful way by the consciousness that the timehas arisen for them to rise by their efforts outof the darkest night into the bright glory ofthe sun. Even the most sluggish become in-dustrious, even the most cowardly bold, eventhe most intellectually limited acquire a widermental grasp. In such times, political educa-tion of the masses that would otherwise re-quire generations takes place in years.”5

Lenin also picks up on this idea that youlearn more in months in a revolutionary situ-ation than you would in decades of peacefuldevelopment many times in his writings. Bythe way, I think that this idea comes from theMarxist notion that revolutionary situationsare not created by the party. The party is revo-lutionary, but it is objective forces that pre-pare the way for revolution - you just have tobe ready. Therefore you need new tactics.

At the time of writing The road to powerKautsky had been engaged in a polemic withRosa Luxemburg. He argued that a massstrike is fine for a revolutionary situation,but we are not in one now so let us not useit just yet.

I am not going to evaluate the situationthat was actually faced, but will merely high-light how the idea of a revolutionary situa-tion affects the context of the party’s re-sponse. That is the most abstract idea. Nextwe are going to progress to another fairlyabstract set of necessary and sufficient con-ditions for recognising a revolutionary situ-ation. There is a fairly well known Leninquote on this, and what is interesting is thatit bears a very strong resemblance to theone presented by Kautsky.

Kautsky offers four conditions: 1. a re-gime hostile to the people; 2. a party of ir-reconcilable opposition; 3. mass supportgiven to the party; 4. a regime crisis of con-fidence.

Lenin’s own definition also contains fourparts, and the ‘aggressive unoriginality’rhetoric can once more be seen when Leninstates: “Such are the Marxist views on revo-lution - views that have been developedmany, many times, have been accepted asindisputable by all Marxists and for us Rus-sians were corroborated in a particularlystriking fashion by the experience of 1905.”6

So again he his disclaiming any originalityfor his own definition.

Kautsky was one of the first to have theidea of moving into one of three periods -1. a revolutionary period up until 1871; 2. apeaceful period of development between1871 and 1905; and then 3. 1905 onwards -a new era of revolutions, unrest and accel-erated revolutionary development. Leninadopted this idea, and it is part of his expla-nation for what happened to the SecondInternational - ie, that during the time ofpeace it degenerated.

Turning to the concrete, let us look atwhat Kautsky said and what Lenin pickedup on in terms of the expected revolution-ary situation in Europe. In western Europe,there were sharpening class contradictions- not the softening of them, as the revision-ists around those like Bernstein maintained.The framework and the prerequisites ofsocialism are in place and therefore it isimpossible to speak of a premature revolu-tion. At one point Lenin said of this: “Thereis no need for us to prove that the objectiveconditions in western Europe are ripe forsocialist revolution. This was admitted be-fore the war by all influential socialists inall advanced countries.”7

That quote brings out two things. Firstly,whilst Kautsky was the main guy, Lenin isclearly talking of all influential socialists inthe advanced countries. Secondly, the state-ment, “There is no need for us to prove …”,in my opinion shows the rhetorical use ofthis aggressive unoriginality. He is sayingthat not just some radical Russian is tellingyou this - it is the informed consensus ofthe experts, so you had better believe it!And, by the way, Kautsky himself had saidthat there was nothing new in The road topower, but that it was merely a summationof what he had been arguing for the previ-ous seven or eight years.

Then there was what I call the ‘globalinteractive revolutionary scenario’. This isan aspect of Kautsky which I think has notbeen fully explored. And he was also highlyinterested in colonial policy - the first at-tack on Edward Bernstein, which led to thefamous debates of the 1890s, was over co-lonial policy, because Bernstein fought for

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an ethical or ‘nice’ colonialism. As I men-tioned in my last talk, Kautsky was particu-larly interested in and knowledgeable aboutRussia, and the Bolsheviks were picking upon this global scenario even before the out-break of war.

What are the features of this? Firstly, the‘interactive’ formula generally means thatevents in one country have a strong influ-ence on those in other countries, andKautsky stresses that as something we haveto understand. How does he fill this pictureout? Firstly, there are all sorts of linkagesbetween the class struggles in various coun-tries. One is that people can read and knowabout them - particularly the case for Rus-sia, where everybody has been influencedby events in western Europe. Any classstruggle today will be different to those ofyesterday because people can know aboutand be influenced by them.

Secondly, bourgeois revolutions can nolonger be the same because there is a newneed to fight external domination, whichthere was not previously. Thirdly, there isthe possibility of what you might call syn-copated development - ie, backwardnesscan actually be an advantage because youmove faster. One example he gives of thisis Japan, which he argues was able to leapover feudalism.

Of course, there was also Russia. Russiaplays a big role in this ‘interactive’ formula,because it was a generally accepted idea thatRussia’s democratic revolution might wellspark off a socialist revolution in westernEurope. But Kautsky also says that shouldthis happen then you might well have accel-erated development in Russia: because it isbackward, it might proceed faster in the con-text of a socialist Europe than one of the morehidebound western European countries.

Finally, he talks a great deal about na-tionalist revolutions. He wants to make clear

that countries such as China, Turkey andRussia represent a new development that isgoing to upset things, and he insists that theleaders of the movements in these countriesare generally not nice people! But forKautsky this does not alter the fact that theyare weakening capitalism and are bringingan element of political unrest to the wholeworld - ie, he almost cheers on these move-ments because they are fighting against na-tional oppression and also making life moredifficult for the European powers.

