10. “Revolutionary Communes” and the Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry

The Conference of the new-Iskrists did not keep to the anarchist position that the new Iskra had talked itself into (“from below” only, not “from below and from above”). The absurdity of allowing for an uprising while not allowing for victory and for participation in the provisional revolutionary government was too glaring. The resolution therefore introduced reservations and restrictions into the solution of the question given by Martynov and Martov. Let us examine these reservations, set out in the following part of the resolution:

If that is so, then action not only from below but also from above is admitted in principle. Then the proposition put forward in L. Martov’s well-known feuilleton in Iskra (No. 93) is overthrown, and the tactic of Vperyod is recognised as correct: not only “from below” but also “from above”.

Further, a seizure of power (even if partial, episodic, etc.) obviously presupposes the participation not of Social-Democracy alone and not of the proletariat alone. This follows from the fact that it is not only the proletariat that is interested in the democratic revolution and takes an active part in it. It follows from the fact that the uprising is a “people’s” uprising, as the beginning of the resolution under examination says, that “non-proletarian groups” (the expression of the Conference’s resolution on the uprising) also take part in it, that is, the bourgeoisie as well. Consequently, the principle that any participation of socialists together with the petty bourgeoisie in the provisional revolutionary government is a betrayal of the working class has been thrown overboard by the Conference, as Vperyod sought. “Betrayal” does not cease to be betrayal because the act that constitutes it is partial, episodic, local, and so on. Consequently, the equation of participation in the provisional revolutionary government with vulgar Jaurèsism has been thrown overboard by the Conference, as Vperyod sought. A government does not cease to be a government because its power extends not to many cities but to one, not to many districts but to one, nor because of what that government is called. Thus the statement of the question in principle that the new Iskra tried to give has been abandoned by the Conference.

Let us see whether the restrictions that the Conference places on the formation of revolutionary governments, and on participation in them, now admitted in principle, are reasonable. How the concept “episodic” differs from the concept “provisional” we do not know. We fear that a foreign and “new” word only covers up here the absence of a clear idea. It seems “deeper”, but in fact it is only darker and more confused. How does the “expediency” of a partial “seizure of power” in a city or district differ from participation in the provisional revolutionary government of the whole state? Is there not among the “cities” such a one as St Petersburg, where the Ninth of January took place? Is there not among the districts the Caucasus, which is bigger than many states? Do not the problems (which once embarrassed the new Iskra) of what to do with the prisons, the police, the treasury, etc., etc., confront us when we “seize power” even in one city, to say nothing of a district? No one will deny, of course, that with insufficient forces, with an incomplete success of the uprising, with an indecisive victory, partial, city and other provisional revolutionary governments are possible. But what has that to do with the matter, gentlemen? Do you not yourselves speak at the beginning of the resolution of the “decisive victory of the revolution”, of a “victorious people’s uprising”?? Since when have Social-Democrats taken upon themselves the business of anarchists: to split up the attention and the aims of the proletariat? to direct it to the “partial” and not to the general, the single, the integral and the complete? Presupposing a “seizure of power” in a city, you yourselves speak of “spreading the uprising”: to another city, may we venture to think? to all cities, may we be permitted to hope? Your conclusions, gentlemen, are as shaky and haphazard, as contradictory and confused, as your premises. The Third Congress of the RSDLP gave an exhaustive and clear answer to the question of the provisional revolutionary government in general. This answer covers all partial provisional governments as well. The answer of the Conference, on the other hand, by artificially and arbitrarily singling out a part of the question, merely evades (but unsuccessfully) the question as a whole and creates a muddle.

