tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-95889062024-03-12T19:11:16.079-07:00maximum redMaximum red is best red, real red. The best writings from those who struggle to smash capitalism and build socialism.Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-88031017668543237502013-04-25T06:38:00.000-07:002016-05-08T20:37:15.252-07:00Thermidor<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Editorial Note:</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> Parallels with the French Revolution, in this case the danger of "Thermidor" had occupied the thoughts of the Bolsheviks almost since the seizure of power. Trotsky had argued on this question at a session of the CCC on on June 24 [1927] In July, </i>Pravda<i> published a series of articles by Maretsky, a student of Bukharin, entitled "The So-called 'Thermidor' and the Danger of Degeneration," denouncing Trotsky's use of the analogy as slander. This memorandum may have been stimulated by that series, or it may have been drawn up in connection with the joint plenum of the CC and CCC in late July - early August. </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> There were many opinions about the likelihood of a Soviet Thermidor - what Trotsky called counterrevolution on the installment plan - and a lively debate in the ranks of the Opposition would persist long after 1927. Even in 1927 some Oppositionists were of the opinion that Thermidor had already been accomplished, while Trotsky felt that it had not been, although the tendencies leading <span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">toward it were being strengthened by the party's right win<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">g</span></span>.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> By permission of the Library of Social History in New York. </i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">From: Leon Trotsky, <i>The Challenge of The Left Opposition (1926-27),</i> Pathfinder Press, New York, 1980, 258-264.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trotsky and Left Opposition 1927</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Can a Thermidor occur in our country? In <i>Pravda </i>they have proved with the aid of quotations that it cannot. Stalin said something about the ignorance of those who make references to Thermidor. But all of this is wrong; it misses the point. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">To denounce the Opposition as a petty-bourgeois deviation, as a reflection of the growing petty-bourgeois element, and at the same time to deny the very possibility of a "Thermidorian" return of a bourgeois regime, is to fail to put two and two together. It means to make two mistakes: in assessing the Opposition and in assessing the dangers facing us in the process of our development. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Before the introduction of NEP and during its first phase, many of us had quite a few discussions with Lenin about Thermidor. The word itself was in great currency among us. It never entered anyone's head to argue - with absurd pedantry or charlatanism - that Thermidor was "impossible" in general, in view of the socialist character of the revolution, etc., etc.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In speaking of the Kronstadt uprising Lenin said: "What does [this event] mean? It was an attempt to seize political power from the Bolsheviks by a motley crowd or alliance of ill-assorted elements, apparently just to the right of the Bolsheviks, or perhaps even to their 'left'...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> "The nonparty elements served here only as a bridge, a stepping stone, a rung on the ladder, on which the White Guards appeared. This is politically inevitable" [an inadequate translation of this passage is in <i>Collected Works</i>, vol. 32, p. 184; emphasis added by Trotsky].</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">What was involved in Kronstadt, as we know, was not just nonparty elements: many sailors who were party members took part in the revolt. Together with the nonparty people they shifted power so that it ceased to hew to the class line. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Kronstadt form of Thermidor was an armed uprising. But under certain circumstances a Thermidor can creep up on us in a more peaceful way. If the Kronstadters, party and nonparty elements together, could backslide toward a bourgeois regime with the slogan of soviets and in the name of soviets, it is also possible to backslide into Thermidorian positions even with the banner of communism in one's hands. Herein lies the diabolical trickiness of history.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">What is Thermidor? A stepping down one rung on a ladder of revolution - a slight shift of power to the right - as a result of a certain crucial change or break in the psychology of the revolution. At the top, at the helm, there seem to be the very same people, the same speeches, the same banners. The day after Thermidor, the victorious participants were profoundly confident that nothing catastrophic had happened: they simply had dealt with a group of "ex-leaders" who had become confusionists, disrupters, and "objectively" accomplices of Pitt, the Chamberlain of that day. But down below, deepgoing rearrangements of the class forces had taken place.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The propertied elements had succeeded by that time in righting themselves, recovering their strength, and gathering their courage. Civil order was restored. The new property owners wanted more than anything not to be prevented from enjoying the fruits of their property. They pressured the state apparatus and the Jacobin clubs, many of whose members felt themselves also to be property owners, people of order, and the Jacobin party was forced to regroup itself, to put forward some elements more disposed toward swimming with the new stream, to link up with the new elements, not of Jacobin origins - and to press back, cast out, incapacitate, and decapitate those elements who reflected the interests and passions of the urban lower classes, the sans-culottes. In turn, these lower strata no longer felt the same confidence in their power as before -feeling the pressure of the new propertied elements and the state apparatus that covered up for the people of property. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The first shift of power was expressed in the movement within the same old ruling party: some Jacobins forced out others. But that too was - to use Lenin's words - as stepping stone, a bridge, a rung on the ladder, on which later the big bourgeoisie, headed by Bonaparte, was to step into power. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Is there a danger of Thermidor in our country? This question means: (a) Is there a danger of bourgeois restoration in general? (b) Are there reasons to think that this restoration would not be carried out all at once, with one blow, but through successive shiftings, with the first shift occurring from the top down and to a large extent within one and the same party - a shift from the elements who represented the upward sweep of revolution to elements adapting themselves to its downward turn?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">To deny the danger of bourgeois restoration for the dictatorship of the proletariat in a backward country under capitalist encirclement is inconceivable. Only a Menshevik or a genuine capitulator who understands neither the international nor the internal resources of our revolution could speak of the <i>inevitability</i> of a Thermidor. But only a bureaucrat, a windbag, or a braggart, could deny the<i> possibility</i> of Thermidor. We of course are only talking about the possibility, only about the danger - in the same sense that Lenin did when he said that no force in the world could take back the agrarian revolution but that our enemies could still take away the socialist revolution. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">But bourgeois restoration, speaking in general, is only conceivable either in the form of a decisive and sharp overturn (with or without intervention) or in the form of several successive shifts. This is what Ustryalov calls "going downhill with the brakes on." Or course when you go downhill with the brakes on things don't always work out smoothly, without injuries, as the French Revolution itself showed. The Ninth of Thermidor was supplemented by the Eighteenth Brumaire.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Thus, as long as the European revolution has not conquered, the possibilities of bourgeois restoration in our country cannot be denied. Which of the two possible paths is the more likely under our circumstances: the path of an abrupt counterrevolutionary overturn or the path of successive shiftings, with a bit of a shake-upat every stage and a Thermidorian shift as the most imminent stage? This question can be answered, I think, only in an extremely conditional way. To the extent that the possibility of a bourgeois restoration is general cannot be denied, we must keep our eyes out for either of these variants - with the brakes on or without the brakes - to weigh the odds, and to note elements contributing to either. In politics, as in economics, the same question continues to be posed: Who will prevail? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">At the Eleventh Congress Lenin brilliantly sketched out the possible way a Thermidorian shift in power might take place. He took up the question of the cultural level, which of course is closely linked with both politics and economics"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> "History knows all sorts of metamorphoses. Relying on firmness of convictions, loyalty, and other splendid moral qualities is anything but a serious attitude in politics...We were told in our history lessons when we were children: sometimes one nation conquers another, and the nation that conquers is the conqueror and the nation that is vanquished is the conquered nation. This is simple and intelligible to all. But what happens to the culture of these nations? Here things are not so simple. If the conquering nation is more cultured than the vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture upon the latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror" [<i>Collected Works</i>, vol 33, pp. 287-288]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Did Lenin think that such a degeneration of the administrators was <i>inevitable</i>? No. Did he think it <i>possible</i>? Undeniably. Did he consider it<i> probable</i>? Under certain historical circumstances, yes. Did this signify<i> pessimism</i>? No; the very question sounds foolish. (It should be stated parenthetically at this point that one of the pillars of the party had a bad trick played on him by a friend, who showed him the excerpt I have quoted from Lenin's speech at the Eleventh Congress under the pretext that it was his own article. Our party "stalwart" did not recognise the real author and judged Lenin's speech as follows: "The ravings of an old man; it has the smell of the Opposition about it.")</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Thus Lenin did not think the possibility was excluded that economic and cultural shifts in the direction of bourgeois degeneration could take place over a long period even with power remaining in Bolshevik hands; it could happen through an inconspicuous cultural-political assimilation between a certain layer of the Bolshevik Party and a certain layer of the rising new petty-bourgeois element. By this very position Lenin acknowledged the possibility of a Thermidorian breaking point and a shift of the power, although that does not in any way mean he considered the party Thermidorian or was simply cursing at the Thermidorians. It is necessary after al to understand the language of Marxism. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Are there processes taking place in the country which can produce a very real danger of Thermidor - given blindly bureaucratic policies or our part? Yes there are. I will not dwell on the kulak, the private trader, or the external pressure from imperialism. These are know to all. But let us take this example: At a certain factory the old cadre of revolutionary workers is being pushed aside or is simply driven into opposition by new elements, sometimes ones who did not even go through the civil war, and among these new elements there are quite a few who before the revolution were obedient to the bosses and in the first period of the revolution were hostile to the Bolsheviks - and now these elements, as party members, rail at the Opposition, with the same words they had used at another time against the Bolsheviks. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Such "shifts" even in the factories are not rare exceptions. What do they mean? They do not constitute a counterrevolution, or an overturn, but a realignment of the elements within one and the same class, one and the same party - the kind of regrouping that brings to the top these elements who most easily adapt themselves. By the same token this lowers the revolutionary powers of resistance of the class. Is a realignment of elements on this pattern taking place among us on a broader scale? I contend that it is. The frenzied struggle against the Opposition is ni fact a method that facilitates the indicated realignment of forces inside the party - under the pressure of the non-proletarian classes. This is what the most dangerous process consists of, a process that can greatly facilitate the aim of the Thermidorian elements in the country to strike at the party. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Against our admonitions, as to the danger of Thermidor they argue that these is a different correlation of classes in our country than there was in France, etc., etc. But we too have some inkling of the fact that the base of the Bolsheviks is not the pre-proletariat of the eighteenth century but the industrial working class of the twentieth. And we have heard about the fact that the French Revolution had no apparent way out, for France was surrounded by more backward feudal countries. Our revolution, on the other hand, has a way out, for we are surrounded by more advanced capitalist countries. The counterrevolution in France was an absolute historical <i>inevitability</i>. In our case it is only a possibility - in the event of exceptionally unfavorable combination of international circumstances in the future and exceptionally incorrect policies internally. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">One of the present theoretical disarmers of the party has quoted Marx to the effect that there is no reason to clothe the proletarian revolution in a costume of the past and has drawn the silly and sugary conclusion form this that there is no reason to speak of Thermidor. One may wrap oneself in a toga of the past in order to hide from oneself and others the puniness of one's historical role. That should not be done. But one can and should seek analogies with the past and learn from past examples. In 1902 [actually 1904] Lenin wrote that a Social Democrat is a Jacobin who has linked his fate with the revolutionary movement of the working class [see <i>Collected Works</i>, vol 7, p. 383]. At that time, twenty-five years ago, I myself took the occasion to argue against Lenin to the effect that the French Revolution was a petty-bourgeois revolution and ours is a proletarian revolution, that there was no need to return to the past, to the Jacobins, etc. In short, I expounded the same super-wisdom that is now being repeated, and added to considerably, by the critics of the opposition. There is no need to point out that Lenin had no worse an understanding than we did of the difference between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, between the sans-culottes and the industrial workers. Nevertheless he was completely right in following a thread of historical continuity from the Jacobins to Bolshevism.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The analogy with Thermidor makes the same kind of sense. It teaches a great deal. Thermidor is a special form of counter-revolution carried out on the installment plan through several installments, andmaking use, in the first stage, of elements of the same ruling party - by regrouping them and counterposing some to others. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Several wise observers have referred to the fact that Robespierre's group was still in power on the Ninth of Thermidor and not in opposition. It is completely laughable to make much of that. No one is talking about an exact identity of the two processes. If the Thermidorians had not guillotined the Robespierre group right away but had only stripped them of power gradually - let's say, had only "worked them over" at the start - the group would have ended up in opposition. And on the other hand, we have no shortage of already fully fledged Thermidorians who call for speeding up measures of physical retribution against the Opposition. What is involved here is technicalities, and not the political essence of the process. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I have not the slightest doubt that from these words of mine someone will draw the conclusion, and publish it widely, that our revolution is doomed, that before us lies only the road of Thermidor, that our party is Thermidorian, that socialist development is impossible, and so on and so forth. I view this method of "working people over" as one of the most malignant symptoms of the influence of Thermidorian tendencies on the apparatus of our own party. This is the spiritual disarming of the proletariat, the anaesthetization of the party, the obliteration of the ideological and political boundaries between right and left, between revolutionaries and opportunists, between Social Democracy and Bolshevism. The theoretical disarming and political narcotization of the party facilitates the work of Thermidorian tendencies. Against such disarming the Opposition has waged, and will continue to wage, an irreconcilable struggle - precisely because it does not in any way regard Thermidor as inevitable. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[Summer 1927]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-3894838186008408452012-08-03T20:49:00.001-07:002012-08-03T20:49:20.418-07:00Ten Years of the LRCI<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheqitMNw8lhANjYvjLPTilmWyHAeBMPouQ7wZMwwH8H9Poni_Z_FoKyS9FxuZjvjIqRgNT9jZxlLCuEEpYOtQhfymJGK_n8fmU-go9GLFMaMhzw8eVxPW4egFd9UQw9CXOlPUugQ/s1600/Kosovo+protest+italy+aviano.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="496" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheqitMNw8lhANjYvjLPTilmWyHAeBMPouQ7wZMwwH8H9Poni_Z_FoKyS9FxuZjvjIqRgNT9jZxlLCuEEpYOtQhfymJGK_n8fmU-go9GLFMaMhzw8eVxPW4egFd9UQw9CXOlPUugQ/s640/Kosovo+protest+italy+aviano.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b><i><span><b>AVIANO, Italy (Reuters) - A protestor throws
a rock at riot police outside the Aviano Air base in northern Italy
Sunday. More than 300 protestors took part in the demonstration against
NATO's air strikes on Yugoslavia. Photo by Stefano Rellandini </b></span></i></b></i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /><br />By José Villa </span> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /><br />IN COMMEMORATION of the ten years since the foundation of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI), Dave Stockton recently wrote a major article in Workers Power (July-August 1999) which reveals how deformed this organisation has become. <br /><br />In it there is no balance sheet of the LRCI’s intervention inside the workers’ movement or its programmatic achievements. Its only enemies seem to be the "Stalinophiles". But moribund Stalinism and the currents that adapt to it are not the main enemies of a working class which is globally facing the terrible imperialist offensive that is destroying the workers’ states and the main conquests of the labour movement. <br /><br />Comrade Dave Hughes was not even mentioned once in the article. He was the theoretical architect of Workers Power and the LRCI, and the man who won the organisation to orthodox Trotskyism from its original state capitalist position. After his death (1991) the anti-defencists he had defeated took control of the organisation, transforming it into a centrist sect. <br /><br />Stockton’s article is dominated by an obsession with the Bolivian, New Zealand and Peruvian sections which broke with the LRCI in 1995, and in particular with José Villa, whose name was mentioned more than all the other names put together. These are the comrades who most strongly defended the League’s original programme against the right-wing shift that Keith Harvey started to push forward after Hughes’s death. In fact, Stockton continues the method of Harvey, who always attacked the LRCI’s initial Trotskyist orthodox positions by trying to unite the comrades from the imperialist countries against the Left Opposition within the LRCI, through scapegoating Villa and the comrades from the semi-colonies. From Stockton’s account, it would appear that for the LRCI’s leaders their greatest achievement in the last ten years was to get rid of Villa and all the comrades from the "Third World". <br /><br />In the following article we shall examine how the LRCI was created and how it degenerated. <br /><br />On 4 August 1989, exactly 75 years to the day after the collapse of the Second International, the LRCI was founded in Coventry. It adopted a very serious programme and democratic centralist structures. The new organisation’s aim was to overcome the bankruptcy of the Third and Fourth Internationals. <br /><br />As a revolutionary force, the Fourth International did not survive the end of the Second World War. Democratic imperialism and Stalinism mutilated the post-war revolutionary upheavals. Trotskyists could not understand the new phenomenon of the bureaucratic revolutions in Eastern Europe and Asia. In the immediate post-war period none of the Trotskyists understood that the new "socialist" states were degenerated workers’ states from their inception. These states needed to be defended against internal and external counter-revolution while, simultaneously, the Stalinist bureaucratic caste had to be overthrown by means of a political revolution. Stalinism, even when it smashed the bourgeois state, had not renounced its counter-revolutionary opposition to a real and democratic transition towards international socialism. <br /><br />The anti-defencists thought that because these states were not based on workers’ councils the Stalinists had not smashed the bourgeois state but merely established another form of class exploitation. The majority of the Fourth International recognised that these revolutions expropriated capitalism and the bourgeoisie, establishing nationalised planned economies. In that sense they recognised that they were deformed workers’ states, but they believed that in some cases these states could be reoriented through reforms. The Fourth International collapsed politically in 1948 when it adopted the position that the Yugoslav Stalinist party could be reformed, and it later applied that same method to other petit bourgeois movements that it believed could become revolutionary tools. <br /><br />In the Bolivian Revolution (1952), when Trotskyists had their best chance ever to take power, the whole Fourth International supported the bourgeois nationalist regime and demanded more labour ministers in it. In 1953 the International split between the "Pabloites" and ex-Pabloites. All of them backed the Menshevik line that betrayed the Bolivian revolution, and their only difference was over which counter-revolutionary apparatus they would practice deep entrism in (social democracy, nationalism or Stalinism). Over the following decades these fragments were atomised. <br /><br />Several failed attempts were made by small orthodox Trotskyist groups with the aim of restoring and developing the Transitional Programme in the face of such terrible bankruptcy. The last significant one was the LRCI. It was created around very good programmatic positions and international analysis. Initially this organisation was an attempt to fuse the traditions of the Western European comrades around Workers Power (so rich in important theoretical contributions) with those developed in revolutionary crises by the comrades who had launched an Andean Workers Trotskyist Fraction. Later on, other important traditions came to the LRCI, the most significant of which was a long established group in New Zealand. <br /><br />Workers Power originated inside Tony Cliff’s International Socialists, and during its first five years (1975-80) it remained a state capitalist group. With the opening of the Second Cold War, however, this group made a radical shift towards orthodox Trotskyism. Under Dave Hughes’s influence, Workers Power critically sided with the Afghan popular front government and the USSR against the pro-CIA Mujahedin. It published the best book written at that time on the character of the Stalinist states (The Degenerated Revolution), and also produced a very good analysis of the post-war collapse of the Trotskyist movement (The Death Agony of the Fourth International). On the basis of these theoretical developments, comrades inside other organisations were influenced. In the mid-1980s Workers Power was able to create very small circles around its policies in Ireland, Germany, France and Austria. They set up a Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International (MRCI), which was based on fraternal relations rather than democratic centralism. <br /><br />In 1985-86 comrades from Peru and Bolivia developed similar conclusions arising from another continent and conditions. They were active in the two revolutionary situations that put the self-proclaimed Trotskyists in the forefront of the struggles in those years. In Peru the Trotskyists achieved 12% of the vote and were the largest electoral anti-imperialist force during a period of intense class conflict marked by several general strikes. <br /><br />In Bolivia, when the miners occupied the capital for two weeks in March 1985, the comrades who launched Guía organised daily political schools with hundreds of workers. In September 1985 they were the main opposition in Oruro during the Popular Assembly and the five-week general strike. In August 1986, when 15,000 miners marched to the capital, these comrades were extremely active. Thousands of workers listened to them every day and some of their supporters were elected to the leadership of mining and metallurgical unions. <br /><br />The Peruvian and Bolivian comrades saw how all the "Fourth Internationals" squandered so many good possibilities, and they adopted a quite radical analysis of the collapse of that International, calling for a New International Workers Trotskyist Fraction (FOT). These comrades would maintain very strong links with the workers’ movement. Poder Obrero Bolivia was once elected to the leadership of the main workers’ union (Huanuni). It still leads a national union and has delegates in the assemblies and congress of the COB (national trade union congress), and today has comrades in leading positions in the current wave of strikes that is shaking this country. <br /><br />In 1986-87 the first discussions started between the MRCI and the FOT. None of the European groups had experience of leading unions or mass strikes, but their strength was in their political positions and potential. The European comrades were very much influenced by the Andean comrades and learned a lot from their policies and experiences in the class struggle. The theoretical contributions made by Dave Hughes and the then healthy Workers Power were also important in developing the Andean comrades. <br /><br />During the 1980s the groups that constituted the LRCI adopted a clear revolutionary profile. We differentiated ourselves from the Stalinophobic currents like the Morenoites, Lambertists or Cliffites, who sided with the Afghan clerical-feudal reaction against the USSR or who fought for Walesa’s Solidarnosc to form a government in Poland. We also demarcated ourselves from the Stalinophiles like the Spartacists who hailed the USSR’s military intervention in Afghanistan and backed Jaruselski’s coup against the most militant European workers’ movement. In Afghanistan we sided with the left bourgeois government and the Stalinist army against the medievalist reaction, but condemned the reactionary methods of the Soviet invasion and the bureaucracy’s conduct of the war. We defended the Polish workers’ committees and unions against Stalinist repression without trying to overthrow the workers’ state and install a pro-church capitalist restorationist Solidarnosc government. <br /><br />On the question of the struggle against imperialism, we differentiated ourselves from currents like the USec or Healyites that capitulated to the PLO, FSLN and other nationalist movements. We also defended Palestine, Argentina, Ireland, Iran and other oppressed nations in their confrontations with imperialism, unlike the Cliffites, Militant or the Spartacists who adopted a neutral and dual defeatist position which in practice aided imperialism. <br /><br />However, the LRCI did not understand the new period that opened some months after its founding congress. The disintegration of the Stalinist dictatorships in Eastern Europe did not lead to working class political revolution but to a multi-class democratic social counter-revolution. Trotsky always aimed to replace the bureaucratic dictatorship of the proletariat with a revolutionary one based on workers’ councils. However, after 1989 a worse scenario developed, and the dictatorship of the incipient local bourgeoisie and the multinationals replaced every form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. <br /><br />Communists had to actively intervene in the mass demonstrations against Stalinist rule but without making united fronts with the pro-imperialist bourgeois opposition, which we always had to treat as the main enemy. If Stalinism was the political counter-revolution inside the workers’ states, the pro-imperialist "democrats" were organising a vast capitalist social counter-revolution. <br /><br />At the beginning of the post-1989 events the LRCI adopted correct positions. It fought against German unification on a capitalist basis and against any bourgeois parliament in the East. It fought for workers’ democracy but it believed that the restoration of capitalism in bourgeois-democratic form was even worse than the authoritarian workers’ states. In 1990 the LRCI also critically sided with the Stalinists against the Azerbaijani bourgeois independence movement and the pro-imperialist democratic and anti-Communist student demonstration in Romania. <br /><br />However, the LRCI was under extraordinarily great pressure from the pro-democracy imperialist media and public opinion. In 1991 it started to radically shift its policies. It proposed to make a united front with the Lithuanian bourgeois restorationist movement Sajudis and to ask the imperialist powers to intervene in the internal affairs of a workers’ state in order to help them. Trotskyists could not support Gorbachev’s repression of the Lithuanian workers because he was not defending the workers’ state against a counter-revolution, but neither could they block with imperialism. <br /><br />In August 1991, when Yeltsin made his counter-coup that finally dismantled the Soviet Union and created a new Russian bourgeois republic, the LRCI proposed a united front with him and all the non-fascist bourgeois parties. This was a radical departure from the original LRCI programme, which said that revolutionaries should not be in favour of freedom for bourgeois parties in a workers’ state, still less make blocs with them. During those events, revolutionaries should have opposed the Yanayev coup because it was launched against union rights, but without making a bloc with the social counter-revolution and keeping in mind always that the latter was the main threat. <br /><br />The introduction of these new right-wing policies created a big conflict at the second LRCI congress (December 1991), where the leadership of the League was heavily punished. However, after it they decided to introduce new revisions to the programme behind the backs of the rank and file. The LRCI’s thesis that the right of self-determination is a bourgeois concept which could not be mechanically applied to the workers’ states was replaced by another supporting unconditionally the right of every nation or ethnic group to separate from a workers’ state, even when this could lead to capitalist restoration. Harvey tried to introduce the idea that the struggle for bourgeois parliaments and constituent assemblies was progressive in the workers’ states. He was defeated when he attempted to revise our line on Germany to say that it was wrong not to have been in favour of a pan-German constituent assembly in 1989. <br /><br />Later on it was discovered that in 1991-93 Harvey had been holding secret meetings with a Stalinophobic ex-member hostile to the League, planning to move the LRCI back to anti-defencist positions. In 1980-81, when Workers Power shifted from state capitalist theories to orthodox Trotskyism, Harvey was the main opponent of that turn. Harvey had argued for a third way between Cliff and Trotsky, claiming that a bourgeois counter-revolution had happened in the USSR in 1927 and that since then the struggle for bourgeois democratic demands and united fronts with bourgeois anti-Stalinist forces was progressive. He considered the Afghan feudal-clerical Mujahedin to be a legitimate "national liberation movement" which should be supported against "soviet expansionism", and argued that revolutionaries had to join its ranks. After Hughes’s death, Harvey decided to relaunch a big offensive against the LRCI’s programmatic foundations. <br /><br />The term "workers’ state" remained in the lexicon, but only as a category without content. For Harvey a "workers’ state" could be ruled for a decade by an anti-Communist regime and have a market economy controlled by private and multinational capitals. In Yugoslavia, the LRCI said that a workers’ state was ruled by fascists, even though fascism is a movement that smashes any element of working class organisation in the interests of finance capital. Until July 1997 the LRCI described all the states east of Germany as workers’ states, and one month later it accepted that eight of them had become bourgeois states. <br /><br />The LRCI was becoming an extremely eclectic current which was trying to reconcile its existing revolutionary Trotskyist defencism with the pressure of Western democratic public opinion and Harvey’s anti-defencist theories. That led it into the most bizarre contradictions. <br /><br />Until November 1992 the LRCI leaders opposed the independence of Bosnia and condemned Izetbegovic’s Bosnian Muslim forces as reactionary ethnic cleansers and pro-imperialists. One month later they decided to support them, and later on to ask imperialism to send weapons, money and men for them. In 1992 they organised a common demonstration in Vienna with Great Serb monarchists and a year later with Muslims and Albanians who were asking for NATO intervention against the Serbs. They always said that they would be willing to defend the Serbs against NATO and its Muslim and Croat allies if imperialism bombed Serbia. However, when it happened, they adopted a neutral position towards those bombardments, combining this with calls for more resolute action by the Muslim and Croat troops who were ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Serbs, and for imperialism to give tanks, planes and missiles to their local puppets. <br /><br />In 1995 all the Latin American comrades were expelled because they organised a tendency proposing that the LRCI defend both Haiti and the Serbs against imperialist attacks. Immediately after that, the LRCI moved towards a fusion process with the PTS in Argentina, who also defended Serbia and Haiti against the USA. The LRCI decided once more to shift its position. In the last Kosovo conflict it called for the defence of the Serbs. <br /><br />However, it did so in an extremely contradictory way, because it was also for a military victory of the pro-NATO Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The LRCI advised the KLA to demand more money and weapons from NATO and to use the bombing to smash the Serbs. It regards an anti-Communist formation like the KLA as "petit bourgeois revolutionaries" – a position that contrasts sharply with the LRCI’s attitude to the Basque nationalist ETA, which it denounces as "completely reactionary" and refuses to defend against Spanish state repression. <br /><br />This way of combining the most amazing contradictions is becoming the official LRCI "method" on every single question. In Britain, Workers Power was strongly opposed to any degree of devolution for Scotland and Wales because they said this threatened the integrity of the United Kingdom, which should be preserved as the best way to maintain the unity of the class. Later on they decided to vote in favour of autonomy for Scotland but against it for Wales. <br /><br />On the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) they zigzagged. Initially they enthusiastically supported it, shortly afterwards they condemned it as a Stalinist sect, then some weeks later they sent over 10% of their members into it. In the 1997 general election Workers Power actively campaigned for New Labour against the SLP (including leafleting for an ex-Tory Blairite against Arthur Scargill), while its entryists inside the SLP were advocating standing more SLP candidates. At the end, instead of recruiting people, they lost members in this adventure. <br /><br />It is possible to go on describing these inconsistencies but we don’t have the space. The important conclusion is that the LRCI is becoming a very erratic and irresponsible sect with the most contradictory lines and zigzags. <br /><br />This eclecticism is impossible to maintain without a bureaucratic regime. Harvey and Stockton radically changed the LRCI’s programme without having officially declared a faction. They created a secret clique that manipulated the LRCI through the International Secretariat, suppressing their opponents. All the comrades that led opposition tendencies inside the LRCI were driven out. Good independent thinkers in Austria, Britain and elsewhere were also pushed away. <br /><br />After the League’s first congress, two tendencies emerged in the British section which ended up fusing with the Revolutionary Internationalist League (RIL). One raised differences over work in the gay and lesbian movement, while the other called for a more serious intervention in the industrial working class and criticised Workers Power’s equivocation over the "Victory to Iraq" slogan during the Gulf War. In the first case, instead of discussing the political issues (as the Austrian and Andean comrades demanded), the Workers Power leadership launched a campaign against the RIL over the alleged theft of a computer. The comrade who led the other tendency was suspended and obliged to return all the internal bulletins. <br /><br />In 1991 Brian Green and eight other comrades in Workers Power launched a tendency. Challenging the leadership’s confused line that the disintegration of Stalinism had opened up a world revolutionary period, within which however a counter-revolutionary situation had simultaneously developed, this tendency proposed that the world period was fundamentally counter-revolutionary. Brian Green went on to argue that the ex-Stalinist countries had restored capitalism and that it was wrong to continue calling them workers’ states. He wrote a major book on world economy, but the League vetoed its publication. He was removed from every commission and ostracised. Later on, the LRCI forbade members to live in the same house as him. <br /><br />After August 1991 the US sympathising section, the Revolutionary Trotskyist Tendency (RTT), criticised the LRCI’s leaders for capitulating to Yeltsin during his coup. Two weeks before the LRCI congress in December, without asking the delegates, International Executive Committee (IEC) members or the sections, Dave Stockton broke relations with the RTT and vetoed its participation at a congress that came very close to removing the right-wing leadership. LRCI members were forbidden to contact any RTT member or sympathiser. <br /><br />In 1994 an opposition developed in the Austrian section, comprising half of the Vienna branch and most of the youth. Like the earlier opposition in the British section, they argued that the world period was essentially counter-revolutionary. Instead of efforts being made to integrate this tendency into the leadership, they were under-represented at the 1994 LRCI congress and were excluded from participating in the election of the IEC. <br /><br />In mid-1995, when the majority of the New Zealand section created the Proletarian Fraction, the LRCI’s leaders intervened from Europe to suspend its only full-timer and change the leadership that the section had just elected at its national conference. The LRCI reacted with so much hostility to the Proletarian Faction comrades that they were driven away. Members were instructed to cease contact with the New Zealand dissidents and to show personal letters that they received from them. <br /><br />In December 1992 all the Latin Americans proclaimed a Left Opposition, but were persuaded by the LRCI leaders not to form a faction. The leadership then conducted a series of manoeuvres, attempting to destroy the Peruvian section and to demoralise and divide their adversaries. In 1995 the Latin Americans decided to formally launch a tendency. The tendency was not recognised and its platform was not translated. None of its four full or alternate IEC members was allowed to attend committee meetings, and the comrade who wrote the tendency’s platform was suspended and told he would be expelled if he came to the IEC. The Bolivian section was threatened with expulsion. Villa was forbidden to discuss with any Latin American group or to participate on the editorial board of Revolutionary History. The comrades who defended the principles of the LRCI’s founding conference in Coventry were sent to Coventry. <br /><br />In 1998-99 an opposition in France was declared, attacking the LRCI’s leadership for advocating a vote for the government and not for the far left. They were suspended and expelled. Members of the League were forbidden to discuss or socialise with them. <br /><br />The LRCI is like a middle class social club in which many people are allowed to put forward the most contradictory ideas and the leadership will try to satisfy all of them, combining the antagonistic positions into an eclectic ("dialectical") line. However, if anyone tries to organise an opposition, the LRCI leaders accuse them of being "factionalists", and all the members are urged to close ranks against them. Later on, the oppositionists are witch-hunted or expelled, and accused of robbery or other moral charges. Dissidents in Britain and France were even physically threatened or assaulted. This shows the extreme cowardice of a leadership that resorts to manoeuvres, slanders and threats because it cannot win the political arguments. <br /><br />The LRCI is not a democratic centralist International. All the power is concentrated in the International Secretariat, which is not elected at a congress. It is composed of British full-timers and academics (none of them with the slightest experience of leading mass struggles) and has the power to change the programme, statutes or congress resolutions, to break with sympathising sections, to exclude from the organisation members of the IEC (the highest body elected at congresses), to change the leadership and policies of the national sections, or even to exclude entire sections. Ultimately this small secretariat is dominated by one single great leader who could be the treasurer, the editor of the journal and the person who takes the minutes and edits (changes) all the League’s documents. <br /><br />On 4 August 1995 the Croat army carried out one of the worst atrocities to take place in the Balkans. The entire Serb republic of Krajina was completely depopulated. With financial, military and logistical support from imperialism, and assisted by NATO airstrikes against the Serbs, the Croat troops were able to carry out their own ethnic cleansing. In that significant moment the LRCI decided to treat the people who were victims of imperialist attack as the main enemy. We considered that it meant the final collapse of the organisation and that we needed to publicly declare our own line. We were immediately expelled, and denied the right to attend the IEC in order to defend ourselves or even to appeal, either to the IEC or to congress. <br /><br />On 1 May 1996, in an Andean mine, the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (CEMICOR in Spanish) was founded. It gathered the Bolivian, New Zealand and Peruvian sections and some comrades in Europe who resisted the LRCI’s degeneration and collapse. <br /><br />Our strength lies in our positions and our experiences in the class struggle, our weakness in the adverse objective conditions we face. The break with the LRCI’s centrist and bureaucratic methods left us with comrades scattered over the globe. Normally an international tendency is created around groups that converge around some geopolitical centre. However, between New Zealand, the Andes and the European countries there were no strong links. We managed to resist the neoliberal wave that destroyed our League but we are still incapable, for geographic and material reasons, of creating a democratic centralist tendency that can meet regularly. <br /><br />In New Zealand we maintain a regular bi-monthly journal, Class Struggle; we have published some issues of Guía and other theoretical publications in English; and in Peru and Bolivia we constantly produce leaflets, bulletins and documents, being very active in the unions. Our international tendency produced a joint declaration against NATO with four other South American groups. We have established some new contacts in the imperialist countries. <br /><br />Today the LRCI does not have any significant links with the class anywhere and it is so confused that it cannot attract any important new forces. The LCRI’s leaders will fail in their attempts at regroupment with any considerable organisation, as is happening with the Argentinian PTS. They are reducing the range, the periodicity and the quality of their publications. They don’t have open meetings, and they are incapable of any serious political discussion. They recently opened a discussion site on the Internet, but after resorting to censorship and moral accusations against us they then closed the site, because they were unable to answer the slightest criticisms we made of them. In the last ten years Workers Power has lost at least five times more comrades than it has recruited. The LRCI is dying. It may survive as an apparatus for some years and perhaps win a few individuals, but it will fail to produce any serious impact or political contribution. <br /><br />Our small international current is open to debate and willing to respond to any critique of us. We are committed to discussion with other groups and comrades in the Americas, Australasia and Europe in order to establish a new pole of attraction that could rescue and develop Leninist-Trotskyist principles.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Reblogged from <a href="http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Index/Authors.html">What Next? Marxist Discussion Journal</a>, #14 1999</span>Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-26828036103224606472010-06-23T01:46:00.000-07:002010-06-24T21:38:09.731-07:00Lukacs on Heidegger[Selections from Chapter Four 'Vitalism (Lebensphilosophie) in imperialist Germany' and other parts of <a href="http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/lukacs/index.htm">The Destruction of Reason</a>, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1436113411">Georg Lukacs</a><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/">,</a> Merlin 1980. Chapter 3 on <a href="http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-reason/ch03.htm">Nietzsche</a> is on the Marx Internet Archives, and Chapter 6 'German sociology of the imperialist period' is on this <a href="http://maximumred.blogspot.com/2005/09/lukacs-on-german-sociology-in.html">blog</a>.]<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>6. The Ash Wednesday of Parasitical Subjectivism (Heidegger, Jaspers)</b></span><br />
<br />
Scheler's tempered feelings of uneasiness about the contemporary situation burst into the open in the philosophy of his younger fellow-pupil, Martin Heidegger. With the latter, phenomenology came to occupy the centre of the German intellectuals' philosophical interest for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Time">time being. </a>But it now turned into the ideology of the agony of individualism in the imperialist period. Already the 'consolidation' of Scheler's philosophy echoed only faintly that self-awareness which imperialistic subjectivism had voiced in the philosophy of Dilthey and above all Simmel. It was just extreme relativism which seemed to account for the sovereign assurance of this self-awareness: everything solid resolved into a matter of subjective viewpoint, and all objectivity into a purely relative function or relation conditioned by the subject. This meant that, for all the relativistic resignation, the subject appeared to itself as creator of the spiritual universe, or at any rate as the power creating - in line with its own model, own assessmen and own inner needs - an ordered cosmos out of an otherwise senseless chaos, bestowed on it a meaning to its own greater glory, and appropriating it as the realm of its experiences. Vitalism, even Simmel's, expressed this general feeling more cautiously than did imaginative literature in the imperialist period (we are thinking chiefly of the lyric poetry of Stefan George and Rilke).<br />
The grim years of the First World War, which were full of abrupt changes of fortune, and the ensuing period brought a marked change of mood. The subjectivistic tendency remained, but its basic tenor, its atmosphere was completely altered. No longer was the world a great, multi-purpose stage upon which the I, in ever-changing costumes and continually transforming the scenery at will, couuld play out its own inner tragedies and comedies. It had now become a devastated area. Before the war, it had been possible to criticize that which was mechanical and rigid about capitalist culture from a lofty vitalistic angle. This was an innocuous and safe intellectual exercise, for the being of society appeared to stand undisturbed and to guarantee the safe existence of parasitical subjectivism. Since the downfall of the Wilhelmine regime the social world had started to constitute something alien to this subjectivism; the collapse of that world which subjectivism was continually criticizing, but which formed the indispensable basis of its existence, was lurking at every door. There was no longer any firm means of support. And in its abandoned condition, the solitary Ego stood in fear and anxiety.<br />
As a rule, relatively similar social situations produce relatively similar tendencies in thought and feeling. Before the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, which was an international, European event, Romantic individualism went to pieces for good. The most important thinker during its crisis and fall, the Dane Soren Kierkegaard, formulated in the most original way the philosophy of the then current Romantic-individualistic agony. No wonder that now, when this depressed mood was already starting to make itself felt - years ahead of the actual crisis - as a foreboding of future gloomy events, a renascence of Kierkegaard's philosophy was proclaimed by the new phase's leading minds, Husserl's pupil Heidegger and the former psychiatrist Karl Jaspers. Of course they did so with up-to-date modifications. Orthodox Protestant relgiosity and Kierkegaard's strictly Lutheran faith in the Bible were of no use to present needs. But in Kierkegaard's critique of Hegelian philosophy, as a critique of all striving for objectivity and universal validity by reasoned thought, and of all concepts of historical progress, acquired a very strong contemporary influence. So did Kierkegaard's argumentation of an 'existential philosophy' from the deepest despair of an extreme, self-mortifying subjectivism which sought to justify itself in the very pathos of this despair, in its professed exposure of all ideals of socio-historical life as mere vapid and vain ideas, in contrast to the subject which alone existed.<br />
The altered historical situation did, of course, dictate far-reaching changes. Again, these lay chiefly in the fact that Kierkegaard's philosophy was aimed against the bourgeois idea of progress, against Hegel's idealist dialectics, whereas the renovators of existential philosophy were already principally at odds with Marxism, although this seldom found overt and direct expression in their writings; at times they attempted to exploit the reactionary aspects of Hegelian philosophy on behalf of this new campaign. That in Kiergegaard existential philosophy was already no more than the ideology of the saddest philistinism, of fear and trembling, or anxiety, did not stop it conquering wide intellectual circles in Germany on the eve of Hitler's seizure of power and the nihilistic period of so-called heroic realism. On the contrary: this pretentiously tragic philistinism was precisely the socio-psychological reason for the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers.<br />
It was this mood of despair, and not deep-seated programmatic differences, which distinguished existential philosophy from the rest of vitalism. Admittedly, it was more than a matter of chance or merely terminology that the emphatically used catchword of 'life' was succeeded by an emphasis on 'existence'. Although the difference was one of mood far more than philosophical method, it nevertheless expressed something new in content and not trivial: the intensity of the loneliness, disappointment and despair created a new content. The emphatic stress on 'life' signified that conquest of the world through subjectivity; hence the fascist activists of vitalism, who were about to succeed Heidegger and Jaspers, revived this catchword, although they gave it a new content once more. 'Existence' as a philosophical leitmotif implied the rejection of a great deal that vitalism had elsewhere approved as 'alive', and this was now presented as inessential, non-existential.<br />
Certainly this mood was not unknown in pre-war vitalism. It is obvious in Nietzsche, although in his case the selection from 'life', the rebuttal of a portion of 'life' suggests rather the militant vitalism of fascism and pre-fascism. But Dilthey and Simmel were no strangers to such moods either. Let us remember Simmel's 'tragedy of culture' and his cynically resigned attempts at solving it. And even Dilthey stated once: 'And the contemporary analysis of huyman existence fills us all with a feeling of fragility, of the might of the dark impulses, of being afflicted with obscure visions and illusions, of the finiteness in everything that constitutes life, even where these things give rise to the highest constructions of communal life." [Collected Works, Chap VII, p.150]<br />
But it would be wrong to see only a quantitative difference here, a difference of accent. Granted, in order to recognize that the social and psychical motives which existentialism engendered were operative from the start, it is important that we heed the communal foundation, the <i>being</i> of society in the imperialist period. It is equally important, on the other hand, not to overlook what was specifically new about it. We might say that the same motives now appeared iin different proportions, thus bringing us closer to that which was new. For the basic philosophical mood of existentialism is expressed in just this qualitative change of proportion. Whereas the earlier vitalism had been mainly concerned with rejecting the 'moribund formations' of social being and confronting them with the vivacity of total subjectivity as organ of the conquest of 'life' the cleft now appeared within the subject. Whereas before, - in the context of the aristocratic epistemology this necessarily entailed - human beings were divided to some extent into two classes, the one living oiut life and the other torn from it, now the life of each human being, life in general was considered at risk. And the peril was expressed in the very feeling of becoming inessential, of succumbing to the un-living. The emphatic stress on existence instead of life, even in contrast to life, expressed precisely this fear of life's becoming inessential in general; and it indicated a search for that core of genuineness in subjectivity which, it was hoped, man could still endeavour to rescue from the imminent general destruction. So the pathos of the new orientation expressed the yearning to rescue naked existence from a universal collapse, and therein lay this basic mood's affinity with Kierkegaard's.<br />
Heidegger united Diltheyan tendencies and phenomenology more resolutely and consciously than Scheler. He even brought description and hermeneutics closer together than Dilthey himself had done, and this naturally meant a reinforcement of ovety subjectivism. He stated: 'The methodical meaning of phenomenological description is <i>interpretation</i>.' [This and following quotes unless otherwise stated are from <i>Being and Time</i>] With him even contemplation and thought appear as 'distant derivatives of understanding. The phenomenological "intuition of the essence" too is based on existential understanding.'<br />
Despite this heightening of subjectivistic tendencies, Heidegger represented perhaps even more strongly than his predecessors the philosophical 'third way': the claim to be above the antithesis of idealism and materialism (which he terms realism). 'That which-is-in-being (Seiendes) is independent of experience, discovered, defined. But being (Sein) "is" only in the understanding of that which-is-in-being, to whose Being belongs something like an understanding of Being.' This epistemological hocus-pocus, so typical of the whole imperialist period, was carred out by Heidegger such that he always says 'existence' (Dasein), thus giving the impression of an objectivity independent of human consciousness, although by 'existence' he meant nothing more than human existence, indeed only, in the final analysis, its manifestation in consciousness.<br />
Heidegger solved this crucial question of the philosophical 'third way' on the basis of apodictic statement and 'essential intuition'. He himself was obliged to see that through his position, he was approaching that vicious circle which Dilthey had perceived with alarm in the earlier vitalism. 'But if interpretation must operate within the bounds of the understood and be sustained by it, how then is it to yield scientific results without travelling in a circle, especially if, moreover, the presupposed understanding moves within the general ken of mankind and the world?' But whereas Dilthey paused to regard the circle with scientifically honest alarm, Heidegger resolutely cut the knot with the aid of 'essential intuition' (with which, because of its irrationalistic arbitrariness, anything at all can be sought out, especially by means of an ontological transition to Being). For understanding 'proves' (?) to be 'the expression of the existential pre-construction of existence itself...Because understanding, in its existential sense, is the potential Being in existence, the ontological hypotheses of historical perception surmount, in principle, the rigour of the exact sciences. Mathematics are not stricter than history, but only narrower with regard to teh radius of the existential foundations pertaining to mathematics.'<br />
The special significance of the historical in Heidegger we shall discuss later. Here it is only important to establish that Heidegger 'ontologically' smuggled 'understanding', i.e., a procedure governed purely by consciousness, into objective Being and thus tried to create, in his own way, just as ambigious a contrast between subjectivity and objectivity as Mach, in his own period, had done with regard to the sphere of apprehension. Both, in reality, were carrying out the same transference - though in a different form, as befitted their different intentions - of purely subjective-idealistic positions into objective (i.e., pseudo-objective) ones. It is just that the Machists were far more open and straightforward in translating direct observations into the only (pseudo-objective) reality accessible to us, whereas Heidegger was presenting the project of a - professed - special science of pure objectivity, of ontology. To be sure he was no more successful than the earlier phenemenologists in showing how to find a way from objective reality 'set in parenthesis' to genuine objectivity, independent of consciousness. On the contrary: he posited a close and organic connection between phnomenology and ontology, allowing the latter to grow out of the former without further ado. 'Phenomenology is the mode of access to and the deciding mode of determining that which is to become the theme of ontology. <i>Ontology is only possible as phenomenology.' </i><br />
That this had to do with the intuitivistic (and hence irrationalistic) arbitrariness of 'essential intuition' is indicated by the definition of the object which directly precedes it as: 'Patently that which generally is <i>not</i> immediately manifest, which is <i>concealed</i> in relation to that which generally is immediately manifest, but which at the same time intrinsically belongs to that which generally is immediately manifest, and so as to constitute its meaning and ground.' This is the very <i>'Being (Sein)</i> of which-is-in-being <i>(Seienden)</i>' : the object of ontology. <br />
The advance in Heidegger's proposition as against Machism lies in the fact that he zealously made the difference between essence and phenomenon his central concern, whereas Machism could only draw overtly subjectivistic ('thought-sparing') distinctions in the phenoomenal world. But the advance, which contributed much to Heidegger's influence in a period hankering after objectivity, promptly defeated its own ends in the manner of his answers. For in this method, 'intuition of the essence' alone can decide what is to be comprehended as 'concealed essence' in immediate present reality perceived directly by the subject. Thus with Heidegger too, the objectivity of the ontological materiality remained purely declaritive, and the proclamation of ontological objectivity could lead only to a heightening of the psuedo-objectivism and - owning to the intuitivistic selection principle and criterion - irrationality of this sphere of objectiveness.<br />
But the terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism was exposed each time that Heidegger came to speak of concrete questions. Let us quote just one example: '<i> " There is" truth only insofar and as long as there is existence .</i>..Newton's laws, the thesis of contradiction, every truth in general, these are only true as long as existence <i>is</i>. Before there was any existence and after there is existence no longer, there was and will not be any truth because, as a thing inferred, a discovery and thing discovered, it <i>cannot</i> then be.' That is not less subjective-idealistic than theh view of any follower of Kant or Mach-Avenarius. This jugglingh with quasi-objective categories on an extremely subjectivistic basis pervades Heidegger's entire philosophy. He claimed to be arguing an objective doctrine of Being, an ontology, but he then defined the ontological essence of the category most central to his world on a purely subjectivistic basis, with pseudo-objectivistic expressions. He said of existence: 'Ontologically, existence is fundamentally different from all that is present and real. Its "permanency" is grounded not in the substantiality of a substance, but in the "autonomy" of the existing self whose Being was grasped as care.'<br />
And in another place: 'That which-is-in-being' ... is always we ourselves. The Being <i>(Sein)</i> of this which-is-in-being (<i>das Seiende</i>) is <i>always mine</i>.' The arbitrariness examined above in the transition to (professed) objectivity is voiced quite plainly in some foregoing methodological remarks: 'Higher than reality stands <i>possibility.</i> Phenomenological understanding lies solely in seizing it as possibility.' For clearly, in any serious attempt to conquer subjectivist-irrationalistic arbitrariness scientifically (and also philosophically, only objective reality can produce a standard for genuine or merely imagined possibility. Kierkegaard's conscious subjectivism first reversed the philosophical-hierarchical positions and placed possibility higher than reality in order to create room - a vacuum - for the free dedision of the individual concerned with absolutely nothing beyond saving his soul. Heidegger followed Kierkegaard in this, albeit with a difference which very much impaired the logic and honesty of his philosophizing. For in contrast to his master on this point, he still avowed the objectivity of the categories thus arising (the so-called existentials).<br />
The claim to objectivity is even more marked with Heidegger thann with Scheler, and yet he made the subjectivistic character of phenomonology far more salient. And the Husserlian tendency towards a strictly scientific approach had now already faded completely. In striving to argue an objective doctrine of Being, an ontology, Heidegger needed to dsraw a sharp dividing line between it and anthropology. But it turns out that when he came to his central problems and was not engaged in pure, detached methodology, his ontology is in actual facts merely a vitalistic anthropology with an objectivistic mask. (So here again Heidegger was faced with an insuluble dilemma of the kind we have noted with Dilthey. And here again the same contrast between the two holds good: Dilthey shrank from the dilemma and tried to evade it, whereas Heidegger cut the knot in a loftily declarative, overtly irrationalisitic manner.) Characteristic, for example, are his efforts to prove the underlying anthropological bias in Kant's 'transcendal logic', efforts intended to make Kant just as much a forefunner of existential philosphy as Simmel had made him out to be a forerunner of vitalism.<br />
Over and above his reading of Kant, however, Heidegger expressed this tendency at every point. Anthropology today, in his view, is not a special discipline, 'but thee word signifies a <i>basic tendency</i> of man's present attitude to himself and to the whole of that which-is-in-being (<i>das Seiende</i>). In accordance with this basic attitude, something is only perceived and understood if it has found an <i>anthropological explanation. </i>Anthropology not only seeks the truth <i>about</i> man, but now lays claim to decide <i>what truth can signify in general</i>. [<i>Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics</i>] And he clarified his attitude, which implied a factual indentity between his ontology and anthropology, by saying that while no age had known as much about man as the present one, it was also true that 'no age knew less what man is than the present age. To no age has man become so questionable as to ours.'<br />
This plainly expressed the negativity of Heidegger's philosophical tendencies. For him philosophy was no longer the detached 'strict' science of Husserl, but also no longer the path to a concrete world-outlook, as vitalism from Dilthey to Spengler and Scheler had been. Its task was rather: 'to keep the investigation open by means of questions'. [<i>Kant.</i>..] With a pathos reminiscent of Kierkegaard, Heidegger expounded his position as follows: 'Does it make sense and are we entitled to comprehend man as "creative" and hence as "infinite" on the basis of his intrinsic finiteness - the fact that he needs "ontology", i.e., understanding of Being -, when it is just the idea of infinite essence that rebuffs nothing so radically as an ontology? ... Or have we already become all too much the dupes of organization, industry and speed for it to be possible for us to be familiar with the essential, simple and permanent ...? [<i>Kant.</i>..]<br />
Thus what Heidegger termed phenomenology and ontology was in reality no more than an absractly mythicizing, anthropological description of human existence; in his concrete phenomonological descriptions,however, it unexpectedly turned into an - often grippingly interesting - description of intellectual philistinism during the crisis of the imperialist period. Heidegger himself admitted this to a certain degree. His programme was to show that which-is-in-being 'as it <i>immediately and mostly</i> is, in its average <i>everyday state'</i>. Now what is really interesting about Heidegger's philosophizing is the extremely detailed account of how 'the human being', the supporting subject of existence, 'immediately and for the most part' dissipates and loses himself in this everyday state. <br />
Here reasons of space, apart from anything else, prevent us from retailing this account. Let us stress just one element, namely that the unauthenticity of the Heideggerian everyday existence, that which he calls the 'fallen state' (<i>Verfallensein</i>), is caused by social being. According to Heidegger, man's social character is an 'existential' of existence, which he regards as a term in the sphere of existence equivalent to categories of thinking. Now, social existence signifies the anonymous dominance of 'the one' (<i>das Man</i>). We need to quote at some length from this account in order that the reader can receive a concrete picture picture of Heidegger's ontology of the everyday state:<br />
<blockquote>The Who is not this person or that person, not oneself and not several and not the sum of all. The 'Who' is the neutral, the one (<i>das Man</i>) ... It is by being inconspicuous and incapable of being pinned down that 'the one' evolves his actual dictatorship. We enjoy and amuse ourselves in the way <i>one</i> enjoys himself; we read, view and judge literature and art in the way <i>one</i> looks and judges; but we also withdraw from the 'great mass' of people in the way <i>one</i> withdraws; we find 'outrageous' whatever <i>one</i> finds outrageous. The <i>one</i>, which is no specific person and all persons, although not as the sum of them, dictates the type of being of the everyday state ... Each is the other and nobody is he hinself. The <i>one</i>, the answer to the question as to the <i>Who</i> of everyday existence, is the <i>nobody</i> to which all existence in teh being-among-one-another (<i>im Untereinandersein</i>) has already delivered itself up. In the ontological characteristics of everyday being-anong-one-another on display: staleness, mediocrity, levelling, public life, shedding of being and acquiescence lies the nearest 'permanence' of existence ... One is in the mode of non-independence and unauthenticity. This mode of being does not signify any reduction in the facticity of existence, any more than 'the one' as nobody is a cipher. On the contrary, existence is, in this ontological type, an <i>ens realissimum</i>, provided that 'reality' is understood as being governed by existence. To be sure, 'the one' is as little present as is existence in general. The more obviously 'the one' behaves, the more incomprehensible and latent it is, but it is also all the less of a nought. To unprejudiced ontic-ontological 'vision' it will reveal itsself as the 'most real subject' of the everyday state.</blockquote><i> </i>Such descriptions constitute the strongest and most suggestive part of <i>Being and Time</i>, and in all likelihood they formed the basis of the book's broad and profound effect. Here, with the tools of phenomenology, Heidegger was giving a series of interesting images taken from the inner life, from the world-view of the dissolute bourgeois mind of the post-war years. These images are suggestive because they provide - on a description level - a genuine and true-to-life picture of those conscious reflexes which the reality of post-war imperialist capitalism triggered off in those unable or unwilling to surpass what they experienced in their individual existence and to go further towards objectivity, i.e., towards exploring the socio-historical causes of their experiences. With these tendencies, Heidegger was nhot alone in his time; similar tendencies were expressed not only in Jasper's philosophy, but also in a large part of the imaginative literature of the period (it will suffice, perhaps, to mention Celine's novel, <i>Journey to the End of the Night</i>, and Joyce, Gide, Malrsaux, etc.) However, even if we acknowledge the partial accuracy of these accounts of spirtual states, we must ask how far they square with objective reality, how far their descriptions go beyond the immediacy of the reacting subjects. Of course this question is chiefly of philosphical moment; imaginative literature operates within far more elastic limits, although its stature is still determined by the comprehensive concreteness and depth of the representation of reality. But to treat the problems arising from this is not within the scope of these studies.<br />
Heidegger's descriptions are related to the spiritual conditions prompted by the crisis of power-war imperialistic capitalism. There is evidence for this not only in the influence exercised by <i>Being and Time</i>, far beyond the sphere of the really philosophically-minded - it was repeatedly singled out for praise and censure by philosophical critics. What Heidegger was describing was the subjective-bourgeois, intellectual reverse side of the economic categories of capitalism - in the form, of course, of a radically idealistic subjectifying and hence a distortion. In this respect Heidegger was carrying on Simmel's tendency 'to construct a basement underneath historical materialism', professedly in order to render visible the philosophical, indeed, metaphysical hypotheses of this doctrine. The difference, however, tells us more than the affinity. It is a difference expressed in both the nethodology and the mood of Heidegger's work. Methodologically, in the fact that, in constrast to Simmel, who was expressly criticizing historical materialism and trying tso 'deepen' it through personal reinterpretation, Heidegger did not give the least indication of doing anything similar. Not only is the name of Marx absent from <i>Being and Time</i>, even from allusions where it is patently relevant. The content also dispenses with all objective categories of economic reality.<br />
Heidegger's method was more radically subjectivistic: without exception his descriptions pertain to spiritual reflexes to socio-economic reality. Here we have manifested in practice the inner identity of phenomenology and ontology, the purely subjective character of even the latter in spite of all declared objectivity. Indeed it is even manifest that this shift to ontology - an allegedly objective ontology - rendered teh philosophical view of the world still more subjectivistic than it was at the time of the overtly radical subjectivism of a thinker like Simmel. For the latter, there are at least glimmers of objective social reality with its contours distorted, whereas iin Heidegger this reality is reduced to purely a series of spirtual states described phenomenologically. This shift of method is intimately connected with the change in the basic mood. Simmel was philosophizing in the very hopeful early days of vitalism. Despite establishing a 'tragedy of culture', and for all his critique of capitalist civilisation, he still considered money, as we may recall, the 'guardian of inwardness'. In Heidegger, these illusions had crumbled long ago. The individual's inner life had slong since renounced all world-conquering plans; no longer was its social environment regarded as something prolbematical in itself, but in whose domain pure inwardness could nonetheless lead a free life. The surrounding world was now an uncanny, mysterious permanent threat to everything that would constitute the essence of subjectivity. This again, to be sure, was not a new experience for bourgeois man under capitalism; Ibsen, for example, had portrayed it many decades earlier in the famous scene where his Peer Gynt - symbolising the problem of the essentiality, or lack of it, in his own life - peels an onion and finds no core, only peel.<br />
In Heidegger, this expression of the ageing and despairing Peer Gynt became the determining maxim of his descriptions. This is the meaning of the dominance of 'the one' (translated back into the language of social life: of bourgeois-democratic public life in the imperialist period, and thus, say, the Weimar Republic): 'But the understanding of existence in "the one" perpetually <i>overlooks</i> itself, in its projects, in respect of the genuine ontological possibilities.' <br />
For Heidegger, this was something akin to an ontological proof for anti-democratism. And he amplified this idea in a graphic concept: 'Existence hurtles out of the him-self into the it-self, into the bottomlessness and nothingness of the unauthentic everyday state.' It is just this that is concealed through public life and is manifested as 'concrete life'. But this is a deceptive whirlpool. 'This continual breaking losse from authenticity while always simulating it, at one with the perocess of tearing into "the one" ... Accordingly the <i>average everyday state of existence</i> may be disclosed as the falsifying-disclosed, dejected-projecting (<i>geworfen-entwerfend</i>) state of being-in-the-world, concerned with its intrinsic ontological potential in its being with the "world" and in it co-being with others.' <br />
This makes it clear that with Heidegger, the transition from phenomenology to ontology was, at root, as much directed against the socialist perspective on social development as teh irrationalistic method of all leading bourgeosi thinkers since Nietzsche. Germany's post-war crisis and the class struggles exacerbated as a result of it - with, in the background, the existence and growing strength of the socialist Soviet Union and, among both the working class and intelligentsia, the spread of a Marxism taken a stage higher than Lenin - impelled all men into making a personal choice far more strongly than was the case in quieter times. Heidegger, as we have noted, did not explicitly contest the economic doctrines of Marxism-Leninism of the political consequences they entailed - neither he nor the caste he represented was capable of it. He attempted rather to avoid the necessity of drawing social conclusions by 'ontologically' branding all man's public activity as 'inauthentic'.<br />
Bourgeois man's sense of becoming inessential, indeed a nonentity, was a universal experience among the intelligentsia of this period. Hence Heidegger's complicated trains of thought, his labourious phenomenological introspections struck upon the material of experiences widespread among this class and found an answering chord. Heidegger was here preaching a retreat from all social dealings just as much as Schopenhauer, in his time, had proclaimed a withdrawal from the bourgeois idea of progress, from the democratic revolution. Heidegger's retreat, however, implies a reactionary stand far stronger than that to be found in Schopenhauer's quietism. At the height of the revolution, to be sure, even this quietism could, within the thinker advocating it, all too easily tilt over into counter-revolutionary activity, and Nietzsche demonsztrated how easily a counter-revolutionary activism could be evolved from Schopenhauer's hypotheses on the philosophical level as well. One may say without undue exaggeration that in the period of the imperialistic bourgeoisie's struggle against socialism, Heidegger was related to Hitler and Rosenberg as Schopenhauer, in his own day, was related to Nietzsche.<br />
All the same, events never repeat themselves mechanically - not even in the history of philosophy. The human emotional emphasis in the withdrawing process was totally different, indeed opposed, in Schopenhauer and Heidegger. With the latter, the felling of despair no longer left he individual free scope for a 'beatific' aeshetic and religious contemplation as in Schopenhauer. His sense of peril already encompassed the whole realm of individual existence. And although the solopsism of the phenomenological method may have distorted the depiction of it, it was still a social fact: the inner state of the bourgeois individual (especially the intellectual) within a crumbling monopoly capitalism, facing the prospect of his downfall. Thus Heidegger's despair had two facets: on the one hand, the remorseless baring of the individual's inner nothingness in the imperialist crisis; on the other - and because the social grounds of for this nothingness were being fetishistically transformed into something timeless and anti-social - the feeling to which it gave rise could very easily turn into a desperate revolutionary activity. It is certainly no accident that Hitler's propaganda continually appealed to despair. Among the working masses, admittedly, the despair was occasioned by their socio-economic situation. Among the intelligentsia, however, that mood of nihilism and despair from whose subjective truth Heidegger proceeded, which he conceptualised, clarified philosphically and canonized as 'authentic', created a basis favourable to the efficacy of Hitlerian agitation.<br />
This everyday state of being, dominated by 'the one', was therefore actually non-being. And in fact Heidegger defined Being not as immediately given, but as extremely remote: 'The state of being (<i>das Seiende</i>) in which each of us rests is ontologically the remotest state.' This most intrinsic part of man, he mjaintained, was forgotten and buried in everyday life; and it was precisely the task of ontology to rescue it from oblivion.<br />
This programmatic attitude towards life (the social life of his period) determined Heidegger's whole method. We have already indicated, more than once, the unsurmountable subjectivism of the phenomenology, the pseudo-objectivity of the ontology. But only now that Heidegger's world picture stands before us in a certain concreteness with regard to both content and structure is it plain that this method, for all its objective fragility, was the only possible one for his purposes. For in Heidegger's conception, man's life in society was a matter not of a relation between subjectivity and objectivity, not of a reciprocal relationship between subject and object, but of 'authenticity' and 'unauthenticity' within the same subject. Only in appearance, in the methodological expressions, did the ontological surpassing of objective reality 'set in parentheses' tend towards objectivity; in actual fact it was turning to another, purportedly deeper, layer of subjectivity. Indeed it may be said that with Heidegger, a category (an existential) expressed Being all the more genuinely and came all the closer to Being the less it was uncumbered by the conditions of objective reality. For that reason his defining termsw (mood, care, fear, summons, etc.) were without exception of a decidedly subjective character.<br />
But for that very reason, Heidegger's ontology was bound to grow more irrationalistic the more it developed its true nature. Admittedly, Heidegger was constantly trying to shut himself off from irrationalism. Here too it was his aim to elevate himself above the antithesis of rationalism and irrationalism, to find a philosophical 'third road', just asin the question of idealism and materialism. But for him it was impossible. He repeatedly criticized the limits of rationalism, but would then add to his critique: 'No slighter matter, therefore, is that falsification of phenomena which banishes them to the refuge of the irrational. Irrationalism - as the counterpart of rationalism - speaks only squintingly of that to which the latter is blind.' But since, in Heidegger's eyes, this blindness lies in the fract that rationalism takes into account the observable facts and laws of objective reality, a loss of all real possibility results from his exclusion of irrationalism. For if one removes from a concrete state every condition relevant to observable reality, if this concrete state arises solely in the inner life, it is inevitable that the consequent findings will take on an irrationalistic character.<br />
This was already so with Kierkegaaard. The latter, however, although able to work with theological categories and hence to attain a quasi-rationality or quasi-dialectic, did not shrink from the most extreme conclusions and spoke, with regard to precisely the decisive questions of 'existence', of the paradox, i.e., irrationality. Heidegger lacked, on the one hand, the possibility of resorting to overtly theological categories, and, on the other, the courage openly to declare his allegiance to irrationalism. Yet every one of his ontological statements shows that the de-reification of all conditions of objectivity in reality - however we may phrase this - leads to irrationalism. Let us give a single example. Heidegger writes of 'mood' (<i>Stimmung</i>). This is realised in principle in its Why, Whence and Whither. 'This ontological character of existence which is shrouded in its Whence and Whither, but which is all the more openly revealed to existence itself, this "That it is" we call the throwness (<i>Gewortfenheit)</i> of this state of being in its There, and this means that it constitutes the There <i>qua</i> being-in-the-world.' But the resulting <i>'facticity is not the matter-of-factness of the factum brutum of something which is present, but an ontological character of existence which, although at first forced away, had been taken up into existence.'</i> As long as Being - in Heidegger's 'project' - intervenes or intends to intervene, the findings (and the road to obtaining them) can only be irrationalistic. The road to Being means casting aside of all objective conditions or reality. At all times, Heidegger's ontology imperiously demanded this in order that man (subject, existence) might escape the power of 'the one' that rendered him unauthentic and took away his essence.<br />
We thus see that, inadvertently, Heidegger's ontology was turning into a moral doctrine, indeed almost a religious sermon; this ethico-religious epistemological shift also shows the determining influence of Kierkegaard on Heidegger's propositions and method. The gist of the sermon is that man should become 'essential' and make ready to hear and understand 'the call of conscience' in order to mature to 'resolution'. Heidegger gave a very detailed account of this process too; again, we can give only a brief outline of it here. The disclosure of the nothingness concealed in the 'fallen state' (<i>Verfallensein</i>) is achieved through ontology: 'The essence of the originally nullifying nothing lies herein: it begins by putting being-there (<i>Da-sein</i>) before the state of being (<i>das Seiende)</i> as such ... Being-there means: bound immancency (Hineingehaltenheit) in nothingness.' [<i>Was ist Metaphysik?</i>]<br />
That is the essence of Heidegger's 'existence', and men were deemed to differ merely in respect of whether or not they were conscious of it. The attainment of awareness took place through the conscience: 'Conscience is the call of anxiety from teh uncanniness of being-in-the-world, summoning existence to it most intimate potential state of guiltiness ... Understanding of the summons initiates personal existenc into the uncannincess of isolation.'<br />
The understanding of this summons brought man to a state of resolution. Heidegger stressed the significance o this 'existential' witih great pathos. After what has gone before, it comes as no surprise when he strongly denies that 'resolution' (<i>Entschlossenheit</i>) in respect of man's surroundings might bring about even the slightest change; not even the dominance of 'the one' is disturbed. 'The "world" close at hand does not become another "in substance", and the circle of the "other ones" remains unchanged ... The irresolution of "the one" still holds sway, only it is incapable of combating resolute existence.' Here, the methodology and content of Heidegger's philosophy are expressing in an extremely complicated (but above all, mannered) terminology the intellectual phistine's feelings in a time of severe crisis: the threat to personal 'existence' is so deflected as to prevent its giving rise to any obligation to alter one's living conditions or indeed to collaborate in transforming objective social reality. Difficult though Heidegger may be to grasp, this much was correctly read out of his philosophy.<br />
So the only result arrived at here was the insight that existence as such is to blame. And the authentic life of theh resolution man now constitued a preparation for death; 'a foreshadowing of the possibility', in Heidegger's terminology. Here again there are traces of Kierkegaard, though without the pronounced Protestant theology.<br />
Like every vitalistic philosophy, this Heideggerian theology without positive religion or a personal God was, of course, bound to contain a new doctrine of time of its own. This too was a methodological necessity. For the rigid opposition of space and time was one of the weakest points of undialectical rationalism. But whereas a true way of surmounting that opposition must lie in the dialectical interaction of space and time founded in objective reality, irrational vitalism had alwayas directed its sharpest attacks against the rationalistic time-concept, taking time and space - like culture and civilization in the realm of social philosophy- as diametrically opposed, indeed warring principles. To conquer time was very important to vitalism in a positive respect - this is the reverse side of the aforesaid polemical intention - because the indentification of experience and life (existence) crucial to its pseudo-objectivism was only possible if there was a subjectified, irrationalistic conception of time to meet this demand.<br />
Heidegger laid much weight on this. He sharply divorced himself from Bergson whom he condemned - along with Aristotle and Hegel - as representing the 'vulgar' view of time. This 'vulgar' time was the accepted one that knows past, present and future; the time of the 'fallen' world of the 'one', the time of measurement, clock-time etc. Genuine time, on the contrary, knew no such sequentiality: 'The future is <i>not later</i> than that which has come to pass, and the latter <i>not earlier</i> than the present. Temporaneity proceeeds as futurity which has come to pass and is bringing to pass (<i>gewesende-gegenwartigende Zukunft</i>).' <br />