When Kautsky polemicises againstBernstein and the ‘ethical’ colonialists, hesays: “Colonial policy is based on the ideathat only the European countries are capa-ble of development - the men of other racesare children of idiots or beasts of burden -and even socialists proceed on this assump-tion as soon as they want to pursue a policyof ethical colonial expansionism. But real-ity soon teaches them that our party’s tenetthat ‘All men are equal’ is no mere figure ofspeech, but a very real force.”8

Kautsky is arguing that people are per-fectly capable of fighting back and that theyare actually doing so. He says: “When Marxand Engels wrote the Communist manifesto,they regarded only western Europe as thefield of battle of the proletarian revolution,but today it has become the whole world.Today, the battles and the liberation struggleof the whole of labour and exploited human-ity is being fought not only on the banks ofthe Spree and the Seine, but also on the Hud-son and the Mississippi, the Neva and theDardanelles, the Ganges and the Huangho.”9

Here I call attention to the Neva - theRussian river near Petersburg. Kautsky wasincluding Russia in this idea of global un-rest.

I want now to move on to the subject ofimperialism, war and revolution. In thiscontext I disagree with the idea that

Kautsky’s ‘ultra-imperialism’ theory arguedthat war was not going to break out. This isnot quite correct - for two reasons. The firstis that super-imperialism is a new theorythat Kautsky consciously and explicitly de-veloped in a move away from what he hadhimself been saying earlier. So, it is Kautskywho is rethinking here and exploring a newconcept. And it is once again Lenin who isdefending the old orthodoxy. So when Leninsays that he is getting his definition of thetasks of the times from Kautsky, he was in-cluding imperialism. He was infuriated atthe new concept of ultra-imperialism.

The second thing to be said on this is thatKautsky was not quite saying that ultra-im-perialism is occurring right now, but that it isa possibility - and a strong one - because atsome point the imperialists will wonder whythey are shooting each other when they couldeasily get together and exploit everyone as ateam. So it was not exactly a prophecy - moreof a future possibility.

However, it was exactly this implicationthat made Lenin so furious. He argued thatif you think peace is possible with imperi-alism then you are letting down the side andit is untrue anyway. But I do not want to getinto this debate now, and so will return toour current topic.

We find in Kautsky’s The road to powerthe following ideas: firstly, that imperial-ism is the “last refuge of capitalism”.10 Whathe meant is that people are desperate; theysee capitalism as a blind alley, but there isone possible great rallying idea - imperial-ism, where the country will go forth, makeit in the world, bring benefits to humanityand do well for itself. But he says that, oncethis obviously nonsensical idea is blownapart, then that is it. He is also saying thatthe world is being completely divided up,and in this respect imperialism has reachedits limits in that it has divided up the world.

Lenin made the point that all left Zimmerwaldians were saying what Kautsky had been saying before 1914:namely that revolution will come from war and that we will be faced with a new revolutionary situation.

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Secondly, imperialism leads to war. Hethinks that, even though we are in situationwhere the ruling classes are afraid of warbecause they are afraid of revolution, gunswill fire of themselves.

Another idea - and this links back to theidea of the bourgeois workers’ party concept- is that England has avoided social revolu-tion because of the profits brought by India.As far as I can see, he does not mention thelabour aristocracy, although I think he doesdiscuss that elsewhere. But what he is say-ing here is just that England is exploiting In-dia to make concessions, so that if India rebelsthat will mean crisis for England. This evenleads him on to suggest that if the Englishworkers do not rebel even after India hasbroken free, then they really are hopeless!

Iam not going to try to evaluate these ideaswritten in about 1904. I merely wish to pointout that Lenin’s ideas about imperialism as areason why the revolution has not yet bro-ken out is not a particularly new one. Fur-ther, both Lenin and Kautsky are looking tolimit the damage and to find a reason whythe English workers are not rising up.

To sum up all of what I have said, then,the prediction based on the growing classcontradictions at home and abroad is thatthere is a period of upheaval and unrest com-ing up and it will probably end with the dic-tatorship of the proletariat in Europe.This iswhat Kautsky says in 1906 (I think he is talk-ing about the Russian revolution): “What itpromises to inaugurate is an era of new Eu-ropean revolutions that will lead to the dic-tatorship of the proletariat, paving the wayfor the establishment of a socialist society.”11

Tactics and the ‘new Lenin’The reason that I have emphasised thesethemes in Kautsky is because Lenin empha-sises them. But I now I wish to discuss thetactical conclusions. The two main tacticalconclusions which Lenin draws from this eraof upheaval are also contained in Kautsky,even if they are somewhat more ambiguous.

By the two tactics I mean the ones he isalready going for in September 1914 - ie, turnthe imperialist war into a civil war and get ridof opportunism in the new international.

For the first of these tactics, I wish to bringyour attention to something which was veryimportant to Lenin, and which he referred toon numerous occasions - the Basel manifestoof 1912. It was the last in a series of manifes-tos at Socialist International congresses. Thiswas a special one called because of a diplo-matic crisis. This manifesto is important forLenin, who refers to it many times, and thereason I think he does so is that it was a sol-emn document which everybody signed upto, but few actually carried out.

Representatives of European social de-mocracy at the Basel congress repeated their1907 pledge to resolve to “use the political

and economic crisis created by the war torouse the masses and thereby hasten thedownfall of capitalist class rule.”12

It is a little more evasive than maybe Leninrealised. Note how it says “to rouse themasses and thereby hasten the downfall ofcapitalist rule”. What he understood it tomean was that the parties were under theobligation of their own manifesto to turn theimperialist war into a civil war: ie, turn anunjust war into revolution. So he insists thatthis was a solemn, binding obligation whichKautsky had also signed up to. Furthermore,he believed that the Basel manifesto wassquarely within the socialist tradition - an-other piece of ‘aggressive unoriginality’.

