Results and Prospects
IV. Revolution and the Proletariat
Section summary
Revolution is a struggle for state power, and when the workers take power depends not directly on a country’s productive forces but on the balance of class forces. The proletariat of backward Russia can come to power before its bourgeoisie, as Kautsky’s comparison with America suggests and against the “textual Marxists” who quote Marx’s “like master, like man”. Calling the revolution bourgeois does not settle its course: the proletariat, once in power, will not give it up and will be pushed towards running the economy, so Social-Democrats must decide whether to aim at a workers’ government.
The state is not an end in itself. It is only a working machine in the hands of the dominant social force. Like every machine, the state has its motor, its transmission and its executive mechanism. The motive force is class interest; its mechanism is agitation, the press, the propaganda of church and school, parties, street meetings, petitions, insurrection. The transmission mechanism is the legislative organisation of caste, dynastic, estate or class interest in the guise of the divine will (absolutism) or the will of the nation (parliamentarism). Finally, the executive mechanism is the administration with its police, the courts with their prisons, the army.
The state is not an end in itself. But it is the greatest means for organising, disorganising and reorganising social relations. According to whose hands it is in, it can be the lever of a profound transformation or the instrument of organised stagnation.
Every political party worthy of the name strives to take possession of the power of government and so to put the state at the service of the class whose interests it expresses. Social-Democracy, as the party of the proletariat, naturally strives for the political rule of the working class.
The proletariat grows and gains strength with the growth of capitalism. In this sense the development of capitalism is the development of the proletariat towards dictatorship. But the day and the hour when power will pass into the hands of the working class depend directly not on the level of the productive forces but on the relations of the class struggle, on the international situation, and finally on a number of subjective factors: tradition, initiative, readiness for battle.
In an economically more backward country the proletariat may come to power sooner than in a country capitalistically advanced. In 1871 it consciously took the management of public affairs into its own hands in petty-bourgeois Paris, only for two months, it is true; but it has not held power for a single hour in the great capitalist centres of England or the United States. The notion of some sort of automatic dependence of the proletarian dictatorship on the technical forces and resources of a country is a prejudice of an “economic” materialism simplified to the point of absurdity. Such a view has nothing in common with Marxism.
The Russian revolution creates, in our view, conditions in which power may (and with the victory of the revolution must) pass into the hands of the proletariat before the politicians of bourgeois liberalism have the chance to display their statesmanlike genius to the full.
Summing up the revolution and counter-revolution of 1848–49 in the American paper the Tribune, Marx wrote:
“The working class of Germany is, in its social and political development, as far behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie is behind the bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master, like man. The evolution of the conditions of existence for a numerous, strong, concentrated and intelligent proletarian class goes hand in hand with the development of the conditions of existence for a numerous, wealthy, concentrated and powerful middle class. The working-class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively proletarian character, until all the different factions of the middle class, and particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have conquered political power and remodelled the state according to their wants. It is then that the inevitable conflict between the employer and the employed becomes imminent, and cannot be adjourned any longer…”
This quotation is probably familiar to the reader, since it has lately been much abused by textual Marxists. It has been put forward as an irrefutable argument against the idea of a workers’ government in Russia. “Like master, like man.” If the Russian capitalist bourgeoisie is not strong enough to take state power into its hands, then still less can there be any question of a workers’ democracy, that is, of the political rule of the proletariat.
Marxism is above all a method of analysis: not of the analysis of texts but of the analysis of social relations. Is it true, as applied to Russia, that the weakness of capitalist liberalism necessarily means the weakness of the labour movement? Is it true, as applied to Russia, that an independent proletarian movement is impossible until the bourgeoisie has conquered state power? It is enough to put these questions to see what hopeless formalism of thought lies behind the attempt to turn a historically relative remark of Marx’s into a supra-historical (supra-historique) theorem.
Although the development of factory industry in Russia has had an “American” character in periods of industrial boom, the actual dimensions of our capitalist industry seem childish compared with the industry of the American States. Five million people, 16.6 per cent of the economically active population, are employed in manufacturing industry in Russia; for the United States the corresponding figures are six million and 22.2 per cent. These figures still say comparatively little; they become more eloquent if we remember that the population of Russia is almost twice that of the States. But to get an idea of the real dimensions of the industry of the two countries, we must point out that in 1900 the American works, factories and large handicraft establishments put on the market goods to the value of 25 milliard roubles, whereas Russia in the same period produced in its factories and works goods worth less than 2.5 milliard roubles.
The numbers of the industrial proletariat, its concentration, its culture and its political weight undoubtedly depend on the degree of development of capitalist industry. But this dependence is not direct. Between the productive forces of a country and the political forces of its classes there cut across, at any given moment, various social and political factors of a national and international character, and these deflect and even completely alter the political expression of economic relations. Although the productive forces of industry in the United States are ten times as great as ours, the political role of the Russian proletariat, its influence on the politics of its own country, and the possibility of its exercising an influence on world politics in the near future, are incomparably greater than the role and significance of the American proletariat.