Epistemologically, the contrast to Bergson (but not to Aristotle and Hegel) was merely a difference of nuance. For each of them -Berson and Heidegger - posited a subjectively experienced time as authentic time in opposition to real objective time. Only, in the case of Bergson, who in the essence of his epistemology was a pre-war figure whose thought shows many affinities with Simmel and with pragmatism, experienced time was an organon of the subjective-individualistic conquest of the world. In Heidgger's diseased philosophy, however, 'real' time is de-secularized and becomes devoid of content, theological, concenrated purely on the element of personal decision. Hence Bergson aimed his sallies chiefly against 'spatial' time, against concepts formed in the exact sciences, and his 'real' time was oriented to aesthetic experience, whereas with Heidegger, vulgar time corresponds to an existence that has fallen foul of 'the one', and real time points towards death. (Here again it can be easily spotted that the difference between Heidegger's and Bergon's view of time was of a social character and determined by their respective adversaries. In essence Bergson was polemicizing against the scientific-materialistic world-view obtaining during the rise of the bourgeoisie. Heidegger, even with regard to the theory of time and the reading of historicity closely associated with it, was chiefly attacking the new adversary, historical materialism whose influence was felt in all areas of life.) In both cases, however, this antithesis within the concept of time was a means to setting up an irrationalistic philosophy. Granted, Heidegger did 'discover' that time played a hitherto unobserved role in Kant's <i>Critique of Pure Reason,</i> above all in the chapter on schemata or essential forms. The central position of time, Heidegger stated, 'thus disrupts the dominion of reason and understanding. "Logic" has lost its long-standing primacy in metaphysics. Its idea is becoming questionable.' [Kant...] Thus Kant becomes, for Heidegger, one of the fathers of modern irrationalism.<br />
In view of this interpretation of time Heidegger's second chief programmatic point, proof of the elementary historicality of 'existence' as a basis for comprehending history, turns out to be pure shadow-boxing. Heidegger was right in making a stand against the neo-Kantians who were trying to argue historicality from a 'subjective' setting, and in indicating that Being must be historical in order for there to be any historical science. As on many points, vitalism was here preempting the collapse of undialectical idealism. Butg Heidegger still lagged far behind the neo-Kantians in the concrete definition of his 'existential' historicity. As a consequence the primary phenonmena of history was, for him, existence, i.e., the life of the individual, the 'universal coherence of life between birth and death'. And this too - quite in accordance with the Diltheyan vitalistic method - was defind from experience: 'It (this coherence, G.L.) <i>consists</i> of a sequence of experiences "within time"'. The result was a double distortion. Firstly, Heidegger did not take the historical data in Nature as the 'originals' (Kant-Laplace theory, Darwinism, etc.), but presented the coherence of human experiences far removed from the 'original state' as the starting-point, the 'primal phenomenon'. Secondly, he failed to observe that his 'primal phenomenon' was derivative: a consequence of that social Being and praxis of men in which alone such a 'coherence' of experiences could come about at all. As far as he did notice a link, he rejected it as belonging to the domain of the 'one'. In so doing, he not only isolated a distorted derivate of human social praxis - as an historical 'primal phenonmenon', as 'original' - from real history, but also set them up as antinomies. The tendency to falsify in this way the structure of reality graphically exporesses the pre-fascist character of Heidegger's thinking. Now since the primary historicality was 'ontologically founded' on this basis, the automatic product of it was Heidegger's crucial distinction between 'authentic' and 'unauthentic' history. 'In keeping with the rooting of historicality in anxiety, existence exists as authentically historical or unauthentically historical, all depending.'<br />
But according to Heidegger's reading of history, it was precisely real history that was unauthentic, just as real time is the 'vulgar' kind. In giving history an apparently ontologically reasoned basis, Heidegger actually took away any kind of historicality, whilst acknowledging as historical only a philistine's moral 'resolution'. In his analysis of everyday existence, Heidegger had already rejected all human orientation towards objective facts or treands in socio-economic life. There he stated:<br />
<blockquote>One would completely mistake phenomenally<i> what</i> mood (<i>Stimmung</i>) reveals and <i>how</i> it does so, were one aiming at collating witih the revealed material that which existence, in the given 'mood', knows about and believes 'simultaneously'. Even if existence is 'secure' in the belief of its 'Whither', or thinks it is rationally enlightend about the Whence, none of this affects the established phenomenal fact that teh 'mood' confronts existence with the That of its There, a remorselessly sphinx-like sight. Existentially-ontologically, one has not the least right to suppress the 'evidence' of the existing state thorugh judging by the apodictic certainty of a theoretical perception of that which is purely present.</blockquote> The illumination of existence can come only from within, for every (to Heidegger's mind: purported) objectively directed perception brings about a casting down (<i>das Verfallen)</i>, a state of surrender to the 'one' and unauthenticity. Thus it was only logical for Heidegger, in positing the historicality of existence, to refute equally firmly everything objectively historical; Heidegger's historicality, then, has nothing to do with the point 'that existence occurs in a "world-history"'. Here he was polemicizing - quite rightly to some extent - against the old idealistic argumentation of the theory of history. The 'location of the historical problem', he said, 'must not be sought in history as a science of history ... How history may become a possible <i>object</i> of history (in the absract) can only be inferred from the ontological character of the historical,, from historicality and its rootedness in temporaneity.' Here again Heidegger was pre-empting the collapse of idealism, not unskillfully, by giving the impression that he planned to make the historical nature of existence itself the starting-point of history. But on one breath he was giving his existence itself, as we have observed, a thoroughly subjectivistic definition, while in the next he radically 'purged' the original historicality of existence of all relation to real, objective history. For: 'In accordance with the rooting of history in anxiety, existence existes as either authentically or unauthentically historical.' From this we may logically conclude that 'the authentic being-unto-death, i.e., the finiteness of temporaneity is the latent ground for the historicality of existence'. <br />
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From <i>Epilogue</i> [Heidegger's post-war service to US imperialism]<br />
<br />
...But the problem of conconformity goes deeper. In his <i>Empirio-Criticism</i> Lenin had already shown that the academics' various individual epistemological nuances, furiously attacked and defended as they were, are no longer distinguishable when considered from the angle of the really crucial epistemological question: idealism or materialism? This applies on a heightened scale to ideological problems today. Anyone giving his attention to teh really decisivie philosophical problems will discern an alarmingly conformist montony in the - at first sight - incommensurable chaos of individual nuances. We have indicated, for example, the close proximity of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (beween whom there is no mutual influencing) when regarded from this viewpoint. The situation is exactly the same in ethics, in interpretation of history, in the stance taken towards society, and in aesthetics. And also, of course, in literature and art themselves.<br />
Precisely the most individualistic, most radically non-conformist tendencies involve a radical levelling down of this kind. For objectively (and hence artistically as well) 'the real richness of the individual' depends 'wholly on the richness of his real relations' (Marx), and the more defiantly modern art focuses on the purely sefl-sufficient personality detached from society and from social relationships, the greater the similarity will be between figures outwardly so extraordinarily diverse, until there is no perceptible difference. For objectively (and hence artistically as well) the world of culturally evolved human relations is incomparably more varied than the bare world of the instincts. And this is why an art concentrating on the latter with almost dogmatic insistence is careering inevitably towards monotony and levelling down. How alike Aeneas and Dido are to Romeo and Juliet in their copulation, whereas the differences in erotic feelings determined by their society and culture have created genuine and enduring individuals. The solipsistic, abstract approach of the majority of modern nonconformists has brought about an inhuman levelling in the standards of creative work. Thus an (involuntary) inner regimentation we have indicated above on the part of monopoly capitalism. Ernst Fischer, the distinguised Austrian thinker, rightly said at the Peace Congress in Wroclaw that modern nonconformists are as alike as peas in a pod.<br />
The loader and rowdier the proclamation of nonconformity, the shallower, more uniform and standardized the personality will be. The structure, as reflected in artistic creation and its audience, is an objective fraud which inevitably springs up from the soil of monopoly capitalism; subjectively it is very often a case of self-deception, a delusion. This is the general character of the 'free world' today. It was already thus under Hitler. But in Hitler's day, the fraud was concealed from some people by a gaudy veil of myths, while others thought that Hitler's demagogy and tryanny (and not the character of of advanced monopoly capitalism, of which Hitler was a mere tool) constituted the only obstacle, and that with its elimination, nonconformist individualism would come into its own. Now the veils have beenh removed, and the delirium is over. Today, everyone must see that the precondition of a tolerated nonconformity is an obligatory apologetic of the capitalist system, and this in its present aggressive and bellicose form. Room for manoeuvre in this world is becoming increasingly narrow, and the presecribed content to be promulgated increasingly meagre and fraudulent. It is hard to believe, but true. Cold War ideology has entailed a drop in standards even in comparison with the Hitler era. One has only compare Hans Grimm with Koestler, or Rosenberg with Burnham.<br />
The causes we have already revealed. They stem from the collapse of indirect apologetics, which at least offered ideologists the illusory semblance of a link with the people. However much effort modern 'brains trusts' devote to the task, they are incapable of devising a form for their central content - the struggle against communism - that could really win the people's enthusiasm. The fraud is becoming bigger and bigger, its mode of appearance less and less attractive and appealing. Hitler was still able to sum up everything reactionary accruing from the irrationalist developments of a century and a half and, as we have noted, to take irrationalism out of polite society on to the streets. Today, the socially determined necessity of direct apologetics renders this too impossible.<br />
<br />
5<br />
<br />
It goes without saying that all these tendencies, which we have outlined so far chiefly as they occur in the prevailing American ideology, are also to be found in Western Germany. Here, admittedly, they occur wtih specific variations, and in view of the immediate importance of Western Germany's role, it is certainly worth at least taking a look at these. The main point to observe is that Western Germany is the seat of former Hitlerian fascists. Naturally the occupying powers have done nothing to uproot Nazism in the organizational and ideological sense. On the contrary, they did all they could to salvage and preserve for the furture those elements in the Nazi movement and its mental ambit that could be used in the campaign against the Soviet Union. Nevertheless a certain mental adjustment - in both external and internal respects - we needed in order for a henchman of Hitler to become an ideologist of Truman or Eisenhower. It will suffice to recall those differences in ideological structure we have indicated in their basic outlines, for all the affinities as regards the principal questions. This issue is of particular development which has been undertaken in the American period by ideologists who played a leading part in preparing and establishing Hitler's dominion.<br />
The situation is simplest when it comes to those who - either of their own accord or because of chance personal circumstances - did not themselves participate in Hitler's regime directly although, considered from an objectively ideological angle, as extreme developers of irrationalism they blazed an intellectual trail for Hitler and led a quiet, secure life under his rule. Jaspers is the chief representative of this type. Today the well-tried principle of his philosophizing still holds good: to go along with fashionably reactionary trends all the way, while at the same time accommodating them to the tepid <i>juste milieu</i> of a petty-bourgeois salon of intellectuals. Since Jaspers was an existentialist, irrationalist, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean, nobody in Hitler's time could raise a concrete objection to him. Now, after Hitler's downfall, Jaspers discovers ... reason. This is natural: today 'reason' is dedicated to refuting Marxism as irrationalism was previously. It begins in an 'original' wasy by alleging that Marxism is actually a pseudo-scientific kind of magic: 'The destructive element is the creative element. When nothingness is introduced, Being appears automatically. But in the process of comprehension and action this is, in fact, a rehearsal of magical dealing in the guise of a pseudo-science. Corresponding to this magic is the Marxist claim to command a higher knowledge.' Jaspers's pretended originality consists in the use of a vogue word like 'magical', whicih was meant to give Marxism a devastatingly compromising ring in the age of semantic logic. This apart, the same argument has been already advanced seventy-five years previously by Duhring, and its rebuttal may be easily located in Engel's <i>Anti-Duhring.</i> Here ignoring the ABC of Marxism, Jaspers triumphantly repudiates inventions of his own creating.<br />
As a good remedy for the 'superstition of knowledge' that Marxism supposedly presents, Jaspers recommends his own, fashionably up-to-date irrationalism: we must revert to the 'original deed' of fashionable so-called ontology. 'Then the language of all things becomes discernible, and myth meaningful; poetry and art become the "organon of philosophy" (Schelling). But the language of myth is distinct from a cognitive content. What is perceived in contemplation and is then animating in practice may neither be extinguished nor acquire the character of cognition when reason compels the test of truth. This verification is not a test by experience but a test against one's own intrinsic nature, by whether it causes an upsurge or decline in selfhood (<i>Selbstsein</i>), by the extent of our love.'<br />
And in association with this Jaspers now defines as follows the connection between his old and new philosophy: 'Decades ago I spoke of existential philosophy, and I added that we were dealing not with a new or a particular philosophy but with the one perennial philosophy, which may, for an instant or abandonment to the merely objective realm, be accentuated with Kierkegaard's basic idea. Today I would prefer to call philosophy rational philosophy because it seems incumbent on us to emphasize its ancient essence. If reason is lost, philosphy itself will be lost.' To stress the predominance of reason is the sole possible guarantee of the origin of genuine myth: 'Thus myth is the inescapable language of transcendent truth. The creation of genuine myth is true illumination. This myth conceals reason inside it and is controlled by reason. Through myth, image and symbol we acquire our profoundest insight at the ultimate point.' Where this safeguard is lacking, veneration will inevitably arise. The danger here, accoring to Jaspers, is that there then comes about not an 'impotent nothingness' but a 'potent enchantment.' Jaspers thus employs the ancient distinction between white and black magic to introduce into philosophy the oline pursued by the leaders of the Cold War. That is to say, the 'experience' of the criminal Munich policy is supposed to be a reason for rejecting as appeasement any serious negotiations with the Soviet Union. So what Jaspers had neglected to contribute to the ideological rebuttal of Nazism, he now makes up for as an anti-Marxist campaigner. The parallels are all the more valid in that Chamberlain's political proximity to Hitler was no less than the philosophical proximity of Jaspers's irrationalism to its Nazi slant.<br />
The emphasis on myth does not affect Jaspers's contact with semantics. We can already say this because his constant invocation of Kant is just as agnosticist and irrational as the basic philosophical position of semantics; let us remember the irrationalism of Wittgenstein. Both give expression, under a flimsy mask of rationality, to a despair over reason, to the impotence and dissolution of reason. For Jaspers 'reason' is, for example, <i>a priori</i> unhistorical (because Marx recognizes the rationality of history, Jaspers calls him a relativist), and it forms an antithesis to causal perception - 'causally I recognize only the non-rational,' he writes. Thus it is bound to be completely powerless in the face of reality. What Jaspers thus understands as a philosophy of reason is the old irrationalism in a garb matching modern American needs. It is the same philosophy of no exit as before, again tailored to the spiritual and moral comfort of a self-sufficient petty-bourgeois intelligentsia.<br />
For Heidegger, it was far harder to engineer a transition of this kind. He had not only helped ideologically to bring Nazism about but had also made a direct and active stand on Hitler's behalf. To obtain an amnesty in such circumstances as well as a a leading role once more, in order to assist the renewed barbarization of philosophy, and to do so by associating with the professed combatants of Hitler, but without conceding the 'achievements' gained in paving the way for Hitler intellectually - in other words, to present a public image changed and unchanged at the same time - is a more difficult task. How does Heidegger solve it? The Kierkegaardian arsenal offers an outstanding weapon for these purposes: an incognito. This is central to Heidegger's thinking today. With Kierkegaard himself, to be sure, the situation was relatively simple. Objectively, because in his case the incognito followed logically from the anti-rationality, the anti-humanity of the relationship to God; personally, because he had nothing compromising to hide.<br />
Heidegger - unworldly, world-despising thinkers are often very practical in the conduct of their private lives - knows very well that atheism is not a going commodity whilst there exists an alliance between the Vatican and Wall Street. He draws from this the appropriate consequences. Not, of course, in the form of an overt break with the atheism and nihilism of <i>Bring and Time</i>, but simply be stating apodictically that his <i>chef d'oeuvre</i> was neither atheistic nor nihilistic. But in spite of this concession to present day religious trends, he cannot render Kierkegaard' s theology of immediate use to his personal aims. He attempts, on the contrary, to deduce a dogmatic incognito as the essence of all historicity from an extension of the familiar theory of history and time. (In its intrinsic content, it must be admitted, this is still only an up-to-date variant of Kierkegaard's thesis that there is a world-history only in the sight of God.) For Heidegger, history is now a realm of errancy (<i>Irre</i>), of the dogmatic, ontological incognito:<br />
<blockquote> Being withdraws by enclosing itself in that which-is-in-being (<i>das Seiende</i>). In this way Being confuses what-is-in-being, while clarifying it, with errancy. What-is-in-being has been realized in errancy, in which Being misleads it and thus creates ... error. Error is the essential arena of history. In it, the essential matter of history passes its likeness by ... From the epoch of Being comes the epochal nature of its destiny, in which authentic world-History consists. Every time that Being holds fast in its destiny, world is an abrupt, unexpected event. Every epoch in world-history is an epoch of errancy. </blockquote> Here Heidegger found the ontological arguments and justification for his behaviour in the Hitler period. In his book on, or rather against humanism this idea receives a more concrete form still. He stresses - through his falsification of Holderlin - that the latter's relation to Greek antiquity is 'essentially different from humanism'. 'Hence the young Germans who knew of Holderlin thought and lived differently in the face of death from what was publicly proclaimed to be German opinion.' Here Heidegger discreetly refrains from saying - evidently this also belongs to the ontologically historical incognito - that those young men were not only in a 'situation confronting death' under Hitler, but took a highly active part in murder and torture, pillage and rape. Evidently he considers it superfluous to mention this, for after all the incognito covers everything up: who can tell what a pupil of Heidegger intoxicated by Holderlin 'thought and lived' when he was pushing women and children into the gas chambers at Auschwitz? Nobody can tell, either, what Heidegger himself 'thought and lived' when he led the Freiburg students to vote for Hitler. There is nothing unequivocally knowable in history as he presents it: it is a general 'errancy'.<br />
Here Heidegger has a threefold aim in view. Firstly, a total denial of responsibility for what he did to give Hitler active support. Secondly, he wants to preserve his old existential standpoint. Thirdly, he wants to make it seem as if all the changes he has effected today to accommodate himself to American policies had always represented his views. Such acrobatic feats can only be accomplished by resorting to scientific dishonesty. His former pupil, Karl Lowith, has exposed the fraud of this kind of <i>Neue Rundschau. </i> <br />
<blockquote>But a contradiction cannot be resolved either by a shift in perspective or one's view or by a dialectical correspondence. In the postface to the fourth edition of <i>Was ist Metaphysik?</i> we read with regard to the truth of Being that Being 'may well' exist without that which-is-in-being, 'but' that what-is-in-being can never exist without Being. In the fifth edition published six years later, the 'but', i.e., the stressing of an antithesis, is left out and the 'well' replaced by 'never', i.e., the whole meaning of the sentence is turned into the opposite, without any indication of this change. What would one say to a theologian who claimed on one occasion that God may well exist without a Creation and on another that he could never exist without it? How do we account for the fact that a linguistic thinker who weights his words as carefully as Heidegger makes such a radical change to so crucial a passage? For obviously only one of the two formulations can be the true and proper one. </blockquote> Now wither is this philosophy bound? It retains from pre-fascism its extremely anti-rational character. When Heidegger now says, 'Thinking only begins when we have learnt that the reason we have glorified for centuries is thought's most stubborn antagonist,' he is only drawing the most extreme inferences from what was implicit in Husserl's 'intuitive vision' (<i>Wesensschau</i>) from the outset. And since, as we have shown, phenomenology in its origins was closely related to Machism, it is not too tricky for Heidegger - in essence - to come very near to semantics. His terminological peculiarites are well known, as is his verbal hair-splitting. Now, as the crowing of Machism, phenomenology and semantics, he succeeds i making a philosophical method of language. 'Thinking collects language into the simple telling. Thus language is the language of Being as the clouds are the clouds in the sky. With its telling, thinking makes modest furrows in language. They are more modest even than the furrows which a countryman ploughs in a field.' Here we have 'poetic' semantics as a particular German nuance. But in both cases the irrationalist abyss is the same, no matter whether the immediate form of expression is deliberately 'poetic' or soberly prosaic.<br />
The methodological approximation points to an objective proximity. Heidegger's Being (in contrast to what-is-in-being) is not all that far removed from what, according to Wittgenstein, could only be shown and not stated. And a similar method will give rise to similar consequences. In Hitler, Heidegger greeted the dawning of a new age and thereby, to put it mildly, brought enternal disgrace upon himself. Today he is more cautious, at leas in expression, but he seeks to ingratiate himself with today's or tomorrow's rulers as much as with Hitler. He expresses himself with caution, with a deliberate obscurity, but he lets the idea of a new age glimmer through this twilight again.<br />
<blockquote>Are we standing indeed on the eve of the vastest transformation of the earth and of the historical space on which it hinges? Are we on the eve of a night that will precede a different dawn? Are we about to march off into the historical land of this global evening? Will the land of eveningtide emerge first? Is this evening land to become the scene of the coming and more incipiently transmitted history, over and above Occident and Orient and passing beyond the European stage? Are we contemporaries already occidental in a sense that is only coming to light with our passage into the global dark? How are any philosophies of history that are purely historically measured to account for history if they only dazzle with what is surveyable in material historically inculcated, without ever conceiving the foundations of its explanatory causes from the essence of history, and the latter from Being itself? <i>Are we</i> the latecomers we are? But are we at the same time also attendants on the dawn of a quite different world epoch which will have left our present historical ideas of history behind? </blockquote> The form of inquiry and pessimistic impressions suggest Germany's situation today. They are indispensible, for without the pessimistic tone one cannot influence the elite, so-called, of the intellectuals - especially German intellectuals - not even today. But we can see or at least glimpse behind this - in an intended twilight - the outlines of the 'American century', of the global State under American command. (Certainly, if a German imperialism shhould achieve independence at some future date and again aspire to global power, these words from Heidegger's disgrace over Hitler is not enough for him; he needs a second disgrace at all costs. This would be the suitable fulfillment of his philosophy - as a doctrine of 'errancy'.<br />
Naturally the perspective we have drawn is - in immediate terms - the most important feature of these statements by Heidegger. But beside the perspective, the method must no be overlooked completely. We have noted that Heidegger posits an 'authentic' historicity in order to challenge real historicity as 'vulgar' more effectively. This tendency becomes acuter in the post-war period. Whereas his <i>Being and Time</i> was in character a single great polemic against Marxism, but without revealing this character through as much as a distinct reference, Heidegger now feels already obliged to speak of Marx openly. 'What Marx, deriving from Hegel in a substantial and significant sense, recogniezed as the alienation of man reaches back at root into the homelessness of man in the modern epoch ... Because Marx, in experiencing alienation, delves into an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is taken to be superior to all other versions.' Granted, he promptly reduces Marxism to technics, like all bourgeois vulgarizers of historical perception. But this statement, of course, already amounts to saying openly that Heidegger regards Marxism as the chief antagonist. On the one hand all this expresses bourgeois philosphy's universal rearguard action against Marxism: just as Nietzsche, after Schopenhauer's repudiation of all history, was forced to argue a mythical pseudo-historicism, so imperialist phenomenology proceeds from Husserl's a-historicism via Scheler to Heidegger's 'authentic' historicity. And on the other hand, the comments quoted above clearly show that he intends thereby to discredit all real and concrete historical knowledge. For he states: 'How are any philosophies of history that are purely historically measured to account for history if they only dazzle with what is surveyable in material historically inculcated, without ever conceiving the foundations of its explanatory causes from the essence of history, and the latter from Being itself?'<br />
<br />
[to be continued] <br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i><br />
</i>Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-74381491161475280412008-12-30T00:59:00.000-08:002012-08-03T21:02:38.742-07:00THE MARXIST THEORY OF THE STATE AND THE COLLAPSE OF STALINISM<br />
<h3>
<a href="http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/ltt/ltt-idom3.htm">In defense of Marxism Number 3 (June 1995)</a></h3>
<i>Theoretical journal of the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency</i><br />
<br />
“In Russia the reactionary idea of national socialism in one country is winning out. In the last analysis this could lead to the restoration of capitalist relations in the country”<br />
Leon Trotsky at the funeral of Adolf Joffe, 1927 [1]<br />
<br />
“... either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”<br />
Leon Trotsky, 1938 [2]<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">1. The “defence of the Soviet Union” and its historical significance </span><br />
<br />
<br />
The collapse of Stalinism throughout Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union between 1989-1991 is the most important development in world politics in the past half-century. It has resulted in a major shift in the international balance of power, and unleashed in its wake wars, economic crisis and upheaval throughout the region. Its tremors have been felt throughout the world in nationalist and workers’ organisations, which for the previous 75 years had defined themselves in one way or another by their attitude to “communism” and the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
In particular, its effects have gripped all those who identify with Marxism. But the results of much of the wave of reassessment and self-examination provoked by the collapse have in the main proved woefully inadequate. It is our contention that only by theoretically rearming the vanguard of the working class in relation to this watershed experience can there be a revolutionary future for Marxism.<br />
<br />
The “Russian question” has been at the heart of many of the sharpest struggles between those who have identified themselves as Trotskyists. By origin, it turned on whether the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state which should be defended against imperialism, particularly in the event of war. By extension, the “Russian question” came to embrace the deformed workers’ states of Eastern Europe, Asia and Cuba. Each time the question was presented anew, particularly in the “buffer zone” debate of 1946-51 and the controversy surrounding the Cuban Revolution from 1961-63, it caused new crises among the descendants of Trotsky’s Fourth International.<br />
<br />
From the outset, revolutionaries identified this “defence” of the Soviet Union primarily with the gains of the October Revolution, rather than the “territorial integrity” of the Soviet state. Even in the final stages of the death agony of the degenerated/deformed workers’ states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the question of military defence of the workers’ states remained relevant in so far as imperialism continued to exert military pressure on them. But the decisive blows of social counter-revolution were to be political rather than military. With the coming to power of restorationist, pro-imperialist governments, the military aspect of the “Russian question” has been relegated to the status of a historical dispute. But the controversy surrounding the class nature of these states remains.<br />
<br />
From the early 1920s, with the beginning of the New Economic Policy (NEP), Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought both ultra-left and right-centrist forces which abandoned the defence of the Soviet Union on the grounds that a new form of class rule had arisen. The first proponents of a state capitalist theory were the Mensheviks, and similar positions were put forward by Karl Kautsky and some anarchists.<br />
<br />
By 1926, the Democratic Centralism group, led by the old Bolsheviks V. M. Smirnov, T. Sapronov and N. Osinsky, had arrived at the position that the workers’ state had been liquidated. Osinsky and Sapronov developed versions of state capitalism.[3] All three died in the purges; however, their political trajectories were different. Osinsky subsequently became a supporter of Bukharin. It seems that surviving Democratic Centralists in the camps maintained a defencist position in the event of war, despite their position on the nature of the state.[4]<br />
<br />
Hugo Urbahns, the chief theoretician of the Leninbund in Germany, (which collaborated with the Left Opposition until 1930) also developed state capitalist views. Such positions persisted among some German Trotskyists in the mid-1930s,[5] and were also put forward by Yvan Craipeau in the French Trotskyist movement.[6] In 1937, James Burnham and Joseph Carter of the SWP (US) advanced the thesis that the Soviet Union was neither a workers’ nor a bourgeois state.[7] Within two years, they had been joined by SWP leaders Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, and formed a heterogeneous grouping opposed to the designation of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state.[8]<br />
<br />
Both Burnham and Shachtman were influenced by the erratic Italian writer Bruno Rizzi,[9] although they came to different conclusions. Shachtman, who developed the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, initially hedged his bets on the defence of the Soviet Union, and held that it represented a higher stage than capitalism. However, in the course of his evolution into a Cold War social democrat, he came to see bureaucratic collectivism as lower rung on the ladder of social progress than bourgeois democracy, and wound up supporting US imperialism against the degenerated/deformed workers’ states. Burnham, whose managerial revolution thesis[10] foreshadowed much of Cold War sociology (convergence theory), moved far more rapidly to right-wing positions, urging imperialist intervention against the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
The expansion of Stalinism after the Second World War gave a fresh impetus to such theories. Ex-Trotskyist Tony Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russia[11] and Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas’s The New Class[12] were products of this period. The common thread uniting the various new class, state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivist and managerial revolution theses was that the crimes of Stalinism had resulted in the overthrow of the workers’ state, and on this basis the military defence of the USSR was excluded. The defence of the Soviet Union, or the post-war “Stalinist states”, they claimed, implied political support for Stalinism. Trotsky, in contrast, had insisted that it did not mean giving uncritical support to any of the variants of Stalinist policy.<br />
<br />
Although such currents were small and uninfluential in the workers’ movement in the 1950s, and represented an adaptation to the Cold War, they were also the result in part of the theoretical impasse among the Trotskyists. In the 1940s, the vast majority of the FI refused to recognise the emerging workers’ states in Eastern Europe. The mechanical repetition of Trotskyist “orthodoxy” proved wholly inadequate to meet the challenges of the post-war world. Worse still, “orthodox Trotskyism” failed even to develop those pointers within Trotsky’s writings which could have served as the starting point for an analysis of the social overturns in Eastern Europe and China.<br />
<br />
While the decision to reverse this position and extend the FI’s defence of the Soviet Union to the deformed workers’ states was a step in the right direction, the discussion during the “buffer zone” debate demonstrated a high degree of methodological confusion, which sowed the seeds of future crises. The debate surrounding the Cuban revolution demonstrated that none of the theoretical issues had been resolved. The United Secretariat (USFI) was formed in 1963 around broad agreement that Fidel Castro had created a “healthy workers’ state”. Meanwhile, the rump of the International Committee around Healy’s SLL and Lambert’s PCI refused to recognise that anything had qualitatively changed, and clung to the untenable position that Cuba remained a bourgeois state.<br />
<br />
Without any unified theory to explain the emergence of deformed workers’ states – and frequently without even an adequate empirical knowledge of developments within the economies and societies under Stalinist rule – it was almost inevitable that the various strands of “Trotskyism” would be plunged into crisis by the events of 1989-91. Having failed to comprehend the process in one direction, it was unlikely to do so in the other. The suddenness of the collapse of Stalinism only served to deepen the confusion. Chronic theoretical crisis became acute political disorientation.<br />
<br />
“Optimists” uncritically tail-ended the anti-Stalinist opposition movements which emerged, in the belief that the long-awaited political revolution was unfolding. The logic of their position – that whatever replaced Stalinist rule was a step forward – led them to cheer the fall of the Berlin Wall and support the “democratic” counter-revolution.<br />
<br />
“Pessimists”, in the face of widespread illusions in bourgeois democracy and capitalist restoration, abandoned class politics from the opposite direction, and became strategists of “united fronts” with the decomposing bureaucracies, which they continued to regard as having an intrinsic interest in the defence of the workers’ states.<br />
<br />
The programmatic divisions which existed between the various “revolutionary” currents in 1989-91 have naturally carried over into the theoretical plane, with the result that no consensus exists on the class nature of the ex-Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe. Most of the optimists continue to cling to the view that workers’ states still exist, and that the counter-revolution has yet to win a decisive victory. To think otherwise would be out of keeping with their upbeat perspectives. Behind the optimism lurks a gloomy assumption – that the fall of the workers’ states will set back working class struggle for decades.<br />
<br />
For the pessimists, the failure of a “Reiss faction” to emerge within the bureaucracy has led them further into a sectarian wilderness inhabited by fascism and world historic defeats. The absolute distinction they drew between Stalinism and social democracy has been disproved by reality – in so far as Stalinism has made a political comeback in some countries, it has done so by reinventing itself as a pro-market social democracy.<br />
<br />
The largest of the “Fourth Internationals”, the United Secretariat (USFI), is gripped by paralysis and has no clear, agreed position. In keeping with its federal structure, its last world congress in 1990 encompassed both those who saw the reunification of Germany as a liberating event which should be toasted with champagne and others who saw it as the greatest defeat for the working class since 1933!<br />
<br />
Socialist Action, USFI sympathising section in the United States, puts forward the following thesis: “The situation in these countries [Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union] can be summed up roughly as degenerating workers’ states in transition to capitalism under the political rule of a government based on an alliance between bureaucrats and gestating comprador capitalists.”[13] But, as far as a definition of the state goes, this is clearly a fudged position. On the other hand, some supporters of the USFI majority appear to be moving towards the position that bourgeois states have been restored.<br />
<br />
For LO, and presumably for its international tendency, the UCI, as well, “the attempted social counter-revolution aimed at transforming Soviet society into a capitalist society ... has started in a legal sense but is in reality far from being completed”, although a small minority within LO holds that “the state has become the instrument of the bourgeois restoration, in other words simply a bourgeois state”.[14]<br />
<br />
The debate on the class nature of the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is not a dry, academic issue. There is no “Chinese Wall” separating “theory” from perspectives and programme. What is at stake is a fundamental theoretical challenge from which definite political conclusions are drawn. For those who set out to overthrow capitalism, the ability to understand the processes of revolution and counter-revolution is not an optional extra; it is fundamental in order to be able to intervene in them. Five years after the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, and three years after the end of the Soviet Union, it is high time that Marxists stopped whistling to keep up their spirits and took up this challenge.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">2. Mechanical Materialism and the Theory of the State </span><br />
<br />
<br />
Those who still regard the countries of Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union as deformed/degenerated workers’ states rest their case – with varying degrees of sophistication – on the continued existence of predominantly nationalised economies. Despite the existence of bourgeois restorationist governments, the state remains, they argue, the superstructural reflection of the base. Taken in isolation, some of Trotsky’s writings can appear to support such a position. Those who care to look will find numerous examples of “political shorthand”, where Trotsky appears to equate the existence of the workers’ state with the survival of nationalised property; for instance: “So long as the forms of property that have been created by the October Revolution are not overthrown, the proletariat remains the ruling class”.[15]<br />
<br />
The task of Marxists, however, is not to mindlessly repeat sacred texts, but to grasp the underlying method of Marxism. To begin to provide a definition of the class nature of the ex-Soviet Union, it is necessary to return to the most basic question – what is a workers state?<br />
<br />
According to Trotsky’s succinct definition, “The class character of the state is determined by its relation to the forms of property in the means of production” and “by the character of the forms of property and productive relations which the given state guards and defends”.[16] This implies a dialectical rather than a mechanical relationship between base and superstructure: it is not merely a question of the existing forms of property but of those which the state defends and strives to develop.<br />
<br />
Underlining this approach, Lenin argued in early 1918 that: “No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognised as a socialist order.” [17]<br />
<br />
Thus, despite the fact that between 1917 and 1918, the Bolsheviks ruled over a bourgeois economy, only economistic pedants would deny that the infant soviet regime was a workers’ state. Not only did workers hold state power directly through soviets, but the Soviet regime was committed to expropriating the bourgeoisie.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere, we have attempted the following definition: “At root, a workers’ state is one in which the bourgeoisie is politically suppressed, leading to its economic expropriation as a class. This is what such apparently disparate events as the October Revolution of 1917 and the bureaucratic overturns in Eastern Europe, Asia and Cuba after 1945 have in common… We reject both purely “economic” and purely “political definitions of a workers’ state.”[18]<br />
<br />
History abounds with examples of contradiction between the state and economic forms, which demonstrate that the class character of the state cannot be defined in purely mechanical terms. For instance, feudal states continued to exist during the formative period of merchant capital in Europe. In this century, Marxists have recognised as bourgeois states both countries which contain many survivals from pre-capitalist economic formations and countries in which substantial sections of the means of production have been nationalised (e.g. Algeria, Angola, Burma, Ethiopia, Libya, Mozambique, Syria, etc). Among what we previously recognised as deformed workers’ states were countries with numerous pre-capitalist survivals and/or significant private sectors within their economies. Moreover, most of the countries of Eastern Europe had large state sectors prior to 1947-48 – the period most Trotskyists identify as marking the emergence of deformed workers’ states.<br />
<br />
The cutting edge of distinction between bourgeois states and workers’ states is not some decisive degree of nationalisation (Militant/CWI), nor the existence of “central planning” (Workers Power/LRCI), nor the alleged “commitment” of the state apparatus to defend the socialised forces of production (ICL and IBT), but which class interests the economy and the state apparatus ultimately serve.<br />
<br />
Neither elements of private ownership on the one hand, nor extensive nationalisation on the other, in and of themselves, determine the class character of the state, because the state is at least partly autonomous from the economy. This is why the character of the state and the economy can change at different speeds. For example, the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s was a concession to private capital forced on the Bolsheviks in the difficult circumstances of the period, which was – at least initially – within the overall framework of defending working class interests. In contrast, the Chinese Stalinists’ policy today of encouraging private enterprise in the special economic zones is preparing the restoration of capitalism.<br />
<br />
Militant’s theory of “proletarian Bonapartism”[19] is the crassest example of vulgar materialism in awe of nationalised property. The states which Militant characterises as workers states, Angola, Burma etc, were capitalist states from their inception. The high degree of nationalisation carried out by the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie or army officers were the basis for the emergence of a bourgeois class, whose interests were defended by the state apparatus and the legal system.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">3. Workers Power: Economism and the State </span><br />
<br />
<br />
On the face of things, the most sophisticated “economist” attempt to theorise the origin of the deformed/degenerate workers’ states and defend the view that, along with the ex-Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe remain workers’ states, has come from Workers Power and the LRCI.<br />
<br />
According to Workers Power, the degenerate workers’ state is characterised by three main features: “statification of the decisive parts of the means of production; their co-ordination and functioning according to the objectives set by the ruling bureaucratic caste, which necessarily involves the negation of the law of value within the state; the protection of this system from disruption by the external law of value through a state monopoly of foreign trade.”[20]<br />
<br />
Faithful to this “economist” method, Workers Power has tried to isolate a defining moment to “date” the emergence of deformed/degenerate workers’ states. Thus, “by the spring of 1947, with the inauguration of the first five year plan, the process of the creation of a bureaucratically degenerate workers’ state in Yugoslavia was complete”[21] Similarly China: “The introduction of planning in 1953 on the clear basis of subordinating the operation of the law of value, marks the establishment of a degenerate workers’ state in China.”[22] And although “by the summer of 1960, Castro had broken decisively with the Cuban and US bourgeoisie”, Workers Power places the formation of the Cuban workers’ state as 1962, “from the implementation of the first five year plan”[23] – the intervening two years being occupied by a “bureaucratic anti-capitalist workers’ government”, which finally resolved “dual power”. (Quite how dual power could exist with the bourgeoisie already suppressed and expropriated, and the working class demobilised remains a mystery!)<br />
<br />
In its quest to discover elaborate new, watertight schema, Workers Power has only succeeded in piling up further problems. If everything necessary for the functioning of the “post capitalist” economy must be in place before the workers’ state is created, it raises the question of why the workers’ state is necessary, and what its function is.<br />
<br />
History shows that the state is the pioneer of future economic relations represented by the class which controls it. Or as Engels puts it, “The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into state property.”[24] The English bourgeois revolution of the 1640s did not just spring from an already developed capitalism; it swept aside its prime achievement was to sweep aside the obstacles (or, at least many of them) which stood in its way.<br />
<br />
For Workers Power, the opposite is the case: “the state is always the expression of pre-existing productive and property relations.”[25] This leads to the ludicrous notion of “dating” the formation of the deformed/degenerate workers’ states from the day the Stalinists proclaimed five year plans. But in most Eastern European countries these were not inaugurated until 2-3 years after 1947/8 – the point at which what remained of the bourgeoisie was suppressed, its property largely expropriated and its political parties outlawed.<br />
<br />
Workers Power’s claim to be able to analyse at every stage the class nature of the state and the programmatic and tactical implications which flow from it[26] doesn’t hold water. Armed with its theory, it is far from clear what special insight revolutionary parties in Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1950 would have had. How exactly would they have tested that the law of value had been suppressed? Presumably they would have had to wait on the Stalinist planning organs to announce their intentions before amending their programme accordingly.<br />
<br />
Indeed, the idea of planning being the key determinant of the class character of the state places a question mark over the nature of the Soviet Union down to 1928. No doubt Workers Power would reply that the working class held power directly through its soviets after 1917. But the soviets, as organs of direct workers’ democracy, had largely decayed by 1921 – fully seven years before the Stalinist turn to industrialisation, collectivisation and full-scale “planning” – with the majority of workers either mobilised in the Red Army, drawn into the administration, atomised by exhaustion, disease and famine, or dispersed into the countryside.<br />
<br />
No Trotskyist would deny that a gulf exists between the revolutionary workers’ state of 1917 and the Stalinist regimes of “already existing socialism”. Nevertheless, by using two entirely different sets of criteria, Workers Power is left with the conundrum that, according to its theory, the concepts of a “healthy workers’ state” and a “degenerate workers’ state” have nothing at all in common.<br />
<br />
Workers Power’s model of the deformed/degenerate workers’ states is no more than a superficial description – and, what is more, only at a certain stage of their development. It has broken down in the face of real events. It is in any case highly questionable whether their economies functioned “according to the objectives set by the ruling bureaucratic caste”. Aside from the overtones this carries of a “bureaucratic mode of production”, it contrasts with the picture conveyed in much Soviet literature, not of an economy proceeding to plan, but one constantly frustrating its would-be planners by shortages and break-downs – themselves the consequence in large part of bureaucratic misplanning. Even at the level of formal description it is inaccurate. Yugoslavia, for example, was a deformed workers’ state, which for many years lacked both central plan as a determining factor of the economy as a whole, and a monopoly of foreign trade.<br />
<br />
As for the suppression of the law of value, it too is defective as a determinant of the workers’ state. The very nature of transitional society down to 1989-91 ensured that the law of value never entirely disappeared, and lurked behind the apparently monolithic statified economies – which, in any case, from the standpoint of distribution, had always retained bourgeois norms.<br />
<br />
Even under capitalism, the proposition that the value of commodities is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce them does not operate according to a set of ideal norms (free competition), but within living contradictions. What is “normal”, in fact, is that capitalism “violates” the law of value at the particular level so as to realise it at the general level. It is very common for entire branches of industry in capitalist states to be subsidised in the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole.<br />
<br />
In countries in which the bourgeoisie is weak, it frequently resorts to state capitalist methods. The law of value can hardly be said to have operated “normally” in Angola, with much of its economy militarised. And what about countries, such as Ethiopia, which have experienced such acute famines that very few people are producing anything? In neither case, we suspect, would any Marxists seriously propose that the bourgeois state had ceased to exist.<br />
<br />
How has Workers Power’s theory of the degenerate workers’ state held up since 1989? Initially, in the case of the GDR, events seemed to provide a near “economic” cut-off point, with the monetary union with the Federal Republic on July 1, 1990.<br />
<br />
But in all other cases, the attempt to theorise a “purely economic” point of no return for the workers’ state has been doomed to failure. In 1991 Workers Power could still write that “it is the destruction of planning as the determinant of the whole of the economy which marks the destruction of the proletarian character of the property relations and, therefore, of the state which defends them.”[27]<br />
<br />
But the election of bourgeois restorationist governments throughout Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union has been accompanied by the destruction of Stalinist planning organs and the monopoly of foreign trade. Private capitalist accumulation is actively promoted, and the legal obstacles to it removed. What remains is a substantial legacy of state property, which, despite its origin, now performs approximately the same function that it does in weak semi-colonial capitalist states.<br />
<br />
It would seem logical, given the stress it lays on “planning”, for Workers Power to acknowledge that social counter-revolution – at least at the level of the state – has already taken place. But at this point, one strand of Workers Power’s theory collides with another. Since its conditions for retrospectively baptising a degenerate workers’ state include not merely the existence of planning, but “the complete elimination of the bourgeoisie”[28] – and since neither a numerous bourgeoisie nor a “normal” functioning of the law of value exists – Workers Power has decided, for the time being, that bourgeois states have not been restored.<br />
<br />
Its addiction to formal-logical categories did not allow for the contradictions of the real world – a situation in which the Stalinist economic mechanisms would break down, but there would be no developed bourgeoisie to fill the void. Workers Power has continued to fit reality around its schema, unconvincingly arguing that printing bank notes to subsidise state enterprises constitutes a residual form of planning [29] – although it must be obvious that it is impossible to “plan” the economy of a country such as Russia which is experiencing hyper-inflation.<br />
<br />
In order to prepare the evacuation from such untenable positions and to accommodate evident internal opposition, the LRCI’s 3rd international congress, held in August 1994, developed a new category – “moribund workers’ states” (MWS). These are defined as “degenerate workers’ states that have restorationist governments in power which are actively demolishing the foundations of planned economy. The objective of all governments inside the MWS is clear: the complete destruction of the system of command planning and the transformation of the economy into a functioning capitalist market economy.”[30]<br />
<br />
But in line with Trotsky’s definition of the state in terms of the property it “guards and defends” this is clearly a description of a bourgeois state! As a category the MWS is every bit as much of a fudge as the “transitional state” position of the FI in 1948 – it is a “bourgeois state form” whose social content remains undecided.<br />
<br />
The attempt to define the state in purely economic terms leads Workers Power to the following conclusion: “A change of leading personnel within the already bourgeois-type state machine – from objective to subjective restorationists – is not the qualitative moment of transition from a workers’ to a bourgeois state. Only a tendency that had in all essentials abandoned Trotsky’s analysis could identify the collapse of the bureaucratic dictatorship with the collapse of the workers’ state itself.” [31]<br />
<br />
In which case, among those who have “in all essentials abandoned Trotsky’s analysis”, we must include ...Trotsky! : “The inevitable collapse of Stalinist Bonapartism would immediately call into question the character of the USSR as a workers’ state. Socialist economy cannot be constructed without a socialist power. The fate of the USSR as a socialist state depends upon that political regime which will arise to replace Stalinist Bonapartism:”[32]<br />
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In the meantime, it is sobering to consider that, had Nazi Germany succeeded in conquering the Soviet Union, it might well have retained a substantial state sector. According to Workers Power’s theory, the workers’ state would have survived – albeit with a fascist government.<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">4. Stalinism and the Post-War Social Overturns: Problems of the Transition </span><br />
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<br />
The social counter-revolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is (despite obvious dissimilarities) a striking mirror-image of the process which saw the formation of deformed workers’ states in the 1940s. Both have been the subject of considerable, if frequently un-illuminating, dispute among Trotskyists. How we understand the development “forwards” should to a large degree inform our analysis of the regression in the opposite direction.<br />
<br />
The capitalist states of Eastern Europe were all industrially backward and predominantly agrarian before the Second World War, with the exception of Czechoslovakia. During the 1930s, they were effectively semi-colonies of German and French imperialism. In Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, state intervention played an important role in industry.<br />
<br />
The Nazi occupation of Poland and Czechoslovakia converted them into direct colonies of German imperialism. Much of the property of the bourgeoisie was looted, and either taken over directly by the German state, or handed over to German companies. The influence of German capitalism also grew in the economies of its allies, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.<br />
<br />
The defeat of German imperialism by the Soviet army left the latter in control of all of Eastern Europe. The bourgeoisie, greatly weakened by the destruction caused by the war, and with many of its representatives having fled abroad, was in crisis. For the Vern-Ryan tendency in the Socialist Workers Party (US), Stalinist control of the repressive apparatus meant that: “From the time of the occupation onward the designation of these states as worker’s states is an inescapable Marxist characterisation.”[33]<br />
<br />
Although many of Vern-Ryan’s criticisms of the SWP and Fourth International leaderships in the early 1950s were acute, there are a number of objections to their theory. In general, it replaces history with hindsight; it reads the outcome of a process into its origins.<br />
<br />
Vern-Ryan’s emphasis on the repressive apparatus is one-sided. The state does not merely consist of “armed bodies of men”. They are one element of the state, albeit a highly important one. Normally they are subject to political masters who direct what property they defend. Armed with such a theory, some on the left believed that the Soviet army was tied to the defence of nationalised property to the extent that it would be obliged to intervene against counter-revolution in 1989-91. Not for the first time history has proved that armies can transfer their class allegiance without significant disturbance.<br />
<br />
Their theory also fails to explain why Stalinists exercising governmental power and/or control of the repressive apparatus failed to result in worker’s states in Republican Spain, Finland, Northern Iran and the Russian occupation zone in Austria after the Second World War or Afghanistan during the 1980s.<br />
<br />
Vern-Ryan tended to see a predisposition within Stalinism to overturn capitalism, which is clearly linked to their peculiar understanding that “our movement has always characterised Stalinism as a centrist current”[34].<br />
<br />
Certainly, the Soviet bureaucracy could have finished off the Eastern European bourgeoisie without great difficulty at the end of the war. What Vern-Ryan have very little to say about is what it actually did. A serious examination of this demonstrates that what existed in Eastern Europe between 1944/5 and 1947/8 were weak bourgeois states, which the Stalinists set about rebuilding[35].<br />
<br />
True, the most openly pro-fascist, “unpatriotic” elements of the bourgeoisie were purged, and the reins of the repressive apparatus were held by the Soviet bureaucracy and its hirelings. “Unreliable” (i.e. anti-Soviet) bourgeois forces were replaced by elements which were ready to collaborate with the Stalinists to the hilt. But other open reactionaries – collaborators, monarchists, clericalists and even former fascists – were tolerated, and in some cases recruited to the Communist parties.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, workers who attempted to seize factories and estates with the arrival of the “Red” Army were evicted. Bourgeois parties and parliaments were re-established, in line with the Yalta Agreement. Indeed, the term “people’s democracies” was not coined merely out of cynicism. What Stalin intended was to preserve weak bourgeois states with popular front governments under Soviet tutelage, similar to Finland.<br />
<br />
The high degree of nationalisation was a consequence of the war. In many cases the bourgeoisie welcomed state ownership, and recognised it was necessary, since it was in no position to fill the breach. In Czechoslovakia, for example, the state inherited 60 per cent of industry and almost the entire banking system from the German occupation, without having to expropriate the local bourgeoisie. Poland, where the devastation and loss of life were far greater, had nationalised nearly 90 per cent of industry within the first year of liberation.<br />
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This didn’t, however, mean an attack upon bourgeois property as such, as the Stalinists were at pains to stress. In Hungary, factories and mines were restored to private ownership. Strikes were everywhere condemned as sabotaging reconstruction.<br />
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The political forces with which the Stalinists shared power in these years were far from negligible. In Romania, the monarchy was retained and a CP/Liberal Party coalition established headed by the anti-semitic reactionary, Radescu, and including supporters of the fascist Iron Guard.<br />
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Bulgaria also kept its monarchy under the Stalinist-initiated Fatherland Front coalition, led between 1944 and 1946 by the arch-reactionary, General Georgiev; the CP held only three ministerial portfolios in its first coalition, and other forces, including the Agrarian Party, held significant positions. Elections in Hungary in 1945 gave the Smallholders Party 57 per cent, with the Stalinists receiving only 17 per cent.<br />
<br />
Poland saw a coalition between the Stalinists and various supporters of the London-based pro-imperialist émigrés, and the CP faced significant competition from the Polish Socialist Party and the Polish Peasant Party. The Czechoslovakian coalition established in March 1945 included the Communist Party, Social Democrats, National Socialists, the Catholic Popular Party and the Slovak Democrats. Although the Stalinists had significant support – they gained 38 per cent of the vote in the elections of May, 1946 – bourgeois parties operated in relative freedom for another two years.<br />
<br />
It must be remembered that the various Smallholders and Peasant parties were in reality bourgeois parties, which, although they had some radical elements, also served as a refuge for representatives of the pre-war ruling circles, who had close links with the West.<br />
<br />
Only in Yugoslavia and Albania, as a result of the Partisan War, were there no significant bourgeois political forces. The short-lived coalition between the Yugoslav Communist Party and the monarchist-reactionary Subasich only lasted from 1944 to 1945.<br />
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There is no evidence to show that this was all merely a Machiavellian plot on the part of Stalin to create “socialist” states. The protection of bourgeois interests – albeit those prepared to play ball with the Soviet occupiers – was a crucial part of Stalin’s strategy of peaceful co-existence with the West. Its counterpart was the faithful class collaboration practised by the Western Stalinist parties in the same period.<br />
<br />
Only with the onset of the Cold War in late 1946, and particularly with the announcement of the Marshall Aid Plan in March 1947, which posed the reorganisation of the Eastern European bourgeoisie under imperialist leadership, did Stalin’s alliance with imperialism break down, and the necessity to consolidate the “buffer zone” countries as deformed workers’ states arise.<br />
<br />
Without reference to this crucial turn in the international situation – the gravity of which was clearly understood by both sides at the time – it is impossible to explain the decisive nature of the changes which took place in 1947-48. Vern-Ryan’s theory does not ascribe any particular significance to this shift in international relations.<br />
<br />
Historical evidence suggests otherwise. In the course of 1946 and 1947, the reviving eastern economies were forging growing links with the West. Trade with the Soviet Union went into steep decline, while that with the United States grew rapidly.[36] The Marshall Plan, and the willingness of the Czechoslovak and Polish governments to embrace it, threatened to make this trend permanent. Far from acting as a defensive “buffer”, the People’s Democracies threatened to become hostile outposts of imperialism in the Soviet Union’s back yard. Taken together with the eviction of the CP’s from the post-war coalitions in France, Italy and Belgium, it marked an unmistakable breakdown in the “spheres of influence” agreement.<br />
<br />
The final break with the bourgeoisie – conducted bureaucratically, “from above” – was accomplished throughout Eastern Europe, with slight variations in tempo in different countries, between late 1947 and early 1948. It completed the policy of purging bourgeois parties by outlawing them, of eliminating working class opposition by forcible fusion of the social democrat and communist parties, and of concentrating all political power in the hands of the Stalinists. A further nationalisation drive expropriated most remaining capitalist property. All this took place, with the partial exception of Czechoslovakia,[37] without the working class being mobilised.<br />
<br />
How is this apparently “peaceful” process to be understood in terms of the Marxist theory of the state? What of Marx’s famous judgement on the Paris Commune that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”[38] Didn’t Lenin devote much of The State and Revolution to establishing that the capitalist state could not be overturned by an aggregate of reforms, and that it had to be “smashed”? And what of Trotsky’s waning that: “He who asserts that the Soviet government has been gradually changed from proletarian to bourgeois is only, so to speak, running backwards the film of reformism.”?[39]<br />
<br />
Firstly, let us observe that, although nothing resembling a civil war took place in 1947-48, the phenomena of politicians mysteriously preferring windows to lifts; of mass arrests and purges; of party fusion at gun point – none of these were either particularly “peaceful” or typically “reformist”. They all constituted elements of force. As a general rule, force is normally applied in rough proportion to the strength of the opposition and the degree of resistance put up. In a situation in which the Stalinists already controlled the repressive apparatus, this amount of force was relatively less than in, say, an imperialist state with a large standing army.<br />
<br />
Secondly, it is necessary to remember that these were far from “normal” bourgeois states. They existed in a unique situation, which is unlikely to be repeated. The bourgeoisie sought to preserve its slender hold on life by acquiescing to Soviet occupation, thereby surrendering much of its own sovereignty. The Soviet bureaucracy, for its part, opted to preserve this bourgeoisie out of wider international policy considerations. Such a relationship was inherently anomalous, unstable and could only be temporary. The circumstance of a bourgeois state having much of its policy decided for it by a workers’ state, however, is not unique – as is demonstrated by much of modern Finnish history.<br />
<br />
The economies of these states were backward and already highly statified before 1947. The concentration of capitalist property in the hands of the state – state capitalism – is a typical reflex of the bourgeoisie in terminal crisis. Such a situation was anticipated by both Engels and Lenin.[40] In this sense, the bourgeois state prepares the rule of the workers’ state as a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”.<br />
<br />
Does this mean that we are arguing that a bourgeois state can be used as a platform to create a workers’ state, and are thereby fundamentally revising Marxism? The apparently gradual transformation of state structures was, on the face of things, closer to the “gradual” model of the transition from feudal to capitalist states which took place in most central and Eastern European countries. The semi-feudal aristocracy was forced to industrialise in much of central Europe during the 19th century under the threat of economic and political downfall. In these cases state apparatuses were adapted to the needs of new relations of production, whilst partially maintaining the old institutional framework. These old forms finally changed their social character.<br />
<br />
Tim Wohlforth, whose Theory of Structural Assimilation[41] remains one of the few serious efforts to reopen the “buffer zone” debate since the 1940s, attempted to get round the problem of “dating” the transformation by arguing that it was managed during an extended period, by a state which assumes a hybrid, dual character: “It is possible to ascertain around when the process begins and after the process is all over it is clear that a qualitative change has taken place. However, during the process things are nowhere as clear. In fact in the middle of the process things are extremely contradictory for both qualities – what existed before and what is to be – exist in a complex inter-relationship. For this reason there exists no one moment when the qualitative change takes place. That the qualitative change has taken place becomes clear only some time after the change has been consummated.”[42]<br />
<br />
This position is echoed by Westoby,[43] and is the Achilles heel of the structural assimilation theory. If Marxism cannot analyse the class nature of the state power, then a question mark must arise not only over its analysis of class society as a whole, but its ability to advance a programme capable of outlining the tasks of the hour.<br />
<br />
Of course, the overturn of capitalism in Eastern Europe was a process, rather than an isolated event which took place at a definite time on a definite day. However, Wohlforth and Westoby only succeed in mystifying the nature of the process, and rendering it incomprehensible. For all their criticisms of the FI leadership, they manage to provide it with an alibi.<br />
<br />
As we have earlier argued, the break with the bourgeoisie – in spite of its bureaucratic method – was nonetheless real enough, and fairly abrupt. Its timing was conditioned by a fundamental shift in world politics. Having crushed the remaining centres of bourgeois political and economic power in the space of a few months, the foundations of the new states were laid.<br />
<br />
The ability of the Stalinist bureaucracy to effect such a fundamental change did not rest only upon a particular political conjuncture. It was also a by-product of the bureaucracy’s Bonapartist nature. But whereas for Deutscher and Pablo, this implied a residual progressive mission to destroy capitalism, the real “secret” of Stalinist Bonapartism lay in its manoeuvring between classes, both domestically and internationally, and its lack of an “organic” class base. Having politically expropriated the working class in the world’s first workers’ state, while still being dependent upon the foundations of that state as a source of material privilege, the Stalinist bureaucracy balanced uneasily between imperialism and its own masses.<br />
<br />
Between 1944 and 1947, the Stalinists found themselves in possession of the repressive apparatus and many of the elements of government in the Eastern European states. But while these states remained bourgeois, they also were states in a peculiar situation of dependency upon a foreign – and, in the class sense, alien – power. By eliminating the active oppositional elements in both main classes from the equation, the bureaucracy enjoyed a high degree of political independence. It was able to fashion the building blocks of new states from the petrified remains of the old ones, without facing the direct challenge of either bourgeois counter-revolution or proletarian, anti-bureaucratic revolution.<br />
<br />
There were therefore also significant differences with the “hybrid” state formations of early capitalism. Far from taking over these states of Eastern Europe “ready-made”, the Stalinists deconstructed them, filling nominally bourgeois institutions with their own creatures, performing qualitatively different functions. Far from lending theoretical support to reformism – as Wohlforth’s description of an amorphous cumulative process tends to – this understanding fundamentally demarcates the transition of 1947-48 from social democratic reformism.<br />
<br />
The bourgeois states were therefore “smashed”, although not in the manner anticipated by classical Marxism: not at a given hour on a definite day, admittedly, but smashed nonetheless. The survival of some institutions of the bourgeois state – cited by state capitalist theorists and some contributors to the “buffer zone” debate as evidence that no qualitative change had taken place – is of little significance, except that it underlines the particularly degenerate nature of the transformation.<br />
<br />
The fact that the same judges, who had presided at trials of communists in the 1930s, were sometimes to be found passing sentence upon those purged by the Stalinists in the 1940s; that all kinds of bourgeois administrative arrangements carried over; that various quasi-democratic bodies (including nominally independent “bloc parties” and pseudo-parliaments) were permitted by the Stalinists – these things were not decisive in determining the class nature of the state. Certainly, those Trotskyists who argued that they were, had been obliged by reality to quietly drop their objections by the early 1950s.<br />
<br />
The real question for Marxists is not the class origins of the functionaries but in whose interests they function. The history of bourgeois revolutions showed that it was possible for opportunist elements to navigate the choppy waters of both revolution and counter-revolution – General Monck and the Vicar of Bray in England, Fouché and Talleyrand in France. Even the Bolsheviks were obliged to retain a good part of the old civil service for a period, and subsequently re-employ the “military specialists”.<br />
<br />
As we would expect, the bureaucratic overturns in Eastern Europe were far more degenerate in their methods, and considerably less choosy when it came to making use of the dregs of the old society. As a result of the new socio-economic course after 1947, the remnants of the old order were either reconciled to the new regime or systematically purged. State institutions and the legal system, while continuing to harbour numerous reactionaries, were similarly transformed in line with their new function. The Stalinists ensured the loyalty of the state apparatus by establishing and developing links between it and the nationalised sectors of the economy.<br />
<br />
Even with the emergence of deformed workers’ states, matters were far from settled. Trotskyists have tended to overestimate the extent to which the adoption by the People’s Democracies of planning and other typical features of bureaucratic rule necessarily guaranteed their future existence. In fact, they continued to be subject to wider considerations of Soviet foreign policy, as was shown by the preparedness of the Soviet leadership in 1953 to barter away the GDR: “Malenkov and Beria viewed Germany’s division and the presence of the armed forces of East and West on German soil as the chief obstacles to a rationalisation of Soviet foreign policy and the chief source of international tension. They contemplated nothing less than a withdrawal from Germany and the virtual abandonment of the East German communist regime, hoping that they would be able to persuade the Western Powers to agree to a withdrawal of their forces too.”[44] They proposed to Eisenhower that “a peace treaty with Germany giving the German people the possibility of a reunion in one State...should be concluded as early as possible; and following closely upon this the occupation troops should be withdrawn.”[45]<br />
<br />
Although there were significant differences between what took place in Eastern Europe in 1939-40 and 1947-48, Trotsky’s last writings in the course of the struggle against the Burnham-Shachtman opposition should have provided the post-war Fourth International with some of the necessary analytical tools.<br />
<br />
“It is more likely, however,” he wrote in 1939, “that in the territories scheduled to become a part of the USSR, the Moscow government will carry through the expropriation of the large landowners and statification of the means of production. This variant is most probable not because the bureaucracy remains true to the socialist programme but because it is neither desirous nor capable of sharing the power, and the privileges the latter entails, with the old ruling classes in the occupied territories.”[46]<br />
<br />
As to whether this placed a question mark over the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism, he had this to say: “The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organisation of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.”[47]<br />
<br />
Nor was Trotsky in favour of entrusting any historic mission to the Red Army or according it any independent significance: “We have never promised to support all the actions of the Red Army which is an instrument in the hands of the Bonapartist bureaucracy. We have promised to defend only the USSR as a workers’ state and solely those things within it which belong to a workers’ state.”[48]<br />
<br />
He also envisaged a situation in which capitalism could be overturned, not by a workers’ revolution, but by “a civil war of a special type. ... introduced on bayonets from without ...controlled by the Moscow bureaucracy”.[49] At the same time he warned that these “missionaries with bayonets” would alienate the masses.[50]<br />
<br />
The Fourth International responded to the post-war developments inadequately. Not only was the FI’s timing belated; its method was defective, and prepared the political collapse which followed. It remained the prisoner of the prognosis that capitalism could only be destroyed in Eastern Europe as a result of “structural assimilation” into the Soviet Union, as had been the case with the eastern zone of Poland and the Baltic States in 1939-40. Once it abandoned this perspective, it readily accepted that Stalinism could after all “project a revolutionary orientation”.<br />
<br />
It is ironic therefore to find both “anti-Pabloite” David North and “Pabloite” Pierre Frank defending the line of the FI in the late 1940s. North argues that the Second World Congress “correctly maintained that capitalism had not been destroyed in the “buffer zone”,[51] while Frank claims that: “Despite a few measures aimed at those members of the propertied classes who had collaborated with the Germans, the (Soviet) army had left the bourgeois social structures of these countries intact.” [52]<br />
<br />
David Rousset appears to have been one of the first members of the FI to argue that, on the basis of widespread nationalisation, the buffer zone countries had become workers’ states.[53] His contribution to the International Executive Committee Plenum in June, 1946 was opposed by Ernest Mandel, who insisted: “The bureaucracy can definitively bring new territories into its control only by assimilating them structurally on the economic base which issued from the October Revolution.” [54]<br />
<br />
The Fl’s Second World Congress met in April-May, 1948, after the decisive overturns had taken place. Its main document was “The USSR and Stalinism”, presented by Mandel. “To deny the capitalist nature of these countries”, it claimed, “amounts to an acceptance, in no matter what form, of this Stalinist revisionist theory, it means seriously to consider the historic possibility of a destruction of capitalism by “terror from above” without the revolutionary intervention of the masses.”[55]<br />
<br />
Amendments proposed by the RCP (Britain, led by Jock Haston and Ted Grant), arguing that the overturn of capitalism in the buffer zone, and the control of the bourgeoisie over the government and state apparatus was either complete or approaching completion, were heavily defeated.[56]<br />
<br />
In June, 1948, immediately after the congress, the Soviet-Yugoslav split took place. Junking the congress’s analysis of Yugoslavia as a capitalist state in which revolutionary defeatism should be strictly applied in time of war, the Fl leadership immediately began treating it as a de facto workers’ state, headed by a party which had broken with Stalinism.[57] Three fawning open letters were sent to the YCP by the International Secretariat, one of them finishing with the ringing words: “Yugoslav communists, let us unite our efforts for a new Leninist International.”[58]<br />
<br />
Although a majority of the FI was in favour of characterising the buffer zone countries as capitalist, sustaining this analysis was becoming increasingly difficult. The resolution of the 7th plenum of the IEC in April, 1949 described the buffer zone as “a unique type of hybrid transitional society in the process of transformation, with features that are as yet so fluid and lacking precision that it is extremely difficult to summarise its fundamental nature.”[59]<br />
This unique “transitional state” category was in fact a basic revision of Marxism. It meant either that the state could at one and the same time be the instrument of two classes – or that it was neutral between them.<br />
<br />
The IEC’s tortuous reasoning forced it first one way, and then another. The Eastern European bourgeoisie was suffering from “enfeeblement” or “virtual disappearance”,[60] however, “the buffer zone, except for Finland and the Russian-occupied zones in Austria and Germany, are on the road toward structural assimilation with the USSR, but...this assimilation has not yet been accomplished.”[61]<br />
<br />
In order to justify this conclusion, the IEC had to come up with a range of secondary criteria which the buffer zone countries would have to fulfil before becoming workers’ states. National borders would have to be abolished and “real planning” implemented, either by incorporation into the Soviet Union, or by the establishment of a Balkan-Danube Federation.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, none of these conditions were ever met. But the qualitative similarities between Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were already obvious. The FI began to divide into two camps. Those who were moving to recognise the buffer zone as workers’ states argued that the economic criteria had been fulfilled; those who held the line that they were capitalist states maintained that the political criteria had not.<br />
<br />
Bert Cochran (E. R. Frank) put forward a workers’ state position in March, 1949, comparing the degree of statification with the Soviet Union. Morris Stein, addressing the SWP Political Committee in July, 1949, put the case for ostrich Marxism: “Rather than jumping to conclusions as to the social character of the states in Eastern Europe, it is far better to await further developments.”[62] When discussion resumed in August, the positions of the RCP were dismissed out of hand, and with little regard for the facts: “I haven’t read their latest documents, but this is of little importance, since their position dates back some sixteen months...When they first took their position that the buffer countries were workers’ states, [i.e. April, 1948] these countries had not yet undergone any extensive nationalisation.”[63]<br />
<br />
By September, Michel Pablo was proposing that the FI adopt Yugoslavia as a workers’ state – a position it had implicitly held for over a year. Mandel counter-attacked in October, exposing the weaknesses of those who were prepared to equate nationalisation with the overthrow of capitalism, but woodenly sticking to his contention that it could only be overturned by a genuine proletarian revolution. Revealingly, Mandel admitted that his method owed more to political considerations than to the study of objective reality: “Our criterion of Stalinism from the standpoint of its ineffectiveness against capitalism would lose all its meaning.” [64]<br />
<br />
Joe Hansen, writing in December, 1949, noted two major contradictions in the majority position. The Second World Congress resolution, while insisting that revolutionary action was necessary in the buffer zone, acknowledged that capitalism had been overturned in 1939-40 in the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, Bessarabia and Karelia without the mobilisation of the masses. The 7th plenum resolution had emphasised the capitalist nature of the buffer zones states, but had paradoxically argued that this “does not at all imply that the bourgeoisie is in power as the dominant class in these countries”.[65]<br />
<br />
Although this method was similar to Hansen’s – that a sufficient degree of nationalisation resulted in a workers’ state – Pablo was not yet ready in February, 1950, to go beyond admitting Yugoslavia to the fold. It was a “special case”: the result of a proletarian revolution in progress since 1941, (although the FI had not noticed it until 1948). The break with the Kremlin was the summit of this process. The rest of the buffer zone, Pablo saw as only “approaching assimilation to the USSR”, although he was prepared to accept that “it could take place without either the abolition of borders, or formal incorporation into the Soviet Union.”[66]<br />
<br />
Cochran was altogether more blunt: “We maintain that if the state structures and the economies of these countries are similar to that of the USSR, then they are of the same class type. Any other conclusion calls into question our characterisation of the USSR.”[67] He saw the buffer zone countries after 1945 as “regimes of dual power” and the Stalinist constitutions of 1948-49 as “the juridical expression of the fact that the dual power regimes had come to an end”.[68]<br />
<br />
It was Pablo who first coined the term “deformed workers’ state”. By origin, applied to Yugoslavia, it meant a state quantitatively, rather than qualitatively deformed by bureaucracy.[69] At its 8th plenum in April, 1950, the IEC formally accepted Pablo’s position on Yugoslavia, although there were still those like John G. Wright – praised by North as a far-sighted and perceptive dissident![70] – who held out.<br />
<br />
If a semblance of political unity was to be maintained, there was little to do except wrap the discussion up in the Fl as diplomatically as possible. Mandel meanwhile quietly dropped his objections. Matters were not finally settled until the Third World Congress in August, 1951, which extended the category of deformed workers’ state to the remainder of the buffer zone countries. Even then, it did so with a face-saving formula: “We still believe that up to 1949 these states still retained a fundamentally capitalist structure”.[71] This meant that the 7th plenum resolution had been correct, and that – somehow – the qualitative changes in Eastern Europe had taken place since 1949.<br />