For Lenin it was “the summation of mil-lions and millions of proclamations, articles,books and speeches of the socialists of allcountries in the entire epoch of the Social-ist International. To brush aside the mani-festo means to brush aside the whole his-tory of socialism”.13 Because he thoughtthey were brushing this aside, he accusedthem of being traitors.

So that leads to the next tactical conclu-sion, which is to get rid of opportunism fromthe international parties. One of the thingsLenin wanted to achieve by this was to getrid of Kautsky! So it is very ironic that hepractically quotes Kautsky to explain his rea-soning.

Firstly, he gives Kautsky full credit fordeveloping and fighting the concept of op-portunism. Even in 1920 Lenin is still say-ing that, although Kautsky becomes a trai-tor and an opportunist in 1914, he did yeo-man work in fighting opportunism. Sec-ondly, for Lenin the new social chauvinism- ie, people defending the national interest -is just the old opportunism reborn. (By theway, there is a slight problem with this as-sertion, in that the people who were the mostrabid social patriots and social chauviniststended to have been on the left in France,Germany and Russia.)

Lenin is saying that he understands whatis going on in 1914 in terms of how he andKautsky understood the old Second Interna-tional - ie, opportunism versus orthodoxy.Lenin actually quotes Kautsky in underlin-ing the need to split if opportunism becomestoo dominant - Kautsky advised a split ifopportunism became not just a mood or dan-ger, but a tendency that threatened to takeover. And then - this is quite amazing - hequotes Kautsky talking about changing thename of the party from ‘Social Democratic’to ‘Communist’ in order to justify doing sohimself. Kautsky had never called for a ThirdInternational and would never have wantedit, but the idea of it was inspired by thingsthat Lenin got from Kautsky!

What I have tried to show is that between1914 and 1916 Lenin operated on the basisof a revolutionary situation and global un-

rest that had certain features requiring newtactics. He got his understanding of these,and the assurance that it was the truth, fromthe old international and from Karl Kautsky.

I also pointed out that Lenin had rhetori-cal reasons for making this kind of assump-tion. If he had gone and rethought Marx-ism and said that everyone had been wrongfor the last 30 years and people should fol-low him on that basis, then he would nothave got very far. He did not - what he didwas state that he was the one standing upfor what all the others used to say.

Again I am not giving you my opinion,but Lenin’s - he might be right or he mightbe wrong. I happen to think he was right,but even if he was wrong, even if it was alljust rhetorical and he did not really mean it,we should definitely take it very seriouslywhen Lenin says that Kautsky and his Theroad to power is the most precise defini-tion of the tasks of our times.

In Lenin’s mind, the job of a politicalleader was to take the broad definition ofthe historical situation and work out tacticsthat are both true to the principles and ap-plied to the situation, which I think is whathe meant when he talked about dialectics.At one point he says that Kautsky had taughtus dialectics, but he completely failed toapply them himself when it came to 1914.

So did 1914 lead to a new Lenin? I thinkit did in one way. It led to Lenin puttinghimself on the line on a European scale. Hewas now thinking in terms of being a Euro-pean leader with a European programme.To overstate it perhaps, ‘Lenin had to be-come Kautsky because Kautsky was notbeing Kautsky’.

Notes1. Paraphrasing from Lenin’s letter toShlapnikov, October 27 1914.2. October 31 1914.3. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/dec/12.htm4. Ibid.5. Quoted by Lenin in ‘Dead chauvinism andliving socialism’: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/dec/12.htm6. marx.org/archive/lenin/works//1915/csi/ii.htm7. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/nov/20.htm8. www.marx.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch09.htm9. Ibid.10. www.marx.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch09.htm11. www.marx.org/archive/kautsky/1906/xx/revolutions.htm12. www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1912/basel-manifesto.htm13. VI Lenin Imperialist war: the struggleagainst social chauvinism and socialpacifism.

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I am going to talk about the fate of the ‘fourwagers’ made by Lenin in 1917. They are:the wagers on international revolution, onsoviet democracy, on steps toward social-ism, and on what I call ‘peasantfollowership’.

First I will look at them in 1917, and thenassess how Lenin thought they were turn-ing out. By late 1918-early 1919 he is stillvery confident that most of them are pay-ing off, but then he begins to realise in sev-eral ways that they are not. Then I will moveahead to 1922-23 and Lenin’s final writings,where I think he achieves a shaky synthesisof sorts.

I should say that the term ‘wager’ whichI use is not meant to imply in any way some-thing adventurous or risky. It comes fromPyotr Stolypin’s peasant policy, known as awager, or betting, on the strong. In otherwords, it refers to a policy intended to pro-duce certain results, based on the predic-tion that events will turn out in a certain way.

I will not speak much about Kautsky inthis talk, but I will begin with a Kautskyquote from 1904: “The practical politician,if he wishes to be successful, must attemptto see into the future much like the theoreti-cal socialist. Whether this foresight takesthe form of a prophecy will depend on histemperament. But he must at the same timealways be prepared for the appearance ofunexpected factors which will frustrate hisplans and impart a new direction to devel-opments, and he must always be ready tochange his tactic accordingly.”

And that is how I am approaching thissubject: Lenin is making predictions andwhen he sees they are not working he triesto deal with the new situation.

My source for all this - since Lenin wrotelittle in terms of lengthy texts during thisperiod - is his speeches. That was a big ele-ment of Lenin’s role in power: he madespeeches to mainly party or sympathisingaudiences, where he would pound home thebig message about what was happening. Ithink he was sincere in what he was saying,so when he started to recognise things werechanging this was reflected in his speeches.There is a human drama in this: you can see

The Bolshevik decision to make revolution was based on four key predictions, or ‘wagers’,says Lars T Lih: international revolution, soviet democracy, peasant followership andprogress towards socialism

The four wagers of Leninin 1917

his painful disappointment coming right tothe surface.