What does “revolutionary communes” mean? Does this concept differ from the “provisional revolutionary government”, and if so, how? The gentlemen of the Conference do not know themselves. Confusion of revolutionary thought leads them, as happens time and again, to the revolutionary phrase. Yes, the use of the words “revolutionary commune” in a resolution of representatives of Social-Democracy is a revolutionary phrase, and nothing more. Marx more than once condemned such phrases, in which the tasks of the future are hidden behind the “charming” term of an outlived past. The charm of a term that has played a part in history turns in such cases into empty and harmful tinsel, into a rattle. We must give the workers and the whole people a clear and unambiguous idea of why we want a provisional revolutionary government to be set up, of what reforms exactly we shall carry out, if we exert a decisive influence on power, tomorrow, upon the victorious outcome of the people’s uprising that has already begun. Those are the questions that face political leaders.

The Third Congress of the RSDLP answers these questions with complete clarity, giving a full programme of these reforms: our party’s minimum programme. The word “commune”, however, gives no answer whatever; it only clutters people’s heads with some distant ringing... or empty jingle. The dearer to us, say, the Paris Commune of 1871 is, the less permissible it is to dispose of the matter with a reference to it, without analysing its mistakes and its special conditions. To do so would be to repeat the absurd example of the Blanquists ridiculed by Engels, who (in 1874, in their “manifesto”) bowed down before every act of the Commune. What will a Conference delegate say to a worker who asks him about this “revolutionary commune” mentioned in the resolution? He can tell him only that history knows under this name a workers’ government that did not know how, and was then unable, to distinguish between the elements of a democratic and of a socialist revolution; that confused the tasks of the struggle for a republic with the tasks of the struggle for socialism; that was unable to carry out the task of an energetic military offensive against Versailles; that mistakenly failed to seize the Bank of France, and so on. In a word, whether you refer in your answer to the Paris Commune or to some other commune, our answer will be: it was the kind of government that ours must not be. A fine answer, there is no denying it! Does it not testify to the hair-splitting of a pedant and the helplessness of a revolutionary when the party’s practical programme is passed over in silence and a resolution inappropriately begins to give lessons in history? Does it not show precisely the mistake of which they unsuccessfully tried to convict us: the confusion of the democratic and the socialist revolutions, which none of the “communes” distinguished?

The aim of the provisional government (so inappropriately called a commune) is declared to be “exclusively” to spread the uprising and to disorganise the government. In the literal sense of the word, this “exclusively” rules out all other tasks; it is a belch of the absurd theory of “only from below”. Such a ruling out of other tasks is once again short-sightedness and lack of thought. A “revolutionary commune”, that is, a revolutionary power even in a single city, will inevitably have to carry out (if only temporarily, “partially, episodically”) all the business of the state, and to hide one’s head under one’s wing here is the height of folly. This power will have to legislate the eight-hour working day, set up workers’ inspection of factories, introduce free universal education, introduce the election of judges, set up peasant committees, and so on; in a word, it will certainly have to carry out a series of reforms. To bring these reforms under the concept of “helping to spread the uprising” would be to play with words and deliberately to increase vagueness where complete clarity is needed.

The concluding part of the new-Iskrist resolution provides no new material for criticising the tendencies in principle of the revived “Economism” in our party, but it illustrates from a somewhat different angle what has been said above.

Here is that part:

The basic idea here is the one that Vperyod formulated more than once when it said that we must not fear (as Martynov fears) a complete victory of Social-Democracy in the democratic revolution, that is, a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, for such a victory will enable us to rouse Europe, and the European socialist proletariat, having thrown off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, will in its turn help us to carry out the socialist revolution. But see how this idea is made worse in the new-Iskrists’ version of it. Let us not dwell on details: on the nonsense that power can “fall” into the hands of a conscious party that considers the seizure of power a harmful tactic; on the fact that in Europe the conditions for socialism have reached not a certain maturity but maturity in general; on the fact that our party programme knows no socialist reforms, but only the socialist revolution. Let us take the chief and fundamental difference between the idea of Vperyod and that of the resolution. Vperyod pointed out an active task to the revolutionary proletariat of Russia: to win the battle for democracy and to use this victory to carry the revolution into Europe. The resolution does not understand this connection between our “decisive victory” (not in the new-Iskrist sense) and the revolution in Europe, and it therefore speaks not of the tasks of the proletariat, not of the prospects of its victory, but of one of the possibilities in general: “in the event of the revolution spreading”... Vperyod pointed out directly and definitely (and these directions went into the resolution of the Third Congress of the RSDLP) how exactly “governmental power” can and must “be used” in the interests of the proletariat, taking into account what can be carried out at once at the given stage of social development and what must be carried out first, as the democratic precondition of the struggle for socialism. Here, too, the resolution drags hopelessly at the tail, saying: “will be able to prepare itself for the use”, but without being able to say how it will be able to, how to prepare, for what use. We do not doubt, for example, that the new-Iskrists “are able to prepare themselves for the use” of the leading position in the party, but the point is that so far their experience of this use, their preparation, do not inspire hope of the possibility turning into reality...