<br />
The Trotskyist movement paid a heavy price for this display of unity – the congress’s resolutions were adopted overwhelmingly. The theoretical issues at stake were left unresolved and brushed under the carpet. And the political consequence was a somersault from Stalinophobia to Stalinophilia. Having clung for so long to the position that only genuine proletarian revolutions could overturn capitalism, the revelation that Stalinism had already “done the job” in half a continent produced a deep-going adaptation in the FI, which now saw its role as pressuring the communist parties from the left.<br />
<br />
This political collapse cannot simply be put down to “bad men” or “bad politics in the formal sense. At the root of the FI’s disorientation was its failure to develop the Marxist theory of the state, and in particular, to grasp how a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, which had acted as the gravedigger of the world’s first workers’ revolution, could nonetheless expropriate the bourgeoisie.<br />
The fear Mandel had betrayed of ceding Stalinism a historic mission was turned inside out. The FI’s adaptation to Tito was repeated in relation to Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh; each was portrayed as a revolutionary leader who had broken from Stalinism under the impact of “mass pressure”.<br />
<br />
The task of determining which property relations the state defends and/or strives to develop has, in the final analysis, to be answered politically. In the case of classical social revolutions, such as the French bourgeois revolution of 1789 or the socialist revolution of October 1917, where state power clearly passed from one class to another, the task is straightforward.<br />
However, deciding the class nature of the state becomes especially difficult when a petty-bourgeois leadership has come into conflict with both the main classes of modern capitalist society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – typically where both are weak and leaderless. This was the case in both the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions at a certain point of their development.<br />
<br />
In such a situation, the practice of this leadership and the development of the relationship between the state, the property relations and the two main classes have to be carefully analysed. A qualitative change in the state would be marked by the fact that limited collectivist interventions into the economy proved inadequate to stabilise the situation, and placed more drastic measures – the suppression of the bourgeoisie – immediately on the agenda. The alternative is growing paralysis, which prepares political counter-revolution.<br />
<br />
The Nicaraguan FSLN came to power in 1979 as a result of an armed struggle, which overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. It was in essence a radical popular front, with a petty-bourgeois leadership, supported by workers’ parties, and minority anti-Somoza sections of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie – a line-up of forces similar to that led by Fidel Castro in 1959. Moreover, it undertook significant measures of nationalisation and state intervention.<br />
<br />
But despite the subjectively “socialist” intentions of the FSLN, there was to be no “Cuban Road” in Nicaragua. The fate of such revolutions is closely linked to the nature of the political leadership at the head of the state. A revolutionary-internationalist leadership would have combated US/Contra insurgency not only by military means, but by destroying the basis of the bourgeoisie at home, and by spreading socialist revolution abroad. In the absence of such a leadership, the international balance of forces, and within that, the refusal of the Soviet and Cuban bureaucracies to countenance a rerun of the Cuban revolution, determined the eventual outcome – the negotiated settlement with Chamorro and the Contras in 1989.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">5. Trotsky and the Possible Paths of Counter-Revolution </span><br />
<br />
<br />
In its most dogmatic versions, “orthodox Trotskyism” has sought to fit reality around Trotsky’s prognoses, rather than to analyse reality, while using Trotsky’s ideas as a methodological tool. The projection in some of Trotsky’s writings that civil war would be a necessary precondition for capitalist restoration became transformed in the hands of the epigones into a supra-historical dogma. It is small wonder that, armed with such a theory, the events of 1989-91 took the majority of would-be Trotskyists by surprise. Instead of dispensing with the reactionary notion that Marxism is a kind of crystal ball for gazing into the future, some despaired of their “god that failed”, and looked for a purer pre-Bolshevik Marxism. Others pretended that the counter-revolution had yet to happen; the civil war still lay in front.<br />
<br />
Without underestimating the potential for civil wars of various kinds in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, the civil war of the kind the epigones envisaged has not been required to restore bourgeois states, not least because other key elements of Trotsky’s equation – for instance, the contention that “the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists ... in the consciousness of the toiling masses”[72] – had been so substantially eroded in the intervening 55 years.<br />
<br />
By reducing Trotsky’s thinking on the possibility of counter-revolution to a single sentence, the epigones have done it a grave disservice, and overlooked its historical and dialectical evolution. Indeed, without falling into the trap of attempting to show that Trotsky did indeed predict the course of events, a rounded study of his writings shows that he considered a number of possible paths of counter-revolution, and that, viewed in their proper perspective, a number of his insights can shed light on the present.<br />
<br />
Although it is possible to cite a number of agitational manifestos and speeches in which Bolsheviks presented world revolution as “inevitable”, in their mature output, Lenin and Trotsky viewed both revolution and counter-revolution as living struggles of social forces. Their prognoses were therefore historically conditional, and they rarely strayed too far from the present and its short-term potential.<br />
<br />
In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the most likely potential for counter-revolution came from an alliance of domestic forces – landlords, monarchists, capitalists and richer peasants – with external imperialist intervention. But the Soviet victory in the civil war brought an uneasy peace with the imperialists. With this breathing space, the immediate likelihood of a successful White Guardist uprising receded. Moreover, the peasantry, whatever it thought of the Bolsheviks, had a stake in the revolution in the shape of the agrarian revolution. This explains why the machinations of imperialist agents such as Sidney Reilly were crushed so easily. The more perceptive counter-revolutionaries, among them leading Cadets like Ustryalov, saw greater potential in the evolution of the regime itself, and thought that the NEP would naturally evolve back towards capitalism.<br />
<br />
In the course of his “last struggle” of 1922-3, Lenin became acutely aware of the growth of conservative, bureaucratic forces within the party and the state bureaucracy, which through their chauvinism and readiness to retreat, over such central issues as the monopoly of foreign trade, were preparing the collapse of the proletarian dictatorship – a dictatorship, which in Moshe Lewins’s phrase, was increasingly being exercised “in a void”.[73]<br />
<br />
The dangers inherent in reviving private ownership were never far from the thinking of leading Bolsheviks. In his report on production to the 12th congress in April 1923, Trotsky remarked: “Petty commodity production and private trade form a hostile bloc of forces against us.”[74] He went on to give the following summary of the conditions necessary for the survival of the workers’ state: “If we had to explain upon what our hopes for a socialist future for Russia rested, we would reply: I) Upon the political power of the party, supported by the Red Army; 2) Upon the nationalisation of production; 3) Upon the monopoly of foreign trade. It would be sufficient to throw down one of these pillars for the building to fall.”[75]<br />
<br />
The threat represented by the alliance of the bureaucrat, the NEPman and the kulak is a theme running throughout Trotsky’s writings during the struggle of the Left Opposition from 1923-27. His veiled attack in Towards Socialism or Capitalism?[76] in 1925 on the economic programme of Stalin and Bukharin centred on his demand for accurate and comparative coefficients of world economy – which, in contrast to the official legend of socialist self-sufficiency, would have revealed the backward nature of Russian development and its far lower level of labour productivity.<br />
<br />
By 1927, during the last period of the Opposition’s public struggle, this threat had become a growing reality. The “Platform of the Joint Opposition”[77] drew explicit attention to the link between the stabilisation of world capitalism, the counter-revolutionary and chauvinist elements which had flooded the bureaucracy and the discontent of the peasantry in the face of the “scissors crisis”.<br />
<br />
Little attention has been paid to Trotsky’s article Thermidor[78], written during this struggle – perhaps because his views on Thermidor underwent a well-known revision in 1935. Here Trotsky discusses two variants, which show that he was far from categorical in relation to the “civil war thesis”: “But bourgeois restoration, speaking in general, is only conceivable either in the form of a decisive and sharp overturn (with or without intervention) or in the form of several successive shifts. This is what Ustryalov calls “going downhill with the brakes on.”...Thus, as long as the European revolution has not conquered, the possibilities of bourgeois restoration in our country cannot be denied. Which of the two possible paths is the more likely under our circumstances: the path of an abrupt counter-revolutionary overturn or the path of successive shiftings, with a bit of a shake-up at every stage and a Thermidorian shift as the most immediate stage? This question can be answered, I think, only in an extremely conditional way. To the extent that the possibility of a bourgeois restoration in general cannot be denied, we must keep our eyes out for either of these variants – with the brakes on or without the brakes – to weigh the odds, to note the elements contributing toward either.”[79]<br />
<br />
The acute crisis which developed in 1927 led Stalin to somersault from the policy of attempting to conciliate the kulak to one of ruthless collectivisation. Despite its disastrous results, and the fact that it certainly did not eliminate inequality in the countryside, it did effectively remove the rural petty-bourgeoisie as a serious contender for power, at least in the short term. The NEP bourgeoisie was similarly eliminated, in the drive towards industrialisation. Trotsky’s thinking underwent a corresponding evolution, and increasingly saw the bureaucracy itself as the principal source of internal danger. Indeed, his view that the Bukharinite right was “the main danger” and “the Thermidorian wing of the party” led the Left Opposition to refuse to countenance any bloc on internal democracy.<br />
<br />
The characterisation of the Right Opposition as “the masked form of counter-revolution”, as the proxy for the kulaks and NEPmen, runs through many of Trotsky’s writings in Alma Ata. Whatever the merits of this position, the ease with which Stalin crushed the Right made this too an increasingly less likely scenario.<br />
<br />
By the time Trotsky wrote The Class Nature of the Soviet State in 1933 a perspective had emerged which in some respects in its picture of internal disintegration is strikingly contemporary: “The workers, having lost control over the state and economy, may resort to mass strikes, as weapons of self-defence. The discipline of the dictatorship would be broken. Under the onslaught of the workers and because of the pressure of economic difficulties the trusts would be forced to disrupt the planned beginnings and enter into competition with one another. The dissolution of the regime would naturally find its violent and chaotic echo in the village, and would inevitably be thrown over into the army. The socialist state would collapse giving place to the capitalist regime, or more correctly, to capitalist chaos.”[80]<br />
<br />
These themes recur in The Revolution Betrayed in even sharper relief, where Trotsky discusses the interaction of crisis within the regime and the economy: “A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories within them would fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert themselves into stock companies, or they might find some other transitional form of property – one, for example, in which the workers should participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.<br />
<br />
... In the sphere of industry, denationalisation would begin with the light industries and those producing food. The planning principle would be converted into a series of compromises between the state power and individual “corporations” – potential proprietors, that is, among the Soviet captains of industry, the émigré former proprietors and foreign capitalists. Notwithstanding that the Soviet bureaucracy has gone far toward preparing a bourgeois restoration, the new regime would have to introduce in the matter of forms of property and methods of industry not a reform, but a social [counter] revolution.”[81]<br />
<br />
And he noted that the bureaucracy itself would provide much of the cadre of this counter-revolution: “If...a bourgeois party were to overthrow the ruling Soviet caste, it would find no small number of ready servants among the present bureaucrats, administrators, technicians, directors, party secretaries and privileged upper circles in general. A purgation of the state apparatus would, of course, be necessary in this case too. But a bourgeois restoration would probably have to clean out fewer people than a revolutionary party.”[82]<br />
<br />
Against those who insist one-sidedly that Trotsky only considered the variant of a violent overthrow of the workers’ state must be set the theses on The Fourth International and the Soviet Union, drafted for the “Geneva” conference for the FI and written at the same time as The Revolution Betrayed. The Stalin Constitution of 1936, he noted, “opens up for the bureaucracy “legal” roads for the economic counter-revolution, that is, the restoration of capitalism by means of a “cold stroke”.”[83]<br />
<br />
As these references indicate, up to this point Trotsky considered it likely that political and economic counter-revolution would march hand in hand. However, replying to Burnham and Carter in 1937, he revises this view, arguing that: “Should a bourgeois counter-revolution succeed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy period would have to base itself upon the nationalised economy.”[84] Incidentally, it is scarcely credible to argue that Trotsky, in the aftermath of a successful bourgeois counter-revolution, would have continued to claim that a workers’ state existed!<br />
<br />
With the onset of the Second World War, Trotsky’s last writings accurately forecast many of its decisive turning points. Since 1933 he had insistently warned of the threat to the Soviet Union from German imperialism. Having already anticipated the Stalin-Hitler pact, he also foresaw its break up: “In the event of victory Hitler...will make Germany the contractor of the most important state enterprises in the USSR in the interests of the German military machine. Right now Hitler is the ally and friend of Stalin; but should Hitler, with the aid of Stalin, come out victorious on the Western Front, he would on the morrow turn his guns against the USSR.”[85]<br />
<br />
<br />
The urgency with which Trotsky took up the slogan of an Independent Soviet Ukraine in 1939 was related to the restorationist threat posed by Stalinist repression driving the Ukrainian masses into the arms of reactionary nationalists and German imperialism. This warning was fully borne out. When German forces entered Kiev in 1941, they were greeted as liberators.[86]<br />
<br />
Trotsky, naturally enough, did not write a manual on capitalist restoration in the 1990s. Some of his perspectives were strictly limited in their historical scope; others retained an enduring relevance. What he did leave us were sufficient pointers to prepare for the unfolding of the death agony of Stalinism. In practice, however, most of his would-be successors were unable to read the writing on the wall, still less analyse the process.<br />
<br />
Various currents of Greek Trotskyism continue to maintain that it is historically impossible to restore capitalism in the former workers’ states. This is based upon a complete misunderstanding of Trotsky’s analogy of Thermidor in the French Revolution, combined with a metaphysical belief in the powers of nationalised property. Although it is true that after 1935, Trotsky used Thermidor to describe the counter-revolutionary stabilisation of Stalinism on the basis of nationalised property, it is crystal clear that he always considered that a further retrogression to capitalism was entirely possible.<br />
<br />
In what sense can we continue to say today – as Trotsky wrote in 1935 – that “the Soviet state still remains the historical instrument of the working class insofar as it assures the development of economy and culture”[87]? The economy stands in ruins, the masses have been pauperised and culture has been thrown back decades. In the face of such sharp breaks in continuity, the repetition of old formulae becomes a senseless exercise in ostrich Marxism.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">6. The Road to Restoration </span><br />
<br />
<br />
With Trotsky, we believe that the Stalinist bureaucracy only defended the workers’ state insofar as they could derive a reliable source of privilege from it. While politically expropriating the working class, the bureaucracy was obliged to guarantee it tangible gains – job security, low cost housing and other essentials. It was fear of working class resistance to attacks upon these gains which for a long period acted as a constraint upon the pro-market sections of the bureaucracy.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, in the degenerated Soviet Union and the deformed workers’ states Stalinism acted as a transmission belt between the nationalised forces of production and world capitalism. The growing appetites of the bureaucrats to convert their privileges into private property were fuelled by a deepening loss of confidence in the bureaucratically planned economy.<br />
<br />
In the 1930s Trotsky could write that “the nationalised and planned economy of the USSR is the greatest school for all humanity aspiring to a better future” and that it had “assured a development of productive forces never equalled in the history of the world”[88]. But the take-off of the post-war imperialist boom left the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe ever further behind. Once the initial successes of “primitive socialist accumulation” (themselves inflated by the bureaucracy’s statistics) had been achieved, the transition to socialism was blocked. In the long view, the decades since the 1950s represent a long, slow transition in the opposite direction.<br />
<br />
Stalinist “command economy” methods increasingly acted as a fetter on the development of the socialised forces of production. The rate of growth in industrial production fell in each five-year period from 1951-1980. This was partly masked in the 1950s and 1960s by the use of labour-intensive methods which, despite the command structure and the lack of advanced technology, produced significant economic growth. In the 1970s, the beginnings of collapse were staved off only by the leap in world oil prices.[89] But by the late-1970s, with the escalation of the arms race following the Vietnam war, the Stalinist relations of production had suffocated the development of the forces of production. This sharpening contradiction set the stage for the economic crisis of the 1980s, which in turn led to the political collapse of 1989-91.<br />
<br />
The sharper the contradictions became between the socialised forces of production and the command structure (“central planning”!), the further the Stalinists attempted to offset the stagnation of the economy with market experiments. By the late 1980s, Stalinism had already attempted – and failed – to introduce reform programmes in most countries.[90] These failures only served to undermine what confidence workers had in a transition to socialism via these states, and strengthened illusions in capitalism.<br />
<br />
The chief beneficiaries of the various Stalinist attempts at “reform” were the urban middle strata – the “specialists”, the managers and the intellectuals.[91] Their growth not only reflected deep demographic changes – by 1980 over 60 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union lived in cities and towns, and there were 28 million graduates of universities and technical colleges. It also reflected a conscious attempt by the bureaucracy to widen its own social base.<br />
If anything, the social weight of these layers exceeded their numerical strength. It was from such strata that the dissident movement emerged, impatient with the pace of reform and oriented towards bourgeois democracy. And it was to such forces that Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika were directed, as were “premature” reform initiatives in Eastern Europe, like the Prague Spring.<br />
<br />
These middle layers of society increasingly came to identify “democracy” with the market. The effect of the bureaucratic “reform from above” was to temporarily unite the “liberal” market-oriented sections of the bureaucracy with this middle class, as well as most former dissidents. Separated from the working class by a social gulf, and lacking any faith in a socialist perspective, the intelligentsia quickly grew impatient with the manifest failures of the reform process, and looked to a more “radical” settlement with the old regime, with the promise of salvation in the future market economy. Gorbachev’s determination to manage the reform process through the old party machine increasingly alienated those it had set out to attract.<br />
<br />
In contrast, the working class, although its numbers had grown enormously was atomised, cut off from revolutionary traditions and its own organisations for decades. Politically alienated, economically dissatisfied and industrially demotivated, it became increasingly impervious to exhortations and threats. “They pretended to pay us, and we pretend to work” was a well-known samizdat joke. Workers remained suspicious of the entire glasnost and perestroika project. Their consciousness did not rise above a trade union level, so that the miners, whose militant strikes shook the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1991, remained politically loyal at crucial turning points to the restorationist Yeltsin.<br />
<br />
The rural population, except in some non-Russian republics where it mobilised behind nationalists, scarcely played any significant role. Despite the appalling inefficiency of Soviet agriculture, Gorbachev’s frequent promises to make farmers the “real masters” of their own soil, had little appeal. The sheer scale of investment necessary to make individual farmers competitive on the world market was sufficient disincentive.<br />
<br />
These factors go a long way to explaining the form which the counterrevolution look in 1989-91 – why it took an urban petty-bourgeois-democratic form, and not the rural rebellion which many assumed it would in the 1920s. A number of threads of Trotsky’s analysis were nonetheless confirmed. The period of Gorbachev’s leadership did mark a series of “successive shifts downhill” in the direction of restoration; his warnings of the consequence of enterprises competing with each other, and of the destruction of the monopoly of foreign trade have been fully borne out; those who argue on the basis of institutional continuity would do well to ponder his remarks on the potential for large sections of the bureaucracy to go over to the counter-revolution; the industrial managers have indeed become a fertile breeding ground for future proprietors; the concentration of political power in the hands of the bureaucracy did prepare a succession of “cold strokes”; the mighty Soviet miners’ strikes of 1989 and 1991 did serve, in the absence of revolutionary leadership, to further undermine the old regime, which has given way to a regime of “capitalist – or rather state capitalist – chaos”; and finally, the national question did play a central role in the final debacle of the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
The long duration of Stalinist role did not tie the bureaucracies organically to the non-capitalist foundations of the workers’ states. They always remained parasitic castes within the workers’ states. This has now been confirmed by the central role played by Stalinists and ex-Stalinists in the restoration process.<br />
<br />
It is in this context that the dual role/function/nature which Trotsky ascribed to the bureaucracy has to be considered.[92] The foundation of this “duality” lay in the dual character of the workers’ state itself as a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” – while preparing the future society the state was obliged to follow bourgeois norms of distribution.<br />
<br />
The victory of a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy in an isolated and backward workers’ state greatly exacerbated this contradiction: “The function of Stalin ...has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie – but he cannot serve the bureaucracy without defending the social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalised property from imperialist attacks and from the too avaricious layers of the bureaucracy itself. However, he carries through his defence with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society.”[93]<br />
<br />
The two main Trotskyist traditions after 1953 both falsified this analysis. The International Secretariat/USFI tradition saw the “dual character” of Stalinism as a matter of subjective intention – good and bad, progressive and reactionary. The IC, following Joe Hansen, baldly declared Stalinism to be counter-revolutionary through and through – only to flop down on all fours in front of Tito, Mao and Ho Chi Minh.<br />
<br />
No less erroneous was the line of the Stalinophiles who saw the bureaucracy as intrinsically linked to the workers’ state in such a way that it would always be obliged to defend it. If there were any illusions in the correctness of this thesis before, they have been rudely brushed aside.<br />
Clinging to static – and thoroughly false – models of this duality, none of these schools was able to explain its erosion in the materialist terms foreseen by Trotsky: “...if the bureaucracy becomes ever more powerful, authoritative, privileged and conservative, this means that in the workers’ state the bourgeois tendencies grow at the expense of the socialist – in other words, that inner contradiction which to a certain degree is lodged in the workers’ state from the first day of its rise does not diminish, as the “norm” demands, but increases.”[94]<br />
<br />
The more the economies of the workers’ states headed into crisis, the less secure a source of privilege they became. Hence, the bureaucrats were less and less willing to defend this base, and began to look to opportunities to jump ship, to the point where this duality was almost entirely expunged.<br />
<br />
The dilemma facing a bureaucracy which had lost faith in its own system produced corresponding factions, each with their own social base. The “hardliners” feared that the bureaucracy would be swept away by restoration and clung, with increasing hopelessness, to the old apparatus. The Stalinist mainstream hoped to manage the transition at a pace which would enable large sections of the bureaucracy to find a niche in the new order. Its ideology became “market socialism”. The fast-track “radicals” saw the only salvation in crashing the command economy, and out of the resulting chaos, kick-starting capitalism. Nowhere – and for good reason – did a revolutionary or “Reiss” tendency emerge out of the bureaucracy.<br />
<br />
The crisis-ridden bureaucracies, which here and there were able to form alliances with former oppositionists, were able to begin the transformation of the workers’ states info capitalist states, without facing significant resistance on the part of workers.<br />
<br />
The collapse which began in Poland in the spring of 1989, and accelerated in the GDR, rapidly became an avalanche. In the course of that period there took place in each country events which in the consciousness of the masses came to symbolise the point of rupture with the political system of Stalinism. In Poland there were the first partially “free” elections in June 1989; in the GDR the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989; in Romania the fall of Ceaucescu on December 25, 1989; in the Soviet Union the collapse of the coup on August 21, 1991.<br />
<br />
In each of these turning points the restoration of capitalism was far from accomplished; indeed each of them contained the possibility for struggles to defend nationalised property to develop. But in the absence of revolutionary leadership each of these events paved the way for the creation of bourgeois states committed to building and protecting capitalism. To attempt to focus on some single economic measure in order to be able so as to establish exactly the date when the transition from a workers’ state to a bourgeois one took place is a pedantic academic exercise, divorced from the real settlement of accounts which took place on the plane of the class struggle.<br />
<br />
At the Conference for Security and Mutual Co-operation in Europe in 1990 all the ruling bureaucracies of Eastern Europe undertook to restore capitalism in their respective countries. From the point at which the leading elements of the Stalinist bureaucracies opted to restore capitalism, the workers’ states were paralysed as defenders of nationalised property relations. Without significant working class resistance, or any resistance worthy of the name from within the bureaucracies, the destruction and transformation of the state apparatuses governing the economic system began. In most cases, those old bureaucrats who were too closely identified with the old regime were soon swept aside by new bourgeois forces which are now carrying out the process of restoration.<br />
<br />
This unanimous policy on the part of the bureaucracies became possible not only because the working class in these countries lacked even an embryonic revolutionary leadership; its confidence in a collectivist solution to its problems (shown in Berlin, 1953, Poland and Hungary, 1956, Czechoslovakia, 1968, Poland, 1971, 1976 and 1980-1) had steadily ebbed.<br />
This in turn had material roots in the deep crisis gripping the “command economies”. The impasse of “already existing socialism” and the absence of an alternative programme for political revolution had revived “all the old crap”, in the form of bourgeois democratic, social democratic, “self-management”, nationalist and even fascist ideas. Walled off from acting as a class for itself, the working class has tended to respond to the effects, rather than the principle of capitalist restoration.<br />
<br />
Therefore, to argue, as many Trotskyists have, that “all that was missing was the subjective factor” in the Eastern European “revolutions” of 1989-90 is to miss the point completely. It is in fact a “subjective” interpretation of the “subjective factor”, divorced from the objective conditions upon which the consciousness of workers had developed.<br />
<br />
Revolutionary parties do not simply fall from the sky. They depend for success on a level of consciousness among the masses themselves. This is not to argue, of course, that it was a waste of time for revolutionaries to intervene in the collapse of Stalinism. What it does mean is that voluntarist notions of “revolutionary leadership” based on wildly inaccurate estimates of the situation will inevitably fail.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">7. Self-Determination, Secession and the National Question </span><br />
<br />
<br />
Before the August Coup – and even sometimes after it – Stalinophile groups (the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Spartacists and some other groups) considered the fight against national movements and secessionist tendencies to be identical with the defence of the workers’ state. The IBT in its statement of September 15, 1991, declared its solidarity with the Stalinist hardliners because they had “sent ‘black beret’ units to crack down on the pro-capitalist secessionist governments of the Baltic republics.” [95] For the IBT, therefore, the August coup was justified, because Gorbachev “refused to carry the Baltic intervention to its logical conclusion and depose the governments there. He once more began pushing marketization.”[96] The German section of the ICL trumpeted in January 1992: “Dissolution of the Soviet Union means disaster.”[97]<br />
<br />
The question which divided the bureaucracy most sharply on the eve of the coup was how to preserve the great power status of the Soviet Union and how to maintain the existence of large parts of the bureaucracy. This latter concern found its expression in the hardliners’ use of overt Great Russian chauvinism – which in turn strengthened the influence of reactionary nationalists in the non-Russian republics.<br />
<br />
The IBT recognised that the hardliners were “only too willing to stoop to Great Russian chauvinism and even anti-Semitism to protect their political monopoly.”[98] But this was not going to put them off, since the hardliners’ alleged defence of nationalised property stood higher than their chauvinism.<br />
<br />
But lending support to such chauvinism – even indirectly – meant not only dragging the name of Trotskyism through the dirt; objectively it assisted petty-bourgeois nationalism and accelerated the growth of anti-communism.<br />
<br />
Those who adapted to the pro-capitalist Great Russian elements of the Stalinist bureaucracy not only revised the Leninist-Trotskyist position on the national question in general; they also specifically revised the Bolshevik position on the fight of national self-determination within workers’ states, developed prior to the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Basing themselves on a false analysis of Stalinism, these capitulators toyed with any and every means to preserve the role of the bureaucracy: terrorism against the working class, Great Russian chauvinism towards minority nations and the militarisation of politics.<br />
<br />
It is well known that revolutionary Russia recognised the right of Finland and the Baltic republics to secede. In these cases self-determination meant, among other things, accepting the right to form a capitalist state. But the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky did not only accept this separation because it was forced upon them.<br />
<br />
Lenin fought successfully for the inclusion of the fight of self-determination in the programme of the Russian Communist Party: “On the national question, the policy of the proletariat, which has captured political power – unlike that of the bourgeois-democratic formal proclamation of equality of nations, which is impossible under imperialism – is persistently to bring about the real rapprochement and amalgamation of the workers and peasants of all nations in their revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. To achieve this object, the colonial and other nations which are oppressed, or whose fights are restricted, must be completely liberated and granted the fight to secede as a guarantee that the sentiment inherited from capitalism, the distrust of the working people of the various nations and the wrath which the workers of the oppressed nations feel towards the workers of the oppressor nations, will be fully dispelled and replaced by a conscious and voluntary alliance.”[99]<br />
<br />
It is true that the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky did not claim that the fight of national self-determination was absolute, and wrote on several occasions that it was subordinate to the necessities of the class struggle. Nonetheless, they understood that it had to be defended as a precondition for achieving the revolutionary unity of the proletariat.<br />
<br />
Bukharin and Preobrazhensky drafted the ABC of Communism as a basic textbook and popularisation of the post-revolutionary programme adopted by the Bolsheviks at the 8th congress, held in March, 1919, at the height of the civil war. In it, they explicitly recognised the fight of national minorities to secede from the Soviet state, even under a bourgeois leadership: “Finally, take the case of a nation with a bourgeois government which wishes to separate from a nation with a proletarian regime, and let us suppose that, in the nation which desires to separate, the majority of workers or a notable proportion of them are in favour of separation...Even in this case it would be better to allow the proletariat of the separating land to come to terms in its own way with its own bourgeoisie, for otherwise the latter would retain the power of saying: ‘It is not I who oppress you, but the people of such and such a country’.”[100]<br />
<br />
But whereas the revolutionary Soviet state, besieged on all sides at the height of the Civil War, was prepared to recognise this right, certain “Trotskyists” were prepared to volunteer their services as frontier guards for the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991. For sectarians such as the Spartacists and Voce Operaia, the example of Georgia, whose fights to self-determination were overridden by strategic considerations at the end of the civil war in 1921, served as a pretext to turn the exception into the historical rule.<br />
<br />
Trotsky justified the invasion of Georgia, arguing that the revolution faced a direct military threat. However, in his uncompleted biography of Stalin, Trotsky noted that: “In Georgia, premature sovietization strengthened the Mensheviks for a certain period and led to the broad mass insurrection in 1924, when, according to Stalin’s own admission, Georgia had to be “reploughed anew”.”[101]<br />
<br />
Today’s sectarians uphold a new programmatic norm: that the defence of a workers’ state always takes the priority over the fight of national self-determination. This position proceeds from the pessimistic assumption that the majority of the working class does not, and will not, defend the workers’ state, and that the action of the working class must be replaced by military means. Under Lenin and Trotsky, the revolutionary prestige of the Soviet state was such that the departure from the programmatic norm in Georgia could be justified.<br />
<br />
But under Stalinism, military action to stifle demands for independence could only serve to cement relations between the workers of oppressed nations and the petty-bourgeois and nationalist leaderships, thereby derailing the potential for political revolution. “Trotskyists” who advocated such a course of action were actively doing the restorationists’ business for them.<br />
<br />
Faced with mass support for independence, Trotskyists should have counterposed to the nationalist leaderships’ support for separate capitalist states, the slogan of independent Soviet republics, while defending the democratic right of oppressed nations and peoples to secede. Only with such a policy would it have been possible to take the wind out of the sails of the nationalists, and at the same time fight for the unity of workers of all nationalities in the struggle for political revolution. This was the course which Trotsky proposed with growing urgency in the late 1930s for the Ukraine against both fellow travellers of Stalinism and sectarians such as Oehler, when it became apparent, even from the fragmentary information he could obtain, that Stalinism had taken up Tsarism’s role as the jailer of a prisonhouse of nations.<br />
<br />
Indeed, he was in favour of extending this position to other non-Russian nations: “We are for the independence of Soviet Ukraine, and if the Byelo Russians themselves wish – of Soviet Byelo Russia.”[102]<br />
<br />
The crisis of post-war Trotskyism has produced two equally bankrupt revisions of this revolutionary heritage – one trend tailing the Stalinist bureaucracies, and the other adapting to the petty-bourgeois nationalists. To no small extent this assisted in obstructing the re-emergence of revolutionary parties in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. It is the task of revolutionaries today to reassert all that is best in the heritage of Marxism on the national question.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">8. The August Coup and the End of the Soviet Union </span><br />
<br />
<br />
The coup of August 19, 1991, was a decisive political test for all those describing themselves as Trotskyists.[103] The IBT believed that in Yanayev’s “Emergency Committee” it had discovered the Thermidorian wing of the bureaucracy, which would defend the workers’ state in its hour of need. The IBT rendered the coup plotters’ Great Russian chauvinism more profound: their conflict with some of the nationalist leaderships in the non-Russian republics the IBT saw as the showdown between the workers’ state and social counter-revolution. The IBT also believed (and this view was tacitly shared by many other groups) that a successful coup could have slowed down the speed of capitalist restoration. But it was the coup which provided the pretext for the Yeltsinite wing of the bureaucracy to accelerate the destruction of the Soviet Union and the process of capitalist restoration.<br />
<br />
In fact, the skeletal programme put forward by the coup-plotters was not significantly different to that of the other forces of capitalist restoration, and the position that only the Yeltsinite wing of the bureaucracy (as opposed to either Gorbachev or the coup-plotters) was the conscious instrument of the world bourgeoisie is unsustainable. From 1990 onwards, Gorbachev was aiming not just at market “reforms” but at capitalist restoration. The winter of 1990-91 saw Gorbachev pull back from fast-track restoration, and tack in the direction of the “conservatives”. This reflected an attempt to offset the narrowing “democratic” base of the regime. But the intractable problems of the economy forced him by the spring of 1991 back into the arms of the “radicals”.<br />
<br />
The pace of restoration, in any case, could not be determined by any of the decomposing wings of the bureaucracy, and depended on the degree to which foreign capital could be attracted and an indigenous capitalist class developed. In this sense, even Shatalin’s 500-day plan for privatising the economy, which Gorbachev abandoned in October 1990, could not have been decisive in the short term.<br />
<br />
The months leading up to the coup saw the imperialists’ patience wearing thin, as the economic and political situation within the Soviet Union steadily deteriorated. But in the eyes of most of the imperialists, Gorbachev remained a more serious and reliable ally than the erratic and unreliable Yeltsin. Shortly before the coup Yeltsin was received in a very reserved way by the European parliament. Gorbachev, in contrast, was warmly received after the G7 summit in July, 1991 by British Prime Minister Major. In the course of their discussions, Major referred to Yeltsin disparagingly as a “populist”.[104]<br />
<br />
Gorbachev’s biggest problem was that this political sympathy did not extend to hard cash. He was sent away from the G7 summit empty handed, and there were even sympathetic reports in the Western press about a possible “Chilean solution” to carry out capitalist restoration.<br />
<br />
Although the pace of capitalist restoration was one element in the split in the bureaucracy, it was certainly not the decisive one. The immediate motivation for Yanayev and his supporters was Gorbachev’s Union Treaty, which they saw as a betrayal of the Soviet Union’s “great power” status.<br />
<br />
What is more, the restorationist goal was never in dispute. In their declaration to the United Nations and to the world’s governments on August 19, 1991, the coup-plotters stated that the emergency measures taken “will in no way...lead to the abandonment of the course of fundamental reforms in all areas of life of state and society.”[105] Underlining their preparedness to continue Gorbachev’s pro-market “reforms”, they promised: “Favourable conditions shall be created for increasing the real contribution made by all types of entrepreneurial activity”.[106]<br />
<br />
The response of the most important imperialist politicians to the coup was to announce their readiness to continue co-operation with the new leadership of the Soviet Union. Some bourgeois commentators saw it as a chance to slow down the course of restoration and avoid provoking major class struggles.<br />
<br />
These considerations did not prevent both the Spartacists and Franco Grisolia of the Faction for a Trotskyist International (now part of the International Trotskyist Opposition in the USFI) from declaring Yeltsin to have been the main enemy during the August events, or from speculating about a possible alliance with the coup plotters, whom they reproached for their lack of professionalism in the business of carrying out putsches (the Spartacists) or for their lack of proletarian support (Grisolia).<br />
<br />
Both claimed to base themselves upon Trotsky’s hypothesis of a “united front” with the Thermidorian wing of the bureaucracy against capitalist counter-revolution in the Transitional Programme of 1938. Trotsky believed that such a bloc was only possible under the most extreme and exceptional circumstances. (Significantly he uses the term united front in inverted commas in the Transitional Programme.) The Spartacists and the IBT turned this unlikely possibility into the strategic axis of their policy – outside of time and space, and independent of concrete analysis.<br />
<br />
In fact these capitulators to Stalinism and to Great Russian chauvinism (both of them restorationist tendencies incidentally!) were unable to show that even a minority Stalinist current existed within the bureaucracy genuinely committed to the defence of the workers’ state against capitalist counter-revolution, still less a revolutionary one. Idle speculation about whether it would have been permissible to support the coup-plotters if they had had more proletarian support or a better programme simply misses the point.<br />
<br />
The failure to seriously analyse the socio-economic course of the various wings of the bureaucracy, was compounded by an equal failure to examine which relationship of forces offered the best possibilities for the working class to organise, to gain confidence in its own strength and to develop its class consciousness.<br />
<br />
The idea that working class political independence could be bartered for the “right” to passively support a military coup was totally alien to Trotsky’s thinking. The programme of political revolution rested on the premise that the working class could only defend the workers’ state with its own, proletarian, methods. Its interests lay solely in defending its gains, which were linked to the existence of the workers’ state, rather than defending the bureaucratic apparatus which sat on top of it.<br />
<br />
Confronted by the coup – the collapse of which only became apparent after three days – revolutionaries had to propose a course of action which would enable the working class to develop from an atomised and disoriented mass into a class for itself, gaining self-confidence and class consciousness, and understanding the tasks it faced. There could not have been any “purely economic” defence of workers’ interests without also defending the democratic rights – the right to strike, to organise, to hold meetings, to build political parties etc – which had been won.<br />
<br />
The attitude of the coup-plotters towards the working class was clear. The Emergency Committee’s Resolution No. 1 stated: “The activities of political parties, social organisations and mass movements hampering a normalisation of the situation shall be halted...The Procurator’s Office, the Interior Ministry, the KGB and the Ministry of Defence of the USSR shall organise effective interaction between the law-enforcing agencies and Armed Forces...The holding of meetings, street manifestations, demonstrations, and also strikes shall be prohibited. When necessary, a curfew, patrolling of the territory and inspections shall be introduced, and measures taken to strengthen the border and customs regimes…A resolute end shall be put to...disobedience towards officials engaged in ensuring compliance with the regime of the state of emergency.”[107]<br />
<br />
This clearly shows that the pseudo-Trotskyist strategists of “alliances with the Thermidorian wing of the bureaucracy” had overlooked one “small matter”: that every attempt to mobilise the working class independently in defence of its own class interests would immediately have brought it into direct conflict with its “allies”, the putschists. In other words, this “united front” could only operate if the working class stayed at home! Faced with the stark choice of resistance or political capitulation to the coup, they chose the latter, using the argument that Yeltsin – at this moment – was the “main enemy”.<br />
<br />
The fact that any independent working class action would have inevitably led to a sharp confrontation with the putschists did not however mean that revolutionaries should have given political support to Yeltsin. Nevertheless – as at August 19, 1991 – the most important task was to defend the democratic rights of the working class and the minority nations against the immediate threat of the coup, by mobilising for a general strike, and, if conditions had ripened, by organising an armed uprising. Yeltsin had not ceased to be an enemy, but in this situation he had to be fought with different methods from those which were necessary against the putschists.<br />
<br />
Without proposing a united front to Yeltsin, (as Workers Power/LRCI did), common action with Yeltsin’s supporters in the trade unions would have been unavoidable and necessary in the context of a general strike or a generalised armed confrontation. This would have enabled revolutionaries to have criticised Yeltsin and his supporters for failing to take decisive measures against the putschists, and instead of energetically mobilising workers, pinning their hopes on sections of the Stalinist apparatus. The success of such a policy presupposed a willingness to fight in a military bloc alongside Yeltsin and his supporters. Similar tactics were applicable towards the nationalists in the non-Russian republics, most of whom sat out the coup in cowardly neutrality.<br />
<br />
Most of those who speculated on the possibility of an alliance with the Thermidorian wing of the bureaucracy (FTI, ICL, Liaison Committee of Communists) came down in favour of the apparently “revolutionary” line of taking no side in the conflict, and mobilising the working class independently. But such a position was entirely abstract. In so far as the working class mobilised, it took action against the coup. Had Yeltsin’s call for a general strike taken hold, then it would have been farcical to attempt to call another general strike alongside the one already in progress. It would, on the contrary, have been obligatory to agitate among workers taking action, warning of the danger represented by Yeltsin, and counterposing a transitional programme to defend workers’ rights to the programme of the “democratic” restorationists.<br />
<br />
Within three days, however, the situation had changed completely. Yeltsin exploited the situation, in the face of a pantomime coup and widespread working class apathy, to drive forward the development towards capitalist restoration. The basis for a tactical bloc with the Yeltsinites (similar to that of the Bolsheviks with Kerensky during the Kornilov coup) no longer existed. But the fact that Yeltsin was now the main enemy did not give any retrospective justification either to the policy of the putschists, or to the policy of “critical support” for the coup.<br />
<br />
Neither the coup plotters nor any other significant current within the bureaucracy put forward a serious programme for the defence of the workers’ state. But the coup plotters also lacked a viable programme for capitalist restoration. Once this became clear, it had the effect of rallying the fragmenting apparatus around Yeltsin, which in turn meant that he could avoid mobilising workers against the coup. Had he been forced to do so, it would in all likelihood have radicalised the masses, in spite of Yeltsin’s intentions, and potentially have endangered the restorationist course.<br />
<br />
The aftermath of August Coup demonstrated that an overwhelming proportion of the Stalinist bureaucracy supported capitalist restoration in one form or another. Instead of slowing down the pace of restoration, the coup had the opposite result. Yeltsin was now able to purge those elements of the bureaucracy which had hesitated over the restorationist course. The banning of the CPSU – the political headquarters of the bureaucracy – symbolised the collapse, not only of the old regime, but of the workers’ state. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 merely underlined the victory of the counter-revolution.<br />
<br />
On more than one occasion Trotsky compared the degenerated workers’ state to a trade union with a reactionary bureaucracy which had conquered power.[108] However, he also spelt out the limitations of the analogy: “Should these gentlemen [the bureaucracy] in addition defend the income of the bourgeoisie from attacks on the part of workers; should they conduct a struggle against strikes, against the raising of wages, against help to the unemployed; then we would have an organisation of scabs, and not a trade union.”[109] Who today can seriously doubt that the Yeltsin government is “an organisation of scabs” which, in alliance with imperialism, has broken the back of the workers’ state?<br />
<br />
Reality finds it hardest to penetrate the skulls of doctrinaires and sectarians. Stalinophiles like the Spartacists, who had expected that the bureaucracy would, even to a limited extent, resist restoration, were thrown into confusion by Yeltsin’s counter-coup, For more than a year, the ICL clung to the definition of the (ex-) Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state.<br />
<br />
The Spartakist Arbeiterpartei (German section of the ICL) foolishly wrote in January 1992: “In reality the dismembering of the USSR did not leave an accomplished capitalist counter-revolution, but a gigantic mess, since what we are confronted with in the dissolution of the Soviet Union today, is a number of governments, which are counter-revolutionary through and through and which have the intention of smashing the degenerated Soviet workers’ state”.[110]<br />
<br />
In the same issue of its journal it cited approvingly an article from Workers Vanguard[111], which referred to Yeltsin merely as the “would-be grave-digger” of the USSR, and this insight was topped off with a quote from the Financial Times: “The news of the death of the Soviet Union seems to have been a little bit overhasty.”[112] The big hope of the Spartacists followed: “In the whole country there is talk of a new coup d’état – this time it is said, that the military will play an important role – and/or a people’s uprising, triggered off by the economic disaster and the growing hunger.”[113] The order of priorities given to these hopes was hardly surprising!<br />
<br />
In November 1992, the ICL abruptly changed its position, arguing – in terms that which were methodologically very vague – that the failure of workers to resist counter-revolution was central to the redesignation of the state as bourgeois.[114]<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">9. The Crisis of Restoration </span><br />
<br />
<br />
Those who consider that workers’ states still exist in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union in fact press reality into abstract and pre-determined schema, based upon secondary criteria given in some Marxist classics – criteria which moreover have been proven wrong by history. This only gets them deeper into theoretical quagmire. They talk about workers’ states even though for nearly four years Russia and the CIS have been led by pro-capitalist governments actively driving forward capitalist restoration. If this theory were correct, its proponents would have to concede that it is possible for counter-revolutionaries to take possession of a workers’ state and make it serve counter-revolutionary purposes – without fundamentally changing its social character!<br />
<br />
Not all the currents of the “Trotskyist movement” which deny that bourgeois states have been restored are waiting for a classical civil war to unfold. But in common with the doctrinaires, they emphasise the undoubted problems facing the development of capitalism. In particular they refer to the difficulties facing privatisation because of the lack of foreign investment; the weakness of domestic capital formation; the painful and difficult transformation of nationalised property into capital; the creation of a corrupt bourgeoisie, drawn from the former nomenklatura and from criminal and comprador elements; the problem of integration into the world market while attempting to preserve the cores of the existing national economies. Such conditions have inevitably led to enormous instability – the sharpening of the class struggle; the development of xenophobic and fascist movements and repressive regimes; sudden turns in the political situation, including civil wars.<br />
<br />
But these factors, real as they are, do not demonstrate the continued existence of workers’ states; they are the birth pangs of a weak capitalism, operating in a far from “normal” fashion. The central theoretical error at work is the failure to distinguish between the state and the socio-economic system, and to grasp the essential differences between bourgeois and workers’ states.<br />
<br />
In any case, distinctions need to be made between the conditions in different countries. Empirical evidence suggests that the restoration process is proceeding with widely varying results. The more economically advanced countries of Eastern Europe -the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and the Baltic states – having suffered acute crisis between 1989 and 1992 have begun to recover. With productivity at 40 percent but wages at only one eighth of German rates, they have begun to attract inward capitalist investment, and may gain associate status with the EU. For the states laying further to the east Bulgaria, Romania and especially the ex-Soviet Union – the situation is altogether bleaker, with no end in sight to the crisis.<br />
<br />
The turning point in the wake of the abortive coup therefore by no means signified that restoration had been accomplished from an economic standpoint. To break up the degenerated workers’ state is one thing. Building a thriving capitalism in its place is another. Even though after 1991 it was clear to everyone that the old Soviet Union could not be resurrected, Yeltsin has encountered similar intractable problems to Gorbachev. Presidential decrees are only implemented hesitantly and partially. The restoration of capitalism without prior capital accumulation or extensive foreign investment cannot be realised overnight and its successful outcome is far from assured.<br />
<br />
The immediate effects of Yeltsin’s counter-coup were political rather than economic. They imprinted themselves upon the consciousness of the masses, and served to further weaken the small number of Stalinists who attempted to resist.<br />
<br />
The main tasks facing the restorationists in country after country, which are at various stages of completion, can be broadly summarised as follows:<br />
<br />
i. the building of a functioning capitalist state<br />
ii. a purge of the old state apparatus from top to bottom<br />
iii. the dissolution of the machinery of central planning<br />
iv. the abolition of restrictions on commerce and capital transactions, and the development of a capitalist banking system<br />
v. the withdrawal of the state from the economy, transforming nationalised property and the work-force into capital<br />
vi. the establishment of a new tax and fiscal administration.<br />
<br />
The tasks relating to the state and the economy are inter-related, but not identical. The transition from the workers’ state to capitalism is marked by a period of “state capitalism” – mirroring the opposite development in Eastern Europe in the 1940s. Far from representing a continuation of “planned economy”, it is the only viable means of preparing large parts of the economy for privatisation. A central component of this strategy is the conversion of money into capital. The exposure of currencies to international comparison, and the freeing” of prices via “big bangs” restore money as a real (i.e. capitalist) measure of value, and facilitate capital formation through the pauperisation of the masses, on the one hand, and the creation of commodity production for profit on the other. This process is the consequence, rather than the cause, of the creation of bourgeois states.<br />
<br />
The primitive accumulation of capital relies to a considerable extent upon comprador and directly criminal methods together with the exploitation of the old Stalinist apparatus of political and economic management. The development of the new bourgeoisie is therefore characterised by corruption and the pillage of state property “by any means necessary”. But while such methods are necessary in the creation of a capitalist class, they simultaneously obstruct the “normal” functioning of a bourgeois state, which is obliged to create a stable legal framework for capitalist activities.<br />
<br />
In its birth pangs, therefore, the new bourgeois state lacks even the legitimacy of modern imperialist states, which are obliged to appear “impartial” in their dealings with capitalist citizens. It cannot meet the needs of a developed capitalism. But neither capitalist nor bourgeois state apparatuses have to be “ideal” or “ready” in order to be pressed into service. We have already pointed to the fact that capitalism can coexist for a period with other forms of production inherited from the past.<br />
<br />
In transitional periods it is the character and the real policy of the leadership of a state which is decisive in determining its class character. Only guided with this criterion can we give clear answers to the problems posed, in conformity with the rhythm of history.<br />
<br />
The class struggle never entirely disappeared in the degenerated and deformed workers’ states; nor has it in the restored bourgeois states, even if it takes new forms. A period of prolonged political instability is inevitable, in which rival groupings of aspiring capitalists will struggle to win control over the levers of political power. New relations are being established between the classes and the state, and between the different strata of classes. These constant changes in class relations and state institutions do not contradict our characterisation of these states as bourgeois. Rather, their weak character means that this instability is likely to continue so long as authoritative political parties and other means of regulating relations between the new bourgeoisie and the state institutions do not exist.<br />
<br />
Developments since 1991 confirm that the bloc which supported Yeltsin at the time of the coup was far from stable. Conflicts have repeatedly arisen, which reflect the relationship of different sections of the bureaucracy to the restoration process. Some favour protection from the world market on the basis of extensive nationalisation as a means to create a strong Russian bourgeoisie, while others are prepared to accept a capitalist economy dominated by imperialism. Both currents supported, or at least tolerated, Yeltsin for a period and were represented in both the “conservative” parliament and Yeltsin’s government. In the provinces the restorationists were able to base themselves on the regional apparatuses, free from direct political control from the centre.<br />
<br />
Yeltsin’s showdown with the Russian parliament in October 1993 did not solve the conflicts which had arisen.[115] Although he won militarily, it was clear that Yeltsin’s hold over the apparatus and the army was shaky. And although his second “counter coup” strengthened his hand, his allies among the more energetic “modernisers” had lost much of their popular support by the time of the elections in December 1993. In the pre-election period a wave of strikes took place.<br />
<br />
The Yeltsinite electoral bloc, despite the massive financial support it received from the new Russian banks, was wiped out in the provinces and polled less than 20 per cent. Even if these results signalled a defeat for those restorationists most closely identified with international finance capital, they should not be mistaken for a defeat for capitalist restoration as such. The banks had also invested heavily in the campaign of the maverick Russian nationalist Zhirinovsky as a means of derailing popular discontent. Until the elections, Zhirinovsky had pursued a moderate line towards Yeltsin, and had supported him on the constitution. Yeltsin had responded by allowing Zhirinovsky a monopoly of nationalist representation in the elections. Zhirinovsky’s success, together with the results achieved by the opposition obliged Yeltsin to adopt a course which paid more attention to the new “national” capitalists and Great Russian demagogues.<br />
<br />
This marks a qualitative departure from former times. In a bourgeois state, political changes do not eliminate the social role played by capitalists and their representatives – hence the need for the new state to attempt to accommodate and balance between competing factions. In contrast, the old Stalinist cliques lost their material privileges and social role when they were purged from the nomenklatura.<br />
<br />
Yeltsin and his successors will not be able to establish a stable framework for capitalist development so long as the fundamental conflicts within the restoration process remain unresolved. At present the working class is disoriented and without any significant revolutionary leadership. But if workers reoriented themselves towards defending their class interests, the restorationists would in all likelihood attempt to close ranks behind a military dictatorship, or even fascism. Yeltsin’s efforts to impose strong presidential rule are only a weak anticipation of this possibility.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">10. Towards a Programme of Action </span><br />
<br />
<br />
The central task of Trotskyists is to assist the working class in all the territories of the ex-Soviet Union to build revolutionary parties – sections of a rebuilt Fourth International. Such parties will have to orient to every struggle of workers and other oppressed sections of society against the effects of capitalist restoration. In the scope of this document it is only possible to sketch the main lines of a programme of action.<br />
<br />
Such a programme of action must begin with the defence of the democratic rights of the working class and the oppressed.<br />
<br />
For a constituent assembly! In this period where real soviets are not on the immediate agenda and revolutionaries can only propagandise for such workers’ councils, it is necessary to mobilise the multinational working class in the cities and in the kolkhozes against Yeltsin’s Duma.<br />
<br />
The main axis of the programme must be the struggle to defend the living standards of workers, the young and pensioners.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">For a sliding scale of wages and pensions! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Defend nationalised property and social services! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Stop all lay-offs! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Stop privatisation and corruption! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Expropriate the new rich, the new banks and the criminal gangs! </span><br />
<br />
The ex-Stalinist bureaucrats and the new bourgeoisie can be stopped through the fight for workers’ control of factories and kolkhozes and for a new economic plan drawn up democratically by producers and consumers.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Worker’s’ committees to make their own inventory of state and collectivised property to prevent its pillage by the restorationists! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> For a worker’s plan for economic reconstruction – No to the World Bank, the IMF and their Russian agents! </span><br />
<br />
To carry out this struggle, workers must organise themselves both politically and economically, independent of the restorationists and the national chauvinists. Trotskyists must participate in both the trade unions and any mass workers’ party presenting their programme in democratic competition with other tendencies to convince activists of the need for revolutionary leadership.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">For a class struggle policy and workers’ democracy in the trade unions! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> For a worker’s party based on the trade unions! </span><br />
<br />
In every important struggle, workers will be confronted by fascist thugs and other reactionaries, as well the police and the army. A workers’ party must defend all workers’ organisations and the right to strike, as well as defending the democratic rights of rank and file soldiers.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Build defence groups towards the creation of a workers’ militia! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Organise soldiers’ committees! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><br />
Equal rights for women! Working class women must be free to participate fully in the workforce and in the political and social revolution. Such fights must include:<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Equal pay for equal work! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Free 24-hour childcare centres! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Free contraception and free abortion on demand! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Free quality socialised dining rooms in the factories and neighbourhoods and free laundries! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Equal rights for gays and lesbians! </span><br />
<br />
Workers will only successfully defend their rights if they create the maximum unity. Trotskyists will fight for a united front of all organisations which base themselves upon the urban and rural working class. While they advocate a united multinational struggle against social and political reaction, they will defend the right of all oppressed nationalities to self-determination, up to and including secession. Trotskyists will oppose every manifestation of racism and chauvinism, especially the Great Russian variety.<br />
<br />
A fighting united front of the working class poses the building of factory committees and genuine soviets throughout the ex-Soviet Union. In the course of their struggle against the bureaucrats turned restorationists, workers may well throw up different organisational forms to these tried and tested ones. But for them to be successful the goal must remain workers’ governments which base themselves upon the mass organisations of the working class and the principles of workers’ democracy. In such governments there will be no place for those who seek to bring back Stalinism.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Long live internationalism! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Rebuild the Fourth International! </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">April 1995</span><br />
<br />
<br />
________________________________________<br />
[1] Samizdat, p.207<br />
[2] Samizdat, p.207<br />
[3] See L. Trotsky, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’ in: Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35), Pathfinder, 1971, pp. 166-184, and R. V. Daniels: The Conscience of the Revolution, Simon and Schuster, 1969<br />
[4] Samizdat, p.207<br />
[5] M. Dewar, The Quiet Revolutionary, Bookmarks, 1989, p.16<br />
[6] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), pp.34-44<br />
[7] G. Breitman (ed), The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party, Monad, 1982, pp.141-5; L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), pp.60-71<br />
[8] See L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, New Park, 1975, and J.P. Cannon, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, Pathfinder, 1972.<br />
[9] B. Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World, Tavistock, 1985<br />
[10] J. Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, Penguin, 1962<br />
[11] T. Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, Pluto, 1974<br />
[12] M. Djilas, The New Class, Unwin, 1966<br />
[13] Socialist Action (US), World Political Resolution submitted to the USFI 14th World Congress, August 1994<br />
[14] Class Struggle, No. 51, December 1992<br />
[15] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), Pathfinder, 1972, p.104<br />
[16] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), p.65, p.61<br />
[17] W. l. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, Moscow, 1965, p.335<br />
[18] CWG/LTT Fusion Declaration, Workers News, No. 44, Mar-Apr 1993<br />
[19] T. Grant, The Unbroken Thread, Fortress, 1989, pp.342-70<br />
[20] K. Harvey, ‘Poland’s Transition to Capitalism’, Permanent Revolution 9,<br />
Summer/Autumn 1991<br />
[21] Workers Power/lrish Workers Group, The Degenerated Revolution: The Origins and Nature of the Stalinist States, WP/lWG, 1982, p.53<br />
[22] Ibid., p.59<br />
[23] Ibid., p.72<br />
[24] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, cited in A. Richardson (ed), In Defence of the Russian Revolution: A Selection of Bolshevik Writings 1917-1923, Porcupine, 1995, viii<br />
[25] Trotskyist International, No. 11, May-Aug, 1993, p.45<br />
[26] The Degenerated Revolution, p.97<br />
[27] Permanent Revolution No. 9<br />
[28] The Degenerated Revolution, p.46<br />
[29] Trotskyist International, No. 11, p.47<br />
[30] Trotskyist International, No. 16, Jan-Apr 1995, p.24<br />
[31] Trotskyist International, No. 11, p.45<br />
[32] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35), p.182<br />
[33] Documents of the Vern-Ryan Tendency, Communard Publishers, n.d., p.33<br />
[34] Ibid., p3<br />
[35] Much of the empirical information, although not the argument, of the following paragraphs is drawn from T. Wohlforth and A. Westoby, “Communists’ Against Revolution”, Folrose, 1978; C. Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-48, Bookmarks, 1988 and A. Westoby, Communism Since World War II, Harvester, 1981<br />
<br />
[36] F. Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, Peregrine, 1975, p.464<br />
[37] See J. Bloomfield, Passive Revolution: Politics and the Czechoslovak Working Class 1945-48, Allison and Busby, 1979<br />
[38] K. Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 22, Moscow, 1986, p.328<br />
[39] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), p.103<br />
[40] A. Richardson, Introduction to In Defence of the Russian Revolution, vii-ix<br />
[41] In Wohlforth and Westoby, ‘Communists’ Against Revolution<br />
[42] Ibid., pp.87-8<br />
[43] Communism Since World War II, p.387<br />
[44] I. Deutscher, Russia, China and the West 1953-1966, Penguin, 1970, p.47. For a detailed account of twists and turns of Soviet policy on Germany see D. Dallin, Soviet Foreign Policy After Stalin, Lippincott, 1961<br />
[45] Russia, China and the West, p.48<br />
[46] L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p.22<br />
[47] Ibid., p.23<br />
[48] Ibid., p.36.<br />
[49] Ibid., p.113<br />
[50] Ibid., p.34<br />
[51] D. North, The Heritage We Defend, Labor Publications, 1988, p.145<br />
[52] P. Frank: The Fourth International, Ink Links, 1979, pp.72-3<br />
[53] S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, War and the International, Socialist Platform, 1986, p.217<br />
[54] E. Germain, ‘The Soviet Union after the War’, SWP International Information Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 2, September, 1946<br />
[55] Quoted in S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, The War and the International, p.217<br />
[56] Ibid., p.217<br />
[57] See B. Pitt, ‘The Fourth International and Yugoslavia (1948-50)’, Workers News supplement, July 1991<br />
[58] Ibid<br />
[59] Class, Party, and State and the Eastern European Revolution, SWP Education for Socialists, 1969, p.13<br />
[60] Ibid., p.11<br />
[61] Ibid., p.14<br />
[62] Ibid., p.19<br />
[63] Quote in D. North, The Heritage We Defend, pp.162-3<br />
[64] Quoted in ibid., p.175<br />
[65] Class, Party, and State and the Eastern European Revolution, p.22<br />
[66] M. Pablo, ‘Yugoslavia and the rest of the Buffer Zone’, SWP International Information Bulletin, May 1950<br />
[67] Class, Party, and Stare and the Eastern European Revolution, p.40<br />
[68] Ibid., p.41-2<br />
[69] Pablo considered that the transition from capitalism to socialism might span “an entire historic period”, occupied by a “whole gamut of transitional regimes” which would suffer from some degree of “deformation”. This unremarkable prognosis, not greatly dissimilar from Lenin’s conception of the transition period, became transformed by those who formed the International Committee, into the legend of “centuries of deformed workers’ states”.<br />
[70] D. North, The Heritage We Defend, p.181<br />
[71] Pierre Frank’s report to the congress, Class, Party, and Stare and the Eastern European Revolution, p.50<br />
<br />
[72] L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, New Park, 1982, p.255<br />
[73] See W. I. Lenin and L. Trotsky, Lenin s Fight Against Stalinism, Pathfinder, 1975, and M. Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Pluto, 1975<br />
[74] L. Trotsky, ‘Socialism and the Market’, Workers News No. 31, May 1991<br />
[75] Ibid<br />
[76] L. Trotsky, Towards Socialism or Capitalism?, New Park, 1976<br />
[77] The Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927), New Park, 1973<br />
[78] L.Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-27), Pathfinder, 1980, pp.258-64<br />
[79] Ibid., pp. 260-1<br />
[80] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), p.117<br />
[81] L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp.250-53<br />
[82] Ibid., p.253<br />
[83] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935-36), Pathfinder, 1977, p.63<br />
[84] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), p.63<br />
[85] Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, pp.19-20<br />
[86] For an autobiographical account of life under the occupation see A. Kuznetsov, Babi Yar, Penguin, 1982<br />
[87] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35), p.170<br />
[88] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), p.35<br />
[89] Although at what cost is debatable. The short term benefit to the balance of payments must be offset against the negative effects of diverting huge resources away from other branches of the economy<br />
[90] The dissident Andrei Amalrik perceptively noted in 1969: ‘The so-called “economic reform”, of which I have already spoken, is in essence a half-measure and is in practice being sabotaged by the party machine, because if such a reform were carried to its logical end, it would threaten the power of the machine.’ A. Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, Penguin, 1980, p.34.)<br />
[91] See D. Singer, The Road to Gdansk, Monthly Review, 1982, chap. 3<br />
[92] On this point, see D. Bruce, ‘Trotsky and the Materialist Analysis of Stalinism. A Reply to Cliff Slaughter.’, WRP internal document, and A. Richardson, Introduction to In Defence of the Russian Revolution<br />
[93] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), p.65<br />
[94] Ibid., p.67<br />
[95] 1917, No. 11,Third Quarter, 1992<br />
[96] Ibid.<br />
[97] Spartakist, No. 92, January 1992<br />
[98] 1917, op cit.<br />
<br />
[99] W. I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 29, Moscow, 1965, p.127<br />
[100] N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, Penguin, 1970, p.248<br />
[101] L. Trotsky, Stalin, Vol. 2, Panther, 1969, p.47<br />
[102] L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p. 24<br />
[103] For an analysis of the tactical issues, and the positions of various Trotskyist currents, see M. Sullivan, ‘The August Coup Revisited’, Workers News No. 46, August 1993<br />
[104] Guardian, June 21, 1993<br />
[105] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 20, 1991<br />
[106] Putsch -The Diary, p.19<br />
[107] Putsch -The Diary, p.19<br />
<br />
[108] L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p.31, p.36; Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), p.64-5<br />
[109] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), p.65<br />
[110] Spartakist, January 1992<br />
[111] Workers Vanguard, December 27,1991<br />
[112] Financial Times, December 1, 1991<br />
[113] Spartakist, January 1992<br />
[114] How the Soviet Workers State was Strangled, Spartacist pamphlet, 1991<br />
<br />