A lot of this will be somewhat familiar -I am not going to be revisionist in this talk -and there is one familiar framework I ampolemicising against. A lot of people be-lieve that in 1917 and especially 1918 theregime starts off in a moderate, realistic way,but then during the civil war the Bolshe-viks become more and more radical. Theyare forced to be by the civil war, but theydo not realise this is happening, so by 1920they see themselves in the position of tak-ing a leap or short cut to communism - akind of insanity. Then Kronstadt gives thema slap in the face, for which they are grate-ful, and they are able to turn back to thesober moderation of the New EconomicPolicy.

I see it in a different way. In 1917 therewas a lack of reality and even demagogyon the part of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, butafterwards a steady sobering up, so that in1920 they are glum and pessimistic - farfrom ‘euphoric’, as, unbelievably, manywriters claim. Arthur Ransome, the Englishwriter, was in Russia and knew the Bolshe-vik leaders and talked to them a lot. Hewrote two very good books describing theatmosphere at the time: Russia in 1919 andThe crisis in Russia. Both were pre-NEPand so very valuable in this way.

He used this expression: “The Bolshe-viks had illusion after illusion scraped fromthem by the pumice stone of experience.”1

I think that is what happened. I partiallyagree with the theory that the Bolsheviksovertheorised their problems, but I have asomewhat different picture of what thattheory was.

‘October thesis’?Let me now go back to October 1915, to acrucial comment made by Lenin. Most ofhis writings at this time were about the Eu-ropean situation, but on this occasion he setsout a policy for Russia. How does he com-bine this left Zimmerwald message - inter-national revolution, socialism in Europe -with his desire for democratic revolution inRussia? In October1915 he said: “The task

of the proletariat in Russia is to carry outthe bourgeois democratic revolution in Rus-sia to the end.”2 He meant the most thor-oughgoing democratic revolution possible- not one that went on to socialism, but sim-ply won as many democratic gains as pos-sible from the beginning, in order to ignitethe socialist revolution in Europe.

Lenin then sketches out a scenario whichconnects the two. He was against an anti-tsarist revolution that would bring to powerrevolutionary chauvinists: ie, those whowish to remove the tsar only because he isbungling the war effort. He is against thechauvinists even if they are revolutionariesand republicans. The Bolsheviks were tostrive for a second stage to the revolutionled by the proletariat and supported by thepetty bourgeois peasantry, which has beenpushed to the left under the strain of the war.This second stage would resurrect thesoviets of 1905, acting now as the heart ofa new power (vlast) and this revolutionarydictatorship of the proletariat and peasantrywould carry out the full minimum pro-gramme and propose a just peace.

The Bolsheviks did not expect the im-perialists would accept the proposal, but thiswould now put the Bolsheviks in the posi-tion to wage a just, revolutionary war aimedat socialist revolution in Europe and anti-colonial revolutions across the world. InLenin’s words, “There is no doubt the vic-tory of the proletariat in Russia would cre-ate extraordinarily favourable conditions forthe development of revolution in Asia andEurope - even 1905 proved that.”3

So what we see here in 1915 is prettymuch his 1917 platform - perhaps, insteadof talking about the April thesis, we shouldtalk of the ‘October (1915) thesis’. Leninhimself wrote to friends in 1917, saying theBolsheviks had predicted the 1917 eventsin 1915 - “We were absolutely right”.

However, there was one change, achange he made without great fanfare rightbefore he left for Russia, and that what Icall the inclusion of “steps toward social-ism”. That was the careful way in whichLenin described the programme for Russia- he used that metaphor of moving toward

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socialism, and that occurred on the eve ofhis return to Russia in April 1917. This isthe first time we have the notion of not justthe democratic revolution until the social-ist revolution in Europe: now Russia ismoving toward socialism regardless. In1917 he continued to express the threewagers of 1915, plus this new wager.

I will now look at some of the argumentsLenin made in support of this in 1917. Stateand revolution, whilst written in 1917, wasnot published until 1918, and is often over-emphasised in assessing Lenin’s platformof 1917. In State and revolution he aimedto address the European audience, althoughhe could not help at times reverting to Rus-sian examples.

The two books upon which I am basingmy summary are written in September 1917:The impending catastrophe and how to dealwith it and Can the Bolsheviks retain statepower? This is where Lenin talks aboutRussia and explains his logic. He is not call-ing on workers and peasants to make a so-cialist revolution, but to take the power. Thisis based on the assumption that the natureof the class that holds the vlast - Russianfor ‘power’ or ‘governmental authority’ -decides everything. The Bolsheviks ex-plained that, as long as the vlast was heldby their enemies - the landowners, the capi-talists, the bourgeoisie in any form - theimperialist war would continue, the eco-nomic collapse would continue, radical landreform would continue to be postponed.This would cease only when the workers asa class took power and fulfilled their his-toric mission of leading the whole of thenarod (people) to revolutionary victory.

So let us see how these four wagersturned out.

I am not going to say much about thewager on international revolution - not be-cause it is not important, but because I donot have a lot new to say. Soviet democ-racy is also fundamental, but I do not thinkI am going to change your mind on that one.I do, however, want to say something aboutthe other two, the steps toward socialismand ‘peasant followership’.

Lenin’s rhetoric at this time was a newversion of ‘aggressive unoriginality’,4 in thathe said that everybody knew what meas-ures must be taken: the Mensheviks, the lib-erals and even the monarchists are awarethat we need a degree of economic regula-tion, land reform and strong governmentalpower, but are afraid to do these things be-cause of their class position. This is summedup by a section title in The impending ca-tastrophe: ‘Control measures are easy totake and known to all’ (‘control’ meaning‘regulation’). So there is no ambiguity ordifficulty in solving the crisis, if you havethe will. The only way, of course, is to takepower. The logic here is partly what I call a

‘Wumba of the people’. ‘Wumba’ is a Ger-man acronym for Waffen undMunitionsbeschaffungsamt. That was theweapons and supply bureaucracy in Ger-many - everybody was amazed at just howorganised it was.