In his recent work on the American proletariat Kautsky points out that there is no direct and immediate correspondence between the political strength of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the level of capitalist development on the other.
“There are two states,” he says, “diametrically opposite to each other: in one of them one of the elements of the capitalist mode of production is developed out of all proportion, that is, out of proportion to the level of that mode of production, and in the other the other element; in America the capitalist class, in Russia the proletariat. In America, with more justice than anywhere else, one can speak of the dictatorship of capital, while the fighting proletariat has nowhere acquired such importance as in Russia, and this importance must and undoubtedly will grow, for this country has only recently begun to take part in the modern class struggle and has only recently given it some room.” Having pointed out that Germany can to a certain extent study its future in Russia, Kautsky continues: “It is indeed extremely strange that it should be precisely the Russian proletariat that shows us our future, in so far as this is expressed not in the organisation of capital but in the protest of the working class. Russia is the most backward of all the great states of the capitalist world. This seems to contradict,” Kautsky remarks, “the materialist conception of history, according to which economic development serves as the basis of political development; but in reality,” he goes on, “it contradicts only the kind of materialist conception of history that our opponents and critics depict, who see in it not a method of inquiry but only a ready-made pattern.” (K. Kautsky, The American and the Russian Worker, St Petersburg, 1906, pp. 4–5.)
These lines should be particularly recommended to the attention of those of our Marxists at home who replace independent analysis of social relations by deduction from texts selected for every occasion in life. Nobody compromises Marxism so much as these titular Marxists!
Thus, in Kautsky’s assessment, Russia is characterised in the economic field by a relatively low level of capitalist development, and in the political field by the insignificance of the capitalist bourgeoisie and the might of the revolutionary proletariat. The result is that “the struggle for the interests of the whole of Russia has fallen to the lot of the only strong class now existing in it, the industrial proletariat. That is why the latter has enormous political importance there; that is why in Russia the struggle for its liberation from the absolutism that is strangling it like a polyp has turned into a single combat between absolutism and the industrial working class, a single combat in which the peasantry can give considerable support but is incapable of playing the leading role.”
Does not all this give us the right to conclude that the Russian “man” may come to power sooner than his “master”?
Political optimism can be of two kinds. One can overestimate one’s own strength and the advantages of the revolutionary situation, and set oneself tasks whose solution the given relation of forces does not allow. But one can also, on the contrary, optimistically limit one’s revolutionary tasks to a point beyond which the logic of our position will inevitably carry us.
One can limit the scope of all the questions of the revolution by asserting that our revolution is bourgeois in its objective aims, and therefore in its inevitable results; and one can at the same time close one’s eyes to the fact that the chief agent of this bourgeois revolution is the proletariat, which is being pushed towards power by the whole course of the revolution.
One can console oneself with the thought that within the framework of a bourgeois revolution the political rule of the proletariat will be only a passing episode; and one can at the same time forget that the proletariat, once it has power in its hands, will not give it up without the most desperate resistance, will not let it go until it is torn from it by armed force.
One can console oneself with the thought that the social conditions of Russia are not yet ripe for a socialist economy; and one can at the same time fail to reflect that the proletariat, once in power, will inevitably be pushed by the whole logic of its position towards running the economy at the state’s expense.
The general sociological definition, bourgeois revolution, by no means solves the political and tactical problems, contradictions and difficulties that the mechanics of a given bourgeois revolution throws up.
Within the framework of the bourgeois revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, whose objective task was the rule of capital, the dictatorship of the sans-culottes proved possible. This dictatorship was not a mere passing episode; it set its stamp on the whole of the century that followed, and this although it very soon came to grief on the narrow framework of the bourgeois revolution.
In the revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, which is also bourgeois in its immediate objective tasks, there emerges, as a near prospect, the inevitability, or at least the probability, of the political rule of the proletariat. The proletariat itself will see to it that this rule does not turn out to be a mere passing “episode”, as some realist philistines hope. But we can already put the question to ourselves now: must the dictatorship of the proletariat inevitably be dashed against the framework of the bourgeois revolution, or can it, on the given world-historical foundations, open before itself the prospect of victory by breaking through this narrow framework? And from this follow tactical questions for us: should we consciously work towards a workers’ government as the development of the revolution brings us nearer to this stage, or should we at the present time look upon political power as a misfortune that the bourgeois revolution is preparing to bring down upon the heads of the workers, and which they would do best to avoid?
Must we not apply to ourselves the words that the “realist” politician Vollmar once said of the Communards of 1871: instead of taking power into their hands, they would have done better to go to bed?