[115] How the Soviet Workers State was Strangled, Spartacist pamphlet, 1991Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1144809314719790492006-04-11T19:29:00.000-07:002006-04-11T19:35:15.070-07:00The Development of Capitalism in NZ - Part 4<span style="font-size:130%;">4.0 THE ANALYSIS OF CRISIS AND THE N.Z. SOCIAL FORMATION.<br /></span><br /><br />Our previous analysis has stressed two basic points of relevance to an analysis of crisis. First, is the need to consider the N.Z. formation as an articulation of various sub-modes under a dominant mode of product­ion. Second, is that the operation of its economic base may best be thought of as complicated system of interlocking circuits operating to reproduce capital in its various forms. Crisis may be defined as a period of dislocation, or discrete reversal in the speed and pattern of the circulation of capital throughout this base. Since the various moments of the circuit are moments at which capital, in some form, is active, ­e.g. industrial capital at time of advance, productive capital during the process of production, bank and merchant capital at time of sale etc. ­then no one moment or particular fraction or social class represented by that moment, has a fortune fundamentally different from any other. All are affected by the dislocation of the flow of exchange value through the various interlocked circuits. Less profit in one area leads to less in another and hence to cumulative processes of contraction, or expans­ion, as conditioned by various structural and other phenomena involved. These may be, for example, the time periods of production, the nature of operation of monetary institutions, the patterns of income distrib­ution and so on.<br /><br />Since a crisis ultimately affects all moments of the circuit, prod­uction, circulation, distribution, reinvestment, it is unreasonable to classify crises as uniquely crises of overproduction, or of foreign exchange or whatever. Categorising along these lines reflects an attempt to identify the apparent source or most obvious manifestation of the dislocation which has lead to the crisis. For instance, a crisis of over­production as evidenced by unsold stocks of commodity capital has its immediate source in inadequate demand for these commodities which in turn implies a disruption in the flow of purchasing power to those doing the demanding. But, the actual cause of the disruption is not explained. Many crises in New Zealand are, in these terms, crises of production; i.e. they dislocate the production process initially - ­labour disputes for instance - and thereafter affect distribution and exchange. But these crises are of a relatively superficial nature. They don't greatly affect the reproduction process and can be dealt with out­side the production process itself.<br /><br />At some stage however (the mid 1970's) there occurred a "structural crisis of reproduction" reflected in a discrete fall in the rate of profit in a significant number of the main branches of production. The decline in the rate of profit reflects the inadequacy of available meas­ures to counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. A structural crisis of reproduction therefore brings on the need of the ruling class to review the structure of the total social capital and to adopt a range of specific measures for regenerating the accumulation process. It involves, in principle via the mediation of the state at all levels and instances, alteration of the pattern of accumulation, liquidation of inefficient businesses and reorientation in directions that will restore and surpass previous levels of profitability. The crisis acts to "purge" the impurities as it were, and thereby to ensure that expanded reproduction and circulation will be renewed. Such is the nature of the crisis now affecting world capitalism and New Zealand in particular.<br /><br />The main features of the current crisis are by now very familiar –slow growth in production, heavy unemployment, low rates of profit, high indebtedness of many manufacturing businesses, declining real wages etc. At the base of this crisis is the inadequacy of the mass of surplus­-value being produced to satisfy the demands for consumption, accumulation and other reproductive functions placed upon it. The role of the crisis is to effect a redistribution of the surplus value away from areas of lesser efficiency, out of the hard won gains of working class struggles, and out of generally unproductive hands, into areas of higher accumulat­ion potential. The methods used require an attack by the ruling class and the state at the economic, political and ideological instances, in order to bring about the required restructuring. The general direction of the desired restructuring is that of manufacturing production for export, assisted by a widened range of specific state subsidies and tax concessions. Incomes and income taxes have been shifted in favour of the higher income groups and the managerial fraction in particular (see 3.6), with only minor' concessions' allowed for lower wage earners, domestic workers, welfare beneficiaries etc.<br /><br />Given the generalisation of monetary circulation throughout the entire economic base, the impact of the crisis cannot be escaped by any class or class fraction as part of the dominant CMP or any of the sub-­modes with whicl1 it articulates. Rather, the impact is passed through the various circuits to the weakest points, at which 'moments' the impact is offloaded. These points are those at which the sub-modes articulate with the dominant mode and show up as increased exploitation of weaker classes. On this basis the PFM, domestic labour, youth, racial minorities etc. are the groups to bear the major impact of the crisis, a conclusion that can be easily verified by empirical investigation e.g. on properly defined PFM terms of trade , relative wage of Maori labour, whatever.<br /><br />In order to legitimate its economic restructuring policies, the state engages in an ideological and political offensive. On the one hand it must gather support for its policies by appealing to an overriding patriotic sentiment and present the restructuring as in the' national interest'. At the same time as exhorting all New Zealanders to 'pull together' (<em>Task Force Report</em>) the ideological apparatus of the state operates to divide the basis of solidarity within the working-class by setting striker against non-striker, skilled against unskilled, white against non-white, married against unmarried and so on. Any attempt to 'rock the boat' or 'stir' is immediately interpreted as greedy, short-­sighted, communist-inspired etc., and against the nation's' interests'. The bourgeois notion of harmony only resides, in the mind, at the level of joint participation ("working together") in the nation's development, at which level conflict dematerialises.<br /><br />It should be emphasised however, that each 'solution' to a crisis of reproduction in the' national interest', while it may restore the rate of profit for a time, can only do so by accelerating the matur­ation of the CMP and the pre-conditions for socialist revolution (Marx, <em>German Ideology</em> ,54). That is, the basic contradiction between the forces of production and capitalist social relations becomes condensed in a more acute form on a higher plane. The forces of production are concentrated in the monopoly sector to a greater degree by restructuring (supplanting the PFM in agriculture, and small manufacturers etc) while the proletarianisation of the people generates the material basis for overcoming the ideological divisions within the working-class along the lines of skill, income, race and sex. And as we have seen earlier, the ability of the state to contain class struggle arising from the growing contradiction is limited by its own contradictory role as capitalist state masquerading as 'peoples' state'. It becomes increasingly difficult for the state to attack the working-class and pretend to be doing otherwise (e.g. when capital can no longer operate within the' rule of law'). The immediate consequence of restructuring therefore is to intensify class struggles within the political and ideological instances, to foster the growth of the 'new' society within the 'old', and ultimately to hasten the transition to socialism.<br /><br />These general observations regarding the nature of the current crisis in NZ are expressed here to underline an important point of analysis. This is that the forces underlying crisis cannot be understood simply at the level of distribution; i.e. class struggle over the shares of the surplus going to wages and profits. The crisis is one of fundamental restructuring involving discrete shifts in the pattern of accumulation, the welfare of various social groups and the nature of state intervention. These crises do not occur as a result of certain uncontrollable forces such as workers' drives for higher wages al though these may be an easily observable phenomenon associated with the crisis. Rather, their basic function, which is their real significance, is first to bring about a redistribution of surplus value so as to enable a new pattern of capital accumulation to be established and the reproduction of capitalist social relations to be maintained.<br /><br /><br /><strong>4.1 Conclusion<br /></strong><br /><br />What are the most important points to emerge from our analysis? Into which areas do we suggest the greatest attention should be directed?<br /><br />First, we would suggest that our analysis has re-affirmed the import­ance of the science of history. No attempt at explanation of the path of development of any social formation can merit serious consideration if it fails to pay sufficient attention to the historical process. The con­tribution of Marx was that he discovered the continent, or, the science of history (Althusser, <em>Lenin</em>, 42). His method is scientific because it represents a full reconstruction in the mind of the entire process of the operation of a given reality, in our example the development of capitalism in the New Zealand social formation. It is not a partial view, stressing isolated instances and fragmentary appearances; it is a total conceptualisation based on a materialist analysis.<br /><br />Secondly, applying the science of history, our approach has stressed the dynamic of reproduction, as distinct from production. No social order can persist unless it succeeds in reproducing itself together with the contradictions contained within it. This means that the reproduct­ion of the forces and relations have to be analysed using an appropriate method. The interlocking circuit model of reproduction has provided us with the required conceptual apparatus.<br /><br />Finally, implicit in both the Marxist science of history and its application to a particular social formation is the clear opposition to bourgeois ideology. We wish to underline our position in the theoret­ical class struggle in which we are engaged. What we have attempted to show is that the bourgeois approach is unscientific since it never takes into account more than the level of appearances and more than a narrow or partial view of history. On the contrary, the Marxist position is that nothing must be left unexplained and no instance can remain un­-attached if one is aiming for a full explanation of the evolution of any social formation. Our treatment of the case of New Zealand serves, we believe, as an illustration of the validity of a Marxist approach.<br /><br /><br /><strong>REFERENCES<br /></strong><br />Adamson, O., C. Brown, J. Harrison and J. Price. "Women’s Oppression Under Capitalism", REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST No.5, November, 1976.<br /><br />Althusser, L. LENIN AND PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER ESSAYS. New Left Books, 1971<br /><br />Althusser, L. ESSAYS IN SELF-CRITICISM. New Left Books, 1976.<br /><br />Amin, S. UNEQUAL DEVELOPMENT: AN ESSAY ON THE SOCIAL FORMATIONS OF PERIPHERAL CAPITALISM. Monthly Review Press, 1974.<br /><br />Balinky, A. MARXISM AND ECONOMICS. Lexington, 1970<br /><br />Banaji, J."Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History". CAPITAL AND CLASS No. 3, Autumn, 1977.<br /><br />Barratt Brown, M. THE ECONOMICS OF IMPERIALISM, Penguin, 1974.<br /><br />Bedggood, D. "Class Consciousness in New Zealand", in David Pitt, ed. SOCIAL CLASS IN NEW ZEALAND. Longmans, 1977<br /><br />Bedggood, D. "State Capitalism in New Zealand" in Andrew Trlin, ed. SOCIAL WELFARE IN NEW ZEALAND SOCIETY. Methuen, 1977.<br /><br />Bedggood, D. "The Limits of State Intervention and Class Struggle in the Current Crisis" Paper presented to the N .Z. Political Studies Association Conference, Auckland, August 1977.<br /><br />Bedggood, D. and P. De Deckker. ‘The Destruction of the Natural Economy: Articulation of Modes of Production in N.Z.’ Paper presented to ANZAAS, Melbourne, 1977.<br /><br />Bettleheim,G. CLASS STRUGGLES IN THE SOVIET UNION. Harvester Press, 1977.<br /><br />Blyth, C. "'The Special Case: The Political Economy of NZ" in S. Webb and J. Collette eds, NEW ZEALAND SOCIETY. Wiley, 1973.<br /><br />Blyth, C. "The Industrialisation of New Zealand" NEW ZEALAND ECONOMIC PAPERS, Vol. 8, 1974.<br /><br />Bukharin, N. IMPERIALISM AND WORLD ECONOMY. Monthly Review Press, 1973.<br /><br />Bullock, P., and D. Yaffe. "Inflation, the Crisis, and the Post-War Boom" REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST, No. 3/4, November, 1975.<br /><br />Burnham, J. The Managerial Revolution. Penguin, 1945.<br /><br />Census, (NZ Census of Population and Dwellings, Department of Statistics, Wellington, NZ)<br /><br />Clark, D. "Unequal Exchange and Australian Economic Development" in E.L. Wheelwright and K. Buckley eds, ESSAYS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AUSTRALIAN CAPITALISM: VOL. 3 ANZ Books, 1978.<br /><br />Condliffe, J.B. NEW ZEALAND IN THE MAKING. Allen and Unwin, 1959.<br /><br />Deane, R.S. "An Economic Dilemma: the Case of Foreign Investment in N. Z." RESEARCH PAPER NO 18. Reserve Bank of N.Z. April, 1975.<br /><br />de Brunhoff, S. MARX ON MONEY. English Translation. Urizier Books, 1976.<br /><br />Desai, M. MARXIAN ECONOMIC THEORY. Gray-Mills, 1974.<br /><br />Dupre, G. and P-P Rey. "Reflections on the Pertinence of a theory of the History of Exchange" ECONOMY AND SOCIETY, Vol. 2, 1973.<br /><br />Emmanuel, A. UNEQUAL EXCHANGE: A STUDY OF THE IMPERIALISM OF TRADE. NLB 1972.<br /><br />Emmanuel, A. "White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism" NEW LEFT REVIEW, 73, May/June, 1972.<br /><br />Firth, R. ECONOMICS OF THE NEW ZEALAND MAORI. Government Printer, 2nd Ed 1959.<br /><br />Harms, B. VOLKSWIRTSCHAFT UND WELTWIRTSCHAFT. Jena, 1912. (Cited in Bukharin).<br /><br />Hindess, B. and P. Hirst. PRE-CAPITALIST MODES OF PRODUCTION. Routledge Kegan Paul, 1975.<br /><br />Hobsbamn, E. INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE. Penguin, 1969.<br /><br />Jesson, B. "The Family Affair: Wealth and Power in New Zealand", RED PAPERS ON NEW ZEALAND, No. 1, May 1976.<br /><br />Lenin, V. IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISM. Moscow, 1968.<br /><br />Lenin, V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA. Progress Publishers, 1974.<br /><br />Loiseau, B., J. Mazier and M. Winter. "Rentabilite du Capital dans les Economies Daninantes: des Tensions Accrues," ECONOMIC ET STATISTIQUE, 86, February, 1977.<br /><br />Macrae, J. THE MAORI AND THE NEW ZEALAND ECONOMY .Ph.D. Thesis, University of London, 1975.<br /><br />Macrae, J. "The Internationalisation of Capital and New Zealand" RED PAPERS ON NEW ZEALAND, No. 2, May,(1977a)<br /><br />Macrae, J. 'The Neglect of the Turnover Period in Marxist Economic Theorising". Paper presented to the N.Z. Political Studies Association conference Auckland, August (1977b).<br /><br />Macrae, J. "The Evolution of New Zealand Capitalism from a Marxist Viewpoint: A Preliminary Survey" Paper presented to the ANZ Sociolog­ical Assoc. Conference, Christchurch, November, 1977.<br /><br />Mandel, E. MARXIST ECONOMIC THEORY. Monthly Review Press, 1970.<br /><br />Marx, K. GRUNDRISSE. Penguin, 1973.<br /><br />Marx, K. CAPITAL. VOL.l Penguin Edition, 1976.<br /><br />Marx, K. CAPITAL. VOL. 1 Progress Pub. 1970; VOL. 11 (1974); VOL. III (1974). THEORIES OF SURPLUS-VALUE VOL 11 Progress Pub. (1971)<br /><br />Marx, K. THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848. Political Writings, Vol.l Penguin, 1973<br /><br />Marx, K. and F. Engels. THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY. Progress, 1976.<br /><br />Marx, K, and F, Engels, PREFACE TO A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. Selected Works, 1, 1962<br /><br />Mayer, H. MARX, ENGELS AND AUSTRALIA. Cheshire, 1964.<br /><br />Merivale, H. COLONISATION AND COLONIES. Oxford University Press, 1928<br /><br />Michalet, C.A. LE CAPITALISME MONDIAL. Presse Universitaire Francaise, 1976.<br /><br />Murray, D. ''Value and Rent Theory, Part 1 and 2" CAPITAL AND CLASS, No. 3 Autumn, 1977, No. 4. 1978.<br /><br />New Zealand Census of Population and Dwellings, 1971. INDUSTRIES AND OCCUPATIONS. Vol. 4. Department of Statistics, 1974.<br /><br />New Zealand Herald. "The Top 100" December 28th, 29th, 1976, Jan. 1, 1977.<br /><br />New Zealand Planning Council. NEW ZEALAND AT THE TURNING POINT. Wellington, 1976.<br /><br />New Zealand Planning Council, PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 1978-1983. Wellington, March 1978.<br /><br />Palloix, C. "The Self-Expansion of Capital on a World Scale", REVIEW OF RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, Vol. 9 (2), Summer, 1977.<br /><br />Poulantzas, N. CLASSES IN CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM. New Left Books, 1975.<br /><br />Reeves, W. P. STATE EXPERIMENTS IN AUSTRALIA AND N Z . Macm1llan, 1969.<br /><br />Robinson, W. "Imperialism and NZ's Neo-Colonial Future" RED PAPERS ON NEW ZEALAND, No. 1. May 1976.<br /><br />Sinclair, K. A HI$RORY OF NEW ZEALAND. Penguin, 1st ed. 1959.<br /><br />Sinclair, K. ''New Zealand" in R. Winks, ed. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE-COMMONWEALTH Duke University Press, 1966.<br /><br />Sraffa, P. THE PRODUCT'ION OF COMMODITIES BY MEANS OF COMMODITIES, Cambridge 1960.<br /><br />Steven, R. "Towards a Class Analysis of New Zealand" A.N.Z. JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, 14, (2), June, 1978.<br /><br />Steven, R. ''Toward a Marxian Theory of 'Terms of Trade' in N.Z." Red Papers No 3, Summer, 1978-9.<br /><br />Sutch, W.B. POVERTY AND PROGRESS. Reed, Wellington, 1969<br /><br />Sutch, W.B. COLONY OR NATION? Sydney University Press, 1966<br /><br />Sutch, W.B. THE QUEST FOR SECURITY. Oxford University Press, 1966.<br /><br />Sutch, W.B. TAKEOVER NEW ZEALAND. Reed, Wellington, 1972.<br /><br />Terray, E. MARXISM AND "PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES'": TWO STUDIES. Monthly Review Press, 1972.<br /><br />Ward, A. A SHOW OF JUSTICE. Auckland University Press, 1973.<br /><br />Wards, I. THE SHADOW OF THE LAND: A STUDY OF BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY AND RACIAL CONFLICT IN NEW ZEALAND. Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1968.<br /><br />Weston, I. W. "Farm Overhead Charges in New Zealand", ECONOMIC RECORD, Vol. 8, 1931.<br /><br />Wright, E.O."Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies", NEW LEFT REVIEW, 98, July/August, 1976.<br /><br />Wright, E.O. Class, Crisis and the State, New Left Books, 1978.<br /><br />Yaffe, D. s. ‘Crisis, Capital and the State’ Economy and Society, Vol 2 (2) 1973.<br /><br />Yaffe, Inflation (see Bullock and Yaffe).<br /><br />YB and NZYB (NZ Official Year Book, Department of Statistics, Wellington, NZ)Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1144201705562600642006-04-04T18:21:00.000-07:002006-04-05T21:56:38.803-07:00Development of Capitalism in NZ - Part 3<span style="font-size:130%;">3.0 </span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">THE EVOLUTION OF THE N.Z. SOCIAL FORMATION</span><br /><br /><br />We proceed from the level of the material base, using the model of interlocking circuits outlined above, to show how that approach can explain the evolution of the N.Z. social formation. The most import­ant interlock came historically from N.Z.'s (or specifically the PFM's) role as a supplier of cheap foodstuffs to the U.K. in return for the investment of U.K. money capital as well as providing a limited market for British manufactures (see (7) above). This connection between N.Z. capitalism, based mainly on the PFM, and U.K. industrial capitalism, was to completely determine the historical development of the N.Z. social formation. At the same time it operated as a counter-tendency to the falling rate of profit in the U.K. by cheapening wage-goods and returning interest on the national debt.<br /><br />Since this interlock is so important in setting the limits to historical development in N.Z. we must give an explanation of its origins. This involves tracing the causal interplay between the econ­omic base, represented by the interlocking turnover circuits, and the agents who perform class functions within these circuits, and the superstructure of politics (the imperial connection) and ideology (nationalism). Our explanation of the timing of N.Z. settlement and of the subsequent development of the CMP must therefore begin with the question of the causes of colonisation, and in particular with an examination of the ‘land barrier’ in mid-nineteenth century Britain.<br /><br /><br /><strong>3.1 The Land Barrier<br /></strong><br />Our analysis of the historical circumstances which caused white-settler colonisation is based on the barrier of landed property to further capital accumulation. Marx establishes the connection between agriculture and industry as follows:<br /><br />In the period of the stormy growth of capitalist production, prod­uctivity in industry develops rapidly as compared with agriculture, although its development presupposes that a significant change as between constant and variable capital has already taken place in agriculture, that is, a large number of people have been driven off the land. Later, productivity advances in both, although at an un­even pace. But when industry reaches a certain level the disproport­ion must diminish, in other words, productivity in agriculture must increase relatively more rapidly than in industry (<em>TSV</em>, II, 110).<br /><br />From about 1800, increased productivity in agriculture was retarded by the remaining feudal barrier to accumulation on the land - landed property in Britain and the protected colonies. A landlord class extracted an absolute rent from tenant fanners and consumed rather than invested this surplus-value as capital (Marx, <em>Capital</em> Vol. Ill, 748-813). This barrier to agricultural investment prevented a cheapening of the elements of constant capital (raw materials) and wage goods (food etc) in industry acting as a brake on the expansion of industrial capital.<br /><br />The consequence was a prolonged period of relative economic stag­nation, of small booms punctuated by commercial crises, and accompanied by agricultural labourer’s riots, Chartist demonstrations, overpopulat­ion, pauperism and crime (Hobsbawm, <em>Industry</em>, 56-108).<br /><br />Thus the encumbrance of landed property to the further develop­ment of industrial productivity (relative surplus-value) was expressed politically and ideologically as a class struggle between the landlords and the industrial bourgeoisie. Parliament was still the preserve of landed property, propped-up by the mercantilist system, the extraction of absolute rent in Britain and the colonies (Marx, <em>Capital</em> Vol. Ill, 791; Mandel, <em>MET</em>, 282-292). The breaking of the land-barrier came only after a lengthy struggle in which the industrial bourgeoisie asserted its parliamentary supremacy, abolished the feudal rump of mercantilism and put ‘free trade’ in its place. There followed between 1850 and 1870 an unprecedented boom based on new sources of cheap food and raw materials which established Britain as the 'workshop of the world'.<br /><br />Equally important for our purposes was the land barrier as the prime cause of white-settler emigration. While the process of the expropriation of agricultural labourers was continuing apace, together with the depopulation of Ireland, a stagnant industry could not provide employment for this surplus population. In order to escape wage-labour and pauperism large numbers emigrated to the colonies. Between 1815 and 1859 a total of 4,917,598 persons emigrated from the U.K. to all parts of the world. Over the same period approx. 684, 000 emigrated to Australia and New Zealand (Merivale, <em>Colonisation,</em> 166). The outflow of white-settlers to the ‘new lands’ added an important dimension to the development of the CMP in Britain. It established not only new sources of surplus-value, but new ‘little Englands’ i.e. social formations where ‘fragments’ of the British social formation comprising economic, political and ideological levels, were grafted onto pre-capitalist formations, producing a hybrid type of colony.<br /><br /><br /><strong>3.2 The Penetration of the Capitalist Mode<br /></strong><br />It follows that the penetration of the CMP into the Maori social formation occurred at all three levels -economic, political and ideological. The task is to determine the relative impact of each level upon the colonisation process. It is clear at the out­set, that the bourgeois approach to colonisation, in examining in minute detail the motives of those concerned (missionaries, the Colonial Office, settlers), begs the question of economic determin­ation in the last instance (Sinclair, <em>A History</em>, 65; Ward, <em>Justice</em>, 24-40). This is the method of the ‘isolated instance’ as opposed to that of ‘structural causality’. In terms of our explanation, these actors were all agents of the CMP, but they operated at different levels. The settlers most directly represented the class struggle arising from the land barrier in Britain. Consisting of those who were escaping high rents in the hope of getting the benefit of ‘founders’ rent’, or of the unemployed hoping merely to produce their means of subsistence in the land, they were either aspiring capitalist farmers or independent producers (Marx, <em>Grundrisse</em>, 279; <em>TSV</em>, 11, 239).<br /><br />Of the settlers, it was the systematic colonisers who were the most influential in causing the imperial state to annex N.Z. They persuaded the British state agents that colonisation would provide a solution to the social and political problems of the time by serving as an outlet for surplus labour and capital. Merivale, for example, went to great lengths (in his capacity as Oxford don) to demonstrate that controlled emigration would not deplete the reserve army of labour below the numbers necessary to hold down wages at home (<em>ibid</em>, 164-165). The clinching argument was that the expenses incurred would be paid for by a tax on the wages of the emigrating workers in the new colonies (<em>ibid</em>, 158).<br /><br />The imperial state's annexation of N.Z. can therefore be seen as a necessary expense incurred in the maintenance of law and order as a condition of the reproduction of the CMP in Britain (see 2.4). Whether these expenses were involved in putting down rebellion at home, transporting convicts, or pacifying unruly 'natives' - Afghan, Chinese, or Maori - the purpose was the same. The apparent contradict­ion, in bourgeois terms, between the expense of annexation and the absence of any direct economic benefit (raw materials, labour, market) in a period of free trade, which can only be ‘explained away’ by intro­ducing the myth of ‘moral suasion’ (Wards, <em>Shadow</em>), is in the final analysis, no contradiction. Native protection was simply a slogan providing-ideological cover to the geographic extension of the imperial state's political-legal function in reproducing the CMP (see 2.6).<br /><br />Once we have established that the class interests of the set­tlers were not in contradiction with the imperialist state, the highly over-rated role of the missionaries and humanitarians becomes clear.<br /><br />They are revealed as bourgeois agents in the reproduction of ideas at the ideological level. Though these ideas (anti-slavery, native protection, civilising mission etc) are determined in the last instance by the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, the ideological agents do have great ‘relative autonomy’ in practice. Since the function of bourgeois ideology is to represent the values of capital as ‘natural’ and ‘universal’, we must expect well-intentioned missionaries to perform this task literally in the geographical sense, often penetrat­ing pre-capitalist social formations in advance of the market. Accord­ing to Merivale, religion is the basic means by which ‘civilisation’ is introduced to ‘savage tribes’; “For in what mode are we to excite the mind of the savage to desire civilisation?” (<em>ibid</em>, 524).<br /><br />The immediate impact of the ideological ‘civilising mission’ in N.Z. was to challenge the dominance of the Maori chiefs (elders) in the reproduction of the MLM. In this they failed for the introd­uction of commodity trade allowed a rapid adaptation of the MLM to commodity production (flax, wheat etc) but still under the dominance of the elders (cf. Firth, <em>Economics,</em> 482). Thus the combined efforts of the ‘advance guard’ of the CMP, the missionaries and traders, were insufficient to subordinate the MLM, convert its means of prod­uction and labour-power into commodities, or to set-up the settlers’ PFM. The explanation is to be found in the key role of the elders in the MLM (see Section 2.7). Since the elders were not a ruling class;<br />they could not be used in alienating the land without destroying their ideological dominance in the MLM. By 1860 the growing pressure from the settlers for land put this role to the test. A number of chiefs responded by reasserting their ideological command over the MLM in the from of the King Movement to prevent the loss of their remaining land. This resistance was interpreted by the imperialist state as a political rebellion (implying a Maori King and a Maori state) justifying the use of state force to break the elders’ control of the MLM, and in to seize the land in compensation. With the elders' control broken, the imperial state, as midwife of history, introduced the CMP into N.Z., establishing the PFM and articulating the remnants of the MLM, both under the dominance of capital.<br /><br />Following the intervention of the imperial state to establish by force the conditions for the CMP, the way was clear for the settlers to assume responsibility for self-government. The striking difference between the ‘new lands’ and the ‘old world’ was the absence of landed property. Marx, in his discussion of the ‘new system of colonisation’ (<em>Capital </em>Vol. I, Chap. 33) shows how free land is a hindrance to capital accumulation of a different sort to landed property, since it prevents the formation of a wage-labour class without its means of subsistence. That this was the case in N.Z. together with the ref­usal of the British Crown to allow many of the N.Z. Company's dubious claims, accounts for the failure of the Wakefield system to dominate agriculture. Had the Company been able to establish ownership of the vast tracts of land it claimed, then it would have been able to re­produce in the colony a system of landed property, whereby a few land­lords could have extracted absolute rent from agricultural labourers and tenant farmers. While it is true that in the period up to 1890, a landed squattocracy controlling large landholdings did exist, this was in the nature of extensive capitalist farming of wool and wheat, and did not constitute a barrier to capital investment in increasing agricultural productivity. What was established in New Zealand in this period was therefore neither landed property, nor large-scale capitalist farming, but rather the grafting of the old stock of the PFM onto the new roots of ‘free land’ through the agency of the settlers’ state.<br /><br />It is important to stress the key role of the state as it figures prominently in bourgeois explanations of N.Z.’s ‘national development’. The settlers used the local state “to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation.. . to the CMP” (Marx, <em>Capital</em> Vol. I, 915). With the destruction of the MLM, the state legis­lated ‘peaceful’ means of appropriating any remaining Maori land of value (Ward, <em>Justice.</em> 185). It encouraged the immigration of the land-hungry and assisted smallholder settlement with crown leaseholds, loans and other forms of subsidies. Most importantly, it borrowed large amounts of British finance capital to lay down a productive infrastructure, social overhead facilities and the necessary links to international trading networks. It was a very good example of the use of the national debt described by Marx as one of the “most powerful levers of primitive accumulation” (<em>Capital</em> Vol. I, 706-707). While the benefits of the developments made possible by such borrowing went mainly to direct producers, “financiers and middlemen”, much of the burden of interest on the national debt fell on the working-class.<br /><br />Bourgeois conceptions of the role of the state in the artic­ulation process are of two sorts. The neo-classical view reduces the state and ideology to epiphenomena of the international market (Blyth, <em>Industrialisation</em>). N.Z.’s comparative advantage is in its agricultural specialisation - fertile land, plus capital equals ‘take-off’. Following the classical political economy, this view does not recognise exploitative class relations or the capitalist nature of the state. Its perspective is thus entirely limited to the appearances of the market. The more common view of the role of the state is that which draws on the radical tradition of the ‘progressives’ (Reeves, <em>Experiments</em>, 59-102; Sutch, <em>Poverty</em>, Colony, etc). It gives causal primacy to radical ideas which are then translated into progressive legislation to control the ‘excesses’ of the market, and to regulate capital and labour in the ‘common interest’. It acknowledges but does not understand the key role of the state. Following Reeves and Stout, the state is seen as ‘neutral’ and above classes, not merely ‘relatively autonomous’ , but capable of abolishing classes and capital­ism itself (Bedggood, <em>State Capitalism</em>).<br /><br />It is clear that the bourgeois historiography in the ‘long Pink Cloud’ tradition (Sinclair, <em>N.Z</em>.), in making radical ideas the prime cause in N.Z.’s history, has not looked beneath the level of the superstructure to discover the final cause of bourgeois radicalism. A classic example is the role of radical ideas and policies in land settlement (Marx, <em>TSV</em>, II, 44). Once the objective of the ‘nationalis­ers’ or ‘single-taxers’ had been realised, namely land-ownership, radicalism was transformed into a conservatism of private property. There­fore, to take the isolated instance of radical ideas as the independ­ent and ultimate cause of national development, is to replace an economic determinism with a cultural determinism in the ‘last instance’ i.e. idealism. While the semi-colonial state was an important instrument in the development of capitalism in the N.Z. social formation, it was not sufficient. It was the new land combined with immigrant labour, producing a high rent plus a secure return on the national debt, which in the last instance, determined the politics and ideology of ‘national development’.<br /><br /><br /><strong>3.3 The Reproduction of Capitalist Social Relations<br /></strong><br />In summary then, the articulation of modes which evolved in the N.Z. social formation, reflected in the last instance, the ability of the peasant smallholder to achieve state subsidised settlement and to benefit from ‘founders’ rent’ on relatively fertile land (Murray, <em>Value,</em> II). This s provided the material circumstances for the establish­ment of the CMP in N.Z. and the capitalist domination of a new source or surplus-value that entered into the imperial circuit, furthering accumulation both in Britain and the semi-colony. But the whole basis of the extension of capitalist accumulation in N.Z. rested upon the reprod­uction of capitalist social relations. The crucial role in this process was played by the comprador bourgeoisie, who as linking agents, managed the transmission of capitalist social relations into the ‘backwoods’ of the PFM in the new colony. Though now possessing land, the settler lack­ed capital, a crucial fetter to his expansion beyond producing his means of subsistence; and the comprador provided it if the state did not also. The merchant provided commodities for use, and credit for their sale and purchase. The finance capitalist provided capital for the land, and the banker backed them both and directed customers to them. The role played by the comprador class has been nowhere adequately stress­ed in the bourgeois literature, and not even by so-called radicals, who in their concern with ‘foreign control’ ignore the bourgeois class that has acted as the local agents of most forms of ‘foreign control’ (e.g. Sutch, <em>Takeover</em>).<br /><br />The class relation which became the basis of the pattern of interlocking circuit dependence that had emerged by the 1930's was one in which the peasant smallholder had become a form of wage-slave, con­tributing surplus-value to the comprador class. This form of exploitation follows from the key role of the comprador in extracting surplus-value, in controlling the marketing of the primary products, and requiring the farmer to meet his fixed charges out of normal profits and even wages (see next section). This extraction was expressed in a disguised form in accounts as interest on mortgage, rent paid, commission to stock and station agents, freight charges, insurance on chattels,(re-possession on default of mortgage repayments)etc. in total accounting to about 45% of all farm income in normal times, and 100% during the Great Depression (Weston, <em>Farm</em>). The comprador had in effect, replaced the landlord as an agent in extracting surplus-value. Though Condliffe, one of the more perceptive of bourgeois economic historians, recognised that the N.Z. ‘freeholder’ had by the early 20th century, “exchanged the landlord for the mortgagee”, he refused to admit to any more than the possibility of his ‘exploitation’ by the comprador class (<em>NZ</em>, 277).<br /><br />On the basis of this analysis we conclude that the grip of the finance bourgeoisie, both British rentier and local comprador, on the labour process of the peasant producer, did not cease to tighten and consolidate the now traditional pattern of semi-colonial specialisation in the international division-of-labour. Though they replaced the land­lord class in extracting surplus-value from agriculture, their role was not to hold back the investment of capital in agriculture. They accum­ulated rather than consumed the surplus-value off the land, facilitat­ing the circuit of capital into agricultural production in the form of productive capital, providing money capital for investment in the nascent branches of industrial capital in N.Z., and of course re-circulating money capital into British and other international circuits.<br /><br />While Marx and others have written on the articulation of CMP and Peasant Modes, there is no fully developed theory of what we have call called the PFM in the white-settler states. It seems to us that the potential of this form of articulation has been underestimated in circ­umstances where it is introduced into a semi-colonial setting character­ised by (a) an absence of feudal landed property, (b) the dominance of a capitalist comprador class, and (c) in association with a highly interventionist, modernising local state. It is clear that when these conditions prevailed, as in N.Z., the PFM has, in the form which we have described above (2.7), undergone remarkable transformation.<br /><br /><br /><strong>3.4 Unequal Exchange</strong><br /><br />Our analysis of the production and extraction of surplus value in the N.Z. social formation so far leads us to the position of accepting that same form of ‘unequal exchange’ of value operates to maintain<br /><br />N.Z.’s subordination to international capital. This subordination shows up in many forms but is most obviously related to the internat­ional flow of export commodities and the value relationships underlying these flows. Consequently we reject any analysis of ‘unequal exchange’ in the tradition of Emmanuel’s work, which begins from the level of wages, prices or terms of trade, and tries to deduce explanations of ‘ex­ploitation' and under-development. Very briefly, Emmanuel argues that inequality of wages as such, all other things being equal, is alone the cause of inequality of exchange (<em>Unequal</em>, 613). But of course all other things can never be equal and it has become clear that arguments which begin at this level cannot further our understanding of the prob­lem. For example, in Clark’s discussion of Australia, he records that Australian wages have been generally higher than British wages. He can only avoid the absurd conclusion that Australian workers have exploited British workers by calling for more pseudo-statistics! (Clark, <em>Unequal</em>).<br /><br />Yet for all the polemic against Emmanuel, little empirical or theoretical work has been done to counter the appeal of his thesis. Bettleheim and Palloix have pointed to the logic of reproduction as the starting point, and Barratt-Brown has marshalled some data to demonstrate that the level of wages is a mirror image, not a determining factor of unequal exchange (<em>Economics,</em> 235). By contrast, we have argued that the position of various classes in relation to the overall reproduction of capital is what is fundamental, and that this must not merely be asserted but actually demonstrated. This we propose to do, beginning first with an attempt to explain the phenomenon of ‘unequal exchange’ as a particular case of absolute rent in the N.Z. historical context. We start therefore by explaining the basic idea of absolute rent and then adapting it to the problem of unequal exchange. Then we show how responses to this original form of unequal exchange help explain the current pattern of relationships prevailing in N.Z.’s international trade in agricultural commodities.<br /><br /><br /><strong>a. Marx's Theory of Absolute Rent<br /></strong><br />Marx defines absolute rent as that component of surplus-value which does not enter into the process of equalisation of the rate of profit across departments (<em>Capital </em>Vol.III,760-761). It reflects the monopoly of ownership of a particular resource employed in the production of commod­ities under the CMP. In Marx's example, the resource referred to was land and it was the landlord class which acted as an obstacle to the free flow of capital and the equalisation of the rate of profit in agriculture with that in other departments. In demonstrating the case of absolute rent, Marx defines three levels of analysis<br /><br />(1) the Value of commodity i, understood here as an agricultural commodity, and comprising the elements W1= Ci + Vi + Si<br /><br />(2) Prices of Production (Yi) comprising costs (Ci + Vi if we ignore the transformation problem) plus average profits and<br /><br />(3) a monopoly-­price or modified price (Xi) which equals costs plus profits, at an average rate if the farmer is a '’true’ capitalist, plus absolute rent or excess profits.<br /><br />These 3 levels are defined in the diagram below.<br />(NB: In what follows we ignore the so-called transformation problem which is a red herring for the purposes of the present discussion anyway).<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg15.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 445px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 183px" height="183" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg15.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In this example, Xi >Yi, i.e. the modified price exceeds the price of production by the full amount of the absolute rent, since we assume all items of costs and profits to stay the same in both cases. Absolute rent is added as a monopoly profit to give a modified price which is con­sequently higher than the price of production (Yi). Now whether absolute rent is added on to the price of production (Yi) or is deducted wholly or in part from Yi depends on market conditions (supply and demand) (<em>Capital</em> Vol.III p762) . It also depends on the relations of production in agriculture. Normally under capitalist production relations in agriculture absolute rent is by definition marked up on top of average profit from farming since no capitalist farmer would invest his capital at below average profit and no landlord will let him use the land without paying rent.<br /><br />Now at first glance, there would seem to be little relevance in all this to the N.Z. case. Not only was there no landlord class, but no effective obstacles to settlement on the land existed. How then do we establish a case for unequal exchange along these lines?<br /><br /><br /><strong>b. Adapting the Basic Theory<br /></strong><br />We recall the point made by Marx and Lenin that colonial super­ profits were the most important counter-tendency to the falling rate of profit. Such super-profits in turn imply the existence of monopoly control of finance capital at the centre which could act to eliminate competition and prevent the general process of equalisation of the rate of profit everywhere. But this still does not indicate what the source of unequal exchange was in the periphery. To explain this we refer back to our discussion of the causes of settlement in N.Z. (3.3). Our general thesis was that whilst monopoly over landed property (‘modern landed property’) was never established in N.Z., this was replaced by another form of monopoly, that of finance capital, owned by the comprador class. While the process of settlement was such that some acquired large holdings, the majority were peasant smallholders, buying and selling on the local market. After establishment of the main trading links with the U.K., these smallholders became increasingly indebted to merchant ­bankers for the credit needed to purchase and develop their holdings, consolidating the relationship with the comprador class which extracted the surplus-value from the direct producer in the form of an absolute or monopoly rent, this time understood as a monopoly of large money capital.<br /><br />Now the question arises as to where this rent came from. Was it paid out of a modified price Xi in excess of Yi by the full amount of the rent, as in the original analysis outlined in Section (a) above? Or was it absorbed into Yi and taken out of some combination of wages (i.e. the value of labour-power of the snallholder, Vi) and a rate of profit that was average or less than average? The latter could only occur if the occupying smallholder was not a true capitalist, i.e. did not demand an average rate of profit on his capital.<br /><br />Moreover, its impact on different smallholders’ individual rates of profit would depend on the differential rent from their new land in the colony, i.e. the disparity between their individual costs of pro­duction and the average price as determined for them by the market. We are referring here to DR1 which Marx defines as the varying yields from land of equal area with equal applications of constant capital, arising out of differences in fertility and location with respect to the market (<em>Capital</em> Vol. III 647-673). The effect of greater yields would be to reduce the unit cost of production for the favoured smallholder, and raise his rate of profit above the average. However, we cannot assume that in N.Z. all the land settled was better than older lands under cultivation in the countries of older civilisation (<em>Capital</em> Vol. III p.769). So, in what follows we assume at first land of average fertility and then in Section (c) consider the impact of differential rent on our initial conclusions about the distribution of surplus value produced.<br /><br />In trying to determine the distribution of surplus value we have to consider only 2 alternatives - do we assume the average smallholder realised an average rate of profit or a less than average one, in the conditions of settlement of N.Z.? We suggest that prob­ably the latter was what occurred at least in the early period. The two main reasons for this were (1) that under pioneer conditions, settlers were more concerned with producing their means of subsistence and reproducing their capital at a minimum rather than an average rate. That is, they valued actual possession of the land highly. (2) Market conditions also operated in the same direction. The comprador class had an interest in increasing its share of the surplus value produced at the expense of the direct producer, so keeping the modified price Xi low and the price of the new colony's commodities down. This was after all the basic function of the new colony - to cheapen costs at the centre. The comprador would therefore attempt to take his excess out of average profit of enterprise, rather than mark-up the price of production and lower the colony's international competitiveness. In all cases, however, the share of the comprador in the form of a monopoly rent constitutes unequal exchange.<br /><br />As a simplified abstraction of the likely pattern of unequal exchange we offer the following example. We stress that we are dealing at this stage only with land of average fertility.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg16.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 422px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 90px" height="75" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg16.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Here Ci is constant capital in branch i; Vi is variable capital, Si is surplus value, R is the average rate of profit calculated in the usual way - i.e. assuming the identity between aggregate surplus-value and total money profits. R' is the rate of merchant profit on merchant comprador capital advanced (Mi), and R’ is the analogous rate on enter­prise capital advanced (Ki). We divide the N.Z. social formation into the agricultural sector (or circuit) (A) the industrial sector (or cir­cuit) (M). The table below shows the general relations of exchange which finally prevail after the modifying influence of the comprador class is taken into account.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg17.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 425px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 129px" height="118" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg17.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In the table, R = 20% before modification by merchant finance capital, i.e. before deduction of monopoly rent. After modification, the merchant rate of profit in (A) exceeds that in (M) and merchant capital in the latter receives a rate of return approximating the overall modified rate or enter­prise profit in (M). The rates of profit finally received are:<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg18.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 466px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 97px" height="85" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg18.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(The figures in brackets are actual modified profits received in money terms) .<br /><br />Under this solution ∑Wi = ∑Yi = ∑Xi, but individually values and prices (either Yi or Xi) diverge. The family smallholder ends up with a less than average rate of enterprise profit and turns a monopoly rent over to the merchant comprador in the same way as the English tenants turned over rent to their landlord as the condition of their being permitted to invest capital in his land (<em>Capital</em> Vol. III, 626).<br /><br />In our example, the comprador class, therefore, inserts itself in an intermediary position between the dominant capitalist mode and the depend­ent PFM forcing prices received by the PFM down low enough so that, even after modification by monopoly margins, the market price was still low enough to be competitive.<br /><br />Unequal exchange, as it operates here, is a form of monopoly rent extracted by a comprador class from the surplus value produced in agriculture as a consequence of that class's control over the movement of capital into that branch of production. But it clearly cannot rest there. This monopoly will be subjected immediately to countering forces. For instance, how long will it be before manufacturing capitalists attempt to become merchant compradors? We must now turn to a discussion of the counteracting forces.<br /><br /><br /><strong>c. Countering Obstacles to Extended Reproduction</strong><br /><br />It follows from our example as it stands, that the direct producers of the PFM would have had difficulty reproducing their conditions of existence, or even making improvements to compensate for declining natural fertility of the land. As such our illustration underestimates the potential for expanded reproduction within the PFM, a potential which history shows to have been clearly realised. In the first place, we have ignored Differential Rent 1, i.e. differences in fertility and location which would imply that, although on average, the rate of enterprise profit in (A) was kept low, there were wide variations around this average. Farms with above average DR1 could therefore earn rates of profit equal, or even in excess of the average for the formation as a whole (20% in the example). For these producers, then, there would be fewer obstacles to accumulating capital and extended reproduction. Such disparities in DR1 therefore, (e.g. above average fertility or exceptional location) underlie our explan­ation of the differentiation of the peasantry, as outlined in Section (2.7) above, into 3 classes or fractions after about 1890. The bourgeois fraction was favoured in its ability to invest their own capital in the general modernisation of their holdings, and so reduced their dependence on the comprador class.<br /><br />However natural fertility of the soil has to be replaced, and the pace of mechanisation, or raising of the organic composition had to be maintained and in this process the State played a crucial role. The State's activities may be summarised as intervention in the PFM to sustain extended reproduction by limiting the monopoly control of the comprador class over the movement of capital. This was achieved by methods which influenced both DR1 and DR2 although a clear distinction between the two is difficult to maintain. The most important measures were State subsidies in the development of improved methods of cultivation, higher yielding stock, improved methods of fertilisation, improved public works etc. Secondly, the State limited the monopoly of the comprador over the supply of credit by offering cheap State loans for both settlement and development. Finally, particularly after the onset of the depression of the 1930's, the State itself became a monopoly in the acquisition of smallholder dairy production in an attempt to bolster squeezed profitability and to undertake more ‘rational’ marketing of dairy products. (Such, <em>Security,</em> 183-6)<br /><br />As a consequence of these measures and others too numerous to mention, the State ‘nationalises’ the major costs of agricultural pro­duction and re-circulates excess profits at least partially back to the direct producer, holding down the share of the comprador class of the surplus value produced. The direct producer's rate of realised profit would converge upwards to the overall average and thereby allow for ex­tended reproduction to go ahead more rapidly.<br /><br />But while State intervention breaks the monopoly control of the comprador class over the PFM in subsidising the costs of agricultural pro­duction, this only modifies the basic pattern of unequal exchange, it does not reverse it. The fact that such commodities still sell at modified market prices below their values represents unequal exchange out of the PFM in the conventional sense, i.e. a divergence of value from price. The State operates to redirect some of this transfer of surplus value back into the PFM by means of subsidies paid out of general tax revenues.<br /><br />In addition to this conventional form of unequal exchange, we have added another relating to the monopoly ownership of capital by the comprador class. We have pointed out the limits placed on this monopoly by the State. In terms of the interlocking circuit model, the semi-colonial State, therefore, encourages the reproduction of international capital by transferring value in the form of State subsidies into agriculture, hence countering the tendency for agricultural production to stagnate.<br /><br />To conclude our analysis of unequal exchange in agriculture it follows that the transfer of value out of agriculture, made possible by the combination of 1) a modern progressive form of land tenure in the semi-colony, 2) high differential rent and, 3) State intervention, provided a source of capital which could be used to ‘develop’ domestic manufacturing.<br /><br /><br /><strong>3.5 Contemporary Patterns of Circuit Interdependence</strong><br /><br />The previous sections have been concerned with the application of the interlocking circuit model to the analysis of the development of capitalist dominated agriculture in the N.Z. social formation. To some extent we have presupposed the existence of the Industrial Capital Circuit in our discussion of the flow of surplus-value via the state into the agricultural branch. In this section then, we extend the analysis to include the development of the industrial circuit into N.Z. and to demonstrate its impact on contemporary ‘economic’ relationships affecting the social formation, and on the pattern of social relations, or ‘class structure’. Though we cannot give more than an outline of the growth of the circuit in this paper, we emphasise its importance in the full development of the CMP in N.Z. It represents the further development of the CMP in N.Z. from the initial limited interlock of British capital with the PFM, through the establishment of branches of domestic manufacturing, to the present complete penetration of industrial capital into all branches of production accounting for 3 to 4 times as much as agriculture in the statistics on national production (<em>Year Book</em>, 1977).<br /><br />What is quite distinctive about this development is that while it followed a sequence of ‘stages’ from the introduction of the PFM, to simple manufacturing, to later advanced production by international capital, it did so at a much more rapid rate than the original capitalist transition because it occurred in the context of the already established CMP and as the result of a highly interventionist local state. This meant that the pre-conditions for capitalist manufacture, namely 1)- capitalist dominated agriculture, 2)- wage-labour, 3)- industrial capital and 4)- a market, were rapidly realised by means of their displacement from the British social formation and their re-location in the semi-colony by the agency of the local state. We have emphasised in our previous discussion the influence of the state in establishing capitalist social relations in agriculture by means of the National Debt, using U.K. finance capital to develop the infrastructure of ports, communications , etc. for the full development of capitalist farming. This provided the first condition for manufacture, i.e. wage-goods for a working-class.<br /><br />The state created the second condition, the working-class itself, by means of the assisted immigration of would-be settlers who finding themselves landless had no choice but to work for wages. The creation of wage-labour in the colony was not therefore the result of the original Wakefield scheme, but that of state schemes that applied the same principles of using the revenue from land sales to pay for a supply of immigrant wage-labour.<br /><br />The third condition, industrial capital, arose out of the process we have discussed above. We saw that the accumulation of capital from the PFM, whether by the comprador class or the peasant bourgeoisie, was suf­ficient to increase agricultural production. It also provided the necessary money capital for investment as productive capital in the industrial cir­cuit as soon as the combination of conditions required for domestic man­ufacturing occurred. This conjunction came about during the Long Depress­ion when the pool of unemployed drove down the value of labour-power to the point where the local cost of production (at low organic composition and high absolute rates of exploitation of men, women and children) together with tariff protection (in 1888) made domestic import sub­stitution of some commodities profitable for the local capitalist class (Sutch, <em>Poverty</em>, 106).<br /><br />Apart from the development of primary processing industries, either cooperatively owned, or owned by capitalists (see (11) above), and their more recent extension into areas such as paper pulp etc., the three main branches of domestic manufacturing established after 1880 were:<br /><br /><strong>(1) - Production of Wage-Goods:</strong> articles of consumption for the working-class, beginning with clothing, shoes etc., and incorporating a widening range of commodities entering into the value of labour-power E.g. TV’s, domestic appliances, motor cars (see (9) above).<br /><br /><strong>(2) - Production of Capital Goods for Agriculture:</strong> the local product­ion of previously imported machinery, farm implements, topdressing aircraft etc.<br /><br /><strong>(3) - Production of Capital Goods for the Wage-Goods branch:</strong> a more recent tendency since as we pointed out in 2.5, the production of capital goods is usually the speciality of the Industrial Circuit in the core capitalist states, e.g. steel for construction, plastics for cons­umer durables etc.<br /><br />Though these domestic branches of production were established and sustained by means of state protection (tariffs and import controls etc) they nonetheless represented a new source of surplus-value product­ion open to international capital. As a result, from the 1880’s to the present day, we find that all branches have been penetrated by ‘foreign’ capital which has moved to take advantage of the development of the CMP in the N.Z. social formation, drawing the formation further into the international circuits of capital and reinforcing the semi-colony's extraverted dependence.<br /><br />We can describe the contemporary N.Z. social formation therefore as an immensely complicated system of interlocking circuits of capital spreading throughout its articulated economic base, and now augmented by an increasingly important branch of manufacturing production. The basic logic of the whole unity is one of circuitous interdependence, each circuit feeding or linking at some crucial stage with a foreign counterpart. The most crucial interlocks, in the context of our current discussion, are as follows:<br /><br /><strong>(a) The Level of Production</strong><br /><br />(i) imported materials of labour feed into agricultural production for re-export or for industrial manufactures (oil, chemicals, raw fertilisers etc). We may call this an ‘import-output’ linkage.<br /><br />(ii) Imported machinery is required for use in producing commod­ities feeding into non-agricultural production processes (wood, metal lathes etc). We can call this the ‘import-input’ linkage.<br /><br />(iii) Agricul­tural raw material production feeds into locally-sited production proc­esses, undertaking further processing before exporting takes place (e. g. timber, meat and wool processing). We call this an ‘output-export’ linkage.<br /><br /><br /><strong>(b) The Level of Exchange:</strong> the foreign exchange earned from a( iii) is required to finance linkages a(i) and (ii). The foreign exchange earned from exported manufactures is needed to reproduce production of itself, as seen by linkage a(i).<br /><br /><br /><strong>(c) The level of Finance Capital:</strong> seasonal shifts in the demand for credit by the farming sector results in credit being withdrawn at cert­ain periods from this sector and fed into urban manufacturing. The seasonal pattern of production and realisation of export revenues, im­plies a requirement for foreign exchange credits for purchasing contin­uously needed materials for manufacturing. The credit system operates to effect these linkages and enables reproduction to proceed efficiently.<br /><br />In sum, the basic model is one of the “production of commodities by means of commodities” (Sraffa), but with the crucial extension of all circuits into a foreign counterpart. The high degree of dependence on foreign trade is only partially revealed by aggregate figures relating exports to GNP, where, as can be seen from the table below, N.Z.’s percentage is not particularly high, and corresponds to that of many advanced capitalist social formations.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg19.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 441px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 110px" height="104" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg19.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />However, these figures conceal the dependence on particular primary commodities which is a general characteristic of colonies and semi-colonies. Moreover, as the previous discussion demonstrates, a lower aggregate ratio of exports to GDP may merely reflect the extent of indirect linkages in an increasingly diversified economic base. But these local circuits all at some stage spill out into an external one, so such aggregate data as presented in the table can say little if any­thing about the real degree of dependence or ‘extraversion’ which pre­vails in the N.Z. semi-colony. For, as is well known, the vital significance of the foreign exchange linkage, in permitting the reproduction of the entire economic base, and obvious from our above illustrations, explains why there has developed such heavy state control of foreign exchange transactions in N.Z.<br /><br />Although less so than in the past, the evolution of N.Z. capital­ism is still strongly dependent on the speed of development of the agri­cultural branch. Hence minimising the turnover, i.e. the time of product­ion, plus the time of circulation of agricultural capital is critical to the ongoing pattern of accumulation. However, unlike manufacturing, there are natural limits to the capacity of new technology to speed up turnover of capital in agriculture and related branches of production, e.g. forestry. Agricultural produce simply needs a certain time to grow. Limits to the speed of circulation e.g. on account of the phys­ical distance from its markets, are also important and very costly to overcome. This leads to a key point. Any reduction of these limits becomes increasingly costly in its capital requirements, even with heavy state subsidy. The result must be a tendency for the relative profitability of agriculture to lag behind that in other branches and for capital to be redirected accordingly.<br /><br />These structural limitations (to which others such as the parc­ellisation of land could be added) to the development of the productive forces in the branches of primary production will act as real constraints on N.Z.'s overall capacity for accumulation. They also occur in conjunct­ion with a world of heavily protected production of similar commodities in overseas formations whose states place strong limits on the market access for N.Z.'s traditional dairy products, leading to chronic over­production in those markets that do remain open to N.Z. produce. It follows that the costs of maintaining minimum prices and returns to the smallholder in N.Z. by means of various state subsidies, represent de­ductions from the total social capital. The fact that these revenues might have been used in more productive branches (in line with the current ideology) reflects the price to be paid for preserving the foreign exchange earnings of the semi-colony. In international ‘comparative’ terms then, N.Z. carries a structural weakness much more significant than in social formations such as W. Germany, Japan etc. , which are not dependent on exports of primary produce, and which are currently said to be forging ahead of N.Z. in the international league tables.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg20.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 432px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 122px" height="122" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg20.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Whilst these figures are clearly subject to severe limitations, taken at face value they can be used to support our structural argument.<br /><br />The contradictions inherent in the semi-colony' s new, or rather evolved, pattern of circuit interdependence are fairly obvious, but are clarified by means of our analysis of linkages made earlier in this section. For instance, more exports as called for by the orthodox ‘task force’ ideologists (<em>N.Z. at the Turning Point</em>)requires more export production (output-export), in turn requiring more inputs, and more imports (import-output) and so more exports to pay for them etc. Discrete changes in the cost of any one component (e.g. oil costs) are transmitted and probably magnified in their impact (through mark-up pricing practices) on all other components. So, from the above analysis, it follows that increasing export costs lead to reduced export competitiveness (and so on, in a downward spiral).<br /><br />In addition, the usefulness of across-the-board measures, e.g. devaluation to cheapen exports, have their effects dissipated by the contradictory impact which devaluation has on import costs. This criss-crossing of effects at the level of market forces - prices, terms of trade, incomes etc. - is in truth the realm of the economist number-juggler, whose weighty pronouncements about such complicated interrelationships re­flects their function as mystifiers of the underlying relations of prod­uction. The consequence of their ideological pronouncements is ultimately to assist in the offensive to drive down the value of labour power in the interests of the “export drive” (Steven, <em>Terms).</em><br /><br /><br /><strong>3.6 Contemporary Class Structure<br /></strong><br />In this section we derive the contemporary pattern of social relations (i.e. the class structure) from our analysis of the develop­ment of the CMP and the subordinate modes in N.Z. Our approach is simply to locate classes in terms of their qualitative relations as wage­ labour or capital. We define this relation as one of ‘real ownership’ or ‘real non-ownership’ of capital which determines the form of control of the means of production, the labour process, and the distribution of the surplus-value produced. In our view, ‘legal’ ownership of the means of production is not capital unless accompanied by ‘real’ ownership. Contrary to some views it is meaningless to distinguish between owning either MP, or LP, since the CMP presupposes C (LP+MP) = P. We do not, there­fore propose to attempt to quantify the extent to which an individual may be exposed to ‘contradictory’ positions with respect to capital or wage-labour (Wright, Class, Steven, Class). Nor are we concerned at this stage with the reproduction of social relations, or with any imputation of class ‘interests’. We wish to establish first the links between the interlocking circuit model of accumulation, and the formation of a class structure.<br /><br />From our analysis it follows that two classes produce surplus-value (s) in N. Z. They are:<br /><br /><strong>(1) The working' peasant smallholder</strong> (together with-other residual petty capitalist elements of little importance) which we shall discuss below.<br /><br /><strong>(2) The Productive Working-Class</strong> (PWC) , in all branches of production and both private and public sectors. Productive labour is defined by Marx as the production of surplus-value (s) in commodity form, “The worker who performs productive work is productive and the work he (sic) performs is productive if it directly creates surplus-value” (<em>Capital,</em> Vol. I, 1039). This is an important point because it is the exploitation of this PWC that sets the limits to the production and distribution of surplus-value (cf. Wright, <em>Class</em>). All other classes, and fractions of classes, do not by definition prod­uce s , but they are nonetheless engaged in its realisation, its circ­ulation, its accumulation and its consumption. Arising out of the total circuit of capital therefore, it is possible to determine the form in which the social relation, wage-labour and capital, expresses itself in the contemporary N.Z. class structure. (See diagram below).<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg21.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 410px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 360px" height="320" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg21.jpg" width="366" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><br /><strong></strong><strong></strong><br /><strong>1. The Working Class<br /></strong><br /><strong>(a) Productive workers:</strong> Beginning at the point of production of s in commodity form in all branches of production we have the PWC. Though Marx speaks of ‘direct’ creation of surplus-value it is clear from the context that he includes both mental and manual labour, the “manager, engineer, technologist, the overseer, the manual labourer and the drudge etc” (<em>Capital</em> Vol. I, 1040). The PWC in N.Z. therefore includes not only all those defined as production workers in all industry divisions, but scientists, technicians, graphic artists etc who design and build commodities for the production of other commodities or the consumption of the working-class. See graphic (22) below for an estimate of the total numbers and size of the PWC. Since it is the PWC alone which produces s in the form of commodity capital, C', it is the rate of exploitation of this class of ‘living labour’ which absolutely determines the limits to total s production (excluding the PFM). But while the PWC produces C' it is only one part of the total proletariat (defined as being dis­possessed of capital) which functions to circulate capital through its various moments of the circuit, all of whom can be defined as reprod­uctive workers. They include (following the movement of surplus-value through the circuit):<br /><br /><strong>(b) Realisation Workers:</strong> all those wage and salary earners engaged in sales (wholesale and retail), advertising, promotion etc, who funct­ion to convert C' into M'. This function is performed by employees of capital, public servants on behalf of private capital (e.g. Department of 'Trade and Industry), and public employees on behalf of state enterprises that produce commodities (Gas, Coal etc). They comprise all sales workers (with the exception of those selling financial, business and community etc services) (See Graphic 22. )<br /><br /><strong>(c) Circulation Workers:</strong> all those wage and salary earners who are concerned with the circulation of M' as money capital and its convers­ion into productive capital (exchange for MP and LP) in new productive circuits. They include all forms of commercial workers, banking, finance and administration, both in the private and public sectors. Private sector circulation workers are usually engaged in some aspect of the credit system, advancing M' to finance production or consumption. State circulation workers are those involved in all forms of administration of the public revenue, that is the transfer of s (taxes) from gross wages and salaries, and profits, into all types of productive consump­tion as capital: first, in the state's own productive enterprises, and second, all kinds of subsidies to the private sector's productive branches. The estimated composition of the circulation working-class consists of the total employed in the major Industry Division, ‘Finance/­Business' (less production, sales and service workers) together with clerical and related workers, and professional, technical, managerial etc workers involved in circulation in all of the ‘production’ and ‘realisation’ (sales) industry divisions. ( See Graphic 22)<br /><br /><strong>(d) Service Workers:</strong> Those wage and salary earners who exchange services for wages and salaries of the working-class, or who as state employees staff and operate the social services (health, education etc) thereby contributing to the value of labour-power. This group includes all the major division ‘Community-Services’ etc, together with service workers in the production and realisation divisions.( See Graphic 22)<br /><br /><strong>(e) Domestic Workers:</strong> This Category of worker is usually ignored by bourgeois economists and placed outside the work1ng-class by Marxists on the grounds that the labour performed is not exchanged for variable capital and is therefore not productive, nor is it exchang­ed for wages or revenue. It is regarded as a form of “privatised, unpaid, toil” (Adamson, et. al. <em>Women’s</em>).Yet while domestic work is no more productive of s than is realisation, circulation or service work, it nevertheless contributes to the value of labour-power by performing unpaid surplus-labour and reproducing labour-power below its real value. In many cases domestic labour is done by single men and women, and married women, who also perform wage-labour (in N.Z. 50% of women working for wages are married). It follows that there is no strictly separate cate­gory of ‘domestic workers’, though it is usually identified as consist­ing of married women not otherwise working. In our view domestic labour is clearly a case of reproductive labour since it performs the very important function of reproducing the productive and reproductive working-class without which capitalist production would be impossible. The residual category of ‘domestic workers’ should therefore be added to the other categories of reproductive workers in determining the size and composition of the total working-class. ( See Graphic 22.)<br /><br /><strong>(f) The Industrial Reserve Army:</strong> Since there are always some indiv­iduals(dispossessed of capital) who are unemployed, and the function of the reserve army is to facilitate the production of s through the incr­eased rate of exploitation of all other wage-workers, the unemployed are also reproductive workers (albeit not currently employed). The reserve army, together with the actively employed categories of wage-labour and domestic labour comprise the total working-class.<br /><br />In the following table we present some estimates of the total working-class relative to capital, and of the relative size of the various sections of productive and reproductive workers comprising the working-class. Because of the limitations of the data, they are no more than rough approximations of the numbers involved in 1971.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg22.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 409px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 114px" height="114" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg22.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Our method of making these estimates was to cross-classify workers according to the major occupational group i.e. type of work - production, service, sales etc. and the major industry division. We classified the industry divisions into production (Agriculture etc; Mining etc; Manu­facturing etc; Electricity etc; Construction and Transport etc) and into reproduction (Wholesale etc; Finance etc; and Community etc).<br /><br />The logic of capital accumulation with increasing concentration and productivity, is to expel ‘living labour’ from production into either the reproductive working-class or unemployment. For example the relative decline in productive workers to reproductive workers is evi­dent in the following:<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg23.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 412px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 93px" height="64" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg23.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Similarly, the petty bourgeoisie (those who possess some means of production but do not employ wage-labour) are being progressively squeezed out of existence into the proletariat, even in agriculture where the PFM still accounts for some 65,000 working farmers. For example, in the dairy industry:<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg24.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 409px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 102px" height="68" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg24.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />It would appear therefore that the familiar polarisation of the two main classes in the CMP is taking place in the N.Z. social formation with the working-class now comprising about 90% of the active working population, and the capitalist class about 10%.<br />(Note: It should be emphasised that the identification of the working-class at the level of production relations deliberately excludes the fashionable concept of the ‘function of capital’ which is adopted by Wright and others to introduce a conflict of interest between certain categories of wage-labour who whilst performing wage-labour are ‘possessing’ or ‘controlling’ labour on behalf of capital. Whilst it is true that these categories of labour are often higher paid and may not perform surplus-labour this in our view introduces a conflict at the level of distribution of incomes and not production. This, of course, is not to deny the importance of these distributional conflicts along with other ideological and political differences that separate the immediate interests of various categories of wage-labour. The basic point however, is that the difference between these categories is not one given in the relations of production, those who have some function in supervising labour, are not owners of capital in the sense of controlling both means of production and labour process, so whatever differences exist between the immediate interests of the various categories of wage-labour - productive/unproductive, private sector/state, supervisory/non-supervisory etc. – are not conflicts between wage-labour and capital, but conflicts within wage-labour introduced by capital.)<br /><br /><br /><strong>2. The Ruling Class</strong><br /><br />From what has been said before, the ruling class, which defines the contemporary pattern of control of N.Z. capitalism, will be found to comprise certain definite elements. First, due to the absence of either any established industrial bourgeoisie, or an important landed aristoc­racy, their place taken be elements reflect­ing the actual historical process of accumulation in N.Z. Given the ‘facts’ as outlined above, it is not surprising therefore to find the following four major groups represented in the N.Z. ruling class.<br /><br /><strong>a.The old merchant families.<br /></strong><br /><strong>b. The modern ­finance capitalist</strong> (the modem successor to the early comprador).<br /><br /><strong>c. The ‘new professionals’</strong> - lawyers, accountants etc, together with 4.<br /><br /><strong>d. The splattering of ‘ self-made men’</strong> of various descriptions. In terms of numbers of individuals, the group is small (about 100) but they can be defined as the ruling class because they control (actually own) the MP and LP that is brought together in capitalist production in the N.Z. social formation. (N.Z. Herald, <em>Top 100</em>) '!he function of these groups is to integrate, co-ordinate and control, through the various directorships they hold, all the most important industrial and finance companies in N.Z. (NZH, <em>Top 100</em>, Jesson, <em>Family</em>). The technocrats (group 3) are increasingly important in mediating in relations between capital and the state (taxation, inflation accounting, ‘planning’ etc). The ‘pure’ directors on the other hand represent the interests of both foreign and local capital (foreign shareholding amounted to approx. 20% of the total in N.Z. in the '60s but the true degree of foreign control cannot be properly assessed in these terms (see Deane, <em>Economic</em>).<br /><br />In terms of ‘legal’ ownership of course the ruling class is [still] a minority. This is a consequence of the extensive amount of ‘socialised’ legal ownership of capital in N.Z. both in the form of state shareholding and the ‘pygmy-property’ of thousands of private individuals. But share­holding is as a legal concept, not part of the relations of production. It is the latter which the ruling class controls through their control of management which determines all key decisions affecting the allocation of capital. The separation of the work of management from the owner­ship of capital as different functions, which is illustrated in the following example, was fully analysed by Marx 100 years before its ‘discovery’ by Galbraith under the now renowned phrase ‘the separation of ownership from control’ (<em>Capital </em>Vol. Ill, 388). (cf. Burnham, <em>The Managerial Revolution</em>)<br /><br />The way in which the ruling class operates at the level of the economic base and in particular how they dominate the relations of production by determining the distribution of the realised surplus-value, may be illustrated by a concrete example. In the period following the 1975 downturn in market conditions, more and more apparent has been the alloc­ation to management of surplus-value in the form of higher salaries, Mercedes-Benz cars, petrol, housing and other allowances. These deduct­ions are made, not at the expense of the workers, as workers, but at the expense of the pygmy-shareholders (who may of course be workers) whose rates of dividend on their shares consequently fell in 1976 and 1977. Many dividends were declared at low levels, in accordance with a policy of dividend control to discourage the ‘excessive wage claims’ of workers. But in fact, what was occurring as the result of falling prof­its, was a redistribution of the surplus-value in favour of the manag­erial group within the ruling class, who received an average or above average rate of profit on their capital, since their dividends were augmented by payments disguised in other forms. The absurdity of taking a legalistic view of production relations is fully illustrated by this example. Legal relations are part of the superstructure. Relations of production determine the allocation of the surplus-value to those legally entitled.<br /><br />In sum, therefore, the function of the ruling class is two-fold. First, they determine the distribution of surplus-value between the various capitalist and other class fractions within the limits imposed on the reproduction of capitalist social relations due to the contrad­ictions within the CMP (see next section). Second, a point not stressed above, they manage the articulation of N.Z. peripheral capitalism into the international capitalist system. This function brings with it various conflicts which cannot be properly treated here, but which re­quire serious study. Finally, the social composition of the ruling class reflects the historical process of accumulation in N. Z.<br /><br /><br /><strong>3.7 The ‘Welfare State’ and Reproduction<br /></strong><br />In the preceding sections we have shown how the state played a decisive role in establishing the CMP in the N.Z. social formation by means of its political-legal and economic functions. As a result, capitalist social relations were established in agriculture, and in domestic manufacturing, developing into class struggles between peas­ants and compradors (see 3.4) and between wage-labour and industrial capitalist classes. In this section we show how the semi-colonial state has functioned to reproduce these social relations at the level of political and ideological relations allowing the full development of the CMP within the N.Z. social formation.<br /><br />Up until the establishment of the industrial circuit in N.Z. the semi-colonial state functioned largely as a sub-imperial outpost of the imperial state. It drew heavily on the imperial state's polit­ical-legal and ideological apparatuses (the imperial army, the West­minster system, statute law etc) which it adapted to the transplanted social institutions in education, trades unions, religion and family relations. However, as we have noted, the local state assumed a much more dominant role in establishing the CMP in N. Z. than had the cap­italist states in the historical transition to the CMP in Europe, and it also responded to the growing threat of class struggle arising out of the Long Depression by rapidly transforming its apparatuses, that is introducing ‘state experiments’ to regulate work hours and conditions and provide basic social security measures. The local state therefore assumed a central dominant role in reproducing the CMP in the semi-­colonial setting, fusing its accumulation, political-legal and ideol­ogical functions in the form of the ‘welfare state’ (Poulantzas, <em>Classes,</em> Intro) .<br /><br />It is clear that the serious challenge to the reproduction of capitalist social relations posed by the rise of union militancy, forced the ruling class to rely much more heavily on the state's reproductive functions in maintaining social unity and cohesion. But while the state's role was to moderate class struggle and to shift the basis of accumulation from absolute surplus-value to relat­ive surplus-value (i.e. actively reproducing skilled labour-power by means of the state provision of health, education and welfare) it was presented at the level of popular ideology as ‘state socialism’ . The state was conceived to be a ‘neutral’ institution standing above class interests and capable of reconciling these interests in the general interest expressed in terms of the dominant ideology of nation­alism. By using the state to reconcile class interests at the level of ideology the ruling class was able to reproduce the conditions for extended accumulation. In so doing, it was in turn able to finance the rising living standards and social services of the working-class and continue state subsidies to capitalist production by means of the rising productivity of labour-power. And rapid accumulation, in its turn, worked to legitimate the state’s appearance as the ‘peoples’ state’. Thus, if the working-class benefitted from higher wages, better cond­itions, social security etc. it was not because it had won a victory against the capitalist class, but because it had provided these ‘benefits’ out of its own surplus-labour (Bedggood, <em>Class</em>).<br /><br />The post World War II development of the welfare state has extended its functions in reproducing the CMP and maintaining the unity of the social formation. The use of Keynesian economic policies such as full employment, income maintenance and social security, togeth­er with the reproduction of skilled labour-power, sustained the post-war accumulation boom. This had the effect at the level of ideology of legitimating the state’s capitalist role under the slogans of economic growth and per. capita. prosperity. But clearly the state can only manage to appear as the benign ‘people’ state’ so long as its functions do not require any drastic reduction in the living standards of the working-class. So long as it can perform its accumulation functions of reproducing skilled labour-power through the provision of equal opport­unity in education, health, housing etc. without raising taxes or cutt­ing wages, these functions will appear to be in the ‘interests’ of the working-class. Indeed, they will serve to reproduce capitalist social relations at the level of individual achievement motivation.<br /><br />(Note: Most writers (e.g. Yaffe) assume that state intervention in the economy is a drain on the surplus-value going to the capitalist class thereby lowering the average rate of profit. The position taken in this paper is that this conclusion follows from a static analysis which does not take into account (a) the surplus-generating functions of the state which must offset to some extent the so-called ‘drain’ by creating new surplus-value, and (b) the fact that the state extracts surplus-value from the working class (which would not otherwise have gone to the capitalist) in the form of taxation. Thus over the post-war period increased productivity has created more value, but the state has actively intervened in the class struggle for shares of the newly created value by extracting a portion that would have entered into the historical component of the value of labour-power, and cunningly redistributed it to capital. Thus the ideology of the welfare state is the reverse of the reality. (Bedggood, <em>State,</em> cf. Wright, <em>Class,</em> <em>Crisis and the State</em>)<br /><br />More recently, however, the costs of maintaining the levels of social welfare spending to sustain the illusion of equal opportunity in education, health and so on, has put a strain on the state's fiscal resources, leading to the general situation of cuts in state spending, increased taxation, and the redistribution of state revenue from less productive to more productive branches such as export manufacturing. The basic contradiction between the relations and forces of production which has been suppressed during much of the semi-colony's history by the intervention of the state now threatens to dissolve the unity of the state's reproductive functions. Now that the rate of accumulation has slowed down, the state's efforts in sustaining accumulation require it to redistribute surplus-value from the working-class to the capitalist class. As it takes the offensive against the working-class it sheds its appearance as the ‘welfare’ state and for the first time faces a serious challenge to its ability to suppress class struggle and main­tain social cohesion in the N.Z. social formation.<br /><br />------------------------------------------------Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1143681590762389732006-03-29T16:33:00.000-08:002006-04-05T22:03:53.203-07:00Development of Capitalism in NZ : Part 2<span style="font-size:130%;">2</span><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">.0 The Materialist Framework<br /><br /></span><br />2.1 The Circuit of Industrial Capital.<br /><br /></strong><br />We begin by outlining the basic mechanisms of the circulation process. The economic base, or real foundation, comprises the twin elements of relations and forces of production. The former repres­ents the social circumstances which relate individuals to each other with regard to the production and appropriation of surplus-value ; the latter represents the rode of economic or material life and organis­ation, the level of technology, nature, human qualities, etc., with which the relations of production must operate. Any advanced capital­ist society is one whose economic base, by definition, has experienced considerable accumulation and division-of-labour.<br /><br />To analyse such accumulation, we use the circuit model which brings out the important distinctions between forces and relations, between production and distribution/exchange, and between the product­ion process and circulation process. This is one of Marx's most brilliant simplifications - the basic idea of the circuit is one of reproduction, not production. It is used to analyse a situation where start becomes finish to start again on an expanded scale (Le. as it is across the entire Monetary base of the (Mp). Hence, the capitalist advances fixed and circulating ("working") capital to purchase means of" production and the labour-power of the working class to start the circuit. He receives at the end an expanded mass of money capital, now including his net profit which he (or his bank) could temporarily hoard or immediately reintroduce into the next turnover cycle. Capital in changing its form over the cycle cannot be given any unambiguous (algebraic) definition; capital in Marx's sense must always be related to the reproduction of the underlying capitalist relations of production, wage-labour and capital, as they relate to the turnover circuit. "Capital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various moments it is always capital" (<em>Grundrisse,</em> 258, also 221-370 for Marx's definition of capital).<br /><br />Within the CMP, the circuit of reproduction assumes the form: M - C - M'. Fully expanded this becomes ­:<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg1.1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 428px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 97px" height="60" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg1.1.jpg" width="428" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />where M is money capital, C is commodity, i.e. marketed production, Lp is labour-power (also a commodity), Mp is means of production, and P is productive capital. The primed values represent in general greater magnitudes than the unprimed ones and also later historical stages of a circuit or part of a later circuit. M’ – M = m’ or gross profit (see Macrae, <em>The Neglect</em>).<br /><br />As expressed, this circuit represents the essentials of the underlying relations of production: labour-power as a commodity exchanged for M and organised with means of production by an indust­rial capitalist. It may also be used to assess the level of development of the productive forces since these will be reflected in the speed (time) of the turnover of capital i.e. the time elapsing between M and M'. We see, also the roles played in this process by a) the speed­ing up of the production process - continuous shift work, electronic technology with instant calculations, better product flow and b) the speeding-up of the circulation process - use of marketing, advert­ising, hire purchase agreements etc. to telescope the time of circul­ation. All these agents contribute therefore to the more efficient reproduction of capital (see discussion of productive and unproductive labour in 3.6 below).<br /><br /><br /><strong>2.2 Extensions and Generalisations<br /></strong><br />The above circuit (1) may be extended to assist in understanding certain key parameters of the system, for example the rate of profit – “The motive power of capitalist production” (Marx, <em>Capital</em>, Vol. III, 259). We shall also generalise it to account for interlocking circuits, both within social formations, and between them (internationalisation, Sect. 2.5) something of fundamental importance for our subsequent analysis of the N.Z. social formation.<br /><br />According to Marx, it is during the production process (or during the production phase of the circuit indicated by the series of dots in (1) above) the surplus-value is created, although it does not take on a monetary form until it has been realised as part of gross sales revenue or M'. It is in the form of monetary profit that surplus-value therefore makes its appearance in the CMP. Accepting the formal identity between the mass of surplus-value and the mass of profit as Marx defines it, the annual rate of profit is defined as r (A).<br /><br />(Note: this important distinction must be made more strongly in this current era of costing of “profits” for reasons of tax evasion, thus reducing the significance of ‘declared profits’ as a measure of r (A))<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg2.