So, talking about Europe in 1916, Leninsaid: “If, for instance, Germany can directthe economic life of 66 million people froma single centre and strain the energies of thenarod in order to wage a predatory war inthe interests of 100 or 200 financial mag-nates or aristocrats, the monarchy, etc, thenthe same can be done in the interests of nine-tenths of the people - ie, the non-propertiedmasses - if their struggle is directed by theconscious or purposive workers liberatedfrom social-imperialist and social-pacifistinfluence.”5

So his programme for Europe was: ex-propriate the banks, and, relying on themasses, carry out in their interests what oc-curred in Germany. That is why I call it‘Wumba for the people’. Can this be ap-plied to Russia? Lenin thought so - there isenough of an economic regulatory appara-tus, there is enough of a banking system,there are enough governmental trusts andso forth. He says it is possible to solve thecrisis if we apply determined, revolution-ary-democratic measures.

Steps toward socialismI would like to make three points about thewager on steps towards socialism. First,there has been quite a debate about smash-ing (in Marx zerbrechen) the state, as op-posed to using it ready-made. On this Leninsays explicitly: ‘We will smash the state’ -ie, what he meant by that in the Marxistframework was the bureaucracy, the armyand the police: that is to say, the repressiveand undemocratic apparatus - but we willpreserve the economic apparatus. However,much of that apparatus is part of the state.So he is still saying at this point that we aregoing to preserve what I would call the ‘eco-nomic state apparatus’.

Secondly, when you read the rhetoric ofLenin and other Bolsheviks, they are prom-ising an easy way out. They are saying, ‘Ifyou let us, comrades, we will get you out ofthis crisis pretty quickly and painlessly.’ SoI think that there is a certain unrealism bor-dering on demagogy here.

And finally, Lenin is somewhat ambigu-ous about whether the result will be social-ism and what exactly that is. For example,there is another section entitled: ‘Can wego forward if we fear to go towards social-ism?’ So they are moving forward and arenot afraid of socialism, but he is not quitesaying that it is going to be socialism. As Isaid earlier, the heart of the message in 1917was not ‘Create a socialist revolution’, butrather ‘Take over the vlast’.

Looking ahead, what actually happenedis that the economic apparatus was smashedby events and therefore, precisely becauseit was smashed, the repressive apparatuswas not smashed and had to be strength-ened.

What do I mean by ‘peasantfollowership’? Basically the old Bolshevikidea that you are going to rely on the peas-ants to follow you and try to be their leader.I use the word ‘followership’, as opposedto ‘leadership’, not as an insult, but muchmore of a compliment - the Bolsheviks areoptimistic about the ability of the peasantsand are prepared to make this wager on theirfollowership. It is a question of understand-ing their interests: if we give them their de-mands around land then they will supportus against the counterrevolution. When youlook at the record of the peasants in west-ern Europe you see that this was a gamble,a wager.

It is one half of this wager - the old Bol-shevik view that we are going to completethe democratic revolution. We have onlyhad a half-assed revolution because we areyet to destroy class power and the rule ofthe gentry. We are going to remove this classfrom history and get the peasants on board- they will support us against acounterrevolution. This is a somewhat re-adjusted old Bolshevism, but definitelytaken from it.

But there was a new stage which was notso emphasised - this is something I saw onlywhen I looked at the speeches and offhandcomments. Lenin hoped that the peasantswould move to socialism on their own - now.Of course, if the peasants started movingtowards collectivised forms of production,then you could solve the problems.

This also brings a new twist to the ideaof whether socialism was possible in Rus-sia alone. This is an approach to the idea ofsocialism in Russia from a non-Trotskyist,non-permanent revolution logic. Trotskynever said - and in fact his whole argumentis premised on it - that the peasants wouldbe moving towards socialism on their own,whereas Lenin is banking on this as a pos-sibility: if they are obliged by the emergencyof the war and the prospect of ruin, theymight see that it is good to get together andcooperate with each other.

So let us jump ahead one year to the endof 1918 and look at the book The renegadeKautsky. I am not going to talk about any-thing Lenin says about Kautsky here (onehalf abuse and the other half praise of ‘theold Kautsky’). I want to look at what Leninwrote in response to Kautsky’s criticismsof the revolution. Lenin looks at the accom-plishments of the revolution on its first an-niversary, taking account of everythingagainst Kautsky’s criticisms. He says, so-viet democracy is fine - everybody says that

13

we are coming along nicely.He writes: “In Russia, however, the bu-

reaucratic machine has been completelysmashed, razed to the ground; the old judgeshave all been sent packing, the bourgeoisparliament has been dispersed - and farmore accessible representation has beengiven to the workers and peasants; theirsoviets have replaced the bureaucrats, theirsoviets have been put in control of the bu-reaucrats, and their soviets have been au-thorised to elect the judges. This fact aloneis enough for all the oppressed classes torecognise that soviet power - ie, the presentform of the dictatorship of the proletariat -is a million times more democratic than themost democratic bourgeois republic”.6

DefiantSo at this point Lenin is still saying defi-antly that Russia is unambiguously demo-cratic. On the peasant question he says,rather strikingly: “Things have turned outjust as we said they would. The course takenby the revolution has confirmed the correct-ness of our reasoning.”7

First of all, says Lenin, the Bolsheviksgained the loyalty of the whole peasantryby fulfilling their desire for land. We car-ried the bourgeois revolution to its end.Then he made an argument which we tendto forget about, because it did not pan outthis way - the next ‘steps towards social-ism’ phase: “The peasants themselves willsee the inadequacy of bourgeois democraticsolutions and the necessity of proceedingbeyond their limits and passing on to so-cialism.”8

Lenin argues that Kautsky himself hadsaid much the same in his 1899 Agrarianquestion about the means at the disposal ofthe proletarian state for bringing about thetransition of the small peasants to social-ism. Lenin hoped to see the peasantry mov-ing towards socialism and is encouraged bya policy called ‘class war in the villages’ -although even as he was writing The ren-egade Kautsky, the policy was being pulledback.