Vperyod said precisely what the real “possibility of holding power in its hands” consists of: the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, their joint mass strength, capable of outweighing all the forces of counter-revolution, and their inevitable coincidence of interests as regards democratic reforms. Here, too, the Conference resolution gives nothing positive; it merely dodges the question. After all, the possibility of holding power in Russia must be conditioned by the composition of social forces in Russia itself, by the conditions of the democratic revolution that is now taking place in our country. After all, a victory of the proletariat in Europe (and from carrying the revolution into Europe to the victory of the proletariat there is still some distance) will call forth a desperate counter-revolutionary struggle by the Russian bourgeoisie, and the new-Iskrists’ resolution says not a word about this counter-revolutionary force, whose significance is assessed in the resolution of the Third Congress of the RSDLP. If, in the struggle for a republic and democracy, we could not rely on the peasantry as well as on the proletariat, then the task of “holding power” would be hopeless. But if it is not hopeless, if “the decisive victory of the revolution over tsarism” opens up such a possibility, then we must point to it, actively call for its conversion into reality, and give practical slogans not only for the event of the revolution being carried into Europe, but also for the purpose of carrying it there. In the tail-enders of Social-Democracy the reference to “the limited historical bounds of the Russian revolution” merely covers up a limited understanding of the tasks of this democratic revolution and of the leading role of the proletariat in it!

One of the objections to the slogan of “the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” is that a dictatorship presupposes a “single will” (Iskra, No. 95), and that the proletariat cannot have a single will with the petty bourgeoisie. This objection is untenable, for it rests on an abstract, “metaphysical” interpretation of the concept “single will”. A will may be single in one respect and not single in another. Absence of unity on questions of socialism and in the struggle for socialism does not exclude unity of will on questions of democracy and in the struggle for a republic. To forget this would be to forget the logical and historical difference between a democratic and a socialist revolution. To forget this would be to forget the character of the democratic revolution as a revolution of the whole people: if it is “of the whole people”, then there is “unity of will” precisely in so far as this revolution satisfies the needs and requirements of the whole people. Beyond the bounds of democracy there can be no question of unity of will between the proletariat and the peasant bourgeoisie. Class struggle between them is inevitable, but on the ground of a democratic republic this struggle will be the deepest and broadest popular struggle for socialism. Like everything in the world, the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has a past and a future. Its past is autocracy, serfdom, monarchy, privilege. In the struggle against this past, in the struggle against counter-revolution, “unity of will” of the proletariat and the peasantry is possible, for there is unity of interests.

Its future is the struggle against private property, the struggle of the wage-worker against the employer, the struggle for socialism. Here unity of will is impossible. Here we have before us not the road from autocracy to a republic but the road from a petty-bourgeois democratic republic to socialism.

Of course, in a concrete historical situation the elements of the past and of the future are interwoven, and the two roads are mixed up. Wage-labour and its struggle against private property exist under the autocracy too; they arise even under serfdom. But this does not in the least prevent us from separating, logically and historically, the major stages of development. After all, we all contrast the bourgeois revolution and the socialist revolution, we all insist unconditionally on the necessity of distinguishing between them strictly, but can it be denied that in history individual, particular elements of the one and the other revolution are interwoven? Has not the epoch of democratic revolutions in Europe known a number of socialist movements and socialist attempts? And will not the future socialist revolution in Europe still have a great deal left to do in the way of democracy?