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 437px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 93px" height="48" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg2.jpg" width="437" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />The rate is a relation between a flow magnitude and a stock magnitude. It represents the gross return over total capital advanced by the cap­italist, over a particular period of time, that period thereby giving the rate its time dimension. From (2) it follows that r (A) is directly related to the mass of the surplus-value created, and this in turn, is a function of several variables, the most important being:<br /><br /><br />(a) The rate of surplus-value - itself a function of the level of development of the productive forces<br /><br />(b) The number and quality of productive workers employed<br /><br />(c) The number of effective 'turnovers' of production that can be completed in a year which in its turn is dependent on a range of factors e.g. levels of demand, sales, administrative efficiency, state intervention, together with the development of the credit system, all of which speed-up the circulation process; and factors such as mechanisation, rationalisation etc. which speed-up the production process itself.<br /><br />Our analysis has pointed to the functions of sales agents, credit terns, managerial education and so on in speeding-up turnover. These items may be added to Marx's general list of counter-tendencies operating to overcome the falling rate of profit (<em>Capital</em>, Vol. Ill, 232-240). They all act ultimately on the rate of turnover and hence, the rate of profit, either by helping to economize the amount of capital to be advanced, or by spreading fixed expenses over more production runs. Distinguishing fixed from circulating capital is also important for questions of pricing, employment and distribution (Macrae, <em>The Neglect</em>).<br /><br />(Note: It is important to know how our analysis of reproduction is distinct from most existing Marxist analyses which stress a static approach to the economic base. Such approaches are dominated by questions such as “who gets more or less surplus-value”, or “what groups represent ‘drains’ on surplus-value” often leading to a discussion at the level of distribution rather than one based on a dynamic value analysis.)<br /><br />Using the circuit model is it possible to get from an express­ion of an annual rate of profit (2), to a general rate of profit for any given social formation? Such a vexed question involves a consider­ation of the total social capital as composed of individual capitals with individual rates of profit, each circuit interlocking with others to reproduce the total social capital. Now a circuit of capital can interlock with another in a number of different ways, depending on the particular form which it takes on. One of the most important interlocks is that between the circuit of finance capital, put at the disposal of industrialists; this is the classical context of the discussion of imperialism (See 2.6 below).<br /><br />According to Marx's analysis in <em>Capital</em> Vol. III, the general rate of profit is formed by re-allocating total surplus-value across departments so as to equalise the rate of profit (as defined in (2) above) in each. But, if we view surplus-value as a flow deriving from the continuous movement of production, as in the circuit model, we cannot undertake any transformation as per Vol. III unless we assure a particular hist­orical structure and phasing of interlocking circuits. If surplus-value is an irregular flow, it is not a stock that can be parcelled out into its ‘aliquot’ parts. Consequently it is doubtful whether any meaningful general rate of profit can be measured for a given social formation.<br /><br /><br /><strong>2.3 Money and Credit<br /></strong><br />Use of the interlocking circuit model clearly presupposes an advanced use of money in various forms. Money is the universal medium of exchange by which the circuits can be renewed. In this context money plays the role of a means of commodity circulation, although the Marxist theory of money encompasses other vital functions as well - in particular a measure of value and as an object of specific demand it­self, even when it takes the form of inconvertible paper (De Brunhoff, p. xv). Indeed, the acceptance of money as a medium of circulation pre­supposes its establishment as the measure of value. It would seem, however, that with the development of the credit system, the function of money as a means of circulation declines relative to that as a unit of account, or measure of value, or obligation of debtor to creditor; here lies a major reason for recurring monetary crises, namely the 'liquidity crises' that occur when debts falling due cannot be met. While in normal times, the credit mechanism works to cover such gaps and enables the entire interlocking system to continue, at times of crisis this breaks down, loans are recalled, disruptions of production occur, and so on.<br /><br />We can see then that there are fundamental interconnections between the credit system and the various interlocking production circuits. In some cases, the only interlock between branches of prod­uction may be, not by the exchange of commodities, but through the credit system itself, recycling ‘fallow’ capital from one otherwise independent branch to another. In this respect we see that the main functions of bank credit may be summarised as follows:<br /><br />(a) Economising the absolute amount of capital to be advanced by the industrial capitalist, at the expense of course of interest pay­ments drawn from the mass of surplus-value the industrial capitalist receives - i.e. a deduction from his gross profit.<br /><br />(b) Speeding-up turnover by substituting for an inability to pay (commercial bills etc) and boosting low levels of purchasing power (hire purchase etc).<br /><br />(c) Transferring balances of firms and individuals of one branch to make than work in other branches of production affecting (a) and (b) above, and raising the share of interest in surplus-value. These transfers of M raise the velocity of the circulation of money and thereby the possibility of an increase in the rate of accumulation. This is because the increased velocity of the circulation of money facilitated by the credit system is of itself insufficient to increase the rate of accumulation. It presupposes conditions such as the willing­ness of capitalists to invest, stocks of commodities, balance of pay­ments etc. It may stimulate rapid inflation and contradict the basic aim of increasing capital accumulation, a point we take up below.<br /><br />The importance of these credit functions in relation to the rate of profit has been shown by recent research. In their study of the declining profitability of advanced industrial capitalism, 1955­-1975, Loiseau et. al. are struck by the very rapid growth in indebted­ness of industrial firms to the banks over this period. The authors regard this important trend as both a countertendency to falling rates of profit, as well as a warning of the impossibility of repeated recourse to borrowing of this nature (from the credit system) to over­come the long- term tendency of continued decline in profitability .<br /><br />Money itself has no price, rather a rate of exchange which ties money to socially necessary labour time, thereby expressing the function of money as a measure of value (De Brunhoff, 27). Inflation results in the depreciation of this rate of exchange between money and value. This is immediately reflected at the level of distribution as the depreciation of the holdings of money creditors, who are now repaid the equivalent of less value than they had originally advanced (depending of course on the exact terms of interest and repayment) and favours debtors who must pay a lesser equivalent in terms of value. Whilst much capital that exists today is fictitious capital (i.e. capital which does not enter directly into the productive circuit and therefore plays no direct part in the augmenting of capital, but which nonetheless exists in the form of a monetary claim on total surplus-value, e. g. interest on the national debt (Marx, <em>Capital,</em> Vol. Ill, 465), this mass of fictitious capital is clearly increasing with inflation and its growing claim on total surplus-value is not fictitious. There comes a stage therefore, when monetary phenomena (inflation, balance of payments, interest and exchange rates etc.) will hinder the reproduction process. Whenever monetary phenomena, in the guise of the credit system, interpenetrate the reproduction circuit, as they do to such an overwhelming extent in contemporary capitalism, the potential for crisis is so much more greatly increased. And as the state is drawn into the management of reproduction, any measures affecting money, such as credit policy, expenditures or other policies adopted by governments, because they affect the "universal medium", must therefore percolate throughout the entire system.<br /><br /><br /><strong>2.4 The State and Reproduction<br /></strong><br />The capitalist state functions to reproduce the CMP at three levels - <em>the political/legal, the ideological and the economic.<br /></em><br /><br />(a) <em>Political/Legal</em>. By this we mean the establishment by force of capitalist social relations - the separation of the direct producers from the means of subsistence and production, both in Europe, and the lands subsequently penetrated by the CMP. This function therefore is historically prior to the establishment of the CMP and its internation­alisation (See Marx on "Primitive Accumulation" <em>Capital</em>, V. I 667-724), but remains a necessary condition of reproduction of total social capital on a world scale today as imperialism (2.6 below). The legal aspect of the states function is to legitimate the possession of private property, i.e. the conversion of means of production into alienable commodities including that of labour-power (e. g. the laws governing maximum wages and restricting strike action etc). This function of the state corresponds most directly to the bourgeois view of the state as an institution which has a monopoly of the use of force. Althusser refers to this area of state activity which contains the “Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons etc” as the Repressive State Apparatus (<em>Lenin</em>, 136).<br /><br /><br />(b) <em>Ideological.</em> This function of the state is concerned with the reproduction of capitalist ideology. It extends the commodity fetishism of the marketplace into the realm of politics and culture by means of the Ideological State Apparatuses -educational, family, legal, polit­ical (including parties), trade-unions, communications, the arts etc. (<em>Lenin,</em> 137). The reproduction of ideology is basic to the reproduction of capitalist social relations since it constitutes bourgeois' subjects'- i.e. character structure of bourgeois individuals. Political, Legal and Ideological functions combine to give us the ‘form’ or ‘appearance’ of the capitalist state including Social Democracy and fascism. The particular combination of any given form reflects the ‘relative autonomy’ of the state in performing its basic economic function (Bedggood, <em>The Limits</em>, cf. Poulantzas, <em>Classes</em>, 17-35).<br /><br />(c) <em>Economic.</em> This function presupposes some combination of (a) and (b), i. e. some balance of force and ideology, in establishing the condit­ions of production. At this level the state intervenes in the circuit of capital to operate countertendencies to the falling rate of profit and to reproduce both national and international capital (see 2.5) These inter­ventions can be understood in terms of the points at which they affect the circuit of industrial capital as expressed in (1) above.<br /><br /><strong>M - Mp</strong> - The state advances capital in the form of an infrastructure (public works, railways, ports etc), or in the form of loo interest loans or outright grants. Thus the absolute amount of capital advanced by capitalists is reduced and the organic composition of capital held down, both counteracting the falling rate of profit.<br /><br /><strong>M – Lp</strong> - This is a state subsidy which cheapens the reproduction costs of labour-power to the capitalist. It takes the form of a subsidy on wage-goods (food, mortgages, state rentals, public transport etc) or wage-transfers (the provision of health, education and social services). The ‘cheapening’ of these elements in the value of labour-power is paid for by means of tax revenue drawn ultimately from surplus-value but immediately from wage and salary earners, transferring this cost from the capitalist via the state to the working-class.<br /><br /><strong>P . . . C'</strong> - As well as subsidies to productive capital, the state intervenes in the production process itself. Intervention in the private circuit consists largely in the applications of research and develop­ment to increasing productivity and in speeding up the production proc­ess itself. Since competition generates a drive to improve productivity, state involvement in subsidising the advancement of technology becomes increasingly important. Direct intervention in production takes the form of the nationalisation of particular branches which require except­ionally large capital outlays (energy, transport etc) or which are too risky or unprofitable. In this way the state subsidises the losses involved in high-risk or low profit areas, allowing the goods and serv­ices produced to enter into the circuit of capital at less than 'economic' prices. In so doing it makes possible the concentration and centralisation of capital at rising levels of organic composition, developing the forces of production and intensifying the contradiction between private ownership of the means of production and the increasing socialisation of the forces of production.<br /><br />An important area of state intervention in the circuit is between M' at the end of one turnover and the re-investment of M' as C' at the beginning of another. This concerns the state's policies in facilitating the mass of productive capital and the speed with which it circulates, since productive capital alone (combined with Lp and Mp) makes the production of surplus-value possible. Of course the purpose of all forms of state intervention is to counteract the falling rate of profit and by doing so, to make the re-investment of M' more attractive to the capitalist than consumption, hoarding or speculation. Nonetheless, to the extent it can influence the decisions of capitalists or their agents concerning the use of M', the state plays an important role in the reproduction of capital. The main instruments it uses to control the direction and speed of ‘capital formation’ are those which help to reduce the cost of credit. However, since the operations of the government itself affect this cost by influencing the amount of credit available and the amount demanded, then the analysis of state inter­vention at this point in the circuit is tied up with the circumstances of overall fiscal policy as reflected in the state budget.<br /><br />By means of various institutional arrangements, the state establishes a mechanism of continual credit creation and credit rotation which can be altered to suit the particular needs of capital. Since the state bank has the power to create credit, it can theoretically create unlimited credit to cheapen its cost and encourage the efficient re-investment of M'. In practice however, it cannot do so beyond certain limits without causing hyperinflation and with it that consequence it seeks to avert, namely an investors' strike. It has therefore to rely upon a policy of combining some credit creation together with the rotation and control of credit within the private sector, referred to commonly as the ‘stop-go’ counter-cyclical policy.<br /><br />The credit policy of the state's bank has therefore two major goals:<br />i) to manage the state's own credit needs, and ii), to provide for the credit needs of the business sector in general. For instance, directives to the trading banks to hold more government stock would be made if the state's budget was in heavy deficit, whilst the private sector has a surplus of M'. Selling government securities would have the same impact in principle, raising the cost of credit (the rate of interest) by reducing the supply available to the business sector. The reverse would be the case following a policy of deliberate expansion of the supply of credit. In general, the state's credit policies work to flatten the business cycle by means of its counter-­cyclical ‘stop-go’ controls. It will also attempt to prevent the non-productive use of M' in hoarding or speculation as prices and interest rates rise by means of selective incentives. The logical development of such policy is of course for the state to assert increasingly tight control over capital formation to ensure its recirculation as productive capital. In doing so however, it cannot escape the limits of the credit system as a means of overcoming the rise of inflation, the depreciation of commodity prices, and finally, crisis (Bullock and Yaffe, <em>Inflation,</em> 26).<br /><br />In concluding this section it should be stressed that while the state’s economic interventions are designed to arrest the falling rate of profit in the short term, this merely transfers the tendency from the market onto the state itself in the form of ‘fiscal crisis’. That is to say, the increased costs of subsidising capital become steadily less productive of total surplus-value. The state runs up mounting expenditures wyich tend to outrun its ability to increase its sources of revenue. And as this deficit cannot be met simply by ‘printing money’ beyond a certain point without fuelling inflation, or by increasing taxation of surplus-value going to the capitalist in the form of profit, rent or interest, it must be raised by increasing the rate of taxation of both the productive and unproductive working class. This puts the state in the position of having to expose its functions on behalf of the capitalist class as it becomes difficult to reconcile its attack on workers living standards with a ‘neutral’ non-class ideological status (Bedggood, State Capitalism). The result is that class struggle within the state apparatuses becomes generalised across economic, political and ideological levels, placing limits upon the states ability to resolve the basic contrad­ictions short of the social expropriation of the means of production.<br /><br /><br /><strong>2.5 Internationalisation</strong><br /><br />So far we have considered the process of reproduction in abstract terms without reference to particular social formations. In this section we propose to relate reproduction specifically to the internationalisation of capital. As we have pointed out, the development of capitalism in New Zealand is, by definition, related to the development of the CMP on a world scale and can only be properly conceived at that level. What we shall do here is to apply the interlocking circuit approach to the problem of internationalisation as it affects the development of capitalism in New Zealand. In the light of this discussion we shall then examine the applicability of the traditional theories of imperialism to this problem.<br /><br />We start with the circuit of an industrial capital (M1) which can be schematised (after (1) above) as follows:<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg3.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 431px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 106px" height="71" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg3.jpg" width="431" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In this example, industrial capital in branch 1 takes on at least three different forms at various phases (Marx, <em>Capital,</em> Vol 11 (chaps 1-3l Palloix, <em>Self Expansion</em>, 19) namely<br /><br />1. a commodity capital circuit C1- M'1 – C'1<br /><br />2. a productive capital circuit P1 – M'1 - P'1<br /><br />3. a money capital circuit M' – C'1 - M'1<br /><br />Each of these has to be reproduced in order for self-expansion to occur. In addition various other framents of capital are required at particular stages. These are:<br /><br />· merchant capital to realise linkages marked -<br /><br />· bank capital to achieve adequate levels of M<br /><br />· realisation capital to facilitate the entire circuit by promotional advertising etc of commodities for sale.<br /><br />Note that we have surrounded the whole process by a bracket to indicate that the entire interlocking process bakes place within a given social formation designated by [A]. Now we proceed to extend this to an international context by distinguishing different ‘brackets’ i.e. distinguishing the different (geographical) locations or sites of various components of the whole self-expansion process.<br /><br />As Palloix puts it:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">The process of internationalisation in relation to the self-expansion of capital does not refer simply to the extension of the process of self-expansion beyond national boundaries . . .The internationalisation process is not a reality external to capital, a reflection, a result, (a spatial overflowing, an intersecting of foreign capitals) . . .(it) is a result of the world-wide universality of the CMP . . .internationalisation manifests itself both as an expression of: the national division (into social formations); the universality of the CMP (the generalisation of wage-labour); and the law of uneven development. It takes this form in order to assure the continual increase of the rate of surplus-value on the basis of the fusion of M-Lp and M- Mp within the process of production. The internationalisation of capital and the working of the national economy are not antagonistic, not two alternative realities, but are two phenomena which constantly mirror each other, amplifying each other in their historic development because they are both shaped and moulded by capital (ibid: 23)<br /></span><br />We define internationalisation here as the process of ‘unification’ of different social formations by means of capital in its various forms and fragments for the purpose of its own self-expansion. Given the various forms and fragments of capital mentioned above, the patterns of internationalisation as it affects different social formations will be extremely variable. The best know cases would be:<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg4.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 456px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 71px" height="51" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg4.jpg" width="456" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg56.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 448px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 161px" height="108" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg56.jpg" width="441" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In addition to industrial capital, merchant and bank capital will be involved in the process. The ‘hegemonic’ industrial capital circuit M-C-M will absorb these fractions in its movement. Thus local capital will normally be used to provide commodities auxiliary to the main production process, financial services, or wage-goods to workers employed by foreign capital. Rarely does the dominated social formation provide large amounts of capital in the form of instrument of labour embodying advanced technology (machinery, electronics etc), this being reserved for sale by other branches of capital at the centre. A typical interlock with the local social formation is the absorption of national money capital for advance to the industrial circuit, and it is in this that local finance capital plays a key role. These are some of the mechanisms by which' hegemonic' capital self-expands through the uneven development of the social formations drawn into the internation­alisation process.<br /><br />Having stated the problem in its most abstract and generalised way, we now proceed to its application to the New Zealand formation. In the first place, since the CMP came up against a pre-capitalist and non­monetised mode the form of Maori society, the existing formation had to 'adapt' to the needs of capital. This had to involve the introduct­ion of money forms by means of the attraction of native labour into construction work, and the dispossession of the land - in short the under­mining of the system of production for use-value in Maori society with production for exchange with the CMP. The most significant form of commodity exchange implanted in N.Z. was that of the white-settler production of commodities indirectly related to the circuit of indus­trial capitalism. By this we mean the production of wage-goods for reproducing labour-power in Britain, which in its turn was then directly involved in the production of surplus-value in Britain. There would not be, for some time, a locally established branch of production into which British industrial capital could interlock. The other side of the semi-colonial commodity production was therefore the requirement for money, for capital, mainly freed-up rentier capital from the U.K. which could be used to establish the conditions enabling the new colony to play a role in the international division-of-labour. Schematically we may describe these interlocks as follows. In this diagram [A] is the U.K. and [B] is New Zealand.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg7jpg.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 457px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 188px" height="137" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg7jpg.jpg" width="457" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />We have distinguished here between capital advanced by the enterprise (M11 or M21) in each social formation, and that advanced by agents, namely the rentier in the U.K. (M12) and indirectly, via the state, In New Zealand (M22). We ignore the private rentier capital invested in New Zealand and the export of industrial commodities from the U.K. to N.Z. which in our view were relatively minor interlocks in the initial period (see 3.5). Key interlocks are expressed by the arrows. The rentier interest on M12 in the U.K. is m12 = M'12 – M12. The interest on M22 (the N.Z. public debt) is m'22 = -M'22 – M22. The basic function of the new colony therefore was to expand U.K. industrial capitalism by cheapening the reproduction costs of labour-power, and providing a secure outlet for the investment of rentier capital. Both operated as counters to the falling rate of profit.<br /><br />Once these interlocks had been established their impact on the two social formations was quite dramatic. During the first third of the 19th century England imported only 2.5% of its foodstuffs. In 1912 it imported mainly from Australia and New Zealand about 50% of its meat, 70% of its butter and 50% of its cheese (Harms, 1912: 176). The conse­quences for New Zealand's economy are summarised below:<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg8.0.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 472px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 185px" height="150" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg8.0.jpg" width="472" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Once established this pattern of internationalisation of the circuit of commodity capital has never ceased to be of prime import­ance to the New Zealand social formation. However, the modern period (Post W. W. II) exhibits a far more diversified and evolved pattern of inter-locking than that illustrated above. The contemporary pattern of circuit interdependence is outlined in greater detail below (see Section 3.). We shall limit ourselves to an analysis of the main forms of dependence in abstract terms. The major new development in the modern period has been the establishment of a range of production processes in New Zealand organised along industrial capitalist lines, under the domination of foreign capital. Foreign capital dominates directly - by direct or partial ownership in conjunction with a frag­ment of national capital of these branches. Or else it dominates, in­directly, by provision of the range of modern instruments, materials, patents, licenses, agencies, managerial expertise etc. essential to the reproduction of capital in New Zealand. - all of which are supplied by 'hegemonic' capital. In other words, MA (foreign capital), in various forms, constantly traverses the reproduction of local capital (MB) which in turn functions to reproduce the former (Palloix, <em>Appendix,</em> 21). The following are a few examples of this new pattern of dependence. In all cases, A refers to "abroad", B to the local N.Z. social formation. We also break down Mp into instruments and materials of labour (e.g. machinery and oil), symbolised by IL and ML respectively.<br /><br /><strong>Case A</strong> - a joint venture producing previously imported articles of consumption or instrument of labour<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg9.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 464px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 145px" height="85" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg9.jpg" width="464" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In the extreme case of A (colour TV’s for instance) no MA is advanced in [B], but m'A is drawn off in the form of royalties etc. arising out of the assembly and sale of TV’s in NZ from 'kitset' packs supplied by the licensing company. Local capitalists are happy at the monopoly prof­its provided (m'B) under the protection of rigorous state enforced im­port controls on foreign competitors.<br /><br /><strong>Case B</strong> - The provision of materials of labour for a MNC (eg Comalco)<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg10.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 478px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 169px" height="119" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg10.jpg" width="478" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In this case, Cornalco gets cheap auxiliary materials of labour (electricity C’B ) to smelt imported bauxite ore, which is subsequently re-exported (C’A). Although the production process is located in New Zealand (PB), this signifies few linkages apart from some local employment, (LpB) and, because of transfer pricing, little chance to claw back any declared profit (m’A'). In effect the huge state investment involved in MB (supplying the electricity) and the low price of its sale means that the New Zealand working-class subsidises the profits of the huge MNC, Cornalco.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Case C</strong> - Foreign control of processing of smallholder production (eg meat)<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg11.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 450px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 130px" height="91" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg11.jpg" width="450" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Here the foreign company sells the processed meat (C') to its overseas subsidiaries at inflated overseas (EEC) prices. Smallholders provide the livestock (ML) at low costs and are vulnerable to developments all down the line of processing, transporting, marketing etc.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Case D</strong> - Provision of an advanced transport facility (eg Air New Zealand)<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg12.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 442px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 113px" height="71" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg12.jpg" width="442" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I<br />n this case, heavy overseas costs for importing IL and ML from [A] (fuel, aircraft) are met by state guaranteed overseas borrowing (MA). Rev­enues to return these advances, together with interest, are earned by charging New Zealand and foreign users high monopoly tariffs for travel (the commodity sold) on protected South Pacific routes [C'A/B].'<br /><br />These cases illustrate the degree of penetration of foreign capital in its commodity, money and productive forms into the contemp­orary social formation. The examples underestimate the degree of depend­ence on foreign capital since they ignore for instance, the indirect links to foreign capital through locally provided materials of labour e.g. imported oil to provide electricity (MLB) in the case of Comalco and other firms. Nor does the degree to which the local state makes concessions such as export incentives, state regulation of wages etc. to foreign investment to make the conditions for production as attract­ive as possible, show up in these examples. Moreover, the links with overseas banks, finance, merchant and insurance companies, all of which can be related to the above circuits, have not been isolated.<br /><br />All these links act to manage the flows of commodity production and thereby also to transfer as much of the surplus-value as possible from the direct producers to the various fractions of the capitalist class both in New Zealand and overseas.<br /><br /><br /><strong>2.6 A Note on Imperialism</strong><br /><br />So far we have limited our discussion of the main interlocks affecting the N.Z. social formation to the analysis of the internat­ionalisation process. We have made no reference to the political and ideological context in which this interlocking of circuits occurs. We now want to trace the connection between the internationalisation of capital and the rise of imperialism in order to determine the role of the semi-colonial state in this process.<br /><br />According to Palloix, imperialism differs from international­isation, being the manifestation at the political level of the role of the core capitalist states in linking-up the CMP in various social form­ations on a world scale. If we conceive of internationalisation as the ‘unification’ of social formations by the CMP, then imperialism is the political form taken by this unification. The core states’ dominance over peripheral and semi-peripheral states ranges from direct rule to formal independence, demonstrating the imperial states' ‘relative autonomy’ within the limits set by the particular historic circum­stances of internationalisation. Usually the initial interlocks with pre-capitalist social formations will he established by force, but the development of these interlocks may be managed by ‘self-governing’ or ‘independent’ client states. Imperialism, so defined therefore, spans the whole epoch of internationalisation from the 16th century to the present day. While we should be careful to distinguish between succes­sive phases of imperialism, an adequate theory of imperialism must be able to account for the co-existence of internationalisation and imper­ialism over the whole epoch (Murray, <em>Value</em>, part 2).<br /><br />According to our definition imperialism refers to the role of the core state in serving the needs of capital accumulation by territ­orial expansion. While Marx noted the importance of the state as “a powerful lever of capital accumulation” in the mercantilist phase (<em>Capital,</em> V. I, 706) he appeared to limit its role to one analogous to ‘primitive ­accumulation’ in the period of free trade (i.e. the bombardment of new markets into submission in India and China, and in opening-up the lands of white-settlement). In the chapter on the ‘Modern Theory of Colonisation’ (<em>Capital,</em> V. I Chap. 33), Marx quotes approvingly the Wakefield analysis of systematic colonisation. A working-class could be created according to this plan even when land was abundant, as in the colonies proper such as Australia (he does not mention N.Z.) by means of a ‘sufficient price’ policy operated by the state. The result­ing fund would be used to manage immigration and keep the labour market full for the capitalist. But later on in this chapter Marx reflects on the limited usefulness of this particular analysis in the light of events in North America where other factors such as the civil war, the rise of the national debt, in brief “the most rapid centralisation of capital” (<em>Capital</em>, Vol 1 724) were more important in creating the conditions for capitalist development than any Wakefield type of scheme.<br /><br />Despite these observations, and the brilliance of Marx's vision of the future development of the Pacific Basin (<em>On Revolutions</em>, 392), he and Engels avoided any serious consideration of the long-term consequences of the introduction of the CMP into the Australasian col­onies. They preferred to believe that the abundance of 'free' land would remain a permanent barrier to capitalist production on any large scale, and that as markets for British goods they would be rapidly ‘glutted’ and incapable of preventing the coming crisis in Britain (Mayer, <em>Marx</em>, 97). In other words the element of wishful thinking prevented Marx and Engels from developing their theory of ‘foreign trade’ to allow for the new financial interlocks between the self-­governing colonies and the Imperial state. They failed to appreciate therefore the important role of the semi-colonial state as a ‘powerful lever of capital accumulation’ not only in the colonies but in Britain.<br /><br />Of course it can always be argued in their defense that the great in­crease in British capital exports to the self-governing territories did not take place until after 1880, too late for Marx and Engels to be aware of their significance (Barratt-Brown, <em>Economics</em>, 189). Today, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the interlocks estab­lished between Britain and the colonies proper in the first half of the nineteenth century were characterised by a form of imperialism in which the initial use of imperial state force to implant the CMP was followed by a rapid transition to self-government by the settlers. This form of imperial core/periphery connection was entirely consistent with the nature of the interlocks established (see (7) above).<br /><br />If Marx and Engels had some excuse for underestimating the rise of capitalism in the semi-colonies, Lenin and Bukharin did not. Though they showed that the uneven development of the colonies and semi-colon­ies was the consequence of the centralisation of capital as finance capital in the core states, there is little discussion of the white­ settler colonies in their work. Bukharin stressed the fetter of landed property on the pace of development of agriculture in the established capitalist formations, but did not link this dis-proportionality to the plight of the suffering classes, or the development of capitalism in white-settler colonies such as New Zealand. For though he mentions directly N.Z.'s role in supplying foodstuffs to the British market, he ignores the significance of cheap wage goods supplied by the semi-colonies in overcoming the land barrier and in countering the falling rate of profit of industrial capital (<em>Imperialism</em>, 19-21).<br /><br />The most influential theorist of imperialism, Lenin, conceived of imperialism as a distinct (the "highest") stage of capitalism characterised by the concentration of capital in monopolies and cart­els in the European states, the export of surplus-capital in search of super-profits, and the increasing rivalry between European states for colonial territories (<em>Imperialism,</em> 700). He also drew a direct connect­ion between imperialism and the reformism of the European working-class which was 'bribed' by colonial super-profits and drafted in defence of national capitals (712). Lenin fully understood the degree to which the contradictions of the CMP were expressed in imperialism; on the one hand, the export of capital “greatly accelerates the development of capitalism in those countries to which it is exported. . . .expanding and deepening the further development of capitalism throughout the world” (691) while on the other hand, the concentration of capital in monopolies established monopoly prices as a barrier to competition, to increasing the rate of relative surplus-value and hence the further development of the productive forces at the centre. The stagnation at the centre therefore intensified the scramble for colonial super­-profits based on the extraction of absolute surplus-value at low organic composition (and low wages) (Mandel, <em>MET</em>, 455-458), leading to growing national rivalry and eventually war. ­<br /><br />Like Marx and Engels, the weakness in Lenin's theory of imperial­ism is the element of wishful thinking. Because he believed (rightly as it happened) that the fate of the Russian Revolution would hinge on the revolution in Europe, he exaggerated the ripeness of capitalism's decay and the revolutionary potential of the working-class. Just as important for our discussion, however, was his failure to appreciate the extent and depth of capitalist development in the white-settler colonies. As Barratt-Brown points out Lenin did not distinguish between ‘colonies’ in general and the ‘self-governing colonies of the British Empire’ in his analysis of capital export (<em>Economics</em>, 186). Had he done so he would have seen that the vast export of British capital to the self-­governing colonies and Latin America after 1870 was not in search of super-profits but a secure return from the national debts of a number of white-settler colonies established in the period before 1870.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg13.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 460px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 186px" height="124" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg13.jpg" width="460" border="0" /></a><br /><strong><br /></strong><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />The bulk of British investment was not associated with capitalism's ‘highest stage’ as conceived by Lenin, but with en earlier one, when various class fractions thrown out by the process of accumulation at the centre were relocated in the periphery under changed conditions. There they did lead, it is true, to the consolidation of the (Mp and its development to a higher stage, but only after certain pre-condit­ions had been satisfied. In sum, the establishment of the CMP in the white-settler states before 1850 and their subsequent development by British finance capital, contributed not only to the success of British free trade policy, but also to her continued supremacy after 1870 in the age of imperial rivalry.<br /><br />If we allow for the elements of wishful thinking, Marx, Engels and Lenin have left us a theory of imperialism that can be used, together with the interlocking circuit model of the international­isation process, to analyse the development of capitalism in New Zealand. The changing patterns of world imperialism over this whole period have produced several shifts in the New Zealand state’ s relat­ions with imperial powers, in particular from that of self-governing colony within the British Empire to that of ‘junior partner’ in U.S. imperialism today. But whatever the nature and form of this changing relationship, it has been determined historically by the particular interlocks established with N.Z. by the internationalisation of capital. It is to the actual problem of explaining the historical evolution of the N.Z. social formation (in the light of these combined processes) that we turn in the next section (3). Before doing so however, for the sake of clarity in this analysis we must set-out the basic character­istics of the pre-capitalist modes of production which articulate with the CMP in the N.Z. social formation.<br /><br /><br /><strong>2.7 General Characteristics of the Subordinate modes<br /></strong><br />We stated in the Introduction (1.1.) that the contemporary N.Z. social formation could only be understood in terms of an artic­ulation of various modes of production. These are the CMP in New Zeal­and (the development of which is the object of this analysis), together with the residual elements of the pre-capitalist Maori Lineage Mode of Production, and a highly evolved and differentiated Peasant Family Mode of Production. Since the development of capitalism in N.Z. is viewed as the process of articulation of the CMP with these two subordinate modes, we need to define the main characteristics of each of these modes before proceeding further.<br /><br /><strong>(a) The Peasant Family Mode (PFM).</strong> The mode we refer to here, is a particular form of pre-capitalist simple commodity production establ­ished by the “mass of fanning colonists” in the colonies proper (Marx <em>TSV,</em> V2, 301). Traditionally, the characteristics of this mode are: a patriarchal household and plot of land; production of means of subsis­tence for use, but with some exchange); and its non-capitalist calculation of ‘profit’ – “. . .so long as the price of the product covers (his) wages, (the peasant) will cultivate his land, and often at wages down to the physical minimum" (<em>Capital</em>, V Ill, 805-806). Whilst these features did, to a degree characterise early N.Z. settlement, the contemporary PFM is quite different in almost every respect, retaining only the family form of labour as a traditional social relation. Unencumbered by any feudal rode and benefitting from cheap and abundant land alien­ated from the MLM, the PFM in New Zealand has undergone remarkable evolution (see 3.4). (Note: the PFM does not apply to sheep farming).<br /><br />The evolution and subsequent differentiation of the PFM follow­ed its rapid subordination to the CMP. Thus in N.Z. it came under the firm dominance of the agents of the CMP (e.g. the stock and station agents) who ultimately controlled the family farmer as a sort of wage-­slave, despite the position of the farmer appearing to be one of ‘independence’. His independence becomes a ‘formal’ independence; against the fact that he possesses and legally ‘owns’ his land he does not con­trol it (Banaji, <em>Modes</em>, 33-36). The ‘price’ the farmer gets for his product is in fact a ‘concealed wage’ and the interest and commiss­ions paid to the merchant-banker is ‘rent and profit’ (34).<br /><br />Having determined the underlying nature of the relations of production dominating the PFM as capitalist, we must also point to the manner in which its articulation with the CMP has evolved. In particular, we describe in Section 3.4 how the peasant farmer class used the state as an ally against the merchant-banker class to boost their price and rate of profit. We point to the crucial role of agricultural exports in the 1970's in the efficient reproduction of the CMP in N.Z. (Section 3.5). This historical process has resulted in a considerable differentiation of the PFM, particularly when viewed from the level of distribution (income, profits etc). First, there is the section of quasi-subsistence farmers (e.g. on marginal land); second, there is the middle-peasantry, who in good years might realise an average rate of profit, but because of high levels of debt and fluct­uations in their terms of trade, seldom in fact do so; third, there is the peasant bourgeoisie (capitalist farmers), who for some reason or other, could accumulate on the basis of earning an average or above­ average rate of profit, employing wage-labour, managers, accountants etc. We find, therefore, despite Marx's reference to this form of production as “capitalist. . . without its advantages” (<em>TSV</em>, Ill, 487), (that is, unable to expand reproduction on the basis of the production of relative surplus-value) in N.Z., the interaction of the state, the merchant-bankers, and the natural environment, combined to permit the PFM to evolve out of colonial simple commodity production to provide the basis for expanded capitalist production in the semi-colony (See Lenin, <em>Russia</em>, 175-190).<br /><br /><strong>(b) The Maori Lineage Mode (MLM).</strong> The mode of production which corresponds to the ‘structure’ of the Maori social formation is that of ‘primitive communism’, or the ‘lineage mode’ (Terray, <em>MPS</em>; Hindess and Hirst, <em>PCMP).</em> Notwithstanding the debates surrounding this concept, for the moment we adopt the view that the basic characteristics of the Lineage Mode apply to Maori society - they are; a low level of dev­elopment of the forces of production, community ownership and possession of the means of production, cooperative labour and collective distribut­ion of the product at the economic base; the absence of a state and the dominance of ideology in the form of kinship relations at the level of the superstructure - hence the term ‘lineage’ signifying the key role of ideology in reproducing the conditions of existence of this mode.<br /><br />The MLM can therefore be characterised in these terms as having an economic base comprising collective ownership and control of the means of production, and where the distribution of the product is not determ­ined by class relations at the base, but is dominated by the ideologic­al agents (elders, chiefs) who (a) do not form a ruling class, (b) do not therefore require a state, but (c) are responsible to the collectivity for the reproduction of the mode. In short, the MLM is a good example of Marx’s concept of primitive communism (<em>Grundrisse</em>, 471-474).<br /><br />The historical process by means of which the MLM became subord­inated to the CMP has been described by us elsewhere (Bedggood and De Decker, <em>Destruction;</em> Macrae, <em>The Maori</em>). It follows approximately the same stages suggested by Dupre and Rey (Reflections) beginning with:<br /><br /><strong>(a) Trade:</strong> The period from European contact to about 1860 during which the main links with the MLM were via traders and missionaries. The MLM quickly adapted to the commodity market and withstood early attempts at domination by agents of the CMP to a high degree.<br /><br /><strong>(b) The Colonising Period:</strong> from 1860-1880 approx. during which state force was used to break the resistance of the MLM to the penetration of the CMP resulting in widespread alienation of the land, the pre­-condition for the transformation of collective labour into capitalist wage-labour, and the establishment of the PFM.<br /><br /><strong>(c) The Period of CMP dominance:</strong> From approx. 1880-1945. The MLM was reduced to a semi-subsistence peripheral mode providing labour at low wages in seasonal or casual work in the CMP, now consolidating its hold over the PFM and laying the basis for domestic manufacturing on the post-war 11 scale.<br /><br /><strong>(d) Industrial Proletariat Stage:</strong> From 1945 to the present, during which the bulk of the rural population of the MLM migrated to the cities to join the industrial proletariat. Today, approx. 1.3 million hectares of Maori land remain in areas of strategic importance for forestry, iron sands, urban development etc. This fact, together with the rising level of proletarian consciousness among Maori workers, shows that while the MUM has been almost totally subordinated to the CMP, the residual ele­ments of its base (the land and cooperative social relations) and of the superstructure (ideology and ‘culture’') play a significant role in the current conjuncture (see 3.7).<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/1600/dcnzg14.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 446px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 298px" height="229" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7219/704/320/dcnzg14.jpg" width="446" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1143599562132541872006-03-28T18:21:00.000-08:002006-03-28T18:32:42.153-08:00The Development of Capitalism in New Zealand: Towards a Marxist Analysis<strong>John Macrae and David Bedggood<br /><br />First published in <em>Red Papers</em>, 3, Summer 1978/79<br /></strong><br /><br /><strong>1.0 Introduction<br /></strong><br />In this paper we present the outline of a Marxist analysis of the development of capitalism in New Zealand. Given the circumstances under which we are working, it is obvious that much that will be covered requires further research and further thought. Nevertheless, it reflects a point in the evolution of our thinking. It also repre­sents therefore as much a project of research as a definite statement of progress.<br /><br />We shall show that N.Z.'s "national development" has been determined by its role as a semi-colony (white-settler colony or "colony proper" as distinct from colony) within the world-wide division of labour under capitalism. In taking this approach, we are engaged in theoretical class struggle against bourgeois conceptions of the causes of "development" which focus on there appearances and 'isolated instances' which are taken to represent the total social reality.<br /><br />The method employed is that of Marx and Lenin, together with some reformulations and extensions of their work, which seeks to understand the working of the Capitalist Mode of Production (CMP) in terms of certain "laws of Motion" which operate not in any vulgar deterministic sense, but as a complex "structural causality" determined under spec­ific historical conditions of class struggle. Adopting this method, we intend to demonstrate its power in explaining the development of capit­alism in N. Z. as a complex inter-relation of economic, political and ideological causes which are determined in the "last instance" by the historic expansion of the CMP into the lands of white-settlement in the nineteenth century.<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>1.1 Modes of Production and the Social Formation</strong><br /><br />In this section we set out the basic concepts used in our analysis, essential for the understanding of both the structure and evolution of N.Z. capitalism. The core element of structure which we adopt is Marx's concept of a Mode of production. A Mode of Production consists of an economic base or infrastructure, made up of two elements, forces of production - signifying the level of development of the technology of production, the extent of the division-of-labour in the production process, and the embodiment of scientific knowledge – and the relations of production - referring to the social circumstances of individuals who cane together in the process of producing and approp­riating use-values. Relations refer to relations of production in three senses: legal ownership (e.g. shareholding), real ownership (execut­ive control etc), and possession (e.g. physical operation of the process of production). Of the two elements comprising the economic base, it is the relations of production which are dominant in the form<br /><br />of "class struggle" as the ''motor of history". Overlying the economic base in any mode of production is a superstructure comprising political, legal and ideological relations. Both base and superstructure make up the total structure of a mode of production (Marx, Preface, Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 41-62; Althusser, Essays, 201-8).<br /><br />A mode of production is an abstraction. It is not directly observed; it is not an appearance. Rather it is the product of the Marxist abstraction of the' relevant' structure underlying the main features of the world is seeks to explain. The real world of human relations is not immediately given nor understood by simply observing everyday behaviour in the marketplace or the boardroom - were any 'social scientists' interested. It can only be reconstructed as knowledge of the laws which govern these relations. A Mode of Product­ion therefore does not describe any actual society existing in recorded history. As a concept its purpose is to abstract those basic characteristics common to all actual societies, and to show how any given society can only be understood by means of such a concept.<br /><br />In applying the concept of a Mode of Production to actual societies, Marx put forward another concept, that of a social formation In contrast to the superficial and unscientific bourgeois concepts of 'nations', countries' or 'societies', a social formation is defined as a site of the concrete existence of one or more modes of production, under the dominance of the most' advanced' mode. In almost all cases, social formations will be made up of a complex articulation of modes representing a complex pattern of inter-relations expressed at the level of appearances as a 'unique' pattern.<br /><br />Thus the contemporary N. Z. social formation as we define it can only be understood in terms of the articulation of various modes of production: the CMP in N.Z., together with the residual elements of the pre-capitalist Maori social formation (an example of a lineage mode of production), and the evolved form of the peasant-family sub-mode, but under the dominant influence of the world CMP mediated through its agents in N.Z., the national bourgeoisie. We insist that the concept of the N.Z. social formation has to be constructed as the end-product of the application of the Marxist method, and is not drawn out of the air as are the bourgeois figments of 'nation', 'N.Z. Society' or N.Z. population. We reject, in short, the method of political economy which starts from the outward form (e.g. the size of the population) and is forced to fumble into more and more meaningless generalities (the population's skills, its social composition, the concept of a family etc.). On the contrary, we begin from the abstract and use this to explain the meaning of the concrete level of appearances (Marx, <em>Grundrisse,</em> 100) .<br /><br />[Note : The concept 'mode of production' is a highly contentious one. We use it as an abstraction capable of differentiating distinct 'social forms' of production according to "different forms of the appropriation of resources, or means of production, and of the product itself". Thus the concept is neither a schema emptied of historical content, nor an actual historical social formation. It is an analytic tool enabling us to look beneath the surface forms in any society and determine the 'organising principle' - that of the reproduction of the material means of existence (production) - of that society.]<br /><br />Against the apologetic vision of the (political) economists, namely the harmony of interests, materialist analysis is dialectic; it insists on the primacy of contradiction built into the concept of structure. Now, the very existence of a structure presupposes the reproduction of that structure within a social formation. A mode of production (or any articulation in a given social formation) is not a stable equilibrium, but a system in which contradictory forces are constantly in opposition. The principal contradiction in any mode of production is between the forces and relations of production ­crudely between the forces of material progress and the 'class' appropriation of the materials produced - which generates 'class struggle'. The reproduction of a mode of production therefore is the reproduction of its conditions of existence, namely conditions which contain the class struggle, but which also constantly reproduce class struggle. It is in this sense that Marx describes the CMP as a "unity with contradictions" (<em>Grundrisse</em>, Introduction). It also signifies that class struggle necessarily takes place within the superstructure as well as at the level of productive relations.<br /><br />In contrast to the fragmented and superficial approaches of the bourgeois writers, the concept of the underlying "laws of motion" we advance is that of a complex structural causation which signifies that the reproduction of any social formation will involve the complex interplay of historical and contemporary circumstances, and also the interplay between the base and political and ideological levels of the superstructure. Despite the complexity of these relations as they operate in the case of the N. Z. social formation, we propose to trace this process of complex structural causation in order to demonstrate the primacy of the economic base in determining in the "last instance" the relations at the level of the superstructure. It is important to recognise that the dominance of social relations as expressed in the concept of determination in the' last instance' is in the final analysis, that of class struggle. In this, we follow the position of Althusser:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">The capitalist social formation, indeed, cannot be reduced to the capitalist productive relations alone, therefore to its infrastructure (economic base). Class exploitation cannot con­tinue, that is, reproduce the conditions of existence, without the aid of the superstructure, without legal-political and ideo­logical relations, which in the last instance are determined by productive relations.. .and since the production relation is a relation of class struggle, it is the class struggle which in the last instance determines the super-structural relations, their contradiction, and the over-determination with which they mark the infrastructure</span> (<em>Essays</em>, 203-4).<br /><br />In other words, while the superstructure has a 'relative autonomy' from the base, this is determined within the limits set by the need to reproduce the conditions of existence of the dominant mode of production. Once these conditions begin to weaken or breakdown, we enter the whole new question of the transition from one mode of production to another (Bettleheim, <em>Class Struggles</em>).<br /><br />What we shall be attempting to illustrate is new this pattern of structural causality, including the relative autonomy of the superstruct­ure within limits determined in the 'last instance' by the base, operated in the case of the N. Z. social formation. This means first, determining the specific economic form in which exploitation occurs, and how this relates to the corresponding form taken by the state etc. Marx has stated the logic of this approach very clearly (cf. Althusser, <em>Essays</em>. 175-187).<br /><br />The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself, and in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of prod­uction to the direct producers - a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity - which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social formation, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis - the same from the standpoint of its main cond­itions - due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradat­ions in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances (<em>Vol. III</em>, 791-792).<br /><br />By taking the "facts of development of capitalism in (one) country" (Lenin, <em>Russia,</em> 67), we shall show how in the case of N.Z., any analysis of the "innermost secret" of the "hidden base of the entire social structure" has to take into account what has been said above i.e. natural environment - climate and fertility of new lands in the colony; racial relations - the destruction of Maori society; external historical influences - British Imperialism. Consequently, underneath what is usually taken to be a "unique" pattern of appearances, "the special case" (Blyth, 1973), there is the determination in the last instance of N.Z.'s semi-colonial role within the CMP.<br /><br /><br /><strong>1.2 Our Method of Procedure</strong><br /><br />Since the understanding of the history of the N. Z. social format­ion requires first an understanding of the CMP, we must begin with Capital. In Section 2 we assume that the reader is familiar with Vol. I on the production of surplus value, and the outline of the circulation process in Vol. Il. We use as our basic operational abstraction, the analysis introduced in Vol. Il, which we refer to as the 'circuit model'. This describes the reproduction of capital by means of an increasingly complex system of interlocking circuits of capital in its various forms, constituting the total social capital (Vol. II, 357). We then add to this analysis of the economic base, the analysis of the ‘superstructure’ of the state and its 'ideological apparatuses' to demonstrate their role in the reproduction of the conditions of existence of the social formation. We conclude this section by showing how the circuit model can be used to analyse the process of expanded reproduction of the total social capital on an international scale. Here we extend the analysis of the "internationalisation of capital" pioneered by the French school of Marxists including Michalet and Palloix. We then show how the internat­ionalisation of the circuits of central capital, into the peripheral or semi-peripheral social formations, such as N.Z., provides a significant extension of the basic model for our purposes. In the Note on Imperialism we argue that the use of the circuit model helps in explaining the partic­ular historic roles of core capitalist states in furthering the internat­ionalisation process by the use of force in establishing the CMP in 'new' lands and in setting up dependent client states in peripheral and semi-­peripheral social formations.<br /><br />The circuit model is not the orthodox theoretical model used in Marxist economics and its adoption implies that we approach many of the standard issues of Marxist debate (e. g. the transformat­ion problem, productive vs. unproductive labour etc) from a different perspective (see the earlier formulation of this model in Macrae, <em>The Neglect, Evolution</em>). It is a 'dynamic value analysis' as opposed to a static one found in most standard approaches (Mandel, Desai, Balinky etc). We refer briefly to the implications of this approach for some of these debates in Section 2.<br /><br />In Section 3 the abstract circuit model which provides the basis for our analysis of the internationalisation of capital and of imperialism, is used as a materialist framework for a brief history of the New Zealand social formation. Here we attempt to follow the complex causality at all levels -- economic, political and ideolog­ical, tracing the patterns of change from the British social formation, through annexation, the destruction of Maori society, the implantation of the CMP, and the subsequent semi-colonial form of extraction of surplus-value, all determined in the 'last instance' by the economic base, i.e. the interlocking circuits of capital established in N.Z. In doing so, we subject bourgeois "histories" which put causal primacy on super-structural aspects of the social formation, to the critique of a Marxist science of history.<br /><br />In the concluding Section 4, we attempt to put forward some general observations and guidelines for the analysis of the current crisis, drawing together the main lessons of the foregoing analysis, and setting out areas requiring further detailed analysis.Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1125716718313005922005-09-02T19:59:00.000-07:002005-09-02T20:05:18.403-07:00Lukacs on German Sociology in the Imperialist Period<strong>Chapter 6 of <em>The Destruction of Reason </em>by Georg Lukacs, Merlin Press, London 1980.<br /></strong><br /><br /><strong>1. The Origins of Sociology<br /></strong><br />Sociology as an independent discipline arose in England and France after the dissolution of classical political economy and utopian socialism. Both these, each in its own way, were comprehensive doctrines of social life and therefore treated all important problems of society in connection with the economic questions dictating them. Sociology as an independent discipline came about in such a way that its treatment of a social problem did not consider the economic basis; the supposed independence of social questions from economic ones formed the methodological starting-point of sociology.<br /><br />This separation is linked with profound crises in bourgeois economics that clearly express the social basis of sociology. One crisis was the dissolution of the Ricardo school in Britain, which prompted the drawing of socialist consequences from the classic authors' theory of labour value, and another was the disintegration of utopian socialism in France, which began with a tentative quest for that social path to socialism which Saint-Simon and Fourier had left unexplored.<br /><br />These twin crises, and more especially the solving of both through the appearance of historical materialism and Marxist political economy, terminated bourgeois economics in the classical sense, as a discipline fundamental to the knowledge of society. There arose at the one pole bourgeois 'vulgar economics', later so-called subjective economics, a specialist discipline confined to a narrow range of objects. This refrained from the start from explaining social manifestations and regarded it as its chief task to banish the question of surplus value from economics. And at the other pole there sprang up sociology, a humanistic discipline divorced from economics.<br /><br />Certainly it is true to say that initially, sociology also claimed to be a universal science of society (Comte, Herbert Spencer). For that reason it was trying to find a basis in natural science that would replace an economic basis. This again was closely linked with the - socially dictated -development of economics. Hegel, though he was scarcely understood at the time, had already discovered the principle of contradiction in the economic categories; with Fourier, the internal contradictoriness of capitalist economics was already openly manifest; with the dissolution of the Ricardo school, as with Proudhon, it appeared as nothing less than the central problem of economics, whatever the falsity of the individual answers to it. It was the Marxist doctrine whichfirst discovered the correct dialectical framework in economics.<br /><br />The natural-scientific underpinning of sociology as a universal science was meant to exclude from its doctrine not only economics but the very contradictoriness of social Being, i.e., a thorough critique of the capitalist system. Admittedly to start with, in the case of its founders particularly, sociology adhered to the standpoint of social progress; indeed it was one of its main aims to demonstrate this scientifically.<br /><br />But it was a version of progress tailored to a bourgeoisie about to enter an ideological decline, a progress leading to an idealized capitalist society as the culmination of man's development. Already in Comte's time, not to say that of Spencer, the proof of this progress could no longer be furnished with the tools of economics. Hence a natural science - applied by analogy to society and in this way more or less mythologized - was sought as the sole foundation.<br /><br />But just because of this bond with the idea of progress, sociology could not last as a universal science for long. Soon the natural-scientific, primarily biological argumentation was to lapse - in accordance with the bourgeoisie's general politico-economic development - into anti-progressive, often reactionary ideology and methodology. Most sociologists turned to specialist investigations. Sociology became a pure, detached branch of learning which barely touched on the major questions of the structure and development of society.<br /><br />No longer, therefore, could it fulfil its original task of portraying the - economically no longer arguable – progressive character of bourgeois society and defend it, ideologically, against feudal reaction and socialism alike. As sociology, exactly like economics, etc., grew into this strictly specialized branch of learning, there sprang from it, as from the other divided social sciences, tasks dictated by t!te capitalist division of labour. Prominent among these was one that arose of its own accord and never became a conscious part of bourgeois methodology: namely, the task of transferring the cardinal problems of social life from a specialist discipline incompetent as such to solve them to the authority of another discipline. Then this second specialist discipline would, with equal logic, declare its own incompetency.<br /><br />Naturally it always involved cardinal social questions, for the declining bourgeoisie was increasingly interested in preventing them from being clearly raised and indeed answered. Social agnosticism, as a form of defending ideologically hopeless positions, thereby acquired an – unconsciously functioning - methodological organ. The process much resembles the behaviour of the capitalist or selfcapitalizing, semi-feudal absolutist bureaucracy, which 'solved' awkward questions by perpetually passing the relevant documents from one office to another, with none of them pronouncing itself competent to make an objective decision.<br /><br /><strong>2. The Beginnings of German Sociology</strong><br /><br />(Schmoller, Wagner and Others) But there was a stark difference between Germany's situation and that of the Western, capitalistic ally more advanced countries with a long bourgeois- democratic development behind them. Germany lacked above all any original scientific' study of economics. In 1875 Marx characterized the situation as follows:<br /><br />In Germany, political economy has remained a foreign science up to this day. . . It was imported ready-made from England and France; its German professors stayed pupils. In their hands, the theoretical expression of an alien reality changed into a collection of dogmas which they interpreted in the spirit of the petty-bourgeois world about them, and therefore misinterpreted... Capitalist production has developed rapidly in Germany since 1848, and nowadays it is already bearing its spurious fruit. But fate remained unkind to our experts. All the while that they were pursuing political economy in peace and quiet, modern economic conditions were absent from the German reality. As soon as those conditions became operative in real life, they did so in circumstances which no longer permitted of their unrestricted study within the realm of bourgeois thinking.<br /><br />It was German minds, moreover, which gave birth to scientific socialism, and inevitably it was precisely on German soil that this first began to exert a wide literary influence. And finally, the situation of German sociology at its birth was complicated by the fact that in Germany, the bourgeoisie did not seize power as a political class in a democratic revolution, as had happened in France. Instead, the bourgeoisie reached a compromise with feudal absolutism and the Junkerclass under Bismarck. Thus the birth of German sociology took place within the context of the apologetics of this compromise; and these apologetics determined the tasks of German economics and social science.<br /><br />Such a situation obstructed the origin of a sociology in the Anglo-French sense. The 'social doctrine' put forward by the epigones of the Hegelian distinction between State and Society (L. von Stein, R. von Mohl) , along with the reactionary 'idyllist' (Riehl), represents the first tentative attempts at a German bourgeois theory of society. At first this met with great resistance. The National-Liberal Treitschke, the later notorious historian of Prussianism, published a pamphlet attacking these attempts under the title of Social Doctrine (Gesellschaftslehre, 1859). In this he advanced the view that all social problems were merely political and juridicial ones; thus if all was well with political science, then no particular social science was needed at all. Social science, he maintained, had no object of its own; in reality everything which appeared to be an object of sociology could be settled by constitutional or civil law. Economics Treitschke considered from the viewpoint of popular liberal harmonism; the worker question was, for him, purely a police question.<br /><br />After 1870-1 this rough and summary dismissal of all sociology had become untenable. The great upsurge of capitalism, the exacerbation of the class conflicts and Bismarck's battle against social democracy in connection with his 'social policy' changed the German bourgeoisie's attitude to these problems. Another factor was the divergence of Bismarck, taking large sections of the German bourgeoisie with him, from the popular dogma of free trade. In this new situation, a group of German economists attempted to expand popular economic doctrine into a social science (Brentano, Schmoller, Wagner, etc.). They planned to create a purely a-theoretical, empirical, historical and at. The same time 'ethical' political economy which rejected classical economics and would additionally be capable of comprehending the problems of society. This eclectic pseudo-science grew out of the reactionary historical school of jurisprudence (Savigny) and older German economics (Roscher, Knies, etc.).<br /><br />Methodologically totally without principles, it was the ideology of those bourgeois circles which thought that Bismarck's 'social policy' could offer a solution to the class conflicts. In common with the older generation of German economists they did battle against classical economics, in close association with the struggle against Marxism. In accomplishing a radical subjectification of economics, these circles wholly failed to see the objective economic problems of the classical thinkers, and merely polemicized against an allegedly narrow psychology that perceived in economic self-seeking the sole driving motive of economic behaviour. The intention was now to 'deepen' this psychology and also to give it an ethical character. According to Schmoller, the various theories of economics 'mainly furnished various ideals for the morality of economics? Or, to take a specific example, the whole problem of demand was 'nothing else than a slice of concrete ethical history related to a definite time and a definite nation'.3 Hence these economists opposed all 'abstraction' and 'deduction', i.e., theory of any kind; they were pure historical empiricists and relativists. For that reason it was no accident that the positivistic neo-Kantianism then in the ascendant encouraged their views to drift in the direction of an empirical agnosticism.<br /><br />The social systems of an 'organic' kind which were simultaneously springing up also set out to refute socialism. They sought to justify intellectually the connection between Bismarck's empire and the old semi-feudal, semi-absolutist Germany and so to find a seasonable theory for what the German bourgeoisie of the time called progress. This first German sociology also stemmed from reactionary Romantic philosophy and the 'historical school of law' (Schiiffle, Lilienthal, etc.).<br /><br />But even such a sociology-substitute evoked a sharp rejection of sociology as a scientific discipline on the part of the philosophical doctrine of science that was currently dominant. Most typical of the attitude of German philosophy to the nascent sociology is the critique we find in Dilthey's Introduction to the Humanistic Sciences (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1883). Dilthey, to be sure, was primarily combating the Anglo-French sociology of Comte, Spencer, and so on. He dismissed a limine its claim to comprehend historical processes in a unified way with the aid ofsociological categories.4 His standpoint was radically empirical, specialist and relativist. He saw in the new sociology, not mistakenly, a successor to the old philosophy of history, but contested them both as being a kind of pseudo-scientific alchemy. Reality, he thought, could only be grasped through strictly specialized branches of science. Both the philosophy of history and sociology, on the other hand, were dealing with metaphysical principles.<br /><br />Dilthey observed fairly clearly the consequences of Western sociology's methodology, namely the emergence of claims to a universal philosophy of history which had no foundation in the basic historical facts. But, since he understood even less (if that were possible) of this remoteness from reality and abstractness of sociology than its founders did, his critique remained completely fruitless. A large proportion of Western European sociologists set out on the road to establishing a strictly specialized single branch of science. But, in so doing, they renounced the very purpose of sociology; this course adopted by sociology was not a science, but its abdication. Dilthey's critique was therefore nothing beyond a phenomenon -one whose methodology was defined by German conditions -running parallel to the decline of sociology generally. Sociology was renouncing more and more a bourgeois argumentation of progress, and to an equal degree a unified theory of progress was, from Dilthey's standpoint, scientifically impossible.<br /><br /><strong>3. Ferdinand Toennies and the Founding of the New School of German Sociology</strong><br /><br />The rapid capitalization of Germany rendered such a theor¬etical rejection of sociology as we have just described unten¬able in the long run. (Dilthey's later attitude to Simmel and other sociologists of the imperialist period also changed totally; indeed his own view of history, as it developed in the course of time, became a co-determining factor in later German sociology.) A certain degree, a specific form of theoretical comprehension of social phenomena had become a matter of growing urgency, although it naturally remained, in essence, within the aforementioned politico-ideological compromise which the German bourgeoisie made with the Hohenzollern regime. But as the Junker class too turned increasingly capitalist, and as the country grew into the imperialist stage of its development (not by chance did Bismarck's downfall occur on the eve of it), all these ques¬tions had to be formulated anew. The irresistible growth of the social democrat labour movement also made new proposi¬tions obligatory: neither the. police measures demanded by Treitschke and administered by Bismarck nor the unctuous sermons of Schmoller and Wagner were sufficient. A new form of anti-Marxist polemics was needed.<br /><br />The chief upshot of these needs was a new economic doctrine which claimed to answer 'theoretically' the bour¬geoisie's current economic problems and thereby to 'surmount' even Marxism in the economic field. It was at the same time so abstract and subjectivist that from the outset -if only for methodological reasons -it had to suppress any claim to lay the basis for a sociology. Thus from now on, the Western European separation of economics from sociology and prevalent coexistence of the two held good for Germany as well. We are referring now to the 'Austrian school' of Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, etc., which was just as radically subjectivist as the 'historical school'. Only, the blurred, unctuous moralizing was replaced by a purely psychological approach: the dissolution of all objective economic categories in the casuistry of the abstract anti¬thesis of inclination and disinclination. So pseudo-theories arose which sought their sole object in the surface mani¬festations of economic life (offer, demand, production costs, distribution) and set up pseudo-laws of subjective reactions to these phenomena marginal utility). The 'Austrian school' thought of itself as having overcome the 'teething troubles' of the classic thinkers (Bohm-Bawerk), and hence of Marxism, on the one hand, and those of the 'historical school' on the other. Thereby the new popular economics arising from this cleared the way -as in Western Europe -for a separate science of sociology which was divorced from economics and 'complemented' it. In their economic views, the most important representatives of sociology in imperialist Germany belonged to this school either explicitly or tacitly. The methodological discussion between the two economic orientations associated with the works of Karl Menger is no longer of any interest. For us its only historical significance is that it opened up an avenue for the new sociology.<br /><br />Seemingly linked only loosely with these struggles is what was for a long time the most influential publication of the new German sociology: Community and Association by Ferdinand Toennies (1887). This book occupies a special place in the development of German sociology. Above all, its author's ideological link with the classic German traditions was stronger than that of the later sociologists. Accordingly he had a closer relationship with the progressive scientific learning of Western Europe. (Later he wrote a biography of Hobbes which gained international renown, etc.) Moreover he was the first German thinker to appropriate research results concerning primitive society, primarily Lewis Henry Morgan's, and at the same time the first German sociologist who did not dismiss Marx out of hand but tried to rework him and render him of use to his bourgeois purposes. Thus Toennies expressly stood for the theory of labour value, and he rejected the claim of bourgeois criticism to have exposed insoluble contradictions between the first and third volumes of Capital. That, to be sure, was by no means tantamount to understanding Marxism and recognizing it. 'I have never', Toennies said, 'acknowledged as correct the Ricardo-Rodbertus-Marxian theory of value in the form propounded, but recognize all the more its core and basic idea.'5 This state¬ment, with its identification of Marx and Ricardo and Rodbertus, shows just how little Toennies understood Marxism.<br /><br />Nevertheless, the influence of Marx and Morgan on Toennies went deeper than is apparent from his explicit references to them in his book. It was the antithesis between the old classless primitive society and the capitalism that had come about in the course of socio-economic developments that formed the basis of his sociology. To be sure, Toennies radically reworked the basic ideas of his sources. Firstly, he banished all concrete economics, albeit less radically than later German sociologists. Secondly, he volatilized concretely historical social formations into supra-historical 'essences'. Thirdly, here again the objective economic basis of the social structure was replaced by a subjective prin¬ciple -the will. And fourthly, socio-economic objectivity gave way to a Romantic anti-capitalism. Hence the findings of Morgan and Marx gave rise in Toennies's work to that contrast between 'community' and 'society' which continued to influence the whole of later German sociology. The process of subjectification was achieved through mysticized will-concepts. 'For it emerges from all this how the essential community will carries the preconditions within itself, whereas arbitrary will brings about society.'6 Toennies presented these two mysticized concepts of will as the creators of the two formations.<br /><br />'Society' is capitalism -as seen through the eyes of Romantic anti-capitalism. Admittedly, if we compare Toennies with the older Romantic anti-capitalists, we will notice the particular and subsequently important nuance that he was not voicing a desire to revert to social conditions now sur¬. mounted, and certainly not to feudalism. Toennies was a liberal. His position provided the basis for a cultural critique which strongly emphasized the problematic, negative features of capitalist culture, but which also underlined that capitalism was ineluctable and a product of fate.<br /><br />The antithetical type of the 'community' now determined the character of this critique. It was the antithesis between what was dead, mechanical and machine-like about 'society' and the organic nature of the 'community'. 'As an artificial implement or a machine designed for specific purposes is related to the organ-systems and individual organs of an animal body, so a will-aggregate of this kind -a form of arbitrary will -is related to the other kind -a form of essential will.'7 This contrast was by no means original, but it became of methodological significance because Toennies proceeded from it to that contrast between 'civilization' and 'culture' which later became of crucial importance to German sociology.<br /><br />This antithesis arose spontaneously out of the bourgeois intelligentsia's feeling of discontent with capitalist, and especially imperialist, cultural development. The theoretical problem which objectively existed behind this feeling was Marx's well-known discovery that capitalism in general has an unfavourable effect on the evolution of art (and culture as a whole). Now a real understanding of this problem -if really grasped and thought all the way through -would have turned any intellectual sincerely concerned about culture into an adversary of capitalism. But materially, a great many threads tied the majority of the intellectuals to the capitalist basis of their existence (or at least they thought that to sever those threads would mortally endanger their livelihood). They were, moreover, influenced by the bourgeois ideology of their time, which means that they had no inkling of the socio-economic foundations of their own livelihood.<br /><br />It was possible for the false antithesis of culture and civilization to spring from this soil of its own accord. Con¬ceptually formulated, the antithesis acquired the following ¬factually wrong and misleading -form: promoted by capi¬talism, civilization, i.e., techno-economic development, was constantly ascending, but its evolution put culture (art, philosophy, man's inner life) at an increasing disadvantage; . the conflict of the two would be intensified to the point of a tragic, unbearable tension. Here we see how the case-facts of capitalist development ascertained by Marx were being distorted in a Romantically anti-capitalist, subjectively irrational way. That we are dealing with the irrationalist distortion of a set of historio-social facts is indicated by the simple consideration that culture and civilization-properly understood -cannot be antithetical concepts at all. Culture, after all, encompasses all the activities through which man overcomes in nature, in society and in himself the original personal characteristics bestowed by nature. (For instance, we rightly speak of the cultivation of work, of human beha¬viour, and so on.) Civilization, on the other hand, is a com¬prehensive, periodicizing expression of man's history after his emergence from barbarity; it embraces culture, but along with it the whole of man's life in society. To pose such a conceptual antithesis, and to invent the myth of these counter-active forces, entities, etc., was thus simply an abstracting and also irrationalist distortion of culture's real contradictory nature in capitalist life. (This real contradic¬toriness applies also to the material productive forces; think of their destruction in a time of crisis, the contradictions of the machine in capitalist life in relation to human labour as portrayed by Marx, and so forth.)<br /><br />The irrationalist distortion of the original facts of the matter derived spontaneously from the intellectuals' social situation in capitalism. This distortion, which on account of its spontaneity was continually self-reproducing, was extended in breadth and depth by the ideologists of capitalism. .They did so partly in order to channel into an innocuous cultural critique the potentially rebellious tendencies of Romantic anti-capitalism, and partly because, to many intellectuals, to absolutize the false antithesis of culture and civilization seemed to be an effective weapon against socialism. For since socialism was developing further the material forces of produc¬tion (mechanization, etc.), it too was unable to solve the con¬flict between culture and civilization. It was rather perpetuating the conflict -consequently, the argument ran, the intelligentsia afflicted by this dichotomy would be wasting its time by contesting capitalism for the sake of socialism.