The economy is the one area over whichLenin is a little defensive. The reason obvi-ously being that the crisis had not beensolved by the Bolshevik revolution, but hadspiralled further out of control. He writes:“All the flunkeys of the bourgeoisie in Rus-sia argue in this way: ‘Show us after ninemonths your general well-being!’ And thisafter four years of devastating civil war andforeign capital giving all-round to the sabo-tage and rebellions of the bourgeoisie inRussia.”9And he is absolutely right - that isone of the basic reasons why there was sucha crisis.

The fourth wager is international revo-lution, and here Lenin is absolutely confi-dent because the German revolution has justbroken out. Alexander Rabinovitch’s newbook ends with celebration of the revolu-tion which is on the march in Germany.

This is something Zinoviev said in Sep-tember 1918 as a tribute to Lenin:“Scheidemann [a rightwing German socialdemocrat] knows that if he ends up hang-ing from a lamp post (and I bet that he does!)to a large degree comrade Lenin would beto blame. We comrades will live to see the

moment when our proletariat through itsvozhd, Lenin, will dictate its will to all ofold Europe - and comrade Lenin will agreetreaties with the government of KarlLiebknecht, and the same Lenin will helpthe German workers compose their firstsocialist decrees.”10

In the final part of The renegade Kautsky,Lenin writes: “Kautsky’s above lines werewritten on November 9 1918. The very samenight, news was received from Germany an-nouncing the beginning of the victoriousrevolution - first in Kiel and other townsand ports, where power passed into thehands of the soviets - and then in Berlin.The conclusion which still remained to bewritten for my pamphlet on Kautsky is nowsuperfluous.”11

Now I am going to deal with the phasewhere Lenin is having to start to acknowl-edge that things are not going right, althoughI must stress that I do not see any funda-mental change - there are some very disap-pointing empirical realities that he has tohandle. The euphoria around the interna-tional revolution continues up until the sum-mer of 1919 - and I think ‘euphoria’ is thebest way to describe this. In Krupskaya’smemoirs she writes how Lenin was happierthan she had ever seen him around Novem-ber 1918.

I also get this impression from hisspeeches - he thought the wagers were pay-ing off and things were going OK. So whenaddressing an audience facing many eco-nomic difficulties he says: “This is the lastdifficult half year, because the internationalsituation has never been so good.”12

Zinoviev described the dilemma of the Bolsheviks: “Soviets only make sense in a revolutionary situation, sincesoviets without such a situation will only turn into a parody of soviets.”

14

Lenin is confident that within six monthsthe situation will be much better becauseRussia will no longer be blockaded and theinternational revolution will bail them out.Then in March 1919 the Hungarian revolu-tion broke out and this is a very indicativereaction from Lenin, who is particularlypleased: “As a more cultured country thanRussia, Hungary will show the socialistrevolution in a better light - without the vio-lence, without the bloodshed, that wasforced upon us by the Kerenskys and theimperialists”.13

So you see that this is really from theheart, showing the wariness he held aboutsome of the things he had to do. He alsotalks on numerous occasions about howprevious generations of Russian revolution-aries lived and died, but we are the genera-tion which is going to see it happen: “Nomatter the great misfortunes that may bebrought upon us by that dying beast, impe-rialism, it will perish and socialism will tri-umph throughout the world.”14

This is the most amazing quote from July1919: “We say with confidence - taking allour experience, all that has happened thispast year, into account - that we shall sur-mount all difficulties and that this July willbe the last difficult July and that next Julywe will welcome the victory of the worldsoviet republic - and that this victory willbe full and complete.”15 Again, this comesfrom a public speech - Lenin is really puttinghimself out on a limb.

But this kind of rhetoric comes to a sud-den halt around August with the defeat ofthe Hungarian revolution. It never reallycomes back. I read through Lenin’s speechesin 1919 and, although the content does notreally change much throughout, you do no-tice that on the question of the internationalrevolution he is very confident in the firsthalf of the year, but much less so in the sec-ond half.

In an interview with Arthur Ransome,Lenin confidently predicts the revolution inEngland. When Ransome questions this,Lenin tells him of how he once had typhoidin the 1890s, but he had been carrying thisa long time before he actually knew aboutit. Then suddenly he was struck down. Thisis how he saw England - it has got the dis-ease, is still walking around, but is going tocollapse. However, a year later he is inter-viewed by Bertrand Russell and by then hasalready given up on a revolution in Eng-land. By this point the Bolsheviks were say-ing that they were no longer in a revolu-tionary situation.

This is confirmed at the Second Congressof the Communist International - as opposedto the first one. Zinoviev says: “Soviets onlymake sense in a revolutionary situation,since soviets without such a situation willonly turn into a parody of soviets”.16 So he

is pointing out that in the next historicalperiod we will have soviets, but now it waspropaganda for them which was the onlyappropriate thing.

But this is the dilemma. You have devel-oped a new party model over the years basedon the premise of there being a revolution-ary situation - so all sorts of things are per-tinent to that: the purging of opportunists,the underground and certain other thingswere argued for on the basis of the exist-ence of this situation. What party modelshould be put forward now? I think that is amajor dilemma and has implications for the‘over-theorisation’ problem we have dis-cussed elsewhere - with the Bolsheviksmaking virtues out of the necessities im-posed on them. They never really did solvethis problem.