A Social-Democrat must never for a moment forget the inevitable class struggle of the proletariat for socialism against even the most democratic and republican bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. That is beyond doubt. From this follows the absolute necessity of a separate, independent, strictly class party of Social-Democracy. From this follows the temporary character of our “striking together” with the bourgeoisie, and the duty of keeping a strict watch “over our ally, as over an enemy”, and so on. All this, too, is not open to the slightest doubt. But it would be ridiculous and reactionary to deduce from this that we may forget, ignore or neglect tasks that are urgent for the present, even though transient and temporary. The struggle against the autocracy is a temporary and transient task of the socialists, but any ignoring or neglect of this task is tantamount to betraying socialism and serving reaction. The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry is unquestionably only a transient, temporary task of the socialists, but to ignore this task in the epoch of the democratic revolution is downright reactionary.

Concrete political tasks must be set in a concrete situation. Everything is relative, everything flows, everything changes. German Social-Democracy does not put the demand for a republic in its programme. The situation there is such that this question can hardly be separated in practice from the question of socialism (although even with regard to Germany Engels, in his comments on the draft of the Erfurt Programme in 1891, warned against belittling the importance of a republic and of the struggle for a republic!). In Russian Social-Democracy the question of removing the demand for a republic from the programme and from agitation has never even arisen, for with us there can be no question of an indissoluble connection between the question of the republic and the question of socialism. A German Social-Democrat of 1898 who did not place the question of a republic specially in the forefront is a natural phenomenon, calling for neither surprise nor condemnation. A German Social-Democrat who in 1848 had left the question of a republic in the shade would have been a downright traitor to the revolution. There is no abstract truth. Truth is always concrete.

The time will come when the struggle against the Russian autocracy will be over and the epoch of democratic revolution will have passed for Russia; then it will be ridiculous even to speak of “unity of will” of the proletariat and the peasantry, of a democratic dictatorship, and so on. Then we shall think directly of the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat and speak of it in greater detail. But now the party of the advanced class cannot but strive in the most energetic manner for the decisive victory of the democratic revolution over tsarism. And a decisive victory is nothing other than the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

Note

1) Let us remind the reader that in the polemic of Iskra with Vperyod the former referred, among other things, to Engels’s letter to Turati, in which Engels warned the (future) leader of the Italian reformists against confusing the democratic and the socialist revolution. The coming revolution in Italy, Engels wrote of the political situation in Italy in 1894, will be petty-bourgeois and democratic, not socialist. Iskra reproached Vperyod with departing from the principle laid down by Engels. This reproach is wrong, for Vperyod (No. 14) fully recognised, on the whole, the correctness of Marx’s theory of the distinction between the three main forces of the revolutions of the nineteenth century. According to this theory, the old order (autocracy, feudalism, serfdom) is opposed by 1) the liberal big bourgeoisie; 2) the radical petty bourgeoisie; 3) the proletariat. The first fights for no more than a constitutional monarchy; the second for a democratic republic; the third for the socialist revolution. To confuse the petty-bourgeois struggle for a complete democratic revolution with the proletarian struggle for the socialist revolution threatens the socialist with political bankruptcy. This warning of Marx’s is entirely correct. But it is precisely for this reason that the slogan of “revolutionary communes” is mistaken, for the communes known to history did precisely confuse the democratic and the socialist revolution. Our slogan, on the contrary, the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, fully guarantees against this mistake. While unconditionally recognising the bourgeois character of the revolution, which cannot directly go beyond the framework of a merely democratic revolution, our slogan pushes this given revolution forward, strives to give it the forms most advantageous to the proletariat, and consequently strives to make the utmost use of the democratic revolution for the most successful further struggle of the proletariat for socialism.