<br /><br />Depicting society in the colours of Hobbes's philosophy of law, Toennies described it as a condition in which all men were enemies and only the law preserved an external order. And he went on: 'This is . . . the condition of social civilization, in which convention and the mutual fear expressed in it maintain peace and social intercourse, and which the State protects and extends through legislation and politics; scientific learning and public opinion partly seek to comprehend it as necessary and permanent, partly glorify it as advancing towards perfection. But it is far rather the communal life¬styles and rules in which popular life (V olkstum) and its culture find sustenance...'8 Here Toennies's Romantic anti-capitalism is patent.<br /><br />Morgan and Engels too contrasted primitive communism with the later class societies and indicated -for all the socio-economic necessity and progressiveness of its abolition -the moral decay, the ethical degradation ineluctably linked with this step forward. And in Marxism the contrast was by no means confined to the antithesis of primitive communism and the class-divided society. The idea of irregular develop¬ment inevitably meant that the heights attained in specific cultural fields, in specific branches of art and philosophy for instance, and indeed the general cultural level in class societies very often failed to tally with the level of development reached by the material forces of production. Marx pointed out with regard to epic poetry, and Engels with regard to the golden ages of modern philosophy in the various leading nations, that under specific circumstances, the less advanced conditions more greatly favoured a partial cultural flowering of this nature than did more advanced conditions.9 The confirmation of such connections as consequences of an irregular development was, however, always of a concretely historical character. To reveal the social principles which found expression herein did not permit of any simple and immediate application to the whole of culture.<br /><br />With capitalist culture the position was different. Marx repeatedly pointed out that the development of capitalist economics usually had unfavourable consequences for specific branches of culture (he was speaking of art and poetry).10 And here we have the concrete starting-point of such Romantic anti-capitalist accounts as we have just found in Toennies. As we have seen, the striking contrast between the rapid develop¬ment of material productive forces and, simultaneously, decadent tendencies in the fields of art, literature, philo¬sophy, morality, etc,., caused many thinkers to split in two the inherently unified and organically coherent domain of human culture. Those parts of it which capitalism had brought to a high level they contrasted as civilization with those of culture (in a narrower, special sense) in jeopardy; indeed they saw in this opposition the essential hallmark of the epoch, and even of the whole of mankind's development. Here again we can see that the point of departure behind this false proposition was a real set of social facts. But because of false, unhistorical generalizing, the directly and subjectively justified question was bound to give rise to a false proposi¬tion and a thoroughly erroneous answer. The falsity of these -and also their connection with the general reactionary-oriented philosophical trends of the time -is primarily manifested in the fact that such an opposition of culture and civilization was necessarily backward-looking, that it had to proceed in an anti-progressive direction. We can already observe this with Toennies, although he was very chary of drawing inferences. The more strongly that vitalistic tenden¬cies, especially Nietzsche's, took hold of sociology and social studies in general, the stronger the emphasis became on the contrast between culture and civilization, the more energetic the turning to the past, and the more unhistorical, anti-historical the propositions. And the internal dialectic of ideological developments after the war inevitably meant that the dismissive attitude was extended more and more to cul¬ture as well. Culture and civilization alike were rejected in the name of the 'soul' (Klages), of 'authentic existence' (Heidegger), and so on. .<br /><br />It is only the start of this development that we find in Toennies. But from the results of Morgan's investigations he was already making a -permanent -structure of supra-historical duration and forming in substance a permanent contrast to the structure of society. So Toennies not only placed in opposition to one another family and contract (abstract right); with him the antitheses of man and woman, youth and old age, the common people and educated people also mirrored the contrast between community and society. There thus arose a whole system of abstractly inflated, contrasting subject-concepts which we do not need to set out in detail.<br /><br />This anti-historical exaggeration of concepts originally obtained from concrete analyses of concrete social forma¬tions not only diluted these concepts (and rendered them, for that very reason, highly influential in German bourgeois sociology). It also reinforced their Romantic anti-capitalist character. Community thus became a category covering everything pre-capitalist and a glorification of primitive, 'organic' conditions as well as a slogan to combat the mech¬anizing, anti-cultural effects of capitalism. This cultural' critique of capitalism -characteristically for the next phase in German sociology -henceforth occupied the centre of interest and succeeded the vague ethical utopianism of the preceding phase. The change matched the growth of capitalism in Germany. It came a good way towards meeting widespread intellectual discontent with the increasingly palpable contra¬dictions of the present, and it also diverted attention from the real and decisive economic and social problems of imperialist capitalism. The diversionary trend did not neces¬sarily have to be a conscious trend. On the one hand, how¬ever, concrete social data deriving from the economic character of a particular social formation were being detached from their social roots as a result of the philosophical 'profundity' according to which an autonomous entity found expression in them. And, on the other hand, they were being totally de-historicized by this same abstracting process. This neces¬sarily entailed the disappearance of the object of that protest and struggle which the concrete phenomenpn, historically viewed, could and would indeed have to evoke. (We already found advanced forms of this diversion through 'deepening' in Simmel.)<br /><br />With Toennies himself, admittedly, all these tendencies were only latent. He emphasized the progressive factor more strongly than his successors did. The later, purely apologetic form taken by criticisms of capitalist culture, namely the 'proof' that Germany -because of its unique political development -ranked higher than the Western democracies socially and ideologically, is lacking in Toennies. Also, as yet the vitalist-irrationalist element was barely present in his work, at least in his conscious methodology latently, to be sure, it was there already. The primitive 'organism' con¬cept used by the 'historical school' and early German socio¬logy was no longer adequate to the needs of this phase. It was only to make a comeback in the fascists' racial theory. But 'as we have noted, the new antithesis of the 'living' and 'mechanized' ('constructed') already constituted the centre of Toennies's sociological conception, although he did not imitate Nietzsche, his contemporary, in linking it with vitalistic lines of thought.<br /><br />Granted, in Toennies too we find not a few hints and signs of this. As when, for instance, he sees in the develop¬ment of Roman law a process whose reverse side is the 'decay of life'Y And where he discusses the life-destroying effects of the metropolis it is even more marked. We shall quote this passage because it clearly expresses Toennies's attitude to socialism. He wrote: 'So the metropolis and the condition of society in general spell the ruin and death of the common people vainly striving to attain power by virtue of their numbers and able, to their own way of thinking, to use their power only in the cause of rebellion if they want to cast off their misfortune. . . The ascent is from class con¬sciousness to the class struggle. The class struggle destroys that society and State which it plans to reshape. And since the whole of culture has changed into a civilized society and State, culture itself in this altered form will come to an end. . .'12<br /><br />We likewise find in Toennies the beginnings of the 'internalization' and 'deepening' of economic categories by the historian of culture -a line of development that was to culminate in Simmel. With the concept of money, Toennies was already pursuing analogies whose effects were to extend as far as the post-war vogue for a 'sociology of knowledge'. Thus he wrote on occasion of science and money: ' And consequently, scientific concepts which, in their usual origin and real disposition, are judgements which bestow names on affective complexes behave within science like goods within society. They combine in the system like goods on the market. The uppermost scientific concept, which no longer contains the name of anything concrete, resembles money, e.g., the concept of the atom or energy.'13 Equally, Toennies anticipated the later sociology in exploiting his cultural critique as an ideological prop for reformism in the labour movement ¬as when, for example, he perceived in the building societies a victory of the community principle within capitalist society.<br /><br /><strong>4. German Sociology in the Wilhelmine Age (Max Weber) </strong><br /><br />Toennies's book took a long time to attain influence. Similarly, the new sociology as a whole had to fight unceasingly for scientific recognition in the decades before the First World War. But the conditions and character of this struggle were altered. Above all, sociology in the imperial age increasingly desisted -on an international scale -from taking over the legacy of the philosophy of history or philosophy in general as a universal science. It changed, in connection with the general victory of philosophical agnosticism, more and more consciously into one limited specialist discipline among others.<br /><br />In Germany, this development had the particular nuance that sociology showed a great rapprochement with Romantic-irrationalist history conceptions in the Ranke tradition. Accor¬dingly, the scientific doctrine of the prevalent Kantianism was increasingly willing to allow it a modest niche in the classification of the sciences. It is instructive to compare Rickert's critique of sociology with that of Dilthey. Rickert thought that from a logico-methodological angle, there was nothing contradictory in pursuing natural-scientific 'general¬izing' studies of social phenomena, and that such a sociology was therefore eminently possible. We had just to contest the idea 'that this science might tell us how the life of mankind has really shaped itself in its unique individual course'. !4 Therefore a sociology was possible, but it could never take history's place.<br /><br />This saved the methodological 'honour' of sociology. And the sociologists themselves (especially Max Weber) underlined the fact that they were not claiming to reveal the universal meaning of historical development, that sociology was rather merely a kind of ancillary study to that of history in the Dilthey-Rickert sense. Simmel's standpoint was typical in this respect. On the one hand, he stood with the most extreme vehemence for the possibility of an independent, strictly formalistic sociology, while on the other, he went just as far in his works dealing with the theory of history in abiding by the standpoint of the irrationalist 'singularity' and 'unique¬ness' of historical objects.<br /><br />This friendly, neighbourly relationship between sociology and history was also encouraged by the development of the latter. Even under pre-war imperialism, historical accounts went beyond the coarse forms of apologetics we find in Treitschke. With Lamprecht there were even definite tenden¬cies, if also very inadequate ones, towards a 'sociologization' of historical studies. Although the majority of German historians rejected this project, it is still indubitable that many of them began ascribing greater importance than before to social categories (seen most distinctly in Delbriick's history of the war). This again was closely bound up with the development of capitalism in Germany: from now on it was absolutely imperative to come to intellectual terms with the origin, character and perspective of capitalism (imperialist capitalism). The attitude to Marxism now changed as well: a straightforward total ignorance or a coarsely apodictic rejection of it appeared behind the times, not least because of the constantly growing might of the labour movement. A 'subtler' way of 'refuting' Marxism was called for. This went hand in hand with the equally necessary receptiveness to those of its elements which -in a distorted form, to be sure -seemed acceptable to bourgeois ideology in this period.<br /><br />That such an attitude could emerge at all was caused by the growing strength of the reformist movement in social democracy, by theoretical and practical revisionism. As we know, the leading revisionist theoretician, Bernstein, wanted to eliminate everything revolutionary from the labour move¬ment (materialism and dialectics from philosophy, dictator¬ship of the proletariat from political theory, and so on). Capitalism was to 'grow into' socialism in a peaceable way. Where the strategy and tactics of the labour movement were concerned, this meant that the labour organizations should ¬for the purpose of reforms viewed as stages in this 'growing-in' process -collaborate with the liberal bourgeoisie and form coalitions with it. Here we are dealing with an international trend caused by the influence on the labour elite and bureau¬cracy of the imperial economy's parasitical nature. In France it led to the admission of social democrat ministers into bourgeois cabinets (Millerand), etc.<br /><br />This liquidation in both theory and practice of the class struggle, the proclamation of class co-operation between bourgeoisie and proletariat exerted a great influence on the bourgeois sociologists. For them too, revisionism offered a platform of collaboration; it seemed to them that Marxism ¬which they had so far tried to hush up or to refute as a universal system -might be fragmented on the revisionist model so as to incorporate into sociology those parts of it which were serviceable for the bourgeoisie.<br /><br />We shall pick out only several principal elements of the change now occurring. Above all the struggle against materialism was waged just as resolutely as earlier -and that meant, in the sociological sphere, a struggle against the priority of social being and the determining role played by the development of the forces of production. But the relativistic methodologism arising on the basis of neo-Kantianism and Machism made it possible to absorb into bourgeois sociology definite, abstract forms of the interaction between basis and super¬structure. This we have seen very clearly in Simmel's Philosophy of Money. The same applies to Max Weber. In investigating the interaction between economic formations and religions, he sharply rejected the priority of economics: 'An ethic of economics is no simple "function" of economic forms of organization, no more than these ethics, conversely, unequivocally stamp their intrinsic character on these forms . .. However far-reaching the economically and politically conditioned social influences on religious ethics in individual cases -these ethics still acquired their hallmark primarily<br />from religious sources. '15<br /><br />Here Max Weber started out from the interaction of material motives and ideology. He challenged historical materialism because this, in a way he alleged to be scientific¬ally inadmissible, established the priority of the economic factor. (He left unsaid that historical materialism too ascer¬tains complicated reciprocal influences in the concrete reality of society; the economic grounds have, in Engels's words, a determining effect only in the last instance.) But this struc¬ture of reciprocal influences, which highly suited modern relativism, was not retained j it was only a polemical pro¬legomenon attacking historical materialism. Weber's line of thought continually led him into ascribing to ideological (religious) phenomena, more and more strongly, an 'imman¬ent' development arising out of the phenomena themselves. Then this tendency was always so reversed that the pheno¬mena received causal priority in respect of the entire process. This was already patent in the aforestated remarks of Weber. In the same context he stated further: 'Interests (material and idea!), and not ideas, directly govern the actions of men. But the "pictures of the world" created through ideas have, by changing the points as it were, very often determined the lines along which the dynamic of interests drove those actions.'16 Thus with Weber also, sociology switched to the lines of humanistic studies in general and a humanistic, idealistic interpretation of history. Nor was the irrationalist nuance absent, although Max Weber was opposed to irrationalism in his conscious aims. Precisely this sociology was intended to demonstrate that an irrationalism would necessarily arise on the basis of capitalist rationalism, indeed that it actually lay at the bottom of the whole movement. If we examine closely Weber's afore stated genesis of capitalism (the capitalist mentality), we find a particular significance in his wedding of modern rationalism to the idea that with it, reli¬gion was 'shifted into the domain of the irrational'. Troeltsch and others occupied a similar position, except that they stood nearer still to the irrationalist humanistic sciences.<br /><br />This new, 'refined' form of criticism of historical material¬ism was, as we have noted, connected also with a change of attitude towards the labour movement. The elementary illusions that Bismarck's 'carrot and stick' could put an end to the proletarian class organizations had collapsed with the downfall of Bismarck and his anti-socialist laws. To be sure, experiments were repeatedly made to divert the labour movement from the road of class struggle (Stacker, later Gahre and Naumann; in many cases the German sociologists supported these efforts). Later, however, it became of mounting importance for German sociology to lend ideo¬logical support to the reformist trends in social democracy. They included the aim of proving scientifically the necessity and usefulness of the trade union movement's independence of social democracy. Here Werner Sombart played the leading part.<br /><br />For German sociology, the central problem in pre-war imperialism was to find a theory for the origin and nature of capitalism and to 'overcome' historical materialism in this sphere through a theoretical interpretation of its own. What constituted the real bone of contention was the original accumulation, the forcible separation of the employed from the means of production. (As adherents to the marginal utility theory, the majority of German sociologists regarded the doctrine of surplus value as settled scientifically.) New hypotheses and theories were set up by the dozen as a sociological substitute for original accumulation. Sombart in particular developed a feverish activity in this field. He furnished a whole series of explanations for the origin of capitalism: the Jews, the war, luxury, city ground-rents, etc. With regard to later developments, however, Max Weber's conception became the most influential. Weber, as we have seen, started out from the interaction between the economic ethics of religions and economic formations, whereby he asserted the effective priority of the religious motive. His problem was to explain why capitalism had come about only in Europe. In contrast to the earlier view of capitalism as any accumulation of wealth, Weber was at pains to grasp the specific character of modern capitalism and to relate its European origin to the difference between ethico-religious development in the East and West. To achieve this his prin¬cipal step was to de-economize and 'spiritualize' the nature of capitalism. This he presented as a rationalizing of socio¬economic life, the rational calculability of all phenomena. Weber now devised a universal history of religion in order to show that all oriental and ancient religions produced economic codes constituting inhibiting factors in the rationalization of everyday life. Only Protestantism (and within Protestantism, chiefly the dissident sects) possessed an ideology agreeable >¬to this rationalization and encouraging it. Time and again Weber declined to see in the economic codes a consequence of the esonomic structures. Of China, for example, he wrote: 'But here this lack of an ethically rational religiosity is the primary factor and seems, for its own part, to have influenced the constantly striking limitation in the rationalism of her technology. '17 And in consequence of his identification of technology and economics -a vulgarizing simplication that acknowledged only mechanized capitalism as the authentic variety -Weber then arrived at the 'decisive' historical 'argument' that the Protestant economic ethos which speeded up and fostered capitalist development was already there 'before the "capitalist development" '.18 In this he saw a refutation of historical materialism.<br /><br />These few examples suffice to illuminate the German sociologists' methodology: an apparent comprehension of the essence of capitalism without having to go into its real economic problems (above all the question of surplus value and exploitation). Certainly they recognized the fact of the workers' separation from the means of production and free labour, and it played an important part in the sociology of Max Weber especially. But the cardinal distinguishing feature of capitalism remained rationality, calculability. There we see the sequel to Toennies's concept of society, albeit with many divergences in points of detail. This concept necessarily entailed standing the capitalist economy on its head, in that the popularized surface phenomena took priority over the problems of the productive forces' development. This abstract¬ing distortion also enabled the German sociologists to ascribe to ideological forms, particularly justice and religion, a causal role equivalent and indeed superior to economics. That, in turn, now entailed an ever-increasing methodological substitution of analogies for causal connections. For instance, Max Weber saw a strong resemblance between the modern State and a capitalist industrial works. But since he dismissed on agnostic-relativist grounds the problem of primary causa¬tion, he stuck to description with the aid of analogies. These came to form the broad basis of a cultural critique which never got down to the fundamental questions of capitalism. Although giving free play to expressions of discontent with capitalist culture, it viewed the capitalist rationalizing process as the workings of 'destiny' (Rathenau) and thus, for all its criticisms, showed capitalism to be necessary and inevitable.<br /><br />This thinking always culminated in proof of the economic and social impossibility of socialism. The seeming historicity of sociological studies was aimed -but never explicitly -at arguing the case for capitalism as a necessary, no longer essentially changeable system and at exposing the purported internal economic and social contradictions which, it was claimed, made the realization of socialism impossible in theory as in practice. Here it is not worth examining the argument put forward in more detail. Since the German sociologists adhered, economically, to the standpoint of the new and subjectivist popular economics, they could neither know nor understand Marxian economics, let alone polemicize against them objectively. As bourgeois ideologists of the imperialist age, they merely drew all the conclusions of revisionism more rigorously than its spokesmen were capable of doing -out of tactical considerations in respect of their position in the labour movement.<br /><br />The resulting cultural critique took on, in Germany, a particular nuance. Here pre-war sociology was the successor to earlier trends, in an altered form to be sure. It attempted to prove the superiority of the German political form and social structure over the Western democracies. Here again the change signified only an up-dating of methods. As we know, the contradictions in bourgeois democracy were becoming sharply apparent in the West at this time, and they found a strong literary echo not only in reactionary, anti-democratic sociological writings, but also in the theory of a part of the Western labour movement (syndicalism). The German socio¬logy of the age now absorbed all the findings of this critique of democracy and lent to them a philosophically and socio¬logically 'deepened' form. Henceforth democracy was pre¬sented as the inevitable form of the mechanical violation of 'life', of liberty, of individuality, chiefly because of its mass character. The special development and the condition of Germany were then played off against it as an organic order compared with mechanical anarchy, as a rule of responsibly-minded and competent leaders compared with the irrespons¬ibility of leadership through democratic 'demagogy'. Such influential sociological works as Hasbach's Modern Democracy were nothing more than scientifically puffed-up pamphlets attacking democracy. Just as earlier, the 'historical school' of German economics had glorified the Bismarck regime as a superior political and social form, so now German sociology was writing apologetics for Wilhelmine imperialism.<br /><br />Max Weber occupied a special position in this develop¬ment. Admittedly, his methodological foundations were very similar to those of his contemporaries; he too adopted the Western sociological criticisms of modern democracy. But his attitude to it was totally reversed: despite all the criticism, he regarded democracy as the form most suited to the imperialist expansion of a major modern power.. He saw the weakness of German imperialism as lying in its lack of internal demo¬cratic development. 'Only a politically mature people is a "master race" . . . Only master races are called upon to inter¬vene in the course of global developments. If nations attempt it without possessing this quality, then not only will the safe instinct of the other nations protest, but they will also come to grief in the attempt internally. . . The will to powerless¬ness in home affairs that the writers preach is irreconcilable with the "will to power" abroad which has been so noisily trumpeted.'19<br /><br />Here the social derivation of Max Weber's democratism can be readily grasped. He shared with the other German imperialists the view of the world -political (colonizing) mission of the 'master races'. But he differed from them in that he not only failed to idealize German conditions under specious parliamentary government, but criticized them violently and passionately. Like the English or French, he thought, the Germans could become a 'master race' only in a democracy. Hence for the sake of attaining Germany's imperialist aims, a democratization had to take place inter¬nally and go as far as was indispensable to the realization of these aims. This Weberian standpoint implied a sharp rejec¬tion of the 'personal regime' of the Hohenzollern dynasty and the bureaucratic power closely connected with it. Not only on the political plane did Weber continually challenge this regime; in his sociology, too, he constantly portrayed it as a gloomy prospect. Here he was turning the tables: he showed that a regime like the German one by no means meant 'organic freedom' but the opposite -a bureaucratic, mechanized cramping of all freedom and individuality. (We may note in passing that he also used the same prospect as a warning against socialism, which he interpreted as a total bureaucratization of life.) Weber criticized the inferiority of German foreign policy, which he believed to lie in the system and not the mistakes of individuals, and he stoutly affirmed the view that a proper choice of leader could only come about through a powerful parliament, and through democrat¬ization. Because of its imperialist basis this Weberian demo¬cratism had, to be sure, very curious nuances. Weber, accord¬ing to his wife's notes, expressed himself as follows in a conversation with Ludendorff after the war: 'In a democracy the people elects as its leader a man it trusts. Then the man elected says, "Now hold your tongues and obey!" Neither the people nor the parties may contradict him . . . Afterwards it is for the people to judge -if the leader has erred, then away to the gallows with him!' It is not surprising that Ludendorff said to this: 'I like the sound of such a demo¬cracy! '20 Thus Weber's idea of democracy lapsed into a Bonapartist Caesarism.<br /><br />This concrete political basis of sociological critiques of culture shows even in their most opposed manifestations the deep affinity with the contemporary philosophy of the imperialist age, with the particular forms of neo-Kantianism and the burgeoning vitalism. In sociology too we find an extreme formalism in methodology, and an extreme rela¬tivism and agnosticism in its epistemology which now degenerated into an irrationalist mysticism. Sociology, as we have noted, went through the motions of being a specialist discipline, and indeed nothing other than an ancillary discip¬line to history. Its very formalism, however, removed all possibility of concrete historical elucidation. In this respect the lines along which the different disciplines developed again ran parallel, becoming more and more formalistic, each creating for itself an immanent formal casuistry, and thereby passing from one to another the essential problems of con¬tent and origin. Thus Jellinek -to take jurisprudence as an example -regarded the substantive problems of justice as 'meta-legal' questions; thus Kelsen wrote of the origin of justice: 'It is the great mystery play of Justice and State which is performed in the legislative act. . .'21; thus Preuss stated: 'The content of legal institutions is, however, never of a juristic but always of a political, economic nature.'22<br /><br />In appearance, sociology thereby acquired the important function of explaining, for its own part, these contents and processes of derivation in concrete terms. But that was only apparently the case. What did it really achieve? Instead of causal explanations, its equally formalistic sublimations yielded purely formal analogies. With Simmel this formalism sometimes amounted to a journalistic jeu d'esprit, as when he was discussing the possibility of identical social forms with completely different contents and discovered analogies between religious associations and bands of outlaws. This is concrete evidence of what we stressed in our introductory remarks, namely that the practice of the specialist branches of social theory meant postponing a resolution of the prob¬lems. In that they passed them round among themselves, their method bore a striking resemblance to the document transfers of bureaucratic authorities.<br /><br />Although Max Weber occasionally polemicized against Simmel's exaggerated formalism, his own sociology was like¬wise full of such formalistic analogies. Thus he formally equated, for instance, ancient Egyptian bureaucracy with socialism, councillors (Rcite) and estates (Stiinde); thus in speaking of the irrational vocation of leader (charisma), he drew an analogy between a Siberian shaman and the social democrat leader Kurt Eisner, etc..As a result of its formalism, subjectivism and agnosticism, sociology, like contemporary philosophy, did no more than to construct specified types, set up typologies and arrange historical phenomena in this typology. (Here Dilthey's later philosophy had acquired 'a decisive influence on German sociology. Its real blossoming -after Spengler -we can witness in the post-war period.)<br /><br />With Max Weber this problem of types became the central methodological question. The setting up of purely con¬structed 'ideal types' Weber regarded as a question central to the tasks of sociology. According to him a sociological analysis was only possible if it proceeded from these types. But this analysis did not produce a line of development, but only a juxtaposition of ideal types selected and arranged casuistically. The course of society itself, comprehended in its uniqueness on Rickertian lines and not following a regular pattern, had an irremediably irrationalistic character, although for the rational casuistry of the ideal type the irrational was the 'disruptive' element, the 'deviation'.<br /><br />The ultimately subjective nature of Weber's sociology is best expressed in its concept of law. With regard to the categories of an 'understanding sociology' Weber specifically stressed that: 'the manner in which sociological concepts are formed is always largely a question of practicality. We are by no means obliged to form all . . . the categories set forth below.'23 In accordance with this pragmatically oriented epistemology he wrote: 'The "laws" -our customary designa¬tion for a number of precepts in the "understanding socio¬logy" -. . . are typical chances, hardened by observation, of a course of social action to be actualized in the presence of certain data, chances which are understandable from typical motives and the typically viewed mentality of the agents.'24 This not only suspended subjectivistically the whole of objective social reality; the social data thereby took on a seemingly exact but in reality extremely blurred complexity. For instance Weber described the 'labour contract' in such a way that after enumerating the workers' obligations he wrote: '. . . that if he does all this, he (i.e., the worker, G.L.) moreover has the chance to receive at intervals certain specifically shaped metal discs or pieces of paper which, when placed in the hands of others, enable him to acquire bread, coal, trousers, etc. And the upshot of it is that if somebody then wanted to take these articles away from him again, men in helmets would, wi~h a certain degree of likeli¬hood, appear at his bidding and help to restore them to him etc., etc.'25<br /><br />It is evident from this that Weber's sociological categories -he defined as 'chance' the most diverse social formations such as might, justice, the State and so on -will yield simply the abstractly formulated psychology of the calculating individual agent of capitalism. Even here, with the German scholar who, in his subjective aims, made the most honest and rigorous effort to pursu~ his discipline purely objectively, to found and to translate into praxis a methodology of pure objectivity, the imperialist tendencies of pseudo-objectivity proved stronger. For Weber's conception of 'chance' was, on the one hand, modelled on the Machist interpretation of natural phenomena. And on the other, it was conditioned by the psychological subjectivism of the 'marginal utility theory'; it converted the objective forms, transmutations, happenings, etc., of social life into a tangled web of -fulfilled or unful¬filled -'expectations', and its regular principles into more or less probable 'chances' of the fulfilment of such expecta¬tions. It is likewise evident that a sociology operating in this direction could go no further than abstract analogies in its generalizations.<br /><br />Imperialist sociology, however, not only set itself the tasks we have outlined above. It also attempted to satisfy those 'needs for a world-view' evoked at this time by 'vitalism', the Hegel revival, the Romantic revival, etc., which were all bound in the direction of a mystical irrationalism. These tendencies took various forms in German sociology. Some¬times they expressed themselves quite directly, as when Rathenau was speaking of the irrational revolt of the 'soul' against the mechanical apparatus of capitalism (similarly in the Stefan George school, etc.). Simmel presented the dualism of formalistic sociology and irrationalistic 'vitalism' in a more complex fashion in the problem of the 'tragedy of culture'.<br /><br />Here too we must emphasize the special position of Max Weber, principally because in struggling against this irration¬alism, it provided a bridge to a higher stage of it. Whilst Weber repeatedly defended himself against the charge of relativism, he considered his agnostic-formalistic method to be the only scientific one, since it prohibited the introduc¬tion into sociology of anything that was not exactly verifi¬able. In his opinion, sociology was able only to offer a technical critique, i.e., to investigate 'which means are apt to lead to an envisaged end', and, on the other hand, 'to ascertain the consequences which the application of the required means would have. . . besides the achieving of the purpose intended'.26 Everything else, according to Weber, lay outside the domain of science; it was an object of faith and therefore irrational.<br /><br />Thus Max Weber's 'value-freedom' for sociology, its apparent purging of all irrational elements, finally amounted to a still greater irrationalizing of socio-historical events. Weber himself, although he certainly failed to see that this was to take away the whole rationality of his scientific methodology, had to accept that the irrational basis of 'value judgements' was deeply anchored in social reality itself. He wrote: 'The impossibility of a "scientific" presentation of practical standpoints adopted... follows for much pro-founder reasons. There is in principle no sense in it because the world's various orders of value are inseparably locked in mutual conflict.'27 Here Weber ran up against the problem of the Communist Manifesto, the problem that history is a history of class struggles. But because of his world-outlook, he could and would not acknowledge these facts. Since, as a result, he was neither able nor willing to draw in his mind dialectical conclusions from this dialectical structure of social reality, he was forced to seek refuge in irrationalism. Here it is very evident how imperialist irrationalism arose out of false answers to questions that were justified, because posed by reality itself. The situation was that reality itself was, with great and increasing force, confronting the ideolo¬gists with dialectical questions which -for social and hence methodological reasons -they could not possibly answer dialectically. Irrationalism was the form taken by the result¬ing flight from a dialectical answer to the dialectical question. So in truth this apparently scientific character and strict 'value-freedom' of sociology marked the highest stage of irrationalism hitherto reached. As a result of Max Weber's intellectual rigour, these irrationalist consequences emerged from his writings more clearly than from imperialist neo-Kantianism.<br /><br />At the same time, Weber energetically opposed the conven¬tional German irrationalism which held sway earlier and was continuing to do so. He observed perfectly clearly that some¬thing can be irrational only in relation to something else, and therefore only relatively irrational. He was contemptuous of the experiential irrationalism of his contemporaries: 'Anyone who wants "vision" (Schau) can go to the cinema.'28 Cer¬tainly it is worth noting that he expressly exonerated from this charge the later leading lights of existential philosophy, Jaspers and also Klages. Thus his critical dismissal was only aimed against the outmoded and popular forms of irration¬alism. Weber's own methodology was shot through with irrationalist tendencies which had arisen out of specifically imperialist motives and become insuperable for him, and which stemmed from the inner contradictoriness of his own position regarding German imperialism and the democratizing of Germany. Hence he was obliged to recognize the new, refined forms of irrationalism -forms determined in part by his own equivocal methodology. That he would certainly have repudiated them in their advanced pre-fascist or actual fascist form does not disprove in the least this historio¬-methodological connection. With regard to fascism Weber would -mutatis mutandis -have landed himself in a situa¬tion similar to that later occupied by Stefan George or Spengler.<br /><br />Max Weber contested the outmoded irrationalism of German sociology as represented by Roscher, Knies and Treitschke. He challenged the more modern, but epistemo¬logically still naive irrationalism of Meinecke and jeeringly wrote: 'So human actions would find their specific meaning in the fact that they are inexplicable and hence beyond understanding.'29 He spoke just as ironically of the personal¬ity concept of Romantic irrationality 'which, after all, altogether shares the "person" with the animal'.3O But this lively and just polemic against the vulgar irrationalism pre¬valent at that time does not cancel out the irrational core of Max Weber's method and outlook. Although Weber sought to rescue the scientific character of sociology through its 'value-freedom', he was only shifting all irrationality to the value judgements, the standpoints adopted. (Let us recall his historio-sociological statement about the rationality of economics and irrationality of religion.) Weber summed up his viewpoint thus: a scientific presentation of practical attitudes adopted is impossible.<br /><br />It is meaningless in principle because the world's various orders of value are inseparably locked in mutual conflict . . . if anything, we know again tuday that something can be holy not only although it is not beautiful, but because and insofar as it is not beautiful. . . and that something can be beautiful not only although, but in that it is not good. We have know this again since Nietzsche, and we find it previously in the Fleurs du Mal, as Baudelaire called his cycle of poems, -and it is a platitude to say that something can be true although and whilst it is not beauti¬ful, not holy and not good. . . It is precisely here that even various gods are at loggerheads, and always will be . . . Depending on the latest view adopted, one thing is the Devil and the other God as far as the individual is con¬cerned, and the individual must decide which, for him, is God and which the Devil. And this is so throughout the orders of life. . . The gods of ancient polytheism, bereft of their magic and hence appearing as impersonal powers, are climbing out of their tombs, striving for command over our lives and renewing their eternal battles with each other. 31<br /><br />According to Weber, this irrationality in the views which men will adopt -and precisely in respect of their cardinal praxis -is a supra-historical fundamental fact of social life. But his account bestowed on it some specific features of the present. Above all he put the stress on withdrawing from public life and thus raised the consciousness of the solitary individual to the status of an inappellable arbitrator; and by thus denying even the possibility of an objective authority, he further underlined the irrational character of the judge¬ment. With Max Weber this universal condition was also connected with the world's 'disenchantment' and the origin of modern prose, in which the mythical figures of the warring gods have lost their mythical-religious-sensuous forms and are present only in their abstract antinomies (and the irrational¬ity of their existence as well as of subjective reactions to them).<br /><br />At this point Max Weber's outlook merged with the 'religious atheism' of the imperialist period. The disenchant¬ing godlessness and god-forsakenness of life was presented as the historical face of the times. And whilst it had to be accepted as historical fact, it was bound to evoke a profound mourning, a profound yearning for the old, not yet 'disen¬chanted' ages. With Weber this attitude was less overtly romantic than with most of the 'religious atheists' among his contemporaries. In his work, the lack of socio-historical perspectives emerges all the more graphically as the real basis of 'religious atheism'. As always, he tackled this matter more cautiously than the later critics of culture who repre¬sented this standpoint, and was far more concerned not to lose touch with scientific thinking. So for him, the lack of perspectives did not rule out a limine and a priori the possi¬bility of a perspective. It merely denied the present age this possibility and made this denial a hallmark of intellectual integrity. Considering those views of Weber that we have expounded so far, this attitude may be readily understood. For even were everything that he wished for Germany to be realized, the realization could not decisively alter in any respect his basic assessment of the social reality. In his eyes, after all, the democratizing of Germany was only a technical step towards a better functioning imperialism, only an align¬ment of Germany's social structure with that of the Western European democracies. And these, he perceived dearly, were equally subject to the problems of 'disenchantment', etc., in respect of their essential social life. Hence when he began looking at the essence of the life of society, he saw nothing but general gloom all around. This universal condition he described most impressively: the scholars' highest virtue was, Weber wrote,<br /><br />simple intellectual honesty. .. But it commands us to . state that for all the many people today who are awaiting new prophets and saviours, the situation is the same as that voiced in the beautiful song of the Edomite guards in exile, as recorded in the prophecies of Isaiah: 'The sum¬mons comes from Seir in Edom: dawn is breaking, but night lingers on. If you would ask, return another time.' The race to whom that was spoken had asked and waited for more than two thousand years, and we know its grievous fate. Let us draw a moral from it -that longing and waiting are not sufficient. Let us act differently, let us go to our work and satisfy the 'demand of the day' ¬on the human as much as the professional level. That demand, however, is plain and simple if each of us finds and obeys the daimon holding the threads of his life.32<br /><br />Here Max Weber quite evidently carried 'religious atheism's' lack of perspectives resolutely beyond Dilthey and even Simmel. The existentialists' nihilism could now be directly linked to it, as indeed happened in the case of Jaspers.<br /><br />So Max Weber banished irrationalism from his methodology and analysis of isolated facts only in order to introduce it as the philosophical basis of his world-picture with a firmness hitherto unknown in Germany. Granted, even this elimina¬tion of irrationalism from the methodology was not total. Just as Weber relativized everything in sociology into rational types, so likewise his type of the non-hereditary leader who attains office as a result of his 'charisma' was purely irration¬alistic. That aside, however, imperialist neo-Kantianism really crossed the bridge into irrationalist existentialism for the first time in the lines quoted above. For that reason it was no coincidence that Jaspers saw in Weber a new type of philosopher. How strongly Weber was here expressing the general tendency of the most cultivated (and politically Left-oriented) German intellectuals of the imperialist period, how much his strictly scientific approach was only a path to the definitive establishing of irrationalism in men's out¬look, and thus how helpless the best German minds were in the face of the irrationalist onslaught, is indicated -to quote just one example -in the following comment by Walther Rathenau: 'Let us press on with the language and images of the intellect as far as the gates of eternity; not in order to break them down, but in order to put paid to the intellect by securing its fulfilment.'33 From here it was only a single step to the absolute predominance of irrationalism; only a firm renunciation of this 'detour' via the intellect and scienti¬fic thinking was needed. This step was not long coming. At bottom Spengler constructed in a merely amateurish and overtly mythologizing fashion the same bridge from extreme relativism to irrationalist mysticism which Weber expounded in the form of a credo as he crossed from scientific exactitude into the realm of world-outlook.<br /><br /><strong>5. The Defencelessness of Liberal Sociology (Alfred Weber, Mannheim)</strong><br /><br />Max Weber's conception of society was permeated, as we have seen, by a profound dichotomy. Against Prussian junker reaction, on the one hand, he affirmed the need for demo¬cratic development in Germany, albeit in the service of a more alert German imperialism. He took, on the other hand, a critical view of modern democracy and capitalist culture in general, and entertained a deep-seated pessimism about them. Hence his prognoses and perspectives were bound to be equivocal. We have observed his reactionary utopia of a democratic Caesarism. At the same time, after Germany's defeat in the First World War he was of the pronounced opinion that the possibilities of a German imperialism had been exhausted for a long time to come, and that the German people would have to reckon with this situation. Democracy he presented in this context as the political form of such an accommodation and also as the most effective safeguard against the revolutionary labour movement. We have just noted the same dichotomy in methodology and world-outlook in the matter of irrationalism.<br /><br />Post-war German sociology took over this dichotomy as a legacy from him, as far as it was supported by the least vestige of a democratic idea. The most outstanding repre¬sentative of this transitional form was Weber's younger brother, Alfred. With the latter, however, the dualism of rationalism and irrationalism assumed different proportions from the start (and already before the war). Alfred Weber was strongly influenced by Bergson and other vitalistic irrationalists. That is to say, he was more radical than Max Weber in grasping everything rational and scientific in a purely technical, pragmatic-agnosticist light, as merely external technical aids, since there could be only one entrance to the dead 'shell' of the external aspects of Being. For him, this entrance to 'life' was formed by the element of direct 'experience' in its irrationality. But Alfred Weber did not therefore make a radical break with all science in the name of experience, as Stefan George's pupils had done before the war. Nor did he follow his brother in shifting the problem of irrationality to an extra-scientific philosophical plane. He attempted a 'synthesis', an intellectual 'illumination' of the irrational but without rationalizing it, a scientific approach which was intrinsically anti-scientific. So here Max Weber's dichotomy was reproduced at a higher stage.<br /><br />This was not simply a difference of personal mentality. Before the war Alfred Weber's position was that of a lone wolf. The class struggles were gaining in intensity, the bour¬geoisie was in a critical state, consciously revolutionary ten¬dencies in the labour movement throughout the world were becoming stronger, while in the Soviet Union there existed a growing socialist society which was becoming increasingly established. And as we have noted in analysing Spengler's philosophy of history, the reaction of the bourgeois ideo¬logies to all these events opened up the way to a new, full-blown irrationalist study of sociological problems. On the one hand, there arose an irrationalist 'method' in the social and historical sciences, with the typology of Dilthey and Max Weber branching out into a socio-philosophical 'mor¬phology' and 'doctrine of forms'. In the vigorous class struggles over the new republic starting at the end of the war, on the other hand, irrationalism became to a mounting extent the ideological banner of entrenched reaction. Now since Alfred Weber's methodology sided with the tendencies of post-war reaction on the irrationalism question, but aimed at turning them into a sociological argumentation for a new democratic movement, his vague and vacillating eclecticism temporarily took on a wider importance.<br /><br />Alfred Weber shared his brother's estimation of Germany in comparison with the Western democracies, thereby sharply dissociating himself from entrenched reaction, which idealized the German conditions. On this question he kept his distance from mythologies of history. He saw the difference as lying not in the national character but in the historical destinies of the nations. He saw how the Western cultures had profited by the fact that their attainment to national status was linked with major revolutionary movements, whereas 'establishment as a political nation was handed to us on a plate'.34 This implies a more or less firm rejection of the reactionary theories of history. But this rejection, which stemmed from Alfred Weber's liberal views, he promptly retracted and twisted into a reactionary direction. For he was also influ¬enced very strongly by the Western criticism of modern bourgeois democracy, a criticism always connected with irrationalism. (Note Sorel's relationship to Bergson.) This criticism shows very dearly the reactionary decay of liberal¬ism. Out of a fear of the socialist possibilities of a democracy carried all the way through, the oft-heralded democratic spirit was despicably betrayed. Here Alfred Weber allied himself with those critics of democracy who, following the general imperialist vogue, traced its problems back to its mass form. Thus instead of criticizing firmly the bourgeois, capitalist fetters of contemporary democracy -the real problem which life was posing -he flinched from the socialist consequences of such a critique and began to attack demo¬cracy's mass character, whereupon his criticism -for all its reservations -was bound to join the general trend of reac¬tion. This steered him back to positions which, as we have seen, he was endeavouring to reject: to the world mission associated with Germany's social backwardness. And he now thought that Germany had the chance of finding a new road for which all mankind was looking.<br /><br />Here we see the persistence of that reactionary German tradition which, taking its cue from Bismarck's solution for unifying the German nation, reached a temporary climax at the time of the First World War in the slogan, Am deutscben Wesen soil die Welt genesen (The essence of Germany will set the world to rights). It was, this tradition asserted, pre¬cisely the backward sides of the German people in compari¬son with Western democratic developments that constituted the, source of its international superiority, its vocation for international leadership. Max Weber's specific position was anchored not least in the fact that he was free from this chauvinistic prejudice. Alfred Weber (who, as we have remarked, was essentially in agreement with his brother in his assessment of German history) strayed from the road of sober judgement just where he was required to draw decisive consequences. He capitulated to the reactionary chauvinist view, to which he made major concessions. This surrender clearly illustrates his inconsistent, wavering position, which was connected socially with the weakness of democracy in the Weimar Republic and methodologically with his eclectic, undirected irrationalism.<br /><br />That defines for us the task of Alfred Weber's sociology. It proceeded from the thesis that we find ourselves in a com¬pletely new world-situation. There were, Alfred Weber contended, three periods in the history of thought, and the present age marked the beginning of the third. Hence he deemed it necessary to make a clean break with the classical traditions. Philosophically, he allied himself with that cam¬paign against Descartes and the rationalism derived from him which we have already analysed, a tradition which began with the older Schelling and ended in fascism. He saw the culture of the future in the emergence of a 'post-Cartesian period'. Here his reasoning is not without interest. He said of the legacy of German idealism: 'But this, paradoxical though it is, leads to the shaping of materialist propositions and to con¬tinued compromises with historical materialism. '35 He vigor¬ously reproached Troeltsch for making such compromises.<br /><br />Here again Alfred Weber's conception of history came very close to that of extreme reaction. We noted in the Hegel dispute that such a rejection of the classical period ran from Lagarde to Baeumler. Now the nearer this line came to Hitlerism, the more important the discovery became that, intellectually, historical materialism had a profound link with the ideology of Germany'~ classical period; Rosenberg made this plain with regard to the link between Hegel and Marx.<br /><br />This question is of such significance for the development of German culture that we must dwell on it for a moment.. From the outset all anti-democratic reaction had tended to exclude Marx and Marxism from German culture, although it must have been clear to any student the least bit open-minded how profound the connection was between Marxism and the ideology of the golden age of German culture, the period from Lessing to Heine and from Kant to Hegel and Feuerbach. For a long time it was possible to employ the cliche that Marxism was 'un-German'. The aggravation of the class struggles, and in particular the inevitable first encounter in theory and praxis with the problems of democracy and socialism imposed by the loss of the First World War, now created a new situation, of which Alfred Weber's aforestated standpoint may be termed the ideological expression. The objective development of society wrested from him an insight into this link between the classical age and Marxism; for social democrat literature dealt with this question not at all or very feebly -with the sole exception of Franz Mehring. From both the methodological and the social angle, it is highly remarkable that Alfred Weber countered this correct definition of the concrete connection by dismissing the whole classical period. Methodologically, he drew his conclu¬sions from the basic irrationalistic position; if the future of culture depended on the emergence of a 'post-Cartesian period', then it was only logical to discard the Lessing-Heine period and to see in Marx the -equally dispensable -final realization of this 'Cartesian' development. The struggle against Marxism made obligatory this very break with the greatest traditions of German culture. (That fascist demagogy laid down some exceptions:-chiefly Holderlin, and portions of Goethe -did not materially affect the principal line.)<br /><br />In this methodology we can also observe once more how, in the imperialist age, points of departure that were correct in themselves -here, the connection between classical times and Marx -could lead to the most false and portentous conclusions -here, a rejection of the classical period. The class struggles in the Weimar Republic formed the objective basis for this. It became more and more evident in the course of these struggles that a concrete maintenance and expansion of democracy, which would necessarily lead in the direction of socialism, was only possibl~ with the support of the revolutionary working class. That so-called democracy which was being defended from this onslaught could, in turn, only be preserved with the aid of the extreme reactionaries. Under these conditions the social scope afforded to a purely Western democracy (of the British type) was growing narrower and narrower. So for these liberal middle-of-the road ideologists, of whom Alfred Weber was one, the task became that of saving their liberal conception of democracy. And this, for them, was only possible if they were in the most intimate touch with reaction, and through a resolute battle against the Left, allied to an -inevitably more than lame -resistance to the radical demands of the extreme reactionaries. The latter principle finds clear expression in Alfred Weber's irrationalist sociology. The energetic struggle against the Left and the true forces of democracy led him to associate Lagarde's rejection and Nietzsche's critique of the classical period with the attempt to destroy Marxism. That just this step cleared the way for fascist ideology, and for the theories of history and culture advanced by Baeumler and Rosenberg, is among the not uncommon facts of the development whereby convinced liberals, precisely because of their liberal ideology, have become pioneers of the ideology of extreme reaction in times of crisis.<br /><br />Thus Alfred Weber's dismissal of historical materialism was more vehement and impassioned than that of Max Weber and Troeltsch. Like his brother, but more radically, more strongly detached still from all economic considerations, indeed, repudiating economics in radical fashion, he saw the basic character of contemporary society as lying in the general rationalizing process. But that it was precisely capital¬ism which had achieved this rationalization was, in his eyes, a 'historical coincidence -it could equally well have been. .. the State which carried out the general rationalization'.36 (This radical belittlement of economic life and economic motives again expresses the point that, to him, the real adversary was socialism and Marxism. And here too Alfred Weber was doing preliminary work on behalf of fascist ideology.)<br /><br />For these reasons he called for entirely new forms of sociology: a new method of intuitive sociology of culture. This rested on the thesis that the world was split into three areas with 'different trends of movement': the social process, the process of civilization, and the cultural movement. We can see the significance now acquired by the false antithesis, which first became central with Toennies, between culture and civilization. But we see also how much farther this anti¬thesis had been developed in a reactionary irrationalist direction since Toennies's day. The Romantic anti-capitalist critique of contemporary culture had petrified into a starkly mechanical opposition of culture and socio-economic life. It had become an assertion of the total other-ness of culture to all the rest of mankind's tendencies and forces of develop¬ment: a mysticized fetish for decadent intellectuals who were timidly and artificially cutting themselves off from the public life of society.<br /><br />When analysed the process of civilization showed, accord¬ing to Alfred Weber, only a continuation of the biological stages of man's evolution 'through which, however, we pre¬serve and extend only our natural existence? 7 On the one hand, this evolution had, in principle, nothing to do with culture; culture no longer stemmed from human evolution as its finest flower, but was deemed radically independent of man's physical and social existence. On the other hand, the character of culture, as representing the peak of the human condition, was polemic ally contrasted to all other expressions of life. It was quite logical for Alfred Weber to recognize only works of art and ideas as forms of culture, and artists and prophets as its only transmitters. In its actual content, this sociology of culture was bound to proclaim a complete abstention from social action, which in any case can never touch on essential matters. But since this sociology was, as we shall see, still turning its attention to the social sphere, there arose an important intellectual link between Alfred Weber, the Stefan George school and Hitlerism. Hitler and Rosenberg had only to invest the 'prophet' with a plainly reactionary content in order to complete this development of the irrationalist social doctrine in the fascist spirit. (There is a similarity here to the connection between Max Weber's 'charismatic leader' and the blind worship of the Fiihrer demanded by Hitler.)<br /><br />With Alfred Weber this antithesis of culture and civiliza¬tion coincided with that of emotion and intellect, irrational¬istic intuition and rationalism. All evolution was rationalistic and had a methodological import only outside the cultural sphere; in culture there was no development, no progress, but only a 'live stream' -a true Bergsonian expression. Here Alfred Weber repudiated all perspectives, all 'cultural prog¬noses' of the future; the future was -so irrationalist logic would have it -of necessity a secret. What he wished to achieve was a 'mere orientation in the present'.38 It is striking from a logical viewpoint, but not surprising from that of Alfred Weber's hypotheses, that he did not so much as notice the contradiction occurring here. For if, as he himself repeat¬edly stressed, culture is -as Bergson would have it -a 'stream', then how can we orient ourselves in it without having investigated the direction of the stream (a question involving the matter of perspective)? According to Weber it was sociology's task precisely to attain to a vision of this 'stream' and to express it in 'affective symbols'. On such a basis it could provide an answer to the quest.ion of where we stand. Thus while consciously renouncing the scientific 'dignity' of sociology, Alfred Weber believed that a definite synthesis and analysis resting on intuition would still be possible on this basis, though they would have nothing to do with a causal explanation. It is perhaps superfluous to remark how close this new sociology comes to the existentialism of Heidegger and Jaspers.<br /><br />So let us now take the concrete central question of Alfred Weber's sociology -the respective positions of present things, our present position in history. To a large extent his diagnosis of this tallied with that of Max Weber: the mechanization, technical trappings and mass quality of existence, accom¬panied by a prognosis of the ineluctability of these social manifestations. Democracy too was, in Alfred Weber's eyes, part of this process of civilization. Already going beyond his brother at this point, he characterized democracy as the 'subjugation of the State's political will to mindless economic forces'.39 Naturally this was closely connected with his rejec¬tion of the 'mass quality of existence' in democracy. It was however this diagnosis that gave rise to the particular perspec¬tive of Alfred Weber's sociology. Weber stated, with regard to the fate of democracy and of our tasks in its formation, that one had to penetrate to a deeper level; it was there that the authentic problem first originated. 'We must separate those parts of the democratic idea which follow simply from the development of man's self-consciousness from those which have sprung from the rational mediating apparatus of civilized thinking and contemplation.'4O One must therefore begin to contemplate the 'primal facts of life'. In concrete terms that means: the manifestation is civilization, but the primal facts are the processes of 'leading' and of 'being led'. Thus the central problem of democracy is the creation of a new leader caste.<br /><br />Here there is still a glimmer of a proper democratic instinct in Alfred Weber, inasmuch as he criticized the fact about the German development that the lower classes could not attain to leadership. But all that he could do positively was to set up completely vague reactionary utopias. This was not a matter of chance but the inevitable upshot of his proposition and its social foundation. It was, indeed, again not by chance that the leader problem was raised precisely by sociologists of those countries where there was no really advanced bourgeois democracy (Max Weber in Germany, Pareto in Italy). Max Weber also saw clearly -in his concrete analyses-that pre¬cisely Germany's undemocratic, quasi-parliamentary develop¬ment was bound to entail a defective and fateful choice of leader. Politically he called for the democratizing, the parlia¬mentarization of Germany in view of this very point. But when he summed up his views theoretically, he again drifted into an irrationalist mysticism. As is well known, Max Weber in his sociology regarded the chosen state of the democratic leader in particular as 'charisma', a term already expressing the conceptually unfathomable and incomprehensible irra¬tional character of leadership. For Max Weber this was not to be avoided. For if -following the Rickertian methodology of history, which only recognizes individual phenomena -we ask why it was that Pericles or Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell or Marat became leaders and try to find a sociological generalization covering the separate historical answers, there will arise the concept of 'charisma', which roughly pins down in. a pseudo-concept our ignorant amazement, i.e., something irrational. When, on the other hand, Hegel spoke of the -'world-historical individual', he was proceeding not from the individual but from the historically allotted task of an age, a nation, and regarded as 'world -historical' that individual who could solve this task. Hegel well knew that the question of whether, among those with the potential awareness and capacity for action needed in this situation, it is the indivi¬dual X or Y who does in fact become 'world-historical' conceals within it an element of irreducible chance. Max Weber posed the question precisely from the angle of this unavoidable chance element and sought an 'explanation' for it. Hence he was sure to land up with the partly abstract, partly mystical and irrational pseudo-concept of 'charisma'.<br /><br />Meanwhile the problem itself had been clarified in histori¬cal materialism far beyond the insight accessible to Hegel. The very analysis of the class struggles, and of the varying composition and structure of classes, further diversified according to historical periods, countries and evolutionary stages, offered the methodological possibility of posing and<br />solving in full clarity that which was truly and scientifically soluble in this question. It did so by establishing that the economic and political struggle of a class was always linked with the training of a leader caste. And the nature, composi¬tion, selection, etc., of this caste could be elucidated scien¬tifically from the conditions 'of the class struggle, the com¬position, evolutionary stage and so forth of the class, and the reciprocal relationship between the mass and its leaders etc. In content and methodology Lenin's What Is To Be Done? was the model of such an analysis. To bourgeois sociology, the findings and the methods of a scientific proposition of this kind were automatically inaccessible. This was not only because of its repudiaiion in principle of the class struggle (in spite of this stance, it could still have attained at least a Hegelian clarity). It was because bourgeois sociology posed the question -more or less consciously -as a challenge to the democratic upsurge and because, from the very start, the problem's methodological basis was not the interaction of leadership and masses, but -more or less -the antithetical enmity between them. Such class reasons gave rise to a proposition that was at once abstract and irrationalist: a reduction of the problem of democracy to the leader ques¬tion. Only distortedly irrationalist, anti-democratic answers could be given to so limited and distorted a question. This is best seen in Robert Michels's book on the sociology of party political life. In order to degrade democracy and especially labour democracy, the phenomena which reformism had produced in the social democrat parties and in the trade unions they influenced were elevated to 'sociological laws'. From a specific phenomenon of one part of the labour move¬ment in the imperialist age, Michels deduced the 'law' that it was impossible for the masses to evolve an appropriate leader caste from within their own ranks.<br /><br />We have illustrated the contrast, in Max Weber, between concrete politico-historical criticism where he proved the incapacity, with regard to Wilhelmine Germany, of quasi-parliamentary absolutism to evolve a caste of leaders on the one hand, and his irrational mystical 'charisma' sociology on the other. There is also a similar internal inconsistency in his brother. But with the latter, the criticism of Germany's democratic backwardness was merely episodic, whereas irrationalist mysticism embraced not only the choice of leader but the whole problem of democracy and leadership. Alfred Weber appealed to the country's youth, demanded a separation of personal criterion from party opinion in select¬ing a leader, and called for the working out of 'an intellec¬tually aristocratic norm filled with substance, delineated in character'.41 Of course he was unable to say what the sub¬stance of such a norm might be, for according to his theory the substance was not definable, only 'experience'. Thus the ambitious launching of his new sociology ended with the wholly unsubstantiated, suggested vision of a new change of direction, with vague hints of a total upheaval in terms of world-outlook, and with an appeal to a 'generation unthink¬able without Nietzsche, its master',42 albeit a Nietzsche minus the 'blond beast'. It was on this 'basis' that the new men were supposed to procure peaceful co-operation between nations.<br /><br />Confused though these studies are, and despite the inevit¬able meagreness and eclecticism of their intellectual results, we must not underestimate the importance of such essays of a sociology of leadership in creating a mental climate favourable to the acceptance of the Nazi mystique of the Fuhrer. A methodological foundation was now ach1eved inasmuch as the whole problem-complex was made the necessarily irrational object of subjective experiences. Lack¬ing such a climate, the fascist theory of the Fuhrer could never have gained credence among the intelligentsia. The experiential, irrationalist character of the choice of leader in the Hitler movement was only a facade for the corruption and tyranny which characterized this movement, and it had its own very clear-cut, rational principles of selection (trust¬worthiness in the eyes of monopoly capitalism accompanied by the most barbaric of means). These latter motives were very far from the thoughts of Max and Alfred Weber. But none of this at all affects the objective connection in the development of German ideology towards fascism.<br /><br />This mixture of distinctly reactionary philosophy and indistinctly liberal sociological conclusions and pseudo-democratic utopian perspectives is a clear reflection of the ideology of the Weimar 'republic without republicans'. The incoherent and eclectic character of this sociology reflects not just Alfred Weber's personal qualities, but also the changes taking place at the time t~at these views originated. Dating from before the war, the original conception had survived the war period and the tide of revolution to receive its literary form at the time of 'relative stabilization'. At this time the greatest of hopes and illusions were being cherished by that moderate German intelligentsia which, while going along with the reactionary trends of 'vitalism' all the way in the philosophical sphere, recoiled from the politico-social conclusions of its extreme representatives, especially the fascists. This phase of development was the time most favourable to such hazy utopias. These intellectuals were in no position -not even on an ideological basis -to enter into a real struggle against the reactionaries. They resorted, therefore, to daydreams of the permanance of 'relative stabilization' (and after this collapsed, of its return). And they accordingly adjusted their social theories with a view to absorbing as much as possible of vitalism and existen¬tialism, while also salving something of sociology's scientific character. Simultaneously this rescue operation implied, as we have noted in Alfred Weber's case, an energetic struggle against the Left, and above all against historical materialism. And it was also intended to substantiate in theory the social importance, the leading social role of this 'floating' intelligentsia.<br /><br />Of the younger generation of German sociologists, Karl Mannheim was the outstanding representative of this orienta¬tion. The effects of 'relative stabilization' played an even more decisive role in shaping his views than with the older Alfred Weber. Hence the latter's overtly mystical, intuitionist sociology of culture was supplanted, in Mannheim, by a sceptically relativistic 'sociology of knowledge' which carried on a flirtation with existentialism. (This phase in the develop¬ment of German sociology is, as we have shown in Chapter IV, represented also in the contemporaneous works of the philosopher Max Scheler.)<br /><br />Like all agnosticists and relativists of the imperial period, Mannheim protested against the accusation of relativism. He solved the question with a new term and called himself a relationist. The difference between relativism and relationism is about the--'same as that between the yellow and the green devil in Lenin's letter to Gorky.43 For Mannheim 'overcame' relativism by pronouncing obsolete and discarding the old epistemology, which at least put forward the demand for objective truth and termed the denial of it relativism. Modern epistemology, on the other hand, was to 'proceed from the thesis that there are areas of thought where uncom¬mitted, unrelated cognition is quite unimaginable'.44 Or, more radically as regards the realm of social knowledge: 'But primarily, each of us gets to see that aspect of the social whole to which he is oriented in terms of the will.'45Here Mannheim's source is obvious: it was historical materialism's theory of ideologies. But, like all the popularizers and popular opponents of this doctrine, he failed to observe that in it, the relative and absolute mesh in a dialectical reciprocal rela¬tionship, and that this gives rise to the approximati.ve charac¬ter of human knowledge, for which objective truth (the correct reflection of objective reality) is always an inherent element and criterion. Thus the theory involved a 'false consciousness' as a complementary pole to correct conscious¬ness, whereas Mannheim conceived his relationism as the typification and systematizing of every possible kind of false consciousness.<br /><br />But it was just through this that Mannheim intended to disprove historical materialism. After bourgeois epistemology and sociology had desperately staved off the idea that social Being determines consciousness, it was forced to give in to historical materialism on this question. But this capitulation was, on the one hand, as we have just noted, a relativistic caricature in which, and by the agency of which, any objec¬tivity of knowledge was repudiated. On the other hand, this capitulation to Marxism was to be instantly converted into an -avowedly irrefutable -argument against historical materialism. For to be consistent, one would have to apply the latter to itself; i.e., if the theory of ideologies was correct, then it would also apply to the ideollJgy of the proletariat, to Marxism; if all ideologies had only a relative degree of truth in them, then Marxism too could not claim more. This 'irrefutable' reasoning was the result of simply eliminating both the dialectic of the absolute and relative, and historical development and its concrete facts, which always clearly illustrate how this dialectic of the absolute and relative works out in any given case. Thus arrived what we know as the night of thorough-going relativism, in which all cats looked grey and all perceptions relative. 50 this refutation of Marxism offers us only a sociological variation on the 5penglerian theory of culture cycles. Although the question of ascertaining truth did crop up again in Mannheim's book, it did so only in the form: 'which standpoint provides the biggest chances of an optimum of truth. . .'46And with that, according to Mannheim, the problem of relativism fell into<br />obsolescence.<br /><br />Here the connection with Max Weber is clearly visible. Only, Rickert's neo-Kantianism gave way to a sociologized existentialism a la Jasper,s and Heidegger in that, as we have seen, each social perception was presented in principle as 'situation-bound' and the current crisis of thinking was made the epistemological starting-point and a basis for dismissing the obsolete demand for objectivity. Mannheim formulated his epistemological position as follows: 'There is no "thinking in general"; on the contrary a living being of a specific type thinks in a world of a specific type in order to fulfil a speci¬fied function in life.'47Mannheim even went so far as to see in the call for absolute truth in thinking only an -inferior ¬speculation on a 'need of security'.<br /><br />Mannheim thereby put himself in a somewhat awkward situation with regard to historical materialism. It was very easy for Heidegger or Jaspers to answer the Kierkegaard¬influenced appeal to the 'existing man' because they saw in all social categories only a profoundly unreal 'shell'. But Mannheim was a sociologist, and a thinking bound up with Being logically meant, in his case, that social Being defines consciousness. He found "an escape route by cultivating a formalistic and relativistic sophistry, by projecting irration¬<br />alism into historical materialism and -in close connection with all this -by a radical elimination of economics from sociology. Let us begin with the last of these. Mannheim stated in his later work that competition and controls were not economic but 'general sociological principles, which we just happened to locate and observe first in economics'.48 By thus abstractly generalizing away from all concrete objective¬ness and clearly defined objectivity, Mannheim enabled himself to define any economic or social category just as he pleased and to propound any amount of analyses and con¬trasts between such vacuous and abstract concepts. Only by this abstract distancing from objective socio-economic reality did it become possible to reveal the 'irrational' motives in historical materialism. Consequently, Mannheim regarded the method of historical materialism as a 'synthesis between intuitionism and an extreme rationalizing desire'. 49 The revolutionary situation, or as Mannheim pu"t it, the 'passing moment' (Augenblick), was viewed as an irrational 'gap'. (Here the results of the neo-Hegelian corruption of the dialectic and the equation by Kroner and Glockner of dialec¬tics and irrationalism had their sociological repercussions. To the dialectic of revolution so concrete in Marxism, Mannheim gave as strong a Kierkegaardian twist as the neo-Hegelians had given to dial~ctics as a whole.)<br /><br />Historical materialism in this interpretation -i.e., adjusted in accordance with extreme relativism, and rendered vitalistically irrational -had great merits in Mannheim's opinion. But it also made the mistake of 'absolutizing' the socio-economic structure of society. Moreover, as already shown, it failed to see that its unmasking of ideologies was -yet another ideology. Now we can see for what purpose Mannheim needed to reshape historical materialism as indi¬cated above. With the disappearance of economics and the irrationalizing of the social process, a general 'situation¬bound state' of thought and cognition supplanted the con¬stantly historically concrete relation between economic foundation and ideology. So it now seemed illogical for historical materialism to distinguish between true and false consciousness. In short, it did not come up to the mark of the 'modern epistemology', relationalism. Thus historical materialism's theory of ideologies was not formulated in a sufficiently general way. This universality, Mannheim argued, could only be reached if the 'relationalistic situation-bound state' of thought was correspondingly generalized, i.e., if the relativity of all thinking was corrected by dissolving all objectivity. Then we would have that interpenetration of the various styles of thinking indispensable to a sociology of knowledge. Historical materialism would then form one of the many particularities with regard to this universality and totality.<br /><br />Mannheim now went on from here to moot the problems of ideological and utopian thinking, of the possibility of scientific politics, of governmental planning, etc. The fruits of these inquiries were extremely scanty. Mannheim was abiding by an extremely formalistic standpoint from which he could obtain only a fully abstract typology of the posi¬tions possible in each event, without 'being able to make a factually important statement about them. Mannheim's typo¬logizing was so abstract that his separate types embraced the most diverse and inherently contradictory directions, just in order for him to produce a synoptical, limited number of types in socio-historical reality. Thus he identified as uniform types social democracy and communism on the one hand, liberalism and democracy on the other. In this, as we shall see, the overtly reactionary Carl Schmitt was far superior to him. Schmitt perceived in the antithesis of liberalism and democracy an important present-day problem.<br /><br />The result of the 'Mannheimian sociology of knowledge' was not much more than an actualization of Max Weber's doctrine of the 'ideal type'. And Mannheim was logically<br />obliged to adhere to a scientific agnosticism, leaving all decision to the intuition, the experience, the 'charisma' of the individual. But this is where the illusions of 'relative<br />stabilization' set in. To the 'floating' intelligentsia was imputed the chance and the role of ascertaining the truth that met the present situation from the totality of stand¬points and attitudes linked to these standpoints; This intelli¬gentsia, according to Mannheim, stood outside social class: 'It forms a centre, but not a centre in terms of class.' Now why the thinking of the 'floating intelligentsia' was no longer 'situation-bound', and why relationalism did not now apply its own tenet to itself, as it was asking historical materialism to do, is known only to the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim asserted of this social group that it possessed a social sensi¬bility enabling it to 'share the feelings of the dynamically conflicting forces', but that was a hollow claim without proof. That this group had the delusion that it was standing above social class and the class struggles is a well-known fact. Historical materialism not only repeatedly described it, but also deduced it from the social Being of this group. Here it was Mannheim's duty to point out that the bond with social Being, with the 'situation' which, in his new epistemology, defined the thinking of every man living in society was absent from this group or present in a modified way. But he did not even attempt to show this, and simply had recourse to the 'floating intelligentsia's' illusions about itself. Its situation as propounded by Mannheim now gave rise to its calling 'to locate in each event the point from which a total orientation in what is happening can be undertaken, and to act as watch¬men in an otherwise all too murky night'.5O Since, in view of his methodological hypotheses, Mannheim could not draw upon Alfred Weber's 'vision', he was of course unable to tell us anything at all about the content of this 'total orientation'.<br /><br />His experiences under Hitler's regime did not alter Mannheim's basic conception. Certainly this experience did not leave him unmarked, for his views became more decided: 'The fundamental evil of modern society does not lie in the great number but in the fact that the liberal framework has not yet succeeded in bringing about the organic structure needed for a large-scale society. '51 The reason for this, in Mannheim's opinion, was that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had effected a 'fundamental democratization' making it possible for the irrationalisms to function incor¬rectly. 'That is the condition of a mass society in which those irrationalisms as yet unformed and uncoordinated in the social framework are pressed into politics. This condition is a dangerous one because democracy's mass apparatus brings irrationality into places where rational guidance is needed. '52 From this it would follow that a surplus of democracy, and not the lack of democracy, democratic experience and tradi¬tion, was the main cause of the fascist development in Germany. Here Mannheim was doing the same as a great many spokesmen for anti-democratic, imperialistically corrupt liberalism. Since they had always contested demo¬cracy out of a fear of its social consequences, they seized.on the case of Hitler with delight and satisfaction in order to camouflage their old, unchanged rebuttal of democracy as a battle against the Right and reaction. And in so doing, they used wholly uncritically the demagogic social democrat equation of fascism and bolshevism as the collective enemy of 'true' (i.e., liberalist) democracy.<br /><br />The central problem of the times, according to Mannheim, was this: we have entered the epoch of social planning, but our thinking, morality and so forth are still at more rudi¬mentary stages of development. It was the task of sociology and of the psychology linked with it to put right this discre¬pancy between men and their tasks. Sociology, Mannheim wrote, 'will pursue principles that will redirect militant energies and guide them to a sublimation'. 53 Hence there were three progressive tendencies in present-day psychology: pragmatism, behaviourism and 'depth-psychology' (Freud and Adler). 'Pioneer types' were to be trained with the assist¬ance of these, since the role of advance parties, of elites in social events was of crucial importance. So Mannheim was reviving once more the old problem of leader selection. Alfred Weber's overt irrationalism had now vanished, but the problem had by no means become more concrete. In a society whose economic basis and social structure continued to depend on monopoly capitalism, and whose development was therefore bound to be an imperialist one as long as this basis remained unaltered, Mannheim was seeking to create an anti-imperialist leader caste through education, through the psychological sublimation of irrationalism. And such a utopia, if it were not to represent pure empty demagogy in the imperialist interest, could only be created by radically eliminating all objective categories of the life of society. Mannheim then discussed in great detail some problems of the education, morality, etc., of the new elite, its relation to the old elite, etc. But he did not make the politico-social substance of this new elite any more concrete than Alfred Weber had done.<br /><br />On one point only did Mannheim visibly adopt a clearer stance. He repudiated any social solution through the use of violence, through dictatorship. And here, in a truly formalistic manner, he again treated as equivalents fascist dictatorship and the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence. For this is always the case with the ideologists who fear a radical democratic trans¬formation of society, a real defusing and short-circuiting of the imperialist forces of monopoly capitalism far more than a recurrence and resurgence of fascism.<br /><br />There was only one point on which Mannheim transcended pure formalism and developed something akin to a personal standpoint. That was his hope of a compromise between the embattled parties of the individual states, between the embattled powers on an international scale. 'But such a change of mentality would be a true revolution in the history of the world. . .' To illustrate the possibility of such an answer, Mannheim suggested that an attack by the inhabi¬tants of Mars might bring the hostile groups into agreement. Of course he himself admitted that this was impossible. He thought, however, that the annihilating character of modern warfare was becoming increasingly clear. 