The Polish war of 1920 represented abrief re-ignition of the hopes for interna-tional revolution but they were pushed backvery quickly and soon forgotten. Startingfrom about mid-1919, foreign policy is in-creasingly orientated to trade treaties andeconomic concessions.

The big point I want to make about thewager on Soviet democracy is that the Bol-sheviks were aware and openly acknowl-edged that things were not turning out sowell. And at the end of 1920 there was adebate in the party about elitism, which wascalled ‘The highers vs the lowers’. What isinteresting is the attitude of some of the‘highers’ in admitting just how bad thingswere. I am going to quote what Zinovievsaid.

The soviets of 1917 are described as “or-gans in which the creativity of the massesfinds for itself the most free and most or-ganised path. Soviets are organs that guar-antee a constant stream of forces from be-low. The soviets are organs in which themasses learn to legislate and, at the sametime, carry out their own laws. This is notpaying off at present. The most elementarydemands of democracy are being ig-nored.”17

He gives some excuses for why this isso, however: “The pressures of the modernadministrative state, the necessity to putextreme pressure on the population duringthe civil war, the exceptional discipline im-posed by wartime necessities, the need tooften side with bourgeois specialists againstthe workers, and the overload of work andresponsibility based on a thin party elite”.18

StepsRegarding the wager on steps towards so-cialism I would like to quote Leon Trotsky.Here is what he said in 1920 at the thirdanniversary of the Bolshevik revolution toa popular audience:

“We went into this struggle with mag-nificent ideals, with magnificent enthusiasm,

and it seemed to many people that the prom-ised land of communist fraternity - the flow-ering of not only material but spiritual life -was much closer than it actually turned outto be. That promised land - the new king-dom of justice, freedom, contentment andcultural uplift was so near, it could betouched.

“If three years ago we were given theopportunity of looking ahead we would nothave believed our eyes - we would not havebelieved that three years after the proletar-ian revolution it would be so hard for us tolive on this earth. Our task has not been ac-complished - each one of us knows this. Thenew order for which we have fought andare fighting still does not exist.”

So this very eloquent statement under-lines how the Bolsheviks are certainly notclaiming that they have achieved socialism.

At this point in 1920, Nikolai Bukharincomes up with a theory to explain this - it isa sort of ‘crisis’ theory: “A revolution re-quires a deep, long and abiding crisis”,which is the precondition for workers’power. And when workers’ power getsunderway, the first thing to do is to deal withthis crisis, which will accelerate, eventhough the workers have taken power,meaning that it is necessary to go through aperiod of what he calls “expanded negativereproduction” - ie, a collapse. And then onlylater can we really start to progress.19

This is Bukharin’s understanding ofsmashing the state - you have to smash notonly the political, but the economic and themilitary aspects of the state and you have toaccept that it is going to break apart - a tragicbreakdown in society, which can only beput back together again slowly. So social-ism is only possible when this has happened- which certainly was not the case by 1920.But all the coercion and the militarisationthat the Bolsheviks had organised was jus-tified because in the long run it was neces-sary for workers’ power, which in turn wasnecessary for socialism.

By following these speeches I think Ihave discovered something on peasantfollowership which, as far as I know, hasnot been pointed out by anybody.

A lot of people say that there are twodifferent Lenins when it comes to the peas-ants: the hard-line Lenin of 1919 and the‘good’ Lenin of the NEP period; and thatStalin reverted to the ‘bad’ Lenin of 1919.The plausibility behind this comes from thefact that they were putting extreme pressureon the peasants both for their grain and forrecruits for the army, so that there were alot of rebellions and so forth.

But we are not dealing with this. We aredealing with the change in a whole mode ofproduction, and therefore a whole way oflife. For starters, as I say, Lenin hoped thatthe peasants would move forward by them-

15

selves.There were two forms of local collec-

tive production. The first was state farms,where an estate previously held by a land-owner would be taken over and there wasalready a framework for production. Theother one was communes - again this wason a very small scale, but it was very in-tense. Poor peasants would get together inthe communes and really share everything- not only production. As one Russian, non-Marxist émigré quite accurately observed,“The Bolsheviks made attempts at newagrarian forms, but they did not expect anygreat success from them and did not achieveany either.”

That is how it was. But for reasons I havementioned, Lenin put great hopes on this -especially when the international revolutionwas not being fulfilled. He was absolutelydevastated by this, and you can mark hisreaction in speeches from late 1918 to 1921,when he gets increasingly exasperated aboutthe worthlessness of the communes.

This is him in late 1919: “The peasantssay ‘Long live Soviet power!’, ‘Long livethe Bolsheviks!’ but ‘Down with the com-munes!’ They curse the communes whenthey are organised in a stupid way and whenit is forced upon them. They are suspiciousof everything that is imposed on them, andquite rightly so. We must help the peasantsand teach them - but only in the fields ofscience and socialism - farm managementwe must learn from them!”

So he is sort of taking the side of thepeasants who do not like the communes andthe state farms - there are many quotes show-ing that Lenin thought the communes werean embarrassment and that the peasantswere right to laugh at them.

So voluntary collectivisation is not work-

ing. What is his reaction? To get them towork by force - more or less Stalin’s reac-tion in 1931? Lenin is quite explicit thatviolence is absolutely ruled out when itcomes to changing the mode of production.

He says in 1919: “The communistswould never resort to violence. The absurd-ity of this was so obvious that the Sovietgovernment long ago forbade it, so that thelast trace of this outrage towards the peas-ants would be swept from the face of therepublic.” In other words, no Marxist wouldever condone violence or force in gettingthe peasants to change the mode of produc-tion. This was a point remembered by dis-sident Bolsheviks when forced collectivi-sation occurred.

On the question of whether Lenin’s poli-cies towards the peasants were a forerun-ner of Stalin’s, I think we can say ‘no’ un-ambiguously. He denounced it ahead of itstime. And, by the way, this is why Leninwas so excited about electrification - hethought that by bringing electricity to thecountryside it would help bring the peas-ants nearer to socialism.

Now I would like to quickly discuss Len-in’s writings in 1922-23. On internationalrevolution he has what I call a ‘hold-outperspective’. In Better fewer but better hetalks of the revolution ‘holding out’ on nu-merous occasions. On soviet power thereis a kind of sad irony where the word ‘so-viet’ - which initially meant ‘council’ -comes to mean the government as opposedto the party or the people. So it now referredto the bureaucracy - but this mainly con-sisted of bourgeois spetsy and officials fromthe old tsarist order and so on which thepopulation was suspicious of.

So gradually, at least amongst many ofthe leading Bolsheviks, the word ‘soviet’

started to acquire quite negative connota-tions. I saw this in Stalin’s letters from themid-1920s and it took me quite a while tofigure out. Why was ‘soviet’ such a nega-tive word? It was because it began to mean‘government’. This was the ironic twist toall of this.

What Lenin did in 1922-23 was attemptto come up with a scheme to remake thesoviets from above by using the party, butalso to bring in the workers and peasants -not from below but siphoned to the top. Thatwas his special idea for the workers andpeasants which he took a lot of thought andtime to develop in his last articles.

‘Peasant followership’ now became thelink - we have to lead the peasants to so-cialism, so that the kulaks and the bourgeoi-sie do not lead them in their direction. Thefamous phrase ‘Who, whom?’, which issupposed to be Lenin’s favourite, is onlymentioned two or three times towards theend of his life. Zinoviev and others pickedup on it, which is why we know Lenin usedit. What he meant by it was that the peas-ants will follow either us or the bourgeoisie- it is old Bolshevism transformed into thenew situation. So we are going to remakethe peasantry via electrification and keepthem on our side in the meantime.

In terms of steps towards socialism,things again were not that great, becausethey were just clambering out of the crisisand there was a huge famine in 1921-22.Here is what Lenin says about it - he is soangry that the attractiveness of socialismwas not able to reveal itself: “They failedto overthrow the new system created by therevolution, but they did prevent it from atonce taking the steps forward that wouldhave justified the forecasts of the socialists,that would have enabled the latter to de-

Lenin had great hopes inBela Kun and the HungarianRevolution of 1919: “As amore cultured country thanRussia, Hungary will showthe socialist revolution in abetter light - without theviolence, without thebloodshed, that was forcedupon us by the Kerenskysand the imperialists”.

16

velop the productive forces with enormousspeed, to develop all the potentialitieswhich, taken together, would have producedsocialism; socialists would thus have provedto all and sundry that socialism containswithin itself gigantic forces and that man-kind had now entered into a new stage ofdevelopment of extraordinarily brilliantprospects”.20

SynthesisYou can see from this that Lenin still be-lieved in socialism but that the internationalsituation in particular had caused severeproblems. In one of his very last articlescalled ‘Our revolution’, he admits that thosewho criticised the Bolsheviks for saying thatthe situation was ripe for socialism wereright. But, he says, we had to do what wedid - it was a life-or-death situation. He ques-tions why it was not possible for them tocreate the kind of culture necessary for so-cialism once in power. I think this is quite achange in Marxism.

Now I am going to just read out what Ithink his final synthesis was on the wagers:

“Hopes have faded for the socialist revo-lution in Europe at any time in the foresee-able future: then take courage in the inevi-table awakening of the east, whilst prayingthat inter-capitalist squabbles will allow

socialist Russia to hold out. Hopes havefaded that soviet-style democracy from be-low will transform the state: then use theparty to remake the inherited state appara-tus from above. Hopes have faded that thepeasants would move towards socialisttransformation on their own initiative: thentake the old Bolshevik scenario of classleadership, which had vindicated itself dur-ing the civil war, and apply it to the task ofovercoming the market by using the mar-ket [ie, NEP]. Hopes have faded that themeasures needed to solve Russia’s eco-nomic crisis will also be at the same timesteps towards socialism; then build up in-dustry to the point where Russia can moveahead into socialism - not at the slow paceof a peasant nag but at the high speed ofadvanced industrial technology.

“Do all these faded hopes mean that oursocialist critics were right in that Russia wasnot ready for socialism? Yes, but who is tosay that a proletarian vlast cannot pull itselfup by its own bootstraps by itself creatingthe cultural prerequisites for socialism?”

Notes1. A Ransome The crisis in Russia:www.scribd.com/doc/16189800/The-Crisis-in-Russia2. VI Lenin CW Vol 21, pp401-04

3. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/oct/13.htm4. See ‘Lenin, Kautsky and 1914’ WeeklyWorker September 10.5. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/dec/25.htm6. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/democracy.htm7. Quoted in L Trotsky Permanent revolution:www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr05.htm#n28. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/subservience.htm9. Ibid.10. www.marx.org/archive/zinoviev/works/1918/lenin/ch14.htm11. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/subservience.htm12. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/rcp8th/09.htm13. www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/lenin/works/1919/rcp8th/09.htm14. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/rcp8th/09.htm15. www.marxistsfr.org/archive/lenin/works//1919/jul/12.htm16. www.trotsky.org/archive/weisbord/conquest41.htm17. Ibid.18. Ibid.19. See K Tarbuck Bukharin’s theory of equi-librium London 1989.20. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm

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