'Fears of a future war with its dreadful powers of destruction could increase to such an extent that they would have the same effect as fear of a concrete enemy. In this event, men would decide on compromise solutions for fear of impending general annihila¬tion, and would submit to a central umbrella organization which would administer social planning for all.'s4 As usual with Mannheim, this lacks any indication of what economic and social character such an 'umbrella organization' might have, and of what difference the socio-economic character of such organizations would make. Obviously Mannheim regarded Anglo-Saxon imperialism -as dogmatically as he had previously regarded the intelligentsia -as 'floating' and above social conflicts and 'situation-bound' thinking. In this he becomes one of numerous forerunners of the imperialist reaction after Hitler's downfall.<br /><br />The sociological movement emanating from Max Weber was profoundly sterile. Its sterility is evident from a pro¬gramme of this sort for those bourgeois intellectuals who were reluctant to give in to reactionary fascist irrationalism without a struggle, but who were wholly unable to counter it with a clear and decisive democratic programme. Not to mention the fact that in their epistemological and socio¬logical views, they were deeply implicated in those reaction¬ary tendencies from which fascis!ll ultimately derived on the ideological level. Their inconsistency left this part of the anti-fascist intelligentsia weak and indeed ideologically defenceless in the face of fascist demagogy. And as the example of Mannheim shows, experience of fascism did not help to overcome this vulnerability. His views as set out in this book are as much of an ideology of helpless surrender to a reactionary wave in post-war times as his sociology of knowledge before the war.<br /><br /><br /><strong>6. Pre-Fascist and Fascist Sociology (Spann, Freyer, Carl Schmitt)<br /></strong><br />In accordance with the character and outcome of the German class struggles during the Weimar Republic, a thoroughly reactionary direction became dominant in German sociology. We have seen how Max Weber -involuntarily -paved a way for the new irrationalism methodologically, and how Alfred Weber went a long way towards existentialism, etc. But to put forward a plain and simple reactionary content, a plain and simple reactionary methodology of some sort did not suffice in this period. The outcome of the class struggles indicates the failure of all essays in established Prussian reac¬<br />tion (with or without the Hohenzollerns). The winner was a new barbaric form of reaction, Hitlerian 'National Socialism'. Correspondingly, it was those sociologists becoming ¬whether or not they were aware of this from the outset ¬allies of the tendencies assisting the fascist victory in advance who also gained the upper hand ideologically.<br /><br />Characteristic of this situation was the episodic role .which so pronounced a reactionary as Othmar Spann played in German sociology. Long before Hitler's seizure of power, Spann shared most of the social views of fascism. He saw his main enemies partly in the liberal ideas of 1789, but above all in the Marxist ideas of 1917. He anticipated those national socialist demagogics which charged with Marxism everyone who was not an avowed reactionary; Spann even levelled this charge against the German economic leaders and especially sharply against Max Weber. In anticipation of fascism he removed 'self-interest' from the 'comprehensive economy' and turned the capitalists into 'economic leaders', the workers a 'band of followers' and a new class, 55 etc.<br /><br />As will be already clear from these few indications, Spann achieved a very large measure of agreement with the subse¬quent national socialism; were it worth our while to go into more details, the affinity would emerge more clearly still. Nevertheless Rosenberg rejected the figure of Spann as a whole.s6 Now why was this? It was because Spann developed all his views from a philosophico-sociological system that was certainly extremely reactionary, but in a Catholic and scholastic sense (adapted to Austrian clerical fascism). It was therefore irreconcilable with the most important prin¬ciples of German fascism's social demagogy. Like all the learned reactionaries of the post-war period, Spann too dismissed the category of causality, not however in order to supplant it with irrationalist myth, but to establish a static and inflexible scholastic doctrine of totality and component parts. Thus Spann originated a system of an a priori stable classification. While challenging all progressive scientific thinking in the same way as fascism, this 'comprehensive' study created a system analogous to medieval Catholic scholasticism. And accordingly, it had to be anchored in an ancient, hereditary, traditional authority. Spann's debt to Catholicism was therefore not fortuitous, and therein lies one of the most important reasons why he, like everything Catholic, was repudiated by the National Socialists. Moreover Spann's theory rejected every form of revolution and violent upheaval -a view which National Socialism could not afford to tolerate before its seizure of power. Spann polemicized against Hegel, for instance, because the latter's categories went from the bottom upwards and not the reverse, and because his philosophy was constructed upon the idea of progress: this the 'National Socialist world-view' could still accept. When, however, Spann replaced Hegel's 'suspension' (Aufhebung) with the purely conservative category of the 'preservation of innocence',S? i.e., sought an authoritarian maintenance of the status quo, he was transgressing against the needs of the social demagogy of National Socialism. Therefore the fascist ideologists who were polemicizing against the 'Red Front and reaction' on behalf of their social demagogy turned against Spann as much as Spengler. And finally, Spann's scholastic, Catholic hierarchy had room neither for racial theory nor for the irrationalist mystique of the Fiihrer. Because of his general reactionary tendencies, Spann was very much in fashion among all the German obscurantists for a while, but Hitlerian fascism then swept him aside.<br /><br />More important as regards the transition to fascism are Hans Freyer and Carl Schmitt. Freyer's initial work consisted partly of historical, specialist investigations, and partly of a dithyrambic, mystical philosophy. Directly after this he attempted to construct a new, up-to-date sociology out of German .sociology's previous traditions chiefly by synthesiz¬ing Max Weber's typological casuistry and Dilthey's experien¬tial philosophy. From the outset this had a strong vitalistic, indeed existentialist orientation, but with a long-lasting tendency to seek a synthesis between 'intellect' and 'life'. Hence the State stood at the centre of these treatises. In his Prometheus Freyer outlined a downright Leviathan-like picture of the State's irresistible violence and the intellect's total impotence in the face of power. But that was only his preamble. He sought, on the contrary, to demonstrate their reliance upon each other: 'The history of power is its dialec¬tic; the intellect has need of power to win real recognition on Earth among men. Considered intrinsically, however, power has a still more urgent need of the intellect if it is to emerge as a real force out of a mangled and downtrodden mass of possibilities. '58 Freyer now expounded this inter¬action in more detail in his book on the State. Here he indicated two dialectical paths. One of them was, in his view, concretely historical: that leading from the intellect to the State. The second, on the other hand, signified 'the timeless law of the State structure', 59the path from the State to the intellect. But the stages along this second path (might, law, form), Freyer claimed, were only intellectual reiterations of the real stages along the first path (faith, style, State). Both these paths represent a vitalist caricature of the Phenomenology of the Mind, drawing heavily on all the 'achievements' of German sociology from Toennies to Max Weber.<br /><br />As for the individual stages of these 'phenomenological' paths, Freyer's stage of faith was nothing more than Toennies's community concept. Its forms were myth, cult and language. The next stage, that of style, appears more complicated and contradictory. According to Freyer it was a 'necessary epi¬sode of the intellect'. This stage differs from the preceding one in that the concrete form is now the 'it', whereas it was previously the 'you'. In this case the forms are science, art and justice. In all, this stage was a caricature of Hegel's 'absolute intellect' in the spirit of pre-fascist anti-intellectuality, depicting it as a sphere of dehumanization and also ¬in contrast to Hegel -as a transition to what the latter called 'objective mind'. Style, with Freyer, not only tears the community apart but also exhibits distinctly decadent features: 'The genius is the social world's most negative phenomenon. Genius needs the community as the Devil needs the Godhead: in order to deny it. '60(This was a season¬able variation of Max Weber's 'battle of the gods'.)<br /><br />More important to Freyer's system was the concrete path to the dissolution of the community. It was expressed in the problem of rule. Here the fascist aspects of Freyer's sociology are already fairly visible. 'One is a master through birth. . . one is a bond servant by nature, not by misfortune.'61 The replacing of ranks or stations by classes was also, for Freyer, a sign of the decay accompanying a time of transition. The history of any decline was 'the history of economization . . . When a style comes to an end, the saying comes true that world-history is the history of class struggles.'62 This state¬ment, as we shall see later in a more concrete form, contains a -negatively slanted -acknowledgement of historical materialism. To be sure, even this acknowledgement contains an abundance of Spenglerian motifs. For the view of the conversion of ranks into classes as a sign of decline was modelled on the epoch of Caesars and plebeians from the Decline of the West. There was, though, a difference signifi¬cant to the course taken by the fascist infiltration of German ideology, namely that Spengler's reactionary fatalism lost ground in Freyer and was supplanted by a counter¬revolutionary activism.<br /><br />The apparent recognition of historical materialism was only a means of criticizing it in an 'original' way. Above all, Freyer tackled the de-economizing of sociology far more radically than his predecessors. Carrying on the theory which Max Weber had cautiously expressed in the form of a pre¬ponderant interaction, Freyer reduced the whole genesis of capitalism to purely ideological motives. 'As we know, the theory of capitalism and its development harks back very successfully to philosophical elements... the innermost substance of the capitalist form of life is composed of a particular morality, metaphysic and doctrine of life. '63 Drawing a parallel between Marx and Nietzsche, Freyer's pupil Hugo Fischer voiced the same idea even more vividly: 'The category of capital is a specification of the rampant category of decadence in the philosophy of culture, meta¬physics and sociology. Capital is the form of economic life representing its decadence. The basic error committed by Marxism and Marx himself was to regard decadence as a form of capitalism instead of capitalism as a type of decadence. '64<br /><br />This 'critical' position left Freyer with manifold advan¬tages. Firstly, it enabled him to adapt for his own purposes what he called the dynamics of Marxism. He could introduce into sociology a radical, and radically subjectivist existen¬tialism without -to all outward appearances -invalidating its social objectivity, but also without being bound to the real objective dialectic of the economic process. Freyer too gave rise to a pseudo-objectivity, an irrationalist quasi-dialectic, but his way of 'accepting' Marxism into his thought more strongly reinforced the semblance of dialectics and objectivity than was the case with his predecessors. Thus he was in a position even to acknowledge the fact of the class struggle, for in the activist abstraction through which he viewed it, the class struggle had ceased to be dangerous. To Freyer it meant 'a tension with regard to ruling power between heterogeneous party groups'.6S This is such an abstract concept of the internal social struggle that any groupings and strategies could be redesignated 'revolutionary struggle' if the exterior form of the revolutionary forces was preserved. We shall note a similar tendency in Carl Schmitt, and this was no coincid¬ence. As fascism increasingly. armed itself for the 'revolu¬tionary' seizure of power, there arose the need both to present this as authentic revolution and to conceal the monopoly-capitalist character of the whole movement.<br /><br />A further point is that this onset of fascism occurred during a period when the economic pressure on the masses (intellectuals included) was becoming increasingly unbearable. Fascism had need of the resulting despair and bitterness, the inclination towards resistance and rebellion. In utilizing the anti-capitalist feelings the situation gave rise to, it only sought to prevent the resulting tensions and indeed explo¬sions from being vented against capitalism, which it wanted, rather, to provide with the terrorist instrument of rule. Here pre-fascist sociology performed important preliminary work. In devaluing, in terms of world-oudook, the whole domain of economics, it was on the surface more radical than Marxism. For whereas the latter was directed only against a 'superficial' phenomenon, capitalism, this pre-fascist or fascist sociology was demanding a 'total' upheaval -without affecting the sway of monopoly capitalism in the slightest. But at the same time, it could cater for the immediate longing of the broad masses, especially the petty bourgeoisie, by having a period 'without economics' succeed the 'age of economics' and by devising a perspective of the 'taming of economics' through the intellect, State, etc. Freyer described economics (which, like most popularizers, he identified with technology) 'as the true anarchist opposing the totality of the State', and as a force which for all its apparent power was completely with¬out influence at bottom: 'the boundless world of mere ways and means does hold within itself the power of limitless progress, but not the power to form self-contained areas for the workings of destiny through the intellect'. Hence a dictatorship of the State over economics was needed. 'The economy is recalcitrant and must be taken more strongly in hand.'66<br /><br />Accordingly, historical materialism, in Freyer's sociology, amounted to a mentally adequate expression of the 'age of economics', the period of decadence. Historical materialism as an intellectual expression of a decline was only capable of comprehending the decline, and not the positive side. 'A style perishes in class struggles, but it does not arise out of them. It arises out of the tension between dominant and subject races ordained by nature.'67 In each historical instance, these class struggles now gave rise to the State. But this process seemed as yet far from complete: 'Perhaps the political change of mind in the history of mankind generally has not been accomplished in a way enabling its full meaning to come to light.'68 This change was reserved for Hitler later. The State now developed into the Reich, in which all previous forms were superseded.<br /><br />The reverse path leading from the State to the intellect was, as indicated, an intellectual reiteration of the concrete path. We shall pick out only the most important elements in<br />Freyer's lines of approach. In treating of power he naturally arrived at a glorification of war and conquest: 'Not merely in accordance with reality. . . but by definition, the State is founded upon war and has its beginning in it.' The State 'must conquer in order to be'.69 To this was added the glori¬fication of race: 'Racial blood is the sacred stuff from which a people is formed.' Hence the most important task of political power was to 'hold sacred the race'.70 The next stage, law, correspondingly dealt chiefly with the subjugation under the State of economics, which Freyer always identified with technology and repudiated as being an anarchic principle and a mechanization of life. The dissolution of social classes also belonged to this process. In the last stage, in form, the leader finally appeared. The leader created 'the single class¬less but multi-layered, untyrannical but strictly interlocking formation of the people. To be a people means to become a people, under the guidance of the leader.'7. Here again already, we can see how Freyer was building a fascist doc¬trinal system out of the elements of.German sociology up to that time.<br /><br />Freyer's further development amounted to a still greater reinforcement of his existential, irrationalist tendencies. His theoretical magnum opus, Sociology as the Science of Reality, was an attempt to create a theoretical basis for such tenden¬cies. He offered a detailed critique of sociology to date, strongly emphasizing the merits of Dilthey, Toennies, Simmel and the Weber brothers, in order to demonstrate that if sociology remained a mere 'logos science', i.e., a theoretical science in the neo-Kantian sense, it would inevitably become formalistic and unhistorical, a mere 'morphology of the social world'. And this dismissal of formal sociology he underlined also in terms of political world-outlook by stres¬sing that, consciously or unconsciously, 'the typically liberal view>72lay behind such a sociology. Real sociology was, Freyer believed, an 'ethos science'. Its epistemology was built on the Heidegger-J aspers concept of existence. 'A live reality perceives itself.' The constructions of sociology were 'the existential situation of man'.73 Hence Freyer rejected socio¬logy's 'value-freedom'. He sought to lift sociology out of the condition of a specialist science: 'Even if unconsciously and involuntarily, every sociological system must carry within itself a historio-philosophical substance.'74 It was its task intellectually to pave the way for a decision and to render it a necessary one.<br /><br />There is a patent affinity between this sociology and the existentialism of Heidegger and Jaspers, but the basis of it was consciously transferred from the solitary individual into the social domain. This methodological change meant a concomitant shifting of emphasis. With the existentialists, the essential point was a nihilistic destruction of objectivity, a devaluation of every 'shell', and the 'decision' remained ¬pure Kierkegaard, this -with the solitary individual. Freyer, on the other hand, instigated a struggle against what was 'dead' and 'mechanical' about economics, on behalf of the 'living life' of State, Reich and people. So whereas the existentialists went only so far as to destroy ideologically all the bourgeois class' intellectual defences against the impend¬ing fascism, Freyer was already constructing out of these elements the positive road to fascism. Hence he formulated the essence of sociology's 'situation' as follows: 'Sociology originates as the scientific self-consciouness of a bourgeois society which senses itself as marking a critical phase. Hence it arises as a science of the present day from the very outset . . .' We study the past, according to Freyer, 'not in order to invoke the past, but in order to deepen our perception of present reality and present decisions through an insight into their preconditions.' And he continued: 'A reality of unequi¬vocal historical situation-value, a society which has decom¬posed with the State and grown self-legitimizing becomes the dialectical centre of the system. '75 The flaw in previous interpretations of bourgeois society, above all those of Hegel and Toennies, lay in their static nature. Freyer wanted to introduce a dynamic into sociology, and in connection with this, he recognized the historical necessity of revolutions. The present world, in his opinion, was on the brink of one such revolution. The 'peripeteia' of society was, he stated, 'the existential situation in which sociology is anchored'. 76<br /><br />Freyer now drew the concrete inferences from this argu¬mentation of sociology in individual polemical pamphlets like Rule and Planning and, above all, Revolution from the Right. Here he provided a historio-philosophical survey of European development since the French Revolution. He saw the period as one of permanent revolution, and always a revolution 'from the Left'. Summing up the nineteenth century, he wrote: 'Its states of equilibrium are specious, its nations class struggles. .. its economy built upon crises. This epoch is sheer dialectics: dialectical materialism becomes the doctrine that has understood its law of motion the most profoundly.' Materialist philosophy, although it was 'a wild myth' and a 'wild sort of chiliasm', had 'fully grasped for the first time the revolution from the Left'. But the revolution had not occurred. The nineteenth century 'liquidates itself'.77 Reformism, in Freyer's eyes, had brought about the great change. The change began with the emergence of social policies, but without the active participation of the prolet¬ariat this was a 'feeble conciliatory idea'. Only the victory of reformism within the labour movement had enabled the socialist movement to become a historically decisive power; for when it arrived, the nineteenth century renounced its revolution.<br /><br />These polemical thoughts of Freyer contain a repudiation of historical materialism which was, in fact, 'original'. In themselves they were still relatively lucid, although in essence they were making of the nineteenth century and its history a Spenglerian 'culture cycle' with solipsistically autonomous principles. Only in the positive part does irrational obscurity set in. The proletariat's turn to reformism cleared the way, Freyer thought, for 'revolution from the Right'. The bearer of this revolution was the people, 'which is not society, not class, not interest and therefore not appeasable, but revolu¬tionary to the roots'. The people 'is a new formation with its' own will and own justice. . . it is the adversary of the indus¬trial society'.78 Now here Freyer was already giving tongue to a purely mystical irrationalism. One could, he argued, make no comment about popular forces: 'For the rest, one cannot measure a nothing -or an everything.' And with Heidegger's nullifying Nothing now coming into its own, Freyer refused also to comment with regard to the future, the new State that was coming into being, and the rule of the 'people'. The State that was to emerge out of the 'revolution from the Right' was, according to Freyer, the 'concentrated will of the people: not a stasis but a tension, a constructive formation of lines of energy. . . The revolutionary principle which informs an epoch is not, in essence, a structure, order or edifice, but pure energy, pure eruption, pure protest. . . For it hinges precisely on the fact that the new principle dares to remain the active nil in the dialectic of the present, and therefore pure political energy; otherwise it will be built in overnight and never come to act. '79 Freyer concluded his other pam¬phlet in an equally obscure, mystical-irrationalist manner: 'Here again (i.e., in political ethics) the only true imperative is to make the correct decision, not to know that it is correct or why.'8O<br /><br />This obscurity has, however, a meaning which is easy to scrutinize. Freyer sought to have the 'revolution from the Right' accomplished in such a way that it could give rise to the boundless, completely unrestricted dictatorship of Hitler. The 'revolution from the Right' was thus intended to cast a deliberate darkness upon the awareness of the people enacting it, a political activity aimed against the Weimar system without a fixed objective or commitment to a pro¬gramme. (We recall the earlier discussion of economics and 'freedom from economics'.) To this end Freyer had, in earlier works, already revived in an up-to-date form Max Weber's theory of the charismatic leader. There already, he set the leader the task 'of forming the nation such that its Reich is its destiny' ,81i.e., of binding the broad masses of the German people to the imperialist objective of German mono¬poly capitalism come what may. Freyer saw also the ambi¬tiousness of the leader that was inevitably linked with this. But he wanted to give just this ambitiousness, the striving for German global power, a philosophico-sociological sanc¬tion. 'The statesman does not take his bearings from the hazards but from the timetable. He does not make the possible a reality, but what is necessary a possibility.' And here, in the philosophical transfiguring of the irreality of German imperialist aggression, existentialism's obscurity recurred as a matter of course: these objectives were ones 'transcending human logic and ethics'. The irrationalist darkness had fallen, but the meaning is plain to behold.<br /><br />Even more decided, if that were possible, was the contri¬bution of German sociology to fascism in the work of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was a lawyer or, more accurately, a philo¬sopher and sociologist of law. In this capacity he began by extending the programmatic ideas of Dilthey's humani~tic (social) science and Max Weber's sociology. He used Max Weber's 'neutrality' to combat social causation and, like Weber, employed it as a weapon against historical materialism. 'Whether the ideal matter of radical abstraction is here the reflection of a sociological reality, or whether social reality is viewed as the result of a particular mode of thinking and hence also of acting, does not come into consideration. '82 Sociology's task was limited, he believed, to finding parallels, analogies and so on between the various social and ideo¬logical forms. Schmitt's basic reactionary tendencies were always clearly explicit and closely related to vitalism and existentialism, but his conception had special nuances to it right from the start.<br /><br />We should stress above all that Schmitt dismissed all 'restoration' ideology. And in connection with this, he had only a withering contempt for the fashionable glorify¬ing of the Romantic thinkers; in particular he derided a man held in great esteem by Spann and others, Adam Muller. Schmitt wrote a book of his own about 'Political Romanticism' in order to prove the hollowness of this approach. Romanticism was, in his eyes, 'only the aesthetic realm's intermediate step between the moralism of the eighteenth century and the economism of the nineteenth'.83 The starting-point of this polemic was that the reactionary core of Romantic thought was, to Schmitt's mind, outmoded, and that a new reactionary ideology was needed at present. His decidedly pre-fascist attitude is already manifest in the fact that he repudiated every outmoded and obsolete form of reaction, and that his interest was focused solely on the working out of a reactionary ideology to suit the times. Hence he discovered the significance 'for the history of the mind' of the mid-nineteenth-century Spanish reactionary, Donoso Cortes. Cortes was important because he achieved a break with 'restoration' ideology and grasped that since there were no longer any kings, there was also no legitimacy in the traditional sense. For this reason he called outright for a dictatorship to oppose the revolutionary forces. Schmitt also quoted with approval Cortes's statement that the bourgeoisie was a 'debating class'. His sole criticism of his favourite was that Cortes aimed his polemics against Proudhon, although elements of his later confederacy were present in the latter, and failed to observe the real enemy, namely Marx.84<br /><br />At the same time, Schmitt conducted a violent polemic against neo-Kantian jurisprudence and its idea of the norm, which transformed the whole State into a network of hollow formal relations and regarded the State as just a kind of 'accounting point'. He wrote in opposition to neo-Kantianism in law philosophy: 'All important ideas of man's intellectual sphere are existential and not normative.' In law philosophy neo-Kantianism overlooked 'the simple jurisprudential truth that norms only apply to normal situations and the hypo¬thetical normality of the situation is a statutory component of its "validity" '.85 This was an extension of Max Weber's conception of power on the one hand, and a criticism of the Jellinek-Kelsen 'meta-juristic' concept on the other. Here Schmitt was endeavouring to recognize as the real, authentic problem of law philosophy precisely what neo-Kantianism excluded from its domain: namely, through what power justice is laid down and revoked respectively. And here he was entirely in the right against liberal neo-Kantianism, as indeed he was in his sometimes ingenious polemic against liberal sociology. From the standpoint of a demagogic, monopoly-capitalist dictatorship he often saw clean through the unsubstantiated dogmatism masquerading as strict epistemology by which neo-Kantianism converted justice into an autonomous, self-legitimizing area, on the pattern of its epistemology or aesthetics. The neo-Kantian detaching of the validity of the 'symbolic forms' from the process of their social genesis was also completely untenable on the epistemological and aesthetic planes. But what was truly far-fetched was the dogmatic drawing of analogies between the validity of legal precepts and this area, since they always apply in a concrete, socially determined way. That two and two make four is a truth independent of consciousness. But the laying down of five or ten years' imprisonment for some crime or other does not depend on the inner substance of the legal precept. It depends on whether the competent political authority has decided it thus or otherwise; but the character, composition, etc., of that authority are pre-determined by politico-social and ultimately economic factors.<br /><br />The same difference obtains for the revocation of validity: on the one hand, proof of non-agreement with a reality existing independently of consciousness, on the other a corrective law, an amendment, and so on. Now since the neo-Kantians divorced the 'validity' of legal precepts from all social issues (sociology and jurisprudence; Being and Owing in Kelsen's terms), they could provide at best an immanent interpretation of the legal precepts applying in each instance, and never a scientific explanation of their contents, genesis and expiration. Jellinek's 'meta-juristic' conception lay precisely therein. Schmitt quoted, with justified irony, Anschiitz's remarks on the budget-less condition as a 'gap in the law': 'here constitutional law ceases'.86 He was also right to put the chief stress on the real continuity of socio-political life and to treat formal justice as only part of it.<br /><br />For these methodological reasons in themselves, his interest centred on the analysis of juristic exceptions. It lay in the nature of these, he said, 'that the State stands firm, whereas justice retreats'; there 'still remains an order in the juristic sense, even in the absence of law and order'.87 In investigating this unity -no matter, for the time being, for what motives -he went decidedly beyond the liberalism of the neo-Kantians. 'The exceptional case is more interesting than the normal one. . . in the exception, the force of real life pene¬trates the crust of a mechanism stiffened by repetition.' And he summed up his argument as follows: 'He is sovereign who has power of decision over_the exceptional condition. '88<br /><br />With Schmitt, this methodological approach and this passionate interest in the theory of dictatorship were linked with the fact that he was irreconcilably hostile to the Weimar system from the outset. Initially, this hostility manifested itself as a scientific critique, as an account of the crisis of liberal ideology and, in connection with it, the crisis of the parliamentary system. In contrast to Karl Mannheim who, as we have noted, simply identified liberalism and democracy, Schmitt absorbed all the nineteenth-century anti-democratic polemics in his system in order to prove the irreconcilable antithesis of liberalism and democracy and to show the inevitable growth of mass democracy into dictatorship. Above all, Schmitt subjected the parliamentary system to a sociological analysis. He regarded social homogeneity as the precondition of parliamentary government: 'The method of establishing a will by simply ascertaining the majority view is sensible and acceptable if we can assume a substantial homo¬geneity of the whole people. '89<br /><br />Naturally such a homogeneity never existed in the class societies. Schmitt was overlooking the fact that while the functioning of liberal parliamentarism he had described did, as he stated, depend on a certain parity of interests, this went only for the ruling classes, and not the people as a whole. It presupposed, moreover, the powerlessness of the rest of the people, and this was a point he ignored. Hence he could define this system's dissipative tendencies only in very abstract terms: 'As soon as the hypothesis belonging to the legality of this system of a validity equally legal on both sides ceases, there is no longer a way out. '90That is only the description of an external symptom, not an explanation of the matter itself which, to be sure, is only possible on the basis of concrete class analyses. In reality there corresponded to this condition as described by Schmitt a long period of English parliamentary government, Guizot's period of the juste milieu, which he too cited as a model example. Here one might, with major reservations, interpret public hearings and discussion, truth arising out of exchanges of view, as ideological symptoms but not, as Schmitt did, as the intellec¬tual foundations of the parliamentary system.<br /><br />For Schmitt, this whole analysis had the purpose of proving the impossibility of the Weimar Republic's parlia¬mentary rule, so as to demonstrate the necessity of going over to dictatorship. In it, he offered occasionally correct, albeit always largely ideological examinations of the past and of the behaviour of the liberal bourgeoisie. 'Hatred of king¬ship and aristocracy drives the liberal bourgeois to the Left j fears for his property when threatened by radical democracy and socialism drives him back to the Right to a powerful monarchy whose army can protect him; so he vacillates between both enemies, both of whom he would like to outwit. '91 More important is the realization which dawned on him now and again that 'economy' (i.e., capitalism, G.L.) was 'no longer eo ipso liberty' (since Schmitt failed to see that it had never been so, he could only surmise the change in 'liberty' under imperialism, not grasp it precisely), and that the development of the forces of production revealed its contradictory nature92 (here, naturally, Schmitt was referring only to technology). Schmitt used all these statements solely in order to disparage democratic parliamentary government, to stress its proneness to crises, its historical obsolescence and above all its incompatibility with mass democracy. (Let us recall at this point Max Weber's Caesaristic fits and the views of mass democracy held by Alfred Weber and Mannheim!) In Schmitt's view, mass democracy exploded that homogeneous basis of fundamentally aligned interests which had been the bedrock of liberal ideas in, for instance, the English parliamentary system.<br /><br />Mass democracy, he argued, had left these idyllic states behind. But the effect of democracy was, to his way of think¬ing, purely negative and inherently subject to crises. Demo¬cracy today, Schmitt wrote, 'leads immediately to a crisis of democracy itself, because the general principle of human equality cannot answer the problem of the substantive equality and homogeneity necessary to a democracy. It leads further to a crisis of parliamentarism which must be distin¬guished from the democratic crisis.' Schmitt also pointed out 'that a democracy of the masses, of man, is incapable of realizing any political form, even the democratic State'.93 And in consequence of the democratic parties of the masses, democracy itself was turning into a mere mirage. Even the election process, in Schmitt's opinion, no longer existed. 'There appear five party lists, originating in a highly occult, clandestine way and dictated by five organizations. The masses proceed into five sheep-pens awaiting them, as it were, and the statistical record of this process is called an "elec¬tion".' This meant that under these circumstances the will of the people could never, from now on, 'merge in a single concourse,.94 Thus it now appeared the sole task of parlia¬ment 'to preserve an absurd status quO'.95 On the parlia¬mentary question, Schmitt summed up by saying that par¬liament was becoming 'the scene of a pluralistic division of the organized social powers'.96 It signified a breaking up of the State as much as the growing might of the Princes had once meant the breaking up of the old German Empire. This state of decay and permanent crisis was engendering the necessity for exceptional measures, for the dictatorship of the Reichsprasident. Schmitt's pre-Hitlerian political activity centred mainly on this question, the justification for a dictatorship of the Reichspasident.<br /><br />Here we observe, despite the apparent contrast, Schmitt's fundamental affinity with the reactionary ideologists of the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine empire. Whereas these ideo¬logists defended the status quo of their time through thick and thin, Schmitt was passionately opposed to that of his age. Hence the contrasts in terms of form and 'history of the mind'. In reality both sides contested democracy with equal vehemence in different circumstances: the despised status quo was that of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. Schmitt was challenging the status quo as a reactionary imperialist just as his forerunners had defended theirs as reactionary imperialists.<br /><br />In spite of the existentialist trimmings, the ceaseless flirt¬ing with 'life' and so-called historical concreteness, the posi¬tive core of Schmitt's sociology of law behind all these polemics was a very threadbare design. It was the reduction of all political and hence legal and State relations to terms of friend and foe. In line with his thinking's existentialist foundations, Schmitt eliminated from this basic schema all rationality and with it all concrete content. He stated: '...no programme, no ideal, no norm and no purpose confers authority over the physical life of other men. . . War, fighting men's readiness for death, the physical slaughter of fellow-men who stand on the enemy side -all that does not have a normative but only an existential sense. And it does so in the reality of a situation of real battle with a real enemy, not in any kind of ideals, programmes and norma¬tivities ... If there really are enemies in the ontological meaning of the word, to which we are here referring, then it makes sense, but only political sense, to repulse them physically where necessary and to join battle with them. '97<br /><br />From such thoughts Schmitt derived the essence of his political concept: 'Political thinking and political instinct are proved. . . in theory and practice by the capacity to distin¬guish between friend and foe.' The State's political. existence rested upon 'determining itself the distinction between friend and foe'.98 In these central concepts of law philosophy as formulated by Schmitt, we can see plainly where the existen¬tialist conception was leading: to the union of an extremely scanty and insubstantial abstractness on the one hand and an irrationalist arbitrariness on the other. It was precisely by claiming to solve all the problems of social life that Schmitt's antithetical pairing of 'friend and. enemy' revealed its hollow and arbitrary character. But this claim made it highly influ¬ential during the period of the fascist takeover of German ideology: as a methodological, abstract, purportedly scientific prolegomenon to the racial antithesis construed by Hitler and Rosenberg. In particular the arbitrariness which was of the, essence of this conceptualizing provided a 'scientific' bridge to the 'National-Socialist world -view'.<br /><br />Liberalism, Schmitt explained, was systematically under¬mining this political foundation and the basis of the State. The nineteenth century was an age of neutralization and de-politicizing in the name of culture. It placed culture, progress, education and non-political science in this false antithesis to politics. And Schmitt saw in this tendency a hostility towards a 'strong Germany'. The centres of this ideology were, in his view, the small neutral states, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. But this orientation also had influential representatives in Germany in the persons of Jakob Burckhardt, Stefan George, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, etc.<br /><br />Schmitt now considered from this standpoint the history of Germany. In stark contrast to Max Weber he saw in the origin of constitutional rule and the road to parliamentary government the degradation of this 'strong Germany'. So his analysis of the crisis of the parliamentary system and his concept of friend and enemy -which was based on the desire to renew German imperialism -led him to uncondi¬tional approval of Hitler. Already, his earlier critique of liberalism and democracy had included the 'original' thesis that fascism did not contradict democracy. And before Hitler's seizure of power, Schmitt was already describing Italian fascism with enthusiasm as a 'heroic attempt to preserve and assert the dignity of the State and national -unity against the pluralism of economic interests'. 99 Like¬wise, even before Hitler's time he pointed out that 'the stronger myth lies in the national sphere', and that socialism possessed a relatively 'inferior mythology'. 100<br /><br />It is no wonder that with these hypotheses, Schmitt became an ardent supporter of Hitler and found for all his atrocities a suitable theory from 'law philosophy'. Thus after the massacre of the supporters of the 'second revolu¬tion' (1934), Schmitt wrote an essay bearing the title: 'The Fiihrer Protects Justice'. In it he defended the crassest form of arbitrary fascist justice and most firmly upheld the view that the Fiihrer had the sole right<br /><br />to distinguish between friend and foe. . . The Fiihrer is in earnest over the warnings of German history. That affords him the right and the power to found a new State and a new order. . . The Fiihrer is protecting justice from the vilest misuse when, in the hour 'of danger, he creates justice directly as the supreme authority by virtue of his leader's office. . . The office of judge emanates from that of Fiihrer. Anyone... wishing to separate the two is seeking to put the State out of joint with the aid of justice. .. The Fiihrer himself determines the content and scope of a transgression against the law. 101<br /><br />After these statements it will not surprise us that Schmitt revived for the age of Hitler the old theme of pre-war anti¬democratic propaganda, namely Germany's ideological superiority over the democratic states. 'In the Western democracies today, major twentieth-century problems are still being treated in terms of propositions from the times of Talleyrand and Louis-Philippe, and answered accordingly. In German law studies, the exposition of such problems is a relatively long way ahead. We have gained this lead through experience that was often hard and bitter, but it cannot be disputed. '102This superiority was that of predatory imperial¬ism. Schmitt -expanding his old antithesis of friend and enemy in terms of global politics -now proceeded to argue the Hitlerian State philosophically as follows: 'The core of the matter is found in war. The character of total war deter¬mines the character and shape of the State's totality. But total war receives its meaning through the total enemy.'103<br /><br />Schmitt not only supported Hitler's bestial dictatorship in home affairs. Already before the outbreak of the Second World War, during the preparations for it, he became the leading law ideologist of Hitlerian Germany's plans to conquer the world. He resisted the 'universalist' claims of the League of Nations and called instead for the application of the Monroe doctrine to Germany and territory in which she had interests. He quoted a statement by Hitler on this subject and commented: 'That expresses the idea of a peacefully arbitrated (schiedlich-friedlich) demarcation of the major territories in the simplest business-like terms. It eliminates the confusion that an economic imperialism created around the Monroe doctrine by twisting its reasonable idea of territorial demarcation into an ideological claim to global intervention.'104 This theory too rested on the fascist dogma of the 'Reich'. 'Empires in this sense are the leading and supporting powers whose political idea is radiated over a specified major territory and which fundamentally exclude the intervention of extra-territorial powers with regard to this territory.'lOS Such a division of the world, which would guarantee the appropriate 'major territories' for Germany and Japan, would, in Schmitt's view, mark the start of a new and higher condition of international justice. There would no longer be nation-states, as before, but only 'empires'. The concrete consequences of this Schmitt spelled out in another essay bearing the significant title 'Woe to the Neutrals!' Here it was argued that the concept of major territories implied the abolition of neutrality. So in 1938, Schmitt had penned in advance the 'international' apologia for Hitlerian aggression and the fascist rape of the nations. Thus German sociology contributed to the propaganda for Hitler's bestial imperialism. The German professors used to be called the intellectual bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns. Now they were the intellectual S.A. and S.S.<br /><br /><strong>NOTES<br /></strong><br />1 Marx: Capital, Vol. I, Afterword to the 2nd edition.<br />2 Schmoller: Uber einige Grundfragen der Sozialpolitik und Volkswirtschaftslehre, 2nd edition, Leipzig 1904, p. 292.<br />3 Ibid., p. 50.<br />4 Dilthey: Introduction to the Humanistic Sciences.<br />5 Toennies: Community and Association.<br />6 Ibid.<br />7 Ibid.<br />8 Ibid.<br />9 Marx: Introduction to the Grundrisse and Engels to C. Schmidt on 27.10.1890, Marx-Engels: Ausgewiihlte Briefe, Berlin 1953,<br />p.504.<br />10 Marx: Theorien iiber den Mehrwert, Vol. I, Stuttgart 1919, p.382.<br />11 Toennies: Op. cit.<br />12 Ibid.<br />13 Ibid.<br />14 Rickert: Science and History.<br />15 Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Religionssoziologie, Tiibingen 1920, Vol. I, pp. 238 and 240.<br />16 Ibid., pp. 252f.<br />17 Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tiibingen 1922, p. 277.<br />18 Max Weber: Religionssoziologie, p. 37.<br />19 Max Weber: Collected Political Works, Munich 1921, pp. 258f.<br />20 MarianneWeber: Max Weber, Tiibingen 1926, p. 665.<br />21 Kelsen: Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre, Tiibingen 1911,<br />p.411.<br />22 Preuss: Zur Methode der juristischen Begriffsbildung, Schmoller's Yearbook, 1900, p. 370.<br />23 Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tiibingen 1922, p. 403.<br />24 Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 9.<br />25 Max Weber: Wissenschaftslehre, op. cit., p. 325.<br />26 Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp.<br />149f.<br />27 Ibid., p. 545.<br />28 Max Weber: Religionssoziologie, p. 14.<br />29 Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 46.<br />30 Ibid., p. 132.<br />31 Ibid., pp. 545f.<br />32 Ibid., p. 555.<br />33 Walther Rathenau: Letters, Dresden 1927, p. 186.<br />34 Alfred Weber: Ideen zur Staats-und Kultursoziologie, Karlsruhe 1927, p. 120.<br />35 Ibid., p. 23.<br />36 Ibid., p. 84.<br />37 Ibid., pp. 38ff.<br />38 Ibid., p. 9.<br />39 Ibid., pp. 126 and 104.<br />40 Ibid., p. 113.<br />41 Ibid., p. 130.<br />42 Ibid., p. 141.<br />43 Lenin: Letters, 14.11.1913.<br />44 Mannheim: Ideology and Utopia.<br />45 Ibid.<br />46 Ibid.<br />47 Mannheim: Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction.<br />48 Ibid.<br />49 Mannheim: Ideology and Utopia.<br />50 Ibid.<br />51 Mannheim: Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction.<br />52 Ibid.<br />53 Ibid.<br />54 Ibid.<br />55 Spann: Kiimpfende Wissenschaft, Jena 1934, pp. 9f.<br />56 Rosenberg: The Myth of the Twentieth Century.<br />57 Spann: Geschichtsphilosophie, Jena 1932, pp. 138f.<br />58 Freyer: Prometheus, Jena 1923, p. 25.<br />59 Freyer: Der Staat, Leipzig 1925, p. 131.<br />60 Ibid., p. 92<br />61 Ibid., p. 86.<br />62 Ibid., p. 88.<br />63 Freyer: Theorie des objektiven Geistes, Leipzig 1928, p. 39.<br />64 Hugo Fischer: Marx, Jena 1932, p. 31.<br />65 Preyer: Sociology as the Science of Reality.<br />66 Freyer: Der Staat, p. 177.<br />67 Ibid.<br />68 Ibid., p. 96.<br />69 Ibid., p. 146.<br />70 Ibid., p. 153.<br />71 Ibid., p. 199.<br />72 Freyer: Sociology as the Science of Reality.<br />73 Ibid.<br />74 Ibid.<br />75 Ibid.<br />76 Ibid.<br />77 Freyer: Revolution from the Right.<br />78 Ibid.<br />79 Ibid.<br />80 Freyer: Rule and Planning.<br />81 Freyer: Der Staat, pp. 119 and 202f.<br />82 Schmitt: Politische Theologie, 2nd impression, Munich/Leipzig<br />1934, pp. 58ff.<br />83 Schmitt: Der Begriff des Politischen, Munich/Leipzig 1932, p.70.<br />84 Schmitt: Positionen und Begriffe, Hamburg 1940, pp. 118f.<br />85 Ibid., p. 124.<br />86 Schmitt: Politische Theologie, p. 22.<br />87 Ibid., pp. 18f.<br />88 Ibid., pp. 11 and 22.<br />89 Schmitt: Legalitat und Legitimitat, Munich/Leipzig 1932, p. 31.<br />90 Ibid.<br />91 Schmitt: PoZitische TheoZogie, p. 77.<br />92 Schmitt: Der Begriff des PoZitischen, p. 62.<br />93 Schmitt: Die geistesgeschichtZiche Lage des Parlementarismus, 2nd impression, Munich/Leipzig 1926, pp. 21£.<br />94 Schmitt: Positionen und Begriffe, p. 188.<br />95 Ibid., p. 185.<br />96 Ibid., p. 156.<br />97 Schmitt: Der Begriff des Politischen, p. 37.<br />98 Ibid., pp. 54 and 38.<br />99 Schmitt: Position en und Begriffe, p. 110.<br />100 Schmitt: Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des Parlementarismus, pp. 86f.<br />101 Schmitt: Positionen und Begriffe, pp. 200ff.<br />102 Ibid., p. 5.<br />103 Ibid., p. 236.<br />104 Ibid., p. 302.<br />105 Ibid., p. 303.Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1123836763900806792005-08-12T01:51:00.000-07:002005-08-12T01:52:43.926-07:00Trotsky's 'Stalin' Chap 12 The Road to PowerChapter 12<br />The Road to Power.<br /><br /><br />Part One: Lenin moves to remove Stalin<br /><br />[Early in 1923 it6 had become clear to the top leaders cognizant of the political situation that Stalin was literally packing the forthcoming Twelfth Congress, the highest authority in the Party, with delegates unswervingly loyal to him personally. Lenin became so alarmed by this trend of affairs that he] summoned me to his room in the Kremlin, spoke of the frightful growth of bureaucratism in our Soviet apparat [Note: The Communist word for political machine – C.M.] and of the need to find a solution for the problem. He suggested a special commission of the Central Committee and asked me to take an active part in it. I replied:<br /><br />“Vladimir Ilyich, I am convinced that in the present fight against bureaucratism in the Soviet apparat we must no lose sight of what is going on: a very special selection of officials and specialists, Party members and non-partisans, in the Center and in the provinces, even for district and local Party offices, is taking place on the basis of loyalty to certain dominant Party personalities and ruling groups inside the Central Committee itself. Every time you attack a minor official, you run up against an important Party leader . . . I could not undertake the work under present circumstances.”<br /><br />Lenin was thoughtful for a moment and –I am quoting him literally –said: “In other words, I am proposing a campaign against bureaucratism in the Soviet apparat and you are proposing to extend the fight to include the bureaucratism of the Party’s Orgburo?”<br /><br />I laughed at the very unexpectedness of this, because no such finished formulation of the idea was in my mind at the time. I replied: “I suppose that’s it.” <br /><br />“Very well, then,” Lenin retorted, “I propose a bloc.” <br /><br />“It is a pleasure to form a bloc with a good man,” I said.<br /><br />It was agreed that Lenin would initiate the proposal for this commission of the Central Committee to fight bureaucratism “in general” and in the Orgburo in particular. He promised to think over “further” organizational details of the matter. On that we parted. Two weeks passed. Lenin’s health became worse. Then his secretaries brought me his notes and letter on the national question. For months he was prostrate with arteriosclerosis and nothing could be done about our bloc against the bureaucratism of the Orgburo. Obviously, Lenin’s plan was directed against Stalin, although his name was not mentioned; it was in line with the train of thought Lenin expressed explicitly in his Testament.<br /><br />[If by that time Stalin had the Central Control Commission, the Orgburo and the Secretariat in his grip, Zinoviev still held the plurality in the Politburo and in the Central Committee, by virtue of which he was the leading member of the triumvirate. The contest between him and Stalin, tacit and hidden by nonetheless vehement, was for the majority at the forthcoming Congress. Zinoviev had complete control of the Leningrad organization and his part Kamenev of the Moscow organization. These two most important Party centers needed only the support of a few other large Party centers to secure a majority of the Congress. This majority was necessary for the election of a Central Committee and the ratification of resolutions favorable to Zinoviev. But Zinoviev failed to secure that majority; most of the Party organizations outside of Leningrad and Moscow proved to be under the firm control of the General Secretary.<br /><br />[Nevertheless Zinoviev was foolhardy enough to insist on taking Lenin’s place at the Twelfth Congress and assumed the role of Lenin’s successor by delivering the Political Report at its opening session. During the preparations for the Congress, with Lenin ill and unable to attend,] the most ticklish question was who should deliver this keynote address, which since the founding of the Party had always been Lenin’s prerogative. When the subject was broached in the Politburo, Stalin was the first to say, “The Political Report will of course be made by Comrade Trotsky.”<br /><br />I did not want that, since it seemed to me equivalent to announcing my candidacy for the role of Lenin’s successor at a time when Lenin was fighting a grave illness. I replied approximately as follows: “This is an interim. Let us hope that Lenin will soon get well. In the meantime the report should be made, in keeping with his office, by the General Secretary. That will eliminate all grounds for idle speculations. Besides, you and I have serious differences on economic questions, and I am in the minority.”<br /><br />“But suppose there were to be no differences?” Stalin asked, letting me understand that he was ready to go far I making concessions, i.e., to conclude a rotten compromise.<br /><br />Kalenin intervened in this dialogue. “What differences?” he asked. “Your proposals always pass through the Politburo.”<br /><br />I continued to insist on Stalin making the report.<br /><br />“Under no circumstances,” he replied with demonstrative modesty. “The Party will not understand it. The report must be made by the most popular member of the Central Committee.”<br /><br />[The matter was finally decided by Zinoviev’s majority in the Central Committee. That made it clearer to every Party member that Zinoviev was Lenin’s successor as head of the Party. With the delegates he controlled and the majority controlled by his junior partner in the triumvirate, he had every reason to expect an ovation the moment he appeared on the rostrum in the role of Number One Bolshevik to deliver the Political Report. But the General Secretary double-crossed his fellow-triumvir: Zinoviev was not greeted by the customary applause. He delivered his keynote address in virtually oppressive silence. The verdict of the delegates was clear: in this new role Zinoviev was an usurper.<br /><br />[The Twelfth Congress, which lasted for the week between April 17 and 25, 1923 raised Stalin from junior to senior partnership of the triumvirate. Zinoviev’s plurality in the Central Committee and the Politburo were destroyed. Stalin gained control of both. But his most important achievement at the Twelfth Congress was I the Central Control Commission and the network of provincial control commissions. At the Eleventh Congress Stalin had become the secret boss of the Central Control Commission; the majority of its members were his men. But the provincial, county and local control commissions, many of them elected before he became General Secretary, were beyond his control. Stalin tackled the problem in characteristic fashion. On one pretext or another, cases subject to the jurisdiction of hostile control commissions and involving the interests of Stalin’s political machine were transferred for hearing wherever possible to the Central Control Commission; moreover, whenever it could be done without attracting too much notice, on one or another pretext, a number of hostile control commissions were simply abolished by the Central Control Commission. This, supplemented by organized conniving at provincial and regional conferences of the control commissions, produced fruitful results.<br /><br />[The Party Collegium, made up of Central Control Commission members and especially created at this Congress to “try” and “liquidate” oppositionists, was made up entirely of Stalinists. The membership of the Central Control Commission itself was raised from 7 to 50, with 10 alternates –more high-placed offices with which to reward the faithful. Moreover, the new definitions of its functions and its actual activities transformed the Central Control Commission into a special OGPU for Communist Party members.<br /><br />[Having suffered defeat at the Twelfth Congress, Zinoviev tried to recoup his political fortunes by a deal with the top leaders. He wavered between two plans: (1) to reduce the Secretariat to its former status as a subsidiary of the Politburo, by depriving it of its self-aggrandized appointive powers; and (2) to “politicize” it, which meant establishing a special collegium of three members of the Politburo within it as its highest authority, these three to be Stalin, Trotsky and either Kamenev, Bukharin or Zinoviev. Some such combination, he felt, was indispensable to offset Stalin’s undue influence.<br /><br />[He initiated his conferences on the matter in a cave new Kislovodsk, a famous Caucasian watering place, in September, 1923. Voroshilov, who was in Rostov at the time, received a telegraphic invitation form Zinoviev to attend. So did Stalin’s friend Ordzhonikidze. The others present were Zinoviev, Bukharin, Lachevich and Evdokimov. Zinoviev, who wrote down a summary of the views expressed at that conference in a letter addressed to Stalin and personally given by him to his best friend Ordzhonikidze for delivery to the addressee, revealed that:<br /><br />Comrade Stalin . . . replied with a telegram in a coarse but friendly tone . . . Some time later he arrived and . . . we had several conversations. Finally it was decided that we would not touch the Secretariat, but, in order to coordinate organizational work with political activities, we wou8ld place three members of the Politburo in the Orgburo. This not very practical suggestion was made by Comrade Stalin, and we agreed to it . . . The three members of the Politburo were Comrades Trotsky, Bukharin and I. I attended the sessions of the Orgburo, I think, once or twice, Comrades Bukharin and Trotsky did not come even once. Nothing came of it all . . .<br /><br />[Actually, all the hopeful Zinoviev had to do was to attend one or two meetings of the Orgburo, to realize the hopelessness of anyone not a member of the Stalin machine trying to “crash the gate” there; Trotsky and Bukharin had at least the foresight and imagination to stay away.<br /><br />[Meantime, the revolutionary situation in Germany had come to a head. But the triumvirs and their allies in the Politburo were still too busy undermining the prestige of the over-popular Comrade Trotsky and knifing each other, to give more than an occasional perfunctory glance to the paramount problem of world revolution. The German comrades had standing order to work the level of the United Front tactic to the limit. Then Zinoviev convoked the enlarged Executive of the Comintern in Moscow, and from June 12th to the 24th the leaders of World Communism talked revolution.<br /><br />[The desperate German masses –fifteen million of them in the towns, seven million of them in the country – backed the German section of the Comintern. But with Lenin paralyzed and speechless, with Trotsky hamstrung by Party discipline and rendered politically impotent by his isolation in the Politburo, the Comintern leaders in Moscow had nothing to say to the Communist leaders of Germany. No orders came through and nothing happened. During the fateful August of 1923, Stalin wrote the following lines to Zinoviev (the head of the Communist International) and Bukharin (the officially-acknowledged “chief theoretician of Communist after Lenin”)]:<br /><br />Should the Communists at the present stage try to seize power without the Social-Democrats? Are they sufficiently ripe for that? That, in my opinion, is the question. When we seized power, we had in Russia such resources in reserve as (a) the promise of peace; (b) the slogan: the land to the peasants; (c) the support of the great majority of the working class; and (d) the sympathy of the peasantry. At the moment the German Communists have nothing of the kind. They have of course a Soviet country as neighbor, which we did not have; but what can we offer them? . . . Should the government in Germany topple over now, in a manner of speaking, and the Communists were to seize hold of it, they would end up in a crash. That is the “best” case. While at worst, they will be smashed to smithereens and thrown away back. The whole point is not that Brandler wants to “educate the masses” but that the bourgeoisie plus the Right Wing Social-Democrats is bound to turn such lessons –the demonstration – into a general battle (at present the odds are on their side) and exterminate them [the German Communists]. Of course the Fascists are not asleep; but it is to our advantage to let them attack first: that will rally the entire working class around the Communists (Germany is not Bulgaria). Besides, all our information indicates that in Germany Fascism is weak. In my opinion the Germans should be restrained and not spurred on.<br /><br />[This opinion of the senior member of the triumvirate and secret boss of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was virtually an order to the head of the Communist International, who formulated his instruction to the German Communist Party accordingly. Like all such pronouncements, it was “secret” and “confidential” and not generally known at the time. Trotsky, unaware of Stalin’s secret “opinion” but very much aware of the seriousness of the German situation, urged that a flexible provisional date eight to ten weeks ahead be set at once for the German Insurrection and corresponding preparations be launched at once. But the majority of the Central Committee was in Stalin’s pocket.<br /><br />[Brandler, who came to Moscow early in September for guidance and help, could not even get an interview with the leaders of the world revolution. After being shunted from office to office day after day and week after week, he finally secured an opportunity to air his knowledge and his views of the German situation in the presence of Stalin as well as Zinoviev. Their advice to Brandler was the same as the decision of the Comintern Executive of the previous June –form a workers’ government by entering the Social-Democratic government of Saxony. When Brandler balked he was told the purpose of th4e maneuver was the better to prepare for insurrection. Stalin countered further arguments with a peremptory order for immediate entry, and Zinoviev as head of the Comintern sent telegraphic orders to the Communist Party of Saxony to ente4r the Social-Democratic government at once. Moreover, Brandler himself was instructed to enter that government. He was thus confronted with the alternative of relinquishing leadership of the German Communist Party, if he did not obey. He bowed his head.<br /><br />[The hasty preparations begun at the end of September were woefully inadequate and badly mismanaged. The German Communist Party had organized fighting detachments, the so-called Red Hundreds, in each Communist center, and held them in readiness for the signal to be given as a result of a conference to be held in Chemnitz on October 21st. The insurrection was to begin in Saxony. If it developed according to plan the Communist Party would lead it; if it did not, the Communist Party would disclaim any responsibility and hide behind the protective coloration of coalition with the Social Democrats, with whose aid it would attempt to stave off the inevitable reaction. <br /><br />[It was a typical Stalinist maneuver. He had behaved thus in October, 1917, in Russia, during the debates in the Bolshevik Central Committee, clandestinely supporting Zinoviev and Kamenev who were openly opposed to Lenin’s insistence on the insurrection, while keeping a sharp lookout to see which side was actually winning. In Russia it was of no importance where he stood on the issue of insurrection because he was not entrusted with preparing it. But in the German situation of 1923 he was the supreme boss.<br /><br />[When at the Chemnitz Conference on October 21st the Saxon Social-Democrats turned down Brandler’s proposal for a general strike and an armed insurrection, Brandler gave the only signal he could give in keeping with his instructions from Stalin and Zinoviev; he called the revolution off. But this was not the first time that a revolution in Germany had been scheduled, called off and scheduled again. A revolutionary party straining at the leash for action cannot be expected to respond indefinitely with the regularity of a water faucet. Two days after the off signal from Chemnitz, the insurrection was on in Hamburg. All to no purpose. The fighters were leaderless and without an objective. The uprising petered out. What might have been a revolution became a senseless and criminal adventure. It was the first of a progressive series under Stalin’s leadership in the international arena, his first great rehearsal for his first capitulation to Hitler in 1933.<br /><br />[The German failure found immediate repercussion in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The sincere Bolsheviks were perturbed; many of them insisted on more than the perfunctory accounting of performance by the Party leaders. They wanted to thrash the problems out in open debate. Their first demand therefore was the restoration of the right to form groupings within the Party, abolished by the Tenth Congress in 1921 during the crucial days of the Kronstadt Rebellion. The dissatisfaction with the rule of the triumvirate had been brewing ever since the Twelfth Congress, nor was it confined to the triumvirs; it was directed against the Central Committee as a whole. Forty-six prominent Bolsheviks, among them Pyatakov, Sapronov, Serebryakov, Preobrazhensky, Ossinky, Drobnis, Alsky, V.M. Smirnov, issued a statement in which they declared in part:<br /><br />The regime which has been set up in the Party is utterly intolerable. It is destructive of initiative within the Party. It is replacing the Party with a political machine . . . which functions well enough when all goes well but which I inevitably misfires at moments of crisis and which threatens to prove its absolute bankruptcy in the face of the grave developments now impending. The present situation is due to the fact that the regime of factional dictatorship which developed objectively after the Tenth Congress has outlived its usefulness.<br /><br />[The Forty-Six were not satisfied with the empty gestures of the September Plenum on “extending democracy” in the Party. Meetings of protest were organized and public agitation against the bureaucratic regime was carried on not only in Soviet institutions but even in Party organizations.<br /><br />[In an effort to catalyze this growing movement of protest, which threatened to develop into a united opposition from the Left, Zinoviev on behalf of the triumvirate published an article in the November 7th issue of Pravda, on the sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which legalized the discussion by announcing the existence of “workers’ democracy” within the Party. At the same time, negotiations among the top leaders led finally to a resolution drafted in the Politburo and adopted by the Central Committee on December 5th, 1923, in which all such evils as bureaucracy, special privileges, and the like were condemned and the restoration of the rights to criticize and investigate and to have all offices filled through honest elections was solemnly promised. Trotsky, who had been ill since the beginning of November and therefore unable to participate in the general discussion, attached his signature to it along with all the other members of the Politburo and the Central Committee.<br /><br />[The struggle at the top had been going on for well-nigh two years in such tight-lipped secrecy that the Party as a whole knew nothing about it and all but a handful of trusted initiates regarded Trotsky by and large as a loyal supporter of the reigning regime. He decided therefore to supplement his signature to the Central Committee Resolution of December 5th with a statement of his own position in which he frankly explained his misgivings about the dangers of bureaucracy, the possibilities of the political degeneration of the Bolshevik movement, called upon the youth to spurn passive obedience, careerism and servility, and drew the explicit inference that the new course outline in the Central Committee Resolution of December 5th should lead first of all to clear understanding by everyone “that henceforth no one should terrorize the Party.”<br /><br />[The letter aroused a storm of indignation among the top leaders. Most bitter of all was Zinoviev, who, as Bukharin revealed in the course of a factional fight four years later, insisted on Trotsky’s arrest for the “treason” implicit in his “New Course” letter. Moreover, although the discussion had been sanctioned officially, the Central Control Commission worked full blast. So did the entire political machine of the General Secretary and the senior triumvir. The Thirteenth Party Congress, which met January 16th to 18th, 1924, to lay the groundwork for the forthcoming Thirteenth Party Congress, to be held in May, adopted a resolution on the basis of Stalin’s report which condemned the pro-democracy discussion and Trotsky’s role in the following words:<br /><br />The opposition headed by Trotsky put forward the slogan of breaking up the Party apparat and attempted to transfer the center of gravity from the struggle against bureaucracy in the State apparat to the struggle against “bureaucracy” in the Party apparat. Such utterly baseless criticism and the downright attempt to discredit the Party apparat cannot, objectively speaking, lead to anything but the emancipation of the State apparat from Party influence . . .<br /><br />and that was of course a “petty-bourgeois deviation.” Finally, the Politburo ordered the ailing Trotsky to take a cure in the Caucasus. It was a polite way –(in view of his popularity they were constrained to go easy with him) –of exiling him from the political center for the time being. The sick Trotsky hardly reached the Caucasus, when he received a telegram from Stalin that Lenin, whose health had been improving lately, had suddenly died.]<br /><br />Politically, Stalin and I have long been in opposite and irreconcilable camps. But in certain circles it has become the rule to speak of my “hatred” of Stalin and to assume a priori that everything I write, not only about the Moscow dictator but about the U.S.S.R. as well, is inspired by that feeling. During the more than ten years of my present exile the Kremlin’s literary agents have systematically relieved themselves of the need to answer pertinently anything I write about the U.S.S.R. by conveniently alluding to my “hatred” of Stalin. The late Freud regarded this cheap sort of psychoanalysis most disapprovingly. Hatred is, after al l, a kind of personal bond. Yet Stalin and I have been separated by such fiery events as have consumed in flames and reduced to ashes anything personal, without leaving any residue whatever. In hatred there is an element of envy. Yet to me, in mind and feeling, Stalin’s unprecedented elevation represents the very deepest fall. Stalin is my enemy. But Hitler, too, is my enemy, and so is Mussolini, and so are many others. Today I bear as little “hatred” toward Stalin as toward Hitler, Franco, or the Mikado. Above all, I try to understand them, so that I may be better equipped to fight them. Generally speaking, in matters of historic import, personal hatred is a petty and contemptible feeling. It is not only degrading but blinding. Yet in the light of recent events on the world arena, as well as in the U.S.S.R., even many of my opponents have now become convinced that I was not so very blind: those very predictions of mine which seemed least likely have proved to be true.<br /><br />These introductory lines pro domo sua are all the more necessary, since I am about to broach a particularly trying theme. I have endeavored to give a general characterization of Stalin on the basis of close observation of him and a painstaking study of his biography. I do not deny that the portrait which emerges from that is somber and even sinister. But I challenge anyone else to try to substitute another, more human figure back of these facts that have shocked the imagination of mankind during the last few years –the mass “purges,” the unprecedented accusations, the fantastic trials, the extermination of a whole revolutionary generation, and finally, the latest maneuvers on the international arena. Now I am about to adduce a few rather unusual facts, supplemented by certain thoughts and suspicions, from the story of how a provincial revolutionist became the dictator of a great country. These thoughts and suspicions have not come to me full-blown. They matured slowly, and whenever they occurred to me in the past, brushed them aside as the product of an excessive mistrustfulness. But the Moscow trials –which revealed an infernal hive of intrigues, forgeries, falsifications, surreptitious poisonings and murders back of the Kremlin dictator –have cast a sinister light on the preceding years. I began to ask myself with growing insistency: What was Stalin’s actual role at the time of Lenin’s illness? Did not the disciple do something to expedite his master’s death?<br /><br />I realize more than anyone else the monstrosity of such suspicion. But that cannot be helped, when it follows from the circumstances, the facts and Stalin’s very character. In 1922, the apprehensive Lenin had warned: “That cook will prepared nothing but peppery dishes.” They proved to be not only peppery but poisoned, and not only figuratively but literally so. Two years ago [probably 1937 C.M.] I wrote down for the first time the facts which in their day (1923-24) were known to no more than seven or eight persons, and then only in part. Of that number, besides myself, only Stalin and Molotov are still among the living. But these two –even allowing that Molotov was among the initiated, of which I am not certain –have no motives for confessing that which I am now about to tell. I should add that every fact I mention, every reference and quotation, can be substantiated either by official Soviet publications or by documents preserved in my archives. I had occasion to give oral and written explanations before Dr. John Dewey’s commission investigating the Moscow trials, and not a single one of the hundreds of documents what I presented was ever impugned.<br /><br />The iconography, rich in quantity (we say nothing about quality), produced in the last few years, invariably portrays Lenin in Stalin’s company. They sit side by side, take counsel together, gaze upon each other in friendly fashion. The obtrusiveness of this motif, reiterated in paintings, in sculpture, on the screen, is dictated by the desire to make the people forget the fact that the last period of Lenin’s life was filled with intense conflict between him and Stalin, which culminated in a complete break between them. As always, there was nothing in any way personal about Lenin’s hostility toward Stalin. Undoubtedly he valued certain of Stalin’s traits very highly, his firmness of character, his persistence, even his ruthlessness and conniving, attributes indispensable in struggle and consequently at Party Headquarters. But as time went on, Stalin took increasing advantage of the opportunities his post presented for recruiting people personally devoted to him and for revenging himself upon his opponents. Having become in 1919 the head of the People’s Commissariat of Inspection, [Note: Another name for the Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, for which Rabkrin is the Russian portmanteau word – C.M.] Stalin gradually transformed it into an instrument of favoritism and intrigues. He turned the Party’s General Secretariat into an inexhaustible fountainhead of favors and dispensations. He had likewise misused for personal ends his position as member of the Orgburo and the Politburo. A personal motive could be discerned in all of his actions. Little by little Lenin became convinced that certain of Stalin’s traits, multiplied by the political machine, were directly harmful to the Party. From that matured his decision to remove Stalin from the machine and thereby transform him into a rank and file member of the Central Committee. In present-day U.S.S.R. Lenin’s letters of that time constitute the most tabu of all writings. Fortunately, copies and photostats of a number of them are in my archives, and some of them I have already published. <br /><br />Lenin’s health took a sudden turn for the worse towards the end of 1921. The first stroke came in May of the following year. For two months he was unable either to move, to speak or to write. Beginning with July, he began to convalesce slowly. In October he returned from the country to the Kremlin and took up his work again. He was literally shaken by the spread of bureaucracy, arbitrariness and intrigues in the institutions of the Party and the Government. In December he opened fire against Stalin’s persecutions along the line of the nationalities policy, especially as enforced by him in Georgia, where the authority of the General Secretary was openly defied. He came out against Stalin on the question of foreign trade monopoly and was preparing for the forthcoming Party Congress an address which Lenin’s secretaries, quoting his own words, called ‘a bombshell against Stalin.” On January 23rd, to the great trepidation of the General Secretary, he proposed a project for organizing a control commission of workers [Note: Not to be confused with the Central Control Commission, already functioning then. – C.M.] that would check the power of the bureaucracy. “Let us speak frankly,” wrote Lenin on March 2nd, “the Commissariat of Inspection does not today enjoy the slightest authority . . . There is no worse institution among us than our People’s Commissariat of Inspection . . .” and the like. At the head of the Inspection was Stalin. He well understood the implications of such language.<br /><br />---------------------------------------------------------------------<br />Part 2: Lenin dies, Stalin wins<br /><br />In the middle of December, 1922, Lenin’s health again took a turn for the worse. He was obliged to absent himself from conferences, keeping in touch with the Central Committee by means of notes and telephonograms. Stalin at once tried to capitalize on this situation, hiding from Lenin much of the information which was concentrating in the Party Secretariat. Measures of blockade were instituted against persons closest to Lenin. Krupskaya did whatever she could to shield the sick man from hostile jolts by the Secretariat. But Lenin knew how to piece together a complete picture of the situation from stray and scarcely perceptible indications. “Shield him from worries!” the doctors insisted. It was easier said than done. Chained to his bed, isolated from the outside world, Lenin was aflame with alarm and indignation. His chief course of worry was Stalin. The behavior of the General Secretary became bolder as the reports of physicians about Lenin’s health became less favorable. In those days Stalin was morose, his pipe firmly clenched between his teeth, a sinister gleam in his jaundiced eyes, snarling back instead of answering. His fate was at stake. He had made up his mind to overcome all obstacles. That was when the final break between him and Lenin took place. <br /><br />The former Soviet diplomat Dmitrievsky, who is very friendly toward Stalin, tells about this dramatic episode as it was bandied about in the General Secretary’s entourage:<br /><br />When Krupskaya, of whom he was thoroughly sick because of her constant annoyances, telephoned him in the country once more for some information, Stalin . . . upbraided her in the most outrageous language. Krupskaya, all in tears, immediately ran to complain to Lenin. Lenin’s nerves, already strained to the breaking point by the intrigues, could not hold out any longer. Krupskaya hastened to send Lenin’s letter to Stalin . . . “But you know Vladimir Ilyich,” Krupskaya said triumphally to Kamenev. “He would never have ventured to break off personal relations, if he had not thought it necessary to crush Stalin politically.”<br /><br />Krupskaya did really say that, but far from “triumphantly”; on the contrary, t5hat thoroughly sincere and sensitive woman was frightfully apprehensive and worried by what had taken place. It is not true that she “complained” about Stalin: on the contrary, as far as she was able, she played the part of a shock-absorber. But in reply to Lenin’s persistent questioning, she could not tell him more than she had been told by the Secretariat, and Stalin concealed the most important matters. The letter about the break, or rather the note of several lines dictated on the 6th of March to a trusted stenographer, announced dryly the severance of “all personal and comradely relations with Stalin.” That note, the last surviving Lenin document, is at the same time the final summation of his relation with Stalin. Then came the hardest stroke of all and loss of speech.<br /><br />A year later, when Lenin was already embalmed in his mausoleum, the responsibility for the break, as is clearly apparent in Dmitrievsky’s story, was openly placed on Krupskaya. Stalin accused her of “intrigues” against himself. The notorious Yaroslavsky, who usually carried on Stalin’s dubious errands, said in July, 1026, at a session of the Central Committee: “They sank so low that they dared to come to the sick Lenin with their complaints of having been hurt by Stalin. How disgraceful –to complicate policy on such major issues with personal matters!” Now “they” was Krupskaya. She was being vengefully punished for Lenin’s affronts against Stalin. Krupskaya, for her part, told me about Lenin’s deep distrust of Stalin during the last period of his life. “Volodya was saying: ‘He’ (Krupskaya did not call him by name, but nodded her head in the direction of Stalin’s apartment) “ ‘is devoid of the most elementary honesty, the most simply human honesty . . .’”<br /><br />The so-called Lenin “Testament” –that is, his last advice on how to organize the Party leadership –was written in two installments during his second illness; on December 25th, 1922, and on January 4th, 1923. “Stalin, having become General Secretary,” declares the Testament, “has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution.” Ten days later this restrained formula seemed insufficient to Lenin, and he added a postscript: “I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man,” who would be, “more loyal, more courteous and more considerate to comrades, less capricious, etc.” Lenin tried to express his estimate of Stalin in as inoffensive language as possible. Yet he did broach the subject of removing Stalin from the one post that could give him power.<br /><br />After all that had taken place during the preceding months, the Testament could not have been a surprise to Stalin. Nevertheless he took it as a cruel blow. When he first read the text –which Krupskaya had transmitted to him for the forthcoming Party Congress –in the presence of his secretary Mekhlia, later the political chief of the Red Army, and of the prominent Soviet politician Syrtsov, who has since disappeared from the scene, he broke out into billingsgate against Lenin that gave vent to his true feelings about his “master” in those days. Bazhanov, another former secretary of Stalin’s, has described the session of the Central Committee at which Kamenev first made the Testament known. <br />“Terrible embarrassment paralyzed all those present. Stalin sitting on the steps of the praesidium’s rostrum, felt small and miserable. I studied him closely: notwithstanding his self-possession and show of calm, it was clearly evident that his fate was at stake . . .” Radek, who sat beside me at that memorable session, leaned over with the words: “Now they won’t dare to go against you.” He had in mind two places in the letter: one, which characterized me as “the most gifted man in the present Central Committee,” and the other, which demanded Stalin’s removal in view of his rudeness disloyalty and tendency to misuse power. I told Radek: “On the contrary, now they will have to see it through to the bitter end, and moreover as quickly as possible.” Actually, the Testament not only failed to terminate the internal struggle, which was what Lenin wanted, but, on the contrary, intensified it to a feverish pitch. Stalin could no longer doubt that Lenin’s return to activity would mean the political death of the General Secretary. And conversely: only Lenin’s death could clear the way for Stalin.<br /><br />During Lenin’s second illness, toward the end of February, 1923, at a meeting of the Politburo members Zinoviev, Kamenev and the author of these lines, Stalin informed us, after the departure of the secretary, that Lenin had suddenly called him in and had asked him for poison. Lenin was again losing the faculty of speech, considered his situation hopeless, foresaw the approach of a new stroke, did not trust his physicians, whom he had no difficulty catching in contradictions. His mind was perfectly clear and he suffered unendurably. I was able to follow the course of Lenin’s illness day by day through the physician we had in common, Doctor Guetier, who was also a family friend of ours.<br /><br />“Is it possible, Fedor Alexandrovich, that this is the end?” my wife and I would ask him time and again.<br />“That cannot be said at all. Vladimir Ilyich can get on his feet again, He has a powerful constitution.” <br />“And his mental faculties?”<br />“Basically, they will remain untouched. Not every note, perhaps, will keep its former purity, but the virtuoso will remain a virtuoso.”<br /><br />We continued to hope. Yet here I was unexpectedly confronted with the disclosure that Lenin, who seemed the very incarnation of the will to live, was seeking poison for himself. What must have been his inward state!<br /><br />I recall how extraordinary, enigmatic and out of tune with the circumstances Stalin’s face seemed to me. The request he was transmitting to us was tragic; yet a sickly smile was transfixed on his face, as on a mask. We were not unfamiliar with the discrepancy between his facial expression and his speech. But this time it was utterly unsufferable. The horror of it was enhanced by Stalin’s failure to express any opinion about Lenin’s request, as if he were waiting to see what others would say: did he want to catch the overtones of our reaction to it, without committing himself? Or did he have some hidden thoughts of his own? . . . I see before me the pale and silent Kamenev, who sincerely loved Lenin, and Zinoviev, bewildered, as always at difficult moments. Had they known about Lenin’s request even before the session? Or had Stalin sprung this as a surprise on his allies in the triumvirate as well as on me? <br /><br />“Naturally, we cannot even consider carrying out this request!” I exclaimed. “Guetier has not lost hope. Lenin can still recover.” <br />“I told him all that,” Stalin replied, not without a touch of annoyance. “But he wouldn’t listen to reason. The Old Man is suffering. He says he want to have the poison at hand . . . he’ll use it only when he is convinced that his condition is hopeless.”<br />“Anyway, it’s out of the question,” I insisted –this time, I think, with Zinoviev’s support. “He might succumb to a passing mood and take the irrevocable step.”<br />“The Old Man is suffering.” Stalin repeated, staring vaguely past us and, as before, saying nothing one way or the other. A line of thought parallel to the conversation but not quite in consonance with it must have been running through his mind.<br /><br />It is possible of course, that subsequent events have influenced certain details of my recollection, though, as a general rule, I have learned to trust my memory. However, this episode is one of those that leave an indelible imprint on one’s consciousness for all time. Moreover, upon my return home, I told it in detail to my wife. And ever since, each time I mentally review this scene, I cannot help repeating to myself: Stalin’s behavior, his whole manner, was baffling and sinister. What does the man want? And why doesn’t he take that insidious smile off his mask? . . . No vote was taken, since this was not a formal conference, but we parted with the implicit understanding that we could not even consider sending poison to Lenin.<br /><br />Here naturally arises the question: how and why did Lenin, who at the time was extremely suspicious of Stalin, turn to him with such a request, which on the face of it, presupposed the highest degree of personal confidence? A mere month before he made this request to Stalin, Lenin had written his pitiless postscript to the Testament. Several days after making this request, he broke off all personal relations with him. Stalin himself could not have failed to ask himself the question: why did Lenin turn to him of all people? The answer is simple: Lenin saw in Stalin the only man who would grant his tragic request, since he was directly interested in doing so. With his faultless instinct, the sick man guessed what was going on in the Kremlin and outside its walls and how Stalin really felt about him. Lenin did even have to review the list of his closest comrades in order to say to himself that no one except Stalin would do him this “favor.” At the same time, it is possible that he wanted to test Stalin: just how eager would the chef of the peppery dishes be to take advantage of this opportunity? In those days Lenin thought not only of death but of the fate of the Party. Lenin’s revolutionary nerve was undoubtedly the last of his nerves to surrender to death.<br /><br />When still a very young man in prison, Koba would surreptitiously incite hotheaded Caucasians against his opponents, which usually ended in a beating and on one occasion even a murder. As the years passed by, he perfected his technique. The monopolistic political machine of the Party, combined with the totalitarian machine of the Sate, opened to him possibilities which even such of his predecessors as Caesar Borgia could not have imagined. The office in which the investigators of the OGPU carry on their super-inquisitorial questioning is connected by a microphone with Stalin’s office. The unseen Joseph Djugashvili, a pipe in his teeth, listens greedily to the dialogue outlined by himself, rubs his hands and laughs soundlessly. More than ten years before the notorious Moscow trials he had confessed to Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky over a bottle of wine one summer night on the balcony of a summer resort that his highest delight in life was to keep a keen eye on an enemy, prepare everything painstakingly, mercilessly revenge himself, and then go to sleep. Later he avenged himself on a whole generation of Bolsheviks! There is no reason here to return to the Moscow judicial frame-ups. The judgement they were accorded in their day was both authoritative and exhaustive. <br />[Note: The Case of Leon Trotsky: Report of the Hearings on The Charges Made Against Him In The Moscow Trials: By the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry, John Dewey, Chairman, and others: Harper & Brothers: New York & London” 1937, 617 pp. Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry Into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials: By John Dewey, Chairman, and others: Harper & Brothers: New York & London: 1938: 422 pp.]<br /><br />But in order to understand the real Stalin and the manner of his behavior during the days of Lenin’s illness and death, it is necessary to shed light on certain episodes of the last big trial staged in March, 1938.<br /><br />A special place in the prisoner’s dock was occupied by Henry Yagoda, who had worked in the Cheka and the OGPU for sixteen years, at first as an assistant chief, later as the head, and all the time in close contact with the General Secretary as his most trusted aid in the fight against the Opposition. The system of confessions to crimes that had never been committed is Yagoda’s handiwork, if not his brainchild. In 1933 Stalin rewarded Yagoda with the Order of Lenin, in 1935 elevated him to the rank of General Commissar of State Defense, that is, Marshal of the Political Police, only two days after the talented Tukhachevsky was elevated to the rank of Marshal of the Red Army. In Yagoda’s person a nonentity was elevated, known as such to all land held in contempt by all. The old revolutionists must have exchanged looks of indignation. Even in the submissive Politburo an attempt was made to oppose this. But some secret bound Stalin to Yagoda –apparently, forever. Yet the mysterious bond was mysteriously broken. During the great “purge” Stalin decided to liquidate at the same time his fellow-culprit who knew too much. In April, 1927, Yagoda was arrested. As always, Stalin thus achieved several supplementary advantages: for the promise of a pardon, Yagoda assumed at the trial personal guilt for crimes rumor has ascribed to Stalin. Of course, the promise was not kept: Yagoda was executed, in order the better to prove Stalin’s irreconcilability in matters of law and morals.<br /><br />But exceedingly illuminating circumstances were made public at that trial.<br />According to the testimony of his secretary and confidant, Bulanov, Yagoda had a special poison chest, form which, as the need arose, he would obtain precious vials and entrust them to his agents with appropriate instructions. The chief of the AGPU, a former pharmacist, displayed exceptional interest in poisons. He had at his disposal several toxicologists for whom he organized a special laboratory, providing it with means without stint and without control. It is, of course, out of the question that Yagoda might have established such an enterprise for his own personal needs. Far from it. In this case, as in others, he was discharging his official functions. As a poisoner, he was merely instrumentum regni, even as old Locusta at Nero’s court –with this difference, that he had far outstripped his ignorant predecessor in matters of technique!<br /><br />At Yagoda’s side in the prisoner’s dock sat four Kremlin physicians, charged with the murder of Maxim Gorky and of two Soviet cabinet ministers. “I confess that . . . I prescribed medicines unsuited to the given illness . . .” Thus “I was responsible for the untimely death of Maxim Gorky and Kuibyshev.” During the days of the trial, the basic background of which consisted of falsehood, the accusations, like the confessions of poisoning the aged and ailing writer, seemed phantasmagoric to me. Subsequent information and a more attentive analysis of he circumstances forced me to alter that judgment. Not everything in the trials was a lie. There were the poisoned and the poisoners. Not all the poisoners were sitting in the prisoners’ dock. The principal poisoner was conducting the trial by telephone.<br /><br />Gorky was neither a conspirator nor a politician. He was a softhearted old man, a defender of the injured, a sentimental protester. Such had been his role during the early days of the October Revolution. During the first and second five-year plans famine, discontent and repressions reached the utmost limit. The courtiers protested. Even Stalin’s wife, Alliluyeva, protested. In that atmosphere Gorky constituted a serious menace. He corresponded with European writers, he was visited by foreigners, the injured complained to him, he molded public opinion. But, most important, it would have been impossible for him to acquiesce in the extermination, then being prepared, of the Old Bolsheviks, whom he had known intimately for many years. Gorky’s public protest against the frame-ups would have immediately broken the hypnotic spell of Stalin’s justice before the eyes of the world. <br /><br />In no way was it possible to make him keep still. To arrest him, to exile him, not to say to shoot hi, was even less possible. The thought of hastening the liquidation of the sick Gorky through Yagoda “without bloodshed” must have seemed to the boss of the Kremlin as the only way out under the circumstances. Stalin’s mind is so constituted that such decisions occur to him with the impact of reflexes. Having accepted the assignment, Yagoda turned to his “own” physicians. He did not risk anything. Refusal, according to Dr. Levin’s own words, “would spell ruin for me and my family.” Moreover, “you will not excapte Yagoda anyhow. Yagoda is a man who does not stop at anything. He would get you even if you were underground.” <br /><br />But why did not the authoritative and respected Kremlin physicians complain to members of the government, whom they knew well as their own patients? On Dr. Levin’s list of patients alone were twenty-four high-ranking officials, including members of the Politburo and of the council of People’s Commissars. The answer is, that Dr. Levin, like everyone else in and around the Kremlin, knew perfectly well whose agent Yagoda was. Dr. Levin submitted to Yagoda because he was powerless to oppose Stalin.<br /><br />As for Gorky’s discontent, his efforts to go abroad, Stalin’s refusal to grant him a foreign passport –that was common knowledge in Moscow and was discussed in whispers. Suspicions that Stalin had somehow aided the destructive force of nature sprang up directly after the great writer’s death. A concomitant task of Yagoda’s trial was to clear Stalin of that suspicion. Hence, the repeated declarations by Yagoda, the physicians and the other accused that Gorky was “a close friend of Stalin’s,” “a trusted persons,” “a Stalinist,” fully approved of the “Leader’s” policy, spoke “with exceptional enthusiasm” of Stalin’s role. If only half of this were true, Yagoda would not have taken it upon himself to kill Gorky, and still less would have dared to entrust such a plot to a Kremlin physician, who could have destroyed him by simply telephoning Stalin.<br /><br />Here is a single “detail” taken from a single trial. There were many trials, and no end of “details.” All of them bear Stalin’s ineradicable imprint. The work is basically his. Pacing up and down his office, he painstakingly considers sundry schemes wherewith he might reduce anyone who displeases him to the utmost degree of humiliation, to lying denunciations of his dearest intimates, to the most horrible betrayal of his own self. For him who fights back, in spite of everything, there is always a little vial. It is only Yagoda who has disappeared; his poison chest remains.<br /><br />At the 1938 trial Stalin charged Bukharin, as if incidentally, with having prepared in 19118 an attempt on Lenin’s life. The naïve and ardent Bukharin venerated Lenin, loved him with the love of a child for its mother and, when he pertly opposed him in polemics, it was not otherwise than on his knees. Bukharin, “soft as wax,” to use Lenin’s expression, did not have and could not have had personal ambitious designs. If in the old days anyone had predicted that the time would come when Bukharin would be accused of an attempt on Lenin’s life, each of us, and above all Lenin, would have laughed and advised putting such a prophet in an insane asylum. Why then did Stalin resort to such a patently absurd accusation? Most likely this was his answer to Bukharin’s suspicions, carelessly expressed, with reference to Stalin himself. Generally, all the accusations are cut to this pattern. The basic elements of Stalin’s frame-ups are not the products of pure fantasy; they are derived from reality –for the most part, from either the deeds or designs of the chef of the peppery dishes himself. The same defensive-offensive “Stalin reflex,” which was so clearly revealed in the instance of Gorky’s death, disclosed its full force in the matter of Lenin’s death as well. In the first case, Yagoda paid with his life; in the second –Bukharin. <br /><br />I imagine the course of affairs somewhat like this. Lenin asked for poison at the end of February, 1923. In the beginning of March he was again paralyzed. The medical prognosis at the time was cautiously unfavorable. Feeling more sure of himself, Stalin began to act as if Lenin were already dead. But the sick man fooled him. His powerful organism, supported by an inflexible will, reasserted itself. Toward winter Lenin began to improve slowly, to move around more freely; listened to reading and read himself; his faculty of speech began to come back to him. The findings of the physicians became increasingly more hopeful. Lenin’s recovery could not, of course, have prevented the supersedure of the Revolution by the bureaucratic reaction. Krupskaya had sound reasons for observing in 1926, “if Volodya were alive, he would now be in prison.”<br /><br />For Stalin himself it was not a question of the general course of development, but rather of his own fate: either he could manage at once, this very day, to become the boss of the political machine and hence of the Party and of the country, or he would be relegated to a third-rate role for the rest of his life. Stalin was after power, all of it, come what may. He already had a firm grip on it. His goal was near, but the danger emanating from Lenin was even nearer. At this time Stalin must have made up his mind that it was imperative to act without delay. Everywhere he had accomplices whose fate was completely bound to his. At his side was the pharmacist Yagoda. Whether Stalin sent the poison to Lenin with the hint that the physicians had left no hope for his recovery or whether he resorted to more direct means I do not know. But I am firmly convinced that Stalin could not have waited passively when his fate hung by a thread and the decision depended on a small, very small motion of his hand.<br /><br />Some time after the middle of January, 1924, I left for Sukhum, in the Caucasus, to try to get rid of a dogged, mysterious infection, the nature of which still remains a mystery to my physicians. The news of Lenin’s death reached me en route. According to a widely disseminated version, I lost power because I was not present at Lenin’s funeral. This explanation can hardly be taken seriously. But the fact of my absence at the mourning ceremonies caused many of my friends serious misgivings. In a letter from my oldest son, who was then nearing eighteen, there was a note of youthful despair: I should have come at any price! Such were my intentions, too. The coded telegram about Lenin’s death found my wife and me at the railway station in Tiflis. I immediately sent a coded note by direct wire to the Kremlin: “I deem it necessary to return to Moscow. When is the funeral?” The reply came from Moscow in about an hour: “The funeral will take place on Saturday. You will not be able to return in time. The Politburo thinks that because of the state of your health you must proceed to Sukhum. Stalin.” I did not feel that I should request postponement of the funeral for my sake alone. Only in Sukhum, lying under blankets on the verandah of a sanatorium, did I learn that the funeral had been changed to Sunday. The circumstances connected with the previous setting and ultimate changing of the date of the funeral are so involved that they cannot be clarified in a few lines. Stalin maneuvered, deceiving not only me but, so it appears, also his allies in the triumvirate. In distinction from Zinoviev, who approach every question from the standpoint of its immediate effectiveness as agitation, Stalin was guided in his risky maneuvers by more tangible considerations. He might have feared that I would connect Lenin’s death with last year’s conversation about poison, would ask the doctors whether poisoning was involved, and demand a special autopsy. It was, therefore, safer in all respects to keep me away until after the body had been embalmed, the viscera cremated and a post- mortem examination inspired by such suspicions no longer feasible.<br /><br />When I asked the physicians in Moscow about the immediate cause of Lenin’s death, which they had not expected, they were at a loss to account for it. I did not bother to question Krupskaya, who had written a very warm letter to me at Sukhum, which questions on that theme. I did not renew personal relations with Zinoviev and Kamenev until two years later, after they had broken with Stalin. They obviously avoided all discussion concerning the circumstances of Lenin’s death, answering in monosyllables and avoiding my eyes. Did they know anything or were they merely suspicious? Anyway, they had been so closely involved with Stalin during the preceding three years that they could not help being apprehensive lest the shadow of suspicion should fall on them as well.<br /><br />Over Lenin’s bier Stalin read from a scrap of paper his oath of fealty to his master’s legacy, couched in the style of the homilectics he had studied at the Tiflis theological seminary. In those days that oath was scarcely noticed. Today it is in all the textbooks, having superseded the Ten Commandments.<br /><br />[In Leaving us, Comrade Lenin commanded us to hold high and pure the great calling of Party Member. We swear to Thee, Comrade Lenin, to honor Thy command. <br />In leaving us, Comrade Lenin commanded us to keep the unity of our Party as the apple of our eye. We swear to Thee, Comrade Lenin, to honor Thy command.<br />In leaving us, Comrade Lenin ordered us to maintain and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We swear to Thee, Comrade Lenin, to exert our full strength in honoring Thy command.<br />In leaving us, Comrade Lenin ordered us to strengthen with all our might the union of workers and peasants. We swear to Thee, Comrade Lenin, to honor Thy command.<br />In leaving us, Comrade Lenin ordered us to strengthen and expand the Union of the Republics. We swear to Thee, Comrade Lenin, to honor Thy command.<br />In leaving us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to be faithful to the Communist International. We swear to Thee, Comrade Lenin, that we shall dedicate our lives to the enlargement and reinforcement of the union of the workers of the whole world, the Communist International.]<br /><br />The names of Nero and Caesar Borgia have been mentioned more than once with reference to the Moscow trials and the latest developments on the international scene. Since these old ghosts are being invoked, it is fitting, it seems to me, to speak of a super-Nero and a super-Borgia, so modest, almost naïve, seem the crimes of that era in comparison with the exploits of our own times. It is possible however to discern a more profound historical significance in purely personal analogies. The customs of the declining Roman Empire were formed during the transition from slavery to feudalism, from paganism to Christianity. The epoch of the Renaissance marked the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, from Catholicism to Protestantism and Liberalism. In both instances the old morality had managed to spend itself before the new one was formed.<br /><br />Now again we are living during the transition from one system to another, in an epoch of the greatest social crisis, which, as always, is accompanied by the crisis in morals. The old has been shaken to its foundations. The new has scarcely begun to emerge. When the roof has collapsed, the doors and windows fallen off their hinges, the house is bleak and hard to live in. Today gusty draughts are blowing across our entire planet. All the traditional principles of morality are increasingly worse off, not only those emanating from Stalin.<br /><br />But historical explanation is not a justification. Nero, too, was a product of his epoch. Yet after he perished his statues were smashed and his name was scraped off everything. The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary. I venture to think, that this is consoling.<br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1123836640167192122005-08-12T01:48:00.000-07:002005-08-12T01:50:40.236-07:00Trotsky's 'Stalin' Chap 11 From Obscurity to the TriumvirateChapter 11 <br />FROM OBSCURITY TO THE TRIUMVIRATE<br /><br /><br />Part One: Beginnings of centralization in Party and State<br /><br />[The end of the Civil War found Stalin still in the shadows politically. The Party wheelhorses knew him, of course, but did not regard him as one of the important leaders. To the rank and file of the Party he was one of the least known members of the Central Committee, notwithstanding his membership in the all-powerful Politburo. The country at large had scarcely heard of him. The non-Soviet world did not even suspect his existence. Yet within less than two years his hold on the Party’s political machine had become so formidable and his influence was deemed so injurious by Lenin that in early March, 1923, Lenin broke all “comradely relations” with him. Another two years passed, and Trotsky, next in eminence only to Lenin in the leadership in the October Revolution and the Soviet government, had been relegated by Stalin’s machine to a recarious political position. Not only did Stalin become a member of the triumvirate that led the Party in place of the sick Lenin, but the most powerful of the triumvirs and subsequently Lenin’s sole successor. Moreover, with the years he acquired far greater power than Lenin had ever enjoyed –indeed, more abolute than any Tsar in Russia’s long history of absolutist rule.<br /><br />[How did this come about? What were the causes and steps in Stalin’s rise from political obscurity to political pre-eminence?]<br /><br />Every stage pf development, even such catastrophic stages as revolution and counter-revolution, is an outgrowth of the preceeding stage, is rooted in it, bears a resemblance to it. After the victory of October, there were writers who argued that the dictatorship of Bolshevism was merely a new version of Tsarism, refused ostrich-like to take into consideration the abolition of the monarchy and the nobility, the uprooting of capitalism and the in troduction of planned economy, the abolition of the State Church and the education of the masses in the principles of atheism, the abolution of landlordism and the distribution of the land to the actual tillers of the soil. Similarly, after Stalin’s truimph over Bolshevism many of the same writers –such as the Webbs, the Wellses and the Laskis, who have previously been critical of Bolshevism and had now become fellow-travelers of Stalinism –closed their eyes to the cardinal and stubborn fact thatm, notwithstanding the measures of repression resorted to under the duress of extraordinary circumstances, the October Revolution brought about an upheaval of social relations in the interests of the toiling masses; whereas, the Stalinist counter-revolution has initiated social upheavals that are steadily transforming the Soviet social order in the interests of a privileged minority of thermidorian bureaucrats. Equally immune to elementary facts are certain renegadesof Communism, many of them erstwhile henchmen of Stalin’s who, their heads buried deep in the sands of their bitter disillusion, fail to see that, notwithstanding the survace similarities, the counter-revolution led by Stalin varies in certain definitigve fundamental essentials from the counter-revolutions of the Fascist leaders; they fail to see that the difference is rooted in the dissimilarity between the social base of Stalin’s counter-revolution and the social base of the reactionary movements headed by Mussolini and Hitler, that it runs parallel to the difference between the dictatorships of the proletariat, however distorted by thermidorian bureaucratism, and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the difference between a workers’ state and a capitalist state.<br /><br />Moreover this fundamental dissimilarity is illustrated –and in a certain sense, even epitomized –by the uniqueness of Stalin’s career by comparison with the careers of the other two dictators, Mussolini and Hitler, each the initiator of a movement, each an exceptional agitator, a popular tribune. Their political rise, fantastic though it seems, preceeded on its own momentum in full view of all, in unbreakable connection with the growth of the movements they headed from their very inception. Altogether different was the nature of Stalin’s rise. It is not comparable with anything in the past. He seems to have no pre-history. The process of his rise took place somewhere gehind an impenetrable political curtain. At a certain moment his figure, in the full panoply of power, suddenly stepped away from the Kremlin wall, and for the first time the world became aware ofr Stalin as a ready-made dictator. All the keener is the interest with which thinking humanity examines the nature of Stalin, personally as well as politically. In the peculiarities of his personality it seeks the key to his political fate. <br /><br />It is impossible to understand Stalin and his latter-day success without understanding the mainspring of his personality: love of power, ambition, envy –active, never-slumbering envy of all who are more gifted, more powerful, rank higher than he. With that characteristic braggadocio which is the essence of Mussolini, he told one of his friends: “I have never met my equal.” Stalin could never have uttered this phrase, even to his most intimate friends, because it would have sounded too crude, too absurd, too ridiculous. There were amy number of men on the Bolshevik staff alone who excelled Stalin in all respects but one –his concentrated ambition. Lenin highly valued power as a tool of action. But pure love of power was utterly alien to him. Not so with Stalin. Psychologically, power to him was always something apart from the purposes which it was supposed to serve. The desire to exert his will as the athlete exerts his muscles, to lord it over others –that was the mainspring of his personality. His will thus acquired an ever-increasing concentration of force, swelling in aggresiveness, activity, ranke of expression, stopping at nothing. The more often Stalin had occasion to convince himself that he was lacking in very many attributes for the aquisition of power, the more intensely did he compensate for each deficiency of character, the more subtely did he transform each lack into an advantage under certain conditions.<br /><br />The current official comparisons of Stalin to Lenin are simply indecent. If the basis of comparison is sweep of personality, it is impossible to place Stalin even alongside Mussolini or Hitler. However, meager the “ideas” of Fascism, both of the victorious leaders of reaction, the Italian and the German, from the very beginning of their respective movements displayed initiative, roused the masses to action, pioneered new paths through the political jungle. Nothing of the kind can be said about Stalin. The Bolshevik Party was created by Lenin. Stalin grew out of its politicla machine and remained inseparable from it. He has never had any other apprioach to the masses or to the events of history than thriough this machine. In the fist period of his rise to power he was himself caught unawares by his own success. He took his steps withiout certainty, looking to right and left and over his shoulder, aways ready to slink back and run for cover. Used as a counterweight against me, he was bolstered and encouraged by Zinoviev and Kamenev, and to a lesser extent by Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky. No one thought at the time that Stalin would some day loom away above their heads. In the first triumvirate Zinoviev treated Stalin in a circumspectly patronizing manner; Kamenev with a touch of irony. But more of this later.<br /><br />The Stalinist school of falsification is not the only one that flourishes today in the field of Russian history. Indeed, it derives a measure of its sustenance from certain legends built on ignorance and sentimentalism; such as the lurid tales concerning Kronstadt, Makhno and other episodes of the Revolution. Suffice it to say that what the Soviet government did reuctantly at Kronstadt was a tragic necessity; naturally, the revolutionary government could not have “presented” a fortress that protected Petrograd to the insurgent sailors only because a few dubious Anarchists and Essars were sponsoring a handful of reactionary peasants and soldiers in rebellion. Similar considerations were involved in the case of Makhno and other potentially revolutionary elements that were perhaps well-meaning but definitely ill-acting.<br /><br />Far from sprning the co-operation of revolutionists of all the currents of Socialism, the Bolsheviks of the heroic era of the revolution eagerly sought it on every occasion and made every possible concession to secure it. For eample, Lenin and I seriously considered at one time allotting certain territories to the Anarchists, naturally with the consent of the local population, and letting them carry on their experiment of a stateless social order there. That project died in the discussion stage through no fault of ours. The Anarchist movement itself failed to pass the test of actual events on the proving ground of the Russian Revolution. Many of the ablest and sanest of the Anarchists decided that they could serve their cause best by joining the ranks of our Party. <br /><br />Although we alone seized power in October, we demonstrated our willingness to co-operate with other Soviet parties by engaging in negotiations with them. But their demands were fantastically outrageous; they wanted no less than the decapitation of our Party. We then formed a coalition government with the only other Soviet party with which co-operation seemed possible at the time, the Party of the Left Essars. But the Left Essars resigned from the government in protest against the Peace of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918, and in July they stabged the Soviet government in the back by confronting it with the fait accompli of the assassination of the German Ambassador Mirbach and an attempted coup d’etat. What would the Messieurs Liberals have had us do under the circumstances: let the October Revolution, the country and ourselves be devastated by our treacherous former partners in the coalition government and be trampled under the marching boots of the German Imperial Army? Facts are stubborn things. History records that the Party of the Left Essars crumbled to dust under the impact of impending events and many of its bravest members became stalwart Bolsheviks, among them Blumkin, the assassin of Count von Mirbach. Were the Bolsheviks merely vengeful or were they “liberal” when they perceived the revolutionary motivations behind Blumkin’s studidly disastrous act of provocation and admitted him to full-fledged membership of the Party and to highly responsible work? (Blumkin was far from the only one. His case is merely better known than others.) Far from hurting us, the rebellion of the Left Essars, which deprived us of an ally and a fellow-traveler, strengthened us in the final reckoning. It put an end to the defection of the Left Communists. The Party closed its ranks tighter than ever. The influence of Communist cells in the Army and in the Soviet institutions rose tremendously. The policy of the government became considerably firmer/<br /><br />The Bolsheviks began the heroic period of revolution by erring on the side of tolerance and forbearance in the treatment of all non-Bolshevik political parties. The bourgeois, Essar and Menshevik newspapers turned from the first days of October into a harmonizing chorus of howling wolves, prowling jackals and baying mad dogs. Only Novoye Vremya [The New Times], the shameless organ of darkest Tsarist reaction. Attempted super-subtle maneuvering by trying to maintin a “loyal” tone, wagging its tail. Lenin saw through them all and saw the danger of tolerating the whole pack of them. “Are we going to let this rabble get away with it?” Vladimir Ilyich demanded on every occasion. “Good Lord! What kind of dictatorship have we!” The newspapers of these hyenas pounced upon the phrase “plunder the plunderers” and made the most of it in editorials, in verse, in special articles. “What aren’t they doing to that ‘plunder the plunderers,’” Lenin exclaimed once in jocular despair. “Who really said it?” I asked, “Or is it pure fabrication?” –“Not aat all!” Lenin retorted. “I did actually use those words. Said them and then forgot about them. And here they’ve made a whole program of them!” He waved his hand humorously. <br /><br />Yet we did not interfere with public expression of dissident views, although the Mensheviks deliberately sabotaged vital defense activity through their hold on the railway unions, and others elswhere –until the assassination of Volodarsky and Uritsky and the murderous attempt on the life of Lenin, August 30th, 1918. It was in those tragic days that something snapped in the heart of the revolution. It began to lose its “kindness” and forbearance. The sword of the Party received its final tempering. Resolution increased and, where necessary, ruthlessness, too. At the front the Army’s political departments, hand in hand with the shock troops and the revolutionary tribunals, put a backbone into the immature body of the Army. The same process was in time reflected behind the lines. At the front we then recaptured Kazan and Simbirsk. Throughout the country we sefured a new lease of life. When Sverdlov and I went to visit Lenin in Gorki, where he was convalexceing from his wounds, he showered us with detailed inquiries about the organization of the Army, its morale, the role of the Communists in it, the growth of discipline, interjecting happily, “Now, that’s good, that’s fine! The strengthening of the Army will be immediately reflefted throughout the country in the growth of discipline, the growth of a sense of responsibility . . .” And indeed, by autumn the effects of a great change were evident on every hand. The hslplessness we had sensed during the spring months was definitely a thing of the past. Something had happened. It was no longer a respite, a breathing spell, that had saved the Revolution, but the imminence of a new and great danger which had opened in the proletariat hitherto unplumbed subterranean springs of revolutionary energy.<br /><br />Having deprived the parties of the Mensheviks and the Essars of the Right and Cventre of Soviet legality in June, 1918, after their direct participation in the Civil War against the Soviet government had been established not only through acts of individual terrorm, but sabotage, diversion, conspiracy and other overt acts of war, the Bolsheviks were compelled to add the Left Essars to the proscription list after the latter attempted their treacherous coup d’etat in July. But the June 14th decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet, which expelled the Mensheviks and Essars from that body and recommended similar action to other Soviet institutions, was reconsidered five months later, after those parties returned to the class-struggle position axiomatic for professing Socialists. In October, 1918, the Central Committee of the Mensheviks acknowledged in a resolution that the Bolshevik Revolution of October, 1917, was “historically necessary,” and repudiating “every kind of political collaboration with classes hostile to the Democracy,” refused “to participate in any governmental combinations, even those covered by the democratic flag, that are based on ‘general national’ coalitions of the democracy with the capitalistic bourgeoisie or which depend on foreign imperialism or militarism.” In view of these declarations by the Mensheviks, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee at ist session of Noevember 30th, 1918, decreed to regard as void its resolution of 14th of June “insofar as it refers to the party of the Mensheviks.” Several months later the process of “going left” began among a section of the Essars. The conference of the representatives of the various organizations of the Essar parties on the territory of Soviet Russia, which took place on the 8th of February, 1919, in Petrograd, “resolutely repudiated the attempt to overthrow the Soviet Government by way of armed struggle.” Whereupon, the All-Russian Central Exective Committee on the 25th of February, 1919, decreeed to void its decree of 14th of June, 1918, “with reference to all groups of the party of the Essars which consider obligatory upon themselves the above-mentioned resolution of the conference of the parties of the Essars.” <br /><br />But in the spring the outbreak of Kulak uprisings in a number of provinces and the successful advance of Kolchak induced these parties, with the exceptiohn of a few of their representatives, to return to their old positions. In view of that the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks in May 1919, issued a directive “concerning the arrest of all prominent Mensheviks and Essars about whom it is not personally known that they were ready actively to support the Soviet Government in its struggle against Kolchak.” It thus became obvious that the earlier professions of loyalty to the Soviet “democracy” were mere maneuvers by the Mensheviks and the Essar parties. Their constant agitation for the abolition of the Cheka and the death penalty even for spies and counter-revolutionists played into the hands of the White Guards and spread demoralization in the rear of the Red Army.<br /><br />[Between the arrests by the Soviet government and defections from the ranks of party members sympathetic to the Bolshevik regime, the parties of the Mensheviks and the Essars were reduced to mere skeletons by the end of 1919. Their leaders we4re either under the constant threat of arrest, imprisoned or in exile. The vounted democracy of the Soviets –which gegan as the popular assemblies of the anti-Tsarist and anti-capitalist elements of the country, purporting to represent the vast majority of the common people, and which assumed at first dual and then sole authority over the country – succumbed a year before the end of the Civil War to the absolute rule of the one-party State. <br /><br />[But meantime the trend toward centralization, that sure precursor of totalitarianism, went on within the Bolshevik Party itself. Although, true enough, it was due in a measure to the ante-Bolshevik activities of the other Socialist parties, which in their effort to become effective were actually anti-Soviet by virtue of the overpowering control of the Soviets by the Bolsheviks, no less important as contributing factors were the disastous economic condition of the country, aggravated by the devastation of War Communism and the Civil War, and the “rule or ruin” attitude of the Bolsheviks. The line of development of Soveit democracy and democratic centralism withih the Bolshevik Party itself to totalitarianism in both sphere is not always clearly traceable. But it is sufficiently clear thyat after t6he seizure of power in October, 1917, in the name of the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, by the Bolshevik Party machine, the Party Central Committee and provincial committees, which had prepared and co-ordinated the coup d’etat, yielded priority to the Soviet, in whose name and under whose ostensible auspices the insurrection had been carried out. Within the Soviet itself, the Council of People’s Commissars asumed immediate priority of actual power over the Soviet Central Executive Committee, from which it derived its authority. Within the Council itself the Bolshevik majority held the dominant power. When, furthermore, early I March 1918, the Seventh Party Congress officially apparoved the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the Left Essar members of the coalition government withdrew in protest from the Council of Peoples’ Commissars, while the Left Communists for the same reason became an organized oppostion within the Party and boycotted its Central Committee, the ideal of “democratic centralism” suffered further reverses, for in effect the power within both the government and the Party became concentrated in the hands of Lenin and the immediate retinue of Bolshevik leaders who did not openly disagree with him and carried out his wishes. <br /><br />[An unfortunate precedent had been set in November, 1917, when Sverdlow, already Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, and an outstanding organizer, succeeded L.B. Kamenev as Cheirman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet. Thus, in the person of Sverdlov the Party-State machine found its initial expression in post-October Europe. Unwittingly –and only potentially, of course –the political administration Sverdlov headed was the precursor of the contemporary one-party State. <br /><br />[Note: Cf. The resolution adopted in 1904 by the Amsterdam Congress of the Second International, which reads in part: “In order that the working class may put forth all its strength in the struggle against capitalism, it is necssary that in egery country there exist vis-à-vis the bourgeois parties only one socialist pasrty, as there exists only one proletariat . . .” Experience, particularly the coalitionwith the Left Essars, convinced the Bolsheviks of the validity of this ideal. Speaking on behalf of the routed Opposition at the Fifteenth Party Congress (Dec. 2019, 1927), Kamenev declared: “We have to choose between two roads. One of these roads is that of a scond party. That road, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, is fatal for the revolution. It is the road of political degeneration and class deviation. This road is closed to us, forbidden by the whole system of our ideas, by all the teachings of Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . There remains, consequently, the second road. This road means . . . that we submit completely to the Party. We chose that road, for we are profoundly convinced of the fact that a correct Leninist policy can be realized only inside our Party, not outside the Party and against it . . . But if in addition we are to renounce our point of view (which is what this Congress demands), that would not be . . . Bolshevik. This demand for the renunciation of one’s own opinions has never before been posed in our Party. If we were to declare that we had renounced opinions which we defended only a week or two ago, it would be hypocrisy, and we would not deserve your confidence . . . you would not believe it . . . it would merely introduce decay into the very foundation of the reconciliation . . .” and so forth. The key to the difference between the Leninist and Stalinist views on party discipline us in the sentence italicized by me. The Stalinist Congress replied to Kamenev by expelling the Oppositionists and by demanding of them “complete ideological disarmament, the firm condemnation of the views of the Opposition as anti-Leninist and Menshevik.” The very next day the same Kamenev and Zinoviev led a procession of twenty-three converts from Leninism to Stalinism up to the praesidium of the Congress with the following words of contrition and moral suicide: “ . . . harsh as may be for us the demands of the Congress . . . we . . . bow our will and our ideas to the will and the ideas of the Party . . . the sole supreme judge of what is useful or harmful to the victorious progress of the revolution.” They then accepted the ultimatum of the Congress and petitioned for readmission into the Party. This was the beginning of their end. – C.M ]<br /><br />[Lenin’s prestige was so overwhelming that he had to resort to an exaggeratedely meticulous observance of the forms of collegialism to avoid becoming a personal dictator. Notwithstanding his unaccommodating disposition and bulldog tenacity in defense of his ideas, and his passion for getting things done as quickly and efficiently as possible, he was strongly inclined to be patient with oppositionists in the Party and in the Soviet. He made an earnest effort to meet his opponents on parliamentary grounds. Had it not been for the withdrawal of the Trotsky faction from the contest, Lenin would have gone down in defeat at the hands of Bukharin in the Central Committee debates on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Nor did he bear a grudge against Bukharin and the other Left Communists for waging a vigorous campaign against him and the Party majority in the press and from the resotrrum during the exeedingly critical months of 1918. And on the very day that the Left Essars staged their abortive coup d’etat Lenin was answering arguments of their leader, Maria Spiridonova, on the floor of the Fifth Soviet Congress. But he was no fetishist about parliamentarism. He had written in 1915: “The slogan ‘Constituent Assembly’ as an independent slogan is incorrect, since the question is, who is to call it.” Accordingly, in 1918 he made short shrift of it.}<br /><br />During the very first days, if not hours, after the Insurrection Lenin posed the question of the Constituent Assembly. “We must postpone it,” he insisted, “w must postpone the elections. We must broaden our electoral rights by diving them to the eighteen-year olds. We must make it possible to revamp the lists of candidates. Our own are no good: too many untried intellectuals, when what we need are workers and peasants. The Kornilovites and the Kadets [Constitutional Democrats] must be deprived of legal status.” Tot hose who argued: “It is not politic to postpone it now; it will be construed as liquidation of the Constituent Assembly, especially since we ouselves had accused the Provisional Government of putting it off,” Lenin replied: “Nonsense! Facts are important not words. As against the Provisional Government, the Constituent Assembly was or could have been a step forward, but in relation to the Soviet Government, it can only be a step backward. Why is it not politic to postpone it? And if the Constituent Assembly will prove to bge Kadet-Menshevik-Essar,will that be politic?”<br /><br />“But by that time we shall be stronger,” others argued, “while now we are weak. The Soviet Government is practically unknown in the provinces. And should it become known there that we postponed the Constituent Assembly, our position would become even weaker than it is.” Sverdlov was particularly energetic in his opposition to postponing it, and he was more closely connected with the provinces than any of us. Lenin proved to be alone in his position. He would shake his head in disapproval and reiterate: “It’s a mistake, and obvious mistake, that may cost us dear! I hope that this mistake will not cost the revolution its head . . .” Yet once the decision was made against postponement, Lenin concentrated his entire attention on measures for bringing about the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.<br /><br />Meantime it became clear that we sould be in a minority, even with the Left Essars, who ran on the same ticket with the Right Essars and were fooled at every turn. “Of course, we shall have to disperse the Constituent Assembly,” Lenin said. “But what about the left Essars?” However, old man Natanson <br />------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />[Note: Mark Andreyevich Natanson, alias Bobrov (1849-1919), one of Russia’s great revolutionists and a leading Populist, was one of the organizers of te4h Chaikovsky Circle, which played a very important revolutionary party in the “khozheniye v narod” (“going to the people”) movement. Afer exile in Archangel Province, he organized the stongly conspirative Obshchestvo Severnykh Norodnikov (Society of Northern Populists) in 1876 and that summer initiated and managed a group which effected the escape of Kropotkin. One of the founders of the Zemlya I Volya (Land and Freedom) Party, he became a leader of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) after the split and a leading protagonist of its terrorist policy. Arrested in 1881, in connection with the assassination of Tsar Alexander 11, he was sentenced to 10 years’ exile in Siberia. In 1891 he organized with Victor Chernov the Noradnoye Pravo (People’s Rights) Party. Arrested in 1894, he served his sentence in Peter and Paul Fortress and Eastern Siberia. He was one of the founders of the Essar (Social-Revolutionary) Party, member of its Central Committee, leader of its Left Wing since 1905. During World War 1 he was a consistent internationalist and one of the leading spirits of the Zimmerwald Conference. He became a leader of the Left Essars after the split in 19178, and in July, 1918, after the abortive Left Essar coup against the Bolsheviks, headed a group of Left Essars opposed to the coup and known as the Revolutionary Communists. He was a member of the praesidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet. He died abroad in 1919. ]<br />---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />reassured us on that score. He dropped in to “consult” us, but his very first words were, “I daresay we’ll have to disperse the Constituent Assembly forcibly.” Lenin exclaimed: “Bravo! What’s right is right! But will your people go that far?” Natanson replied: “Some of us are wavering, but I think that in the end they’ll all agree to it.” The Left Essars were then going through the honeymoon of their extreme radicalism: they actually did consent to it. Lenin devoted himself passionately to the problem of the Constituent Assembly. He was thoroughgoing in all preparations, thining through all the details and subjecting Uritsky, who to his great distress had been appointed Commissar of the Constituent Assembly, to the rack of pitiless cross-examination. Incidentally, Lenin attended personally to the transfer of one of the Latvian regiments, preponderantly proletarian in complexion, to Petrograd. “The muzhik might waver in case of something or other,” he observed, “And here we must have proletarian decisiveness.” <br /><br />The Bolshevik delegates to the Constituent Assembly who foregathered from all parts of Russia were –under Lenin’s pressure and Sverdlov’s management –distributed through all the factories, plants and military units. They were an important element in the organizational machine of the “supplementary revolution” of January 5th. As for the Right Essar delegates, they deemed it incompatible with their high calling to engage in a fight: “The people elected us, let the people defend us.” Essentially, these provincial burghers had not the slightest idea what to do with themselves, and most of them had a yellow streak. But to make up for that, they worked out the ritual of the first session most meticulously. They brought alohg candles, in case the Bolsheviks were to turn out the electric lights, and a large quantity of sandwiches, in the event they were deprived of food. Thus, Democracy came to do battle against Dictatorship – fully armed with sandwiches and candles. It did not even occur to the people to defend those who considered themselves the elect of the people but actuallky were mere shadows of a period of the revolution gone beyond recall.<br /><br />I was in Brest-Litovsk during the liquidation of the Constituent Assembly. But as soon as I came for a conference to Petrograd, Lenin told me concerning the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly: “It was of course very risky of us not to have postponed its convocation –very, very incautious of us. But in the final reckoning it was better that it turned out that way. The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by the Soviet government is a frank and complete liquidation of the formal democracy in the name of the revolutionary dictatorship. Henceforth the lesson will be clear-cut.” Thus, theoretical generalization went hand in hand with the utilization of the Latvian Rifle Regiment. It was undoubtedly then that Lenin must have become consciously aware of the ideas he later formulated at the First Congress of the Comintern in his remarkable theses on democracy.<br /><br />As is generally known, the criticism of formal democracy has its own long history. Both we and our predcessors explained the transitional nature of the Revolution of 1848 by the collapse of political democracy. “Social” democracy had come to replace it. But the bourgeois social order was able to force the latter to taketh4e place which pure democracy was no longer able to hold. Political history then passed through a prolonged period during which social democracy, battening upon its criticism of pure democracy, actually carried out the functions of the latter and became thoroughly permeated with the latter’s vices. What happened had occurred more than once in history: the opposition was called upon to solve conservatively the very tasks with which the compromised forces of yesterday were no longer able to cope. Beginning as the provisional state of preparation for proletarian dictatorship, democracy became the supreme criterion, the last controlling resort, the inviolable holy of holies, i.e., the ultimate hypocrisy of the bourgeois social order. It was even so with us. After receiving a moral knock=out in October, the bourgeoisie attempted its own resurrection in January in the phantom sacrosanct form of the Constituent Assembly. The subsequent victorious development of the proletarian revolution after the frank, manifest, blunt dispersal of the Constituent Assembly struck formal democracy the beneficient blow from which it will never again recover. That is why Lenin was right when he said: “In the final reckoning, it was better that it turned out this way!” In the person of he Essarist Constituent Assembly the February Republic had merely achieved the opportunity to die a second time. <br /><br />[When, during Kamenev’s brief tenure as the First President of the Republic –in his capacity as Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet – and upon his initiative] the death penalty law against soldiers introduced by Kerensky was repealed, there was no end to Lenin’s indignation. “Tommy rot!” he stormed. “How can you expect to conduct a revolution without executions? Do you really think you can deal with all these enemies after disarming yourself? What other measures of repression are there? Imprisonment? Who attaches any significance to it during civil war, when each side hopes to win?” Kamenev tried to argue that it was only a matter of repealing the death penalty which Kerensky had intended especially for deserting soldiers. But Lenin was irreconcilable. It was clear to him that behind this decree was a frivolous attitude toward the unprecedented difficulties we wer facing. “A mistake,” he reiterated, “unpardonable weakness, pacifist illusions,” and the like. He proposed an immediate repeal of the decree. It was objected that this would produce an unfavorable impression. Someone suggested hat it would be better to rsort to executions when it became clear that there was no other way out. Finally, we let the matter rest there.<br /><br />“And what,” Vladimir Ilyich asked me once quite unexpectedly, “if the White Guards should kill both of us? Will Bukharin and Sverdlov be able to cope with the situation?” [At first, it was Sverdlov rather than Stalin on whom Lenin relied for centarlization with a firm hand. Sverdlov it was who first attempted to define the division of functions between the Party and the Soviet political machines. It was Sverdlov who was elected chairman of the first constitutional committee (of which Stalin was a member). It was Sverdlov who incorporated in that first Soviet Constitution not only the theoretical principles of Leninism but the initial practical experience of administration in such matters as the inter-relation of central and local organs of the Soviet government, the Committees of the Poor and the Soviets of the villages, the borders and functions of the constituent republics and autonomous regions, and numerous other specific matters that no amount of theorizing could encompass concretely. “Sverdlov,” according to an aulogy by Stalin, “was one of the first, if not the first, who skillfully and painlessly solved . . . the complex organizational task . . . of building the new Russia . . . the government of Soviets, the government of workers and peasants,” which arose “for the first time in the history of mankindm,” the task of effefcting the transition of “the party, hitherto illegal, to new tracks, creating the organizational forms of interrelation between the Party and the Soviets, securing the leadership of the Party and the normal development of the Soviets . . .”] Sverdlov was truly irreplaceable: confident, courageous, firm, resourceful, he was the finest type of Bolshevik. Lenin came to know and appreciate Sverdlov fully in those troubled months. How many times was it that Vladimir Ilyich would telephone Sverdlov to suggest one or another urgent measure, and in most cases would receive the reply, “Already!” This meant that the measure had already been undertaken. We often joked about it, sayingm “With Sverdlov it is no doubt –already!”<br /><br />[The process of centralization gained such momentum by the spring of 1919 that the Soviet Central Executive Committee had lost all of its actual power to the Cental Committee of the Party, the transfer having been made as it were from Sverdlov’s Government office to his Party office, while locally the Soviet committees were entirely subservient to the corresponding Party committees. The latter in turn were under the thumb of the Central Committee in Moscow, which was dominated by Lenin. However, this process had not yet crytallized and was not to achieve completion until years later during Stalin’s incumbency.<br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />Part Two: From Politburo to General-Secretary<br /><br />[At the eighth Party Congress this process of increasing centralization at the expense of the Party democracy was further stimulated by certain formal proposals of Zinoviev’s, who acted ostensibly upon his own inititiative but actually as Lenin’s instrument. Zinoviev proposed on the one hand that for the sake of efficiency the Central Committee should delegate certain of its functions to three other bodies appointed by it –the Political Bureau, the Organizational Bureau and the Secretariat; on the other hand, that a new Commissariat be organized, to be known as the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. The oppositionists at the congress did not take kindly to these proposals. Ossinsky objected most vehemently to the institution of the Political Bureau:<br /><br />Permit me to refer to Comrade Zinoviev’s theses, according to which . . . the Politburo . . . is to decide all urgent questions. The plenary session of the Central Committee is to meet only twice a month and , as Comrade Zinoviev put it circumspectly, is to discuss questions of general policy . . . In other words, the plenum of the Central Committee merely discusses. What it all comes down to, is that the Political Bureau of five people decides all the important questions, while the plenary session meets for general conversation, for discussion. All the other fourteen members are thus reduced to the status of second-rate members.<br /><br />[Ossinsky was right of course. That was precisely that eventually did happen. The Politburo came to pass not only on urgent questions but on all questions and merely informed the Central Committee of its decisions. In 1919 the Politburo consisted of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev and Bukharin. The following year at the Ninth Party Congress it was expanded to seven members –the five of 1919 plus Preobrazhensky and Serebryakov. Moreover, after the Tenth Congress in 1921, the relative share of the Central Committee in the function of governing was further limited by statute: that Congress decreed that the Central Committee was to meet no longer semi-monthly but bi-monthly; moreover, the All-Russian Party Conferences, instead of meeting quarterly were to meet semi-annually. This made the Politburo the actual governing body of the Party and ipso facto of the Soviet government and the Communist International.<br /><br />[At the same Eighth Congress the Organizational Bureau, likewise of five members was created. Its function was personnel work –the appointment and removal of Party members to and from jobs –with the approval of the Politburo. However, at the Party Congress, upon Kamenev’s motion, its functions were broadened: the Orgburo was accorded the right “independently without the sanction of the Politburo to decide questions of an organizational character and questions of personnel with reference to workers not above provincial status . . .” Stalin was the only original member of the Politburo who was likewise a member of the Orgburo. Preobrazhensky and Serebryakov, who also became members of both bureaus in 1920, were both too ethical to stoop to the garden variety of machine politics. Thus, after the Ninth Party Congress, i.e., beginning in 1920, Stalin secured practically a free hand in appointing his own candidates to the key posts of provincial Party secretaries without any interference from the other members of the Politburo. Potentially he became the most powerful member of the most powerful governing body in the Party and the country, the Politburo.<br /><br />[When, moreover, the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Instpection was originated, Stalin was appointed its head. In proposing the creation of this new commissariat at the Eighth Party Congress in 1919, Zinoviev described it as “a commissariat of socialist control that will control all the units of our Soviet mechanism, sinking its feelers into all branches of Soviet constructive effort.” Lenin made no bones about his support of Stalin in that ministry of the ministries, when, replying to the objections of oppositionists, he said:<br /><br />. . . Now about Workers’-Peasants’ Inspection. It’s a gigantic undertaking . . . It is necessary to have at the head of it a man of authority, otherwise we shall sink in a morass, drown in petty intrigues. I think that even Preobrazhansky could not name any other candidature thatn that of Comrade Stalin. <br /><br />[The function of this new commissariat was to root out bureaucracy and red tape in all Soviet institutions. However, under Stalin it seen became a hotbed of political intrigue and one of the chief instruments with which he built his political machine. In a secret memorandum dated April 18, 1922, Trotsky wrote about it:<br /><br />It is impossible to shut one’s eyes to the fact that the Rabkrin [Note: A Russian portmanteau word for the Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection/ -C.M.] is filled chiefly with persons who had failed in various other spheres.Hence incidentally the extraordinary development of intrigue in the . . . Rabkrin, which has long ago become a by-word throughout the country. There is no reason to assume that this institution (not its small ruling circles only, but the entire organization) can be restored to health and strengthened, because in the future the efficient workers will continue to be assigned to the actual job itself, not to its inspection. Hence, the fantastic nature of the plan to improve the machinery of the Soviet State through the leverage of the Rabkrin is obvious.<br /><br />[To this criticism Lenin replied on May 6th”<br /><br />Comrade Trotsky is radically wrong about the Radkrin. With our outrageous “departmentalism” even among the best Communists, the low cultural level of our functionaries, the intra-departmental intrigues . . . it is impossible to get along now without the Rabkrin. We can and must work on it systematically and persistently, in order to make of it the machinery for the inspection and improvement of all government activities.<br /><br />[But before long Lenin was to change his opinion on this subject and to grow even more alarmed than Trotsky about the bureaucratization and political corruption of this commissariat especially designed by him to fight bureaucracy.<br /><br />[The creation of eh Secretariat by decision of the Eighth Congress as the third sub-committee of the Central Committee proved far more portentous than anyone at the time had foreseen. It was in that office that Stalin was later to entrench himself. In time the Secretariat was to supersede the Politburo as the seat of power. The Central Committee had a Secretary in Sverdlov but no Secretariat. Between his appointment as President of the Soviet Republic in November, 1917, and the split between the Bukharinists and the Leninists at the Seventh Party Congress in March, 1918, Sverdlov had been more concerned with his governmental duties than his secretaryship of the Party, so that the function of appointing members to jobs was shared indiscriminately by him with other members of the Central Committee and Central Executive Committee and with the various members of the Council of People’s Commissars acting both individually and as a body. As for the technical work, it was actually performed by persons who were not members of the Central Committee. The records of the officer were kept largely in Sverdlov’s personal notebook and in his head. The man had a phenomenal memory. Although with the emergence of the Party crisis at the Seventh Congress, Sverdlov shifted the emphasis of his attention from the Presidency of the Republic to the Secretaryship of the Party, he continued to conduct his Party office in much the same manner as hitherto, so that he was literally the indispensable hub of the political machine. His death, soon after the opening of the Eighth Congress, placed the Party machine in jeopardy. When the Secretariat was created in March, 1919, Krestinsky was placed at the head of it. He, too, was a man with a phenomenal memory, but he was not allowed to rely on it, and he proceeded to deparmentalize his office and to institute the keeping of records. However, the new Secretariat proved ineffectual to the double task of ferreting out oppositionists from important Party and Soviet positions and replacing them with members willing and able to carry through the official policy of centralization. The Ninth Party Congress, held in 1920, therefore carried out a reform of the Secretariat itself. It decreed:<br /><br />. . . 1.) to reinforce the Secretariat by enlarging it to three members of the Central Committee constantly employed therein; 2.) to transfer to the jurisdiction of the Secretariat . . . the current organizational and executive problems, reserving for the Orgburo . . . the general management of the Central Committee’s organizational activities . . .<br /><br />[The object was to increase the authority and prestige of the Secretariat, the better to enable it to cope with oppositionists and forestall the airing of their heretical views at Party congresses, conferences and meetings.<br /><br />[But the three leading Bolsheviks (Krestinsky, Serebryakov and Preobrazhensky) selected for this high office proved too humane and tolerant of Party police work. Under their administration, oppositionist activities increased instead of subsiding. The three members of the Secretariat became themselves suspected of sympathy for the advocates of democracy. At the Tenth Party Congress, held in March, 1921, they were not only removed from the Secretariat but from the Orgburo, the Politburo and even the Central Committee. Their places were taken by second-raters destined to figure as the rising luminaries of neo-Bolshevik leadership: Molotov, Yaroslavsky, Mikhailov. It is not hard to deduce whose influence figured most potently beind the new “election”, when you consider that of the five members of the Orgburo, three were the aforementioned members of the Secretariat disqualilfied in the eyes of Lenin, the fourth was Rykov, until recently in obloquy for his stubborn opposition to Lenin immediately before and after the October Revolution, and the fifth was thast mastser of political wire-pulling and intrigue, Stalin.<br /><br />[Nor were these three the only rising stars of what was later to become Stalinism. Yoroslavlsky was elected alternate member of the Central Committee as early as the Eighth Congress in 1919, Molotiv and Petrovsky at the Ninth in 1920. These three plus Mikhailov and Ordzhonikidze were elected full-fledged members of the Central Committee at the Tenth Congress in 1921. Gussev, Andreyev, Kirov, Kuibyshev, Uglanov and Chubar’ were other local leaders or minor officials at the Center whom Stalin pushed into political limelight. On the surface relatively a second-rater himself among the Bolshevik leaders, he had already begun convincing a growing group of Bolshevik politicians eager or advancement that he was able to reward the faithfull with political plums. At least that attribute of leadership was his].<br /><br />Stalin found the most loyal of his first collaborators in Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky, both of whom were at the time in disvaor with Lenin. Ordzhinikidze, who was decidedly gifted with forcefulness, courage and firmness of character, was essentially a man of little culture, irascible and utterly incapable of self-conrol. As long as he was a revolutionist, his daring and his resolut self-sacrific predominated. But when he became a high official, his uncouthness and crudity overshadowed his other qualities. Lenin, who had ha a warm feeling for him in the past, avoided him more and more. Ordzhonikidze felt it. Their unsatisfactory relationship came to a head when Lenin proposed that Ordzhonikidze be excluded form the Party for a year or two, for misusing his power.<br /><br />Similarly, Lenin’s friendly regard for Dzerzhinsky cooled off. Dzershinsky was distinguished by profound inherent honesty, a passionate character and impulsivness. He reamined uncorrputed by power. But he did not always measure up in ability to the tasks imposed on him. He was invariably re-elected to the Central Committee. But as long as Lenin lived, it was out of the question to include him in the Politburo. In 1921, or it may have been in 1922, Dzerzhinsky, an exceedingly proud man, complained to me, with a note of resignation in his voice, that Lenin did not consider him a political figure. Of course, I tried as best I could to dispel that impression. “He doesnot consider me an organizer, a statesman,” Dzerzhinsky insisted.<br />“What makes you think so?”<br />“He stubbornly refuses to accept my report as People’s Commissar of Ways of Communication.”<br /><br />Lenin was apparently not enthusiastic about Dzerzhinsky’s record in that position. As a matter of fact, Dzerzhinsky was not an organizer in the broad sense of the word. He would call his collaborators together and organize them around his personality, not according to his method. This was obviously no way to bring order into the Commissariat of Ways of Communication. By 1922 Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky felt thoroughly dissatisfied withi their position and in considerable measure hurt. Stalin immediately recruited both of them.<br /><br />[Another Party institution which played a prominent role in establishing the ascendancy of Stalin was the so-called Control Commissions, first proposed at the All-Russian Party Conference of September, 1920. According to the text of the resolution, the Control Commission was established “in addition to” the Central Committee, not as part of the latter, like the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat. It was invested with the right to consider all complaints and to adjudicate them “by agreement with the Central Committee,” arranging “whenever necessary, joint sessions” with the latter or appealing to the Party congress for solution of certain knotty problems. Similar control commissions, independent of the one elected at the All-Russian Party Conference of September, 1920, were elected at provincial Party congresses. Eventually, but not in the beginning, they were to become merely branches subsidiary to the former, which became known as the Central Control Commission.<br /><br />[At the Tenth Congress, in March 1921, the objectives of the control commissions were defined as follows:<br /><br />For the purpose of reinforcing the unity and authority of the Party, Control Commissions are established, within whose competence are the task of extirpating the insinuating evils of bureaucratism, careerism, misuse by Party members of their Party and Soviet positions, the violation of comradely relations within the Party, the spread of unfounded and unverified rumors and insinusations and similar information that reflect upon the honor of the Party and any of its members, damaging the unity and authority of the Party. <br /><br />[This was sufficiently broad to make any member of the Party in disfavor with the ruling group liable to investigation by a control commission. It is no mere coincidence that at the same Party congress the rescript against factions was promulgated. Both were obviously weapons for getting rid of oppositionists. And so was a third resolution –to institute a Party purge.<br /><br />[At the Eleventh Party Congress in the spring of 1922, the original Control Commission was officially designated as the Central Control Commission and empowered to centralize the activities of the local Control Commissions, which in turn definitely took over punitive functions over recalcitrant Party members from the local and provincial Party committees. Moreover, each constituent republic acquired its own Central Control Commission directly responsible to the one in Moscow. A further proposal to reinforce each Control Commission with a department of investigation and a staff of Party sleuths was also approved. Of the seven members of the top Central Control Commission elected at the Tenth Congress, only Soltz, an Old Bolshevik, was re-elected bgy the Eleventh Congress. Three of the new members of that body elected along with him –Shkiryatov, Korostelev and Muranov –were, like Soltz, political allies of Stalin, who was elected General Secretary for the first time at the same Party Congress. Thus, in the spring of 1922 Stalin secured the support of four out of seven members of the collegium of the supreme Central Control Commission.<br /><br />[Meantime a subtle but deep-running change had taken place in the Party itself. The struggle for inner-party democracy had been open on the floor of the Tenth Congress. It had revolved principally around the subject of proper relations between the State, the Party and the Trade Unions. The so-called Workers’ Opposition, led by Shlyapnikov and Kollontai, proposed a program which the ruling circles had denounced as “an anarcho-syndicalist deviation.” Accoring to official historians, this program called for the trade unions as the organizers of production to take over not only the functions of the State but of the Party as well. Trotsky, on the other hand, contended that while it was essential to pursue a policy of equalitarianism in the field of consumption, it was still necessary to some time to come to insist on “shock methods” in the field of production, which according to Trotsky meant “harnessing the trade union machinery to the administrative system of economic management” and according to his opponents, the conversion of trade unions into State institutions. Lenin maintained that the trade unions should remain under Party control and should become more than ever a vast “school of Communism.” In this controversy Stalin supported Lenin’s position. There were also other opinions of the subject expressed on the floor of the Congress, but the matter was reduced principally to a three-cornered controversy between the groups whose chief spokesmen were Lenin, Trotsky and Kollontai. The discussion was moreover not confined to the floor of the Party congress. It was carried out publicly and invaded all sorts of Soviet institutions.<br /><br />[This atmosphere of free discussion had changed radically by the time the Party met for its Eleventh Congress, held between March 27th and April 2nd, 1922. During the intervening year, factions having been officially proscribed at the Tenth Party Congress, the oppositionists had gone “underground” and had organized clandestinely so well that a number of the resolutions sponsored by the ruling group at the Eleventh Congress were voted down overwhelmingly enough to preclude any fraudulent “revisions” of the ballot.<br /><br />[Not only did the oppositionists show their mettle secretly, but there were turbulent expressions of approval when the oppositionist Ryazanov upbraided the ruling group openly in one of his speeches and when the delegates stubbornly refused to expel from the Party the leaders of the Workers’ Opposition, Shlyapnikov, Medvedev and Kollontai, in open defiance of Lenin’s demand for their expulsion. This open opposition was, moreover, symptomatic of a far more widespread secret opposition. The ruling group refarded the secret dissenters as the more dangerous of the two because their machinations were pregnant with painful surprises. It was clear that the system of divided responsibility between three equal members of the Secretariat, each disclaiming full responsibility, was inadequate to cope with the Secretariat’s function of appointing “loyal” comrades to key positions and of selecting “loyal” delegates to Party congresses. Lenin and his entourage therefore decided to reinforce the Secretariat in two ways –by establishing the office of General Secretary, with the other two members acting as his assistants rather than equal colleagues, and by selecting for the position of General Secretary the man most capable of strong-arm work, Joseph Stalin. Two of his most loyal henchmen, Molotov and Kuibyshev, were elected as his assistants.<br /><br />[Stalin was elected General Secretary on the second of April, 1922. Two months later Lenin fell seriously ill. By that time, through a lucky combination of circumstances as much as his own conniving, Stalin was already in a potentially strategic position. Had Lenin recovered rapidly, the chances are that Stalin would have slunk back into obscurity –the chances, not absolute certainty. But Lenin’s illness went from bad to worse.]<br /><br />Lenin’s relations with Stalin are officially characterized as a close friendship. As a matter of fact, these two political figures were widely separated not only by the ten year’s difference in their ages, but by the very size of their respective personalities. There could be no such thing as friendship between the two. No doubt, Lenin came to appreciate Stalin’s ability as a practical organizer during the parlous times of the reaction of 1907-1913. But during the years of the Soviet regime Stalin’s coarseness repelled him again and again, and increasingly militated against smooth collaboration between them. Owing largely to that, Stalin continued his clandestine opposition to Lenin. Envious and ambitious, Stalin could not help growing restive as he sensed at every step Lenin’s crushing intellectual and moral superiority. [In constantly varying degree, this unstable] relationship persisted [satisfactorily enough for all practical purposes] until Lenin fell so seriously ill [that he retired from active participation in affairs of State], when it became transformed into an outright struggle that culminated in the final break.<br /><br />[As early as the spring of 1920] at the celebration in honor of Lenin’s fiftieth birthday Stalin went to the length of delivering a speech about Lenin’s errors. It is hard to say what impelled him to do it. In any event, the speech seemed so incongrous to all that on the following day, the 24th of April, [in their report of the celebration] both Pravda and Izvestiya stated merely that “Comrade Stalin spoke of several episodes of their work together before the revolution,” and that was all.<br />But at about the same time Stalin also put himself on record in print as to what he had learned and wanted to learn from Lenin, in his general article written for the same occasion under the title, “Lenin as Organizer and Leader of the Russian Communist Party.” It would be hardly worth the effort to examine this piece because of its theoretical and literary value. Suffice it to say that the article opens with the assertion:<br /><br />While in the West –in France, in Germany –the labor party grew out of the trade-unions under conditions permitting the existenc of unions and parties . . . in Russia on the contrary the formation of a proletarian party took place under the cruelest absolutism . . .<br /><br />His assertion is, of course, true of Great Britain, which he fails to mention as an example, but it is not true of France and monstrously untrue of Germany, where the party had built the trade-unions practically from scratch. To this day, as in 1920, the history of the European labor movement is a closed book to Stalin, and hence it is still useless to expect theoretical guidance from him in that sphere.<br /><br />The article is interesting because not only in the title but in his whole conception of him, Stalin acclaims Lenin primarily as an organizer, and only secondarily as a political leader. “The greates credit to Comrade Leninm,” which Stalin puts first, was “his furious assault upon the organizational formlessness of the Mensheviks.” Lenin is accorded credit for his organizational plan because he “generalized like a master the organizational experience of the best practical workers.” Furthermore:<br /><br />Only in consequence if such organizational policy could the Party have achieved that internal unity and amazing solidarity which enabled it to emerge effortlessly from the July Crisis and Kerensky, bear on its shoulders the October Revolution, live through the crisis of the Brest period without cracking, and organized the victory over the Entente . . .<br /><br />Only after that did Stalin add: “But the organizational value of the Russian Communist Party represents only one side of the matter,” and turn to the political content of Party work, its program and tactics. It is no exaggeration to say that no other Marxist, certainly no other Russian Marxist, would have so constructed an appraisal of Lenin. Surely, organizational questions are not the basis of policy but rather the inferences that follow from the crystallization of the theory, program and practice. Yet it is no accident that Stalin looked upon the organizational lever as basic; whatever deals with programs and policies was for him always essentially an ornament of the organizational foundation.<br /><br />In the same article Stalin formulated for the last time, more or less correctly, the Bolshevik ivew, rather new at the time, of the role of the proletarian paty under the conditions of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of our epoch. Ridiculing the Mensheviks, Stalin wrote that to those who had poorly digested the history of the old revolutions it seemed that<br /><br />. . . the proletariat cannot have the hegemony of the Russian Revolution; the leadership must be offered to the Russian bourgeoisie, the very same bourgeoisie that was opposed to the revolution. The peasantry must likewise be placed under the patronage of the bourgeoisie, while the proletariat should be relegated to the position of an extreme left opposition. These disgusting echoes of bad liberalism were offered by the Mensheviks as the latest workd of genuine Marxism . . .<br /><br />It is remarkable that a mere three years later Stalin applied this very conception of the Mensheviks, word for work, letter for letter, to the Chinese bourgeois-democratic revolution, and subsequently, with incomparably greater cynicism, to the Spanish Revolution of 1931-1939. Such a monstrous reversal would have been utterly imposible lif at the time Stalin had really assimilated and thoroughly understood the Leninist conception of revolution. But what Stalin had assimilated was merely the Leninist conception of the centralized Party machine. The moment he got hold of that, he lost sight of its roots in theoretical considerations, its programmatic base became essentialy unimportant, and it consonance with his own past, his own socila origin, training and education, he was naturally inclined toward a petty-bourgeois conception, toward opportunism, toward compromise. In 1917 he had failed to realize fusion with the Mensheviks only because Lenin would not let him; in the Chinese revolution he fully achieved tha Menshevik conception under the banner of Bolshevism. Far more expertly, with a prefected efficiency truly deadly, he carried out the same policy in the Spanish Revolution. <br /><br />Thus, in Stalin’s article on Lenin, which has been republished since them innumerable times in innumerable quantities and in innumerable languages, was a rather simple-minded characterization of its subject, it does give us the key to the political nature of its author. It even contains lines which in a certain sense are auto-biographic:<br /><br />Not infrequently our own comrades (not only the Mensheviks) accused Comrade Lenin of being unduly inclined towards polemics and toward splits in his irrreconcilable struggle against the compromisers . . . There is no doubt that both took place in their time . . .<br /><br />In 1920 Stalin still considered Lenin unduly inclined to polemics and splits, as he had deemed him in 1913. Furthermore, he justified this tendency in Lenin without removing the stigma of the accusations that Lenin was given to exaggerations and to extremism.<br /><br />[Lenin guarded every useful official as the apple of his eye. He was tender with all of them. We find him chatting “for 10-15 minutes” at the bedside of Sverdlov dying from Spanish influenza, notwithstanding the danger of infection; we find him chiding Tsuryupa, “Dear A.D.! You are becoming utterly insufferable in yoiur treatment of government property. Your orders: three weeks’ cure! And you must obey the medical authoriteis who will send you to the sanatorium. So help me, it’s unproductive to be careless with poor health. You must get well!” Similarly, when Stalin was laid up with an operation at the Soldatenkovsky Hospital in Moscow in December of 1920, Lenin, according to the testimony of Stalin’s attending physician, Dr. Rosanov],<br /><br />* Called me by telephone every day, twice a day, morning and evening, and not merely inquired about his health but insisted upon the most thoroughgoing and extensive report. Comrade Stalin’s operation was a very difficult one. A wide incision had to be made around the appendix at that time of the appendectomy, and we found it hard to guarantee results. It was obvious that Vladimir Ilyich was worried. “If anything should happen,” he said to me, “telephone at once –and time, night or day.” When on the fourth of fifth day after the operation it became clear that there was no longer any danger and I told him about it, he exclaimed straight from his heart, “Thank you ever so much! . . .But I am going to pester you with my daily phone calls anyway.”<br />Once while calling at Comrade Stalin’s apartment, I happened to run into Vladimir Ilyich there. He greeted me cordially, took me aside and again plied me with innumerable questions about Comrade Stalin’s illness and cure. I said that it was necessasry to send him away for a rest, so that he might properly recuperate from the difficult operation. He chimed in: “That’s just what I told him! But he won’t listen to me! However, I’ll take care of that. But not in one of the sanitoriums. I am told they are good now, but I haven’t seen anything good about them yet.” I suggested: “Why doesn’t he go straight into his native hills?” To which Vladimir Ilyich resplied: “You’re right! There he’ll be further away from everything and no one will bother him. We’ll have to see to that.” <br /><br />[But Stalin deferred his visit to his native Georgia until the following July. In the midst of that re-entry of Georgia, where he was confronted with militant opposition, Stalin fell ill again. On July 25, 1921, Lenin telegraphed Ordzhonikidze, Stalin’s lieutenant and chief executor of the policy and program of “pacification” in Georgia:<br /><br />Received your 2064. Send name and address of doctor attending Stalin, also how many days Stalin kept from work. Awaiting your reply to coded telegram. Will you attend plenum of August 7? #835 Lenin<br /><br />[And on December 28, 1921, Lenin jotted down the following note to one of his secretaries: <br />Remind me tomorrow, I must see Stalin and before that (exec. 29/xii 21) connect me by telephone with OBUKH (Dr.) about Stalin.<br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />Part 3: Stalin crosses Lenin in Georgia<br /><br />[Less than three months later Lenin himself was too ill to attend a Central Committee plenum, but rallied for the Eleventh Party Congress. Two months later, Lenin’s speech was impaired as well as the functioning of his right arm and leg, in consequence of his first acute attack of arteriosclerosis on May 26, 1922, news of which was not made public until June 4th. After recurrent inmprovements and relapses throughout the summer, Lenin returned to his duties in October, and the following month even addressed the Fourth Congress of the Communist International on the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. He was, however, too ill to attend the Tenth Soviet Congress of the Russian Republic and the First Soviet Congress of the newly-constituted Soviet Union at the end of December, for he suffered his second stroke, which paralyized his entire right side, on December 16. His active participation in the affairs of the U.S.S.R. was over. Like Moses on Mt. Nebo, he viewd the promised land of the world proletariat from afar, and during intervals of improvement between recurrent attacks dictated his last commandments –his Testament, which he completed on January 4th, 1923; his essays On Cooperation; Our Revolution; How the Workers’-Peasants’ Inspection Should be Reorganised; Better les, But Better; and Pages From a Diary. These months encompassed the last of Lenin’s creative effort. It culminated on the night of March 5th-6th, when he dictated his last letter to Stalin, breaking off all comradely relations with him. On March 9th he suffered his third and most devastating stroke, which flung him into an agony of frightful suffereing, aggravated by insomnia and nervous excitement. His power of speech was gone, one half of his body in the vice of complete paralysis. But his will to live and function was indomitable.<br /><br />[Toward the end of the following summer his health improved slightly, the continual nightmare of insomnia came to an end, he began to walk, learning all over again, like a child, and in the autumn he began to learn to speak again. In October, able already to walk by himself with the aid of a cane, he had himself driven to Moscow, where he revisited the Kremlin office, and on the return trip to Gorki stopped at the agricultural exibition then under way. Daily he chose books and articles he wanted read to him. His speech was gradually returning. The day of his recovery seemed not too far off. And then, awaking out of sorts on January 20th, 1924, he complained of a headache, loss of appetite and of feeling generally unwell. The following day he was again out of sorts and ate a little breakfast and dinner under the persuasion of his entourage. After dinner he lay down to sleep. At six in the afternoon a severe attack set in, his breathing became increasingly more labored, his face blanched, his temperature mounted by leaps and bounds, he lay unsconscious, dead within fifty minutes. Hemorrhage of the brain paralyzed his respiratory organs and life burned out of him. Fifteen years and seven months later to the hour, the life of his partner in what the world know as the Lenin-Trotsky Government was to be also snuffed out by hemorrhage of the brain, induced less subtly this time by the blow of an assassin’s pickaxe. Lenin was three months short of fifty-four when he died; Trotsky seven years older. Stalin, whom his most devoted apologists among American journalists, after seventeen years of patient service, was to describe as, “an animal of prey which first paws its victim to feel out its strength, then strikes to cripple and steps back to watch the effect and finally kills,” had survived both of them/ He had planted the means of that survival during Lenin’s illness.<br /><br />[When Lenin suffered his fist stroke, the public the world over, including Soviet Russia, was led to believe that his illness was not serious and he would soon return to his duties. He was a man of bulldog tenacity in body and spirit, and only in his early ‘fifties. At first the members of the Politburo sincerely shared that conviction. They merely did not bother to disabuse the public –not even the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union or the rank-and-file comrades in the Party –when later it became clear to them that the contrary was true. With Lenin temporarily ill, it was taken for granted that the Politburo would carry on. Although to the public at large Trotsky seemed the most likely successor to Lenin, and although the younger Party members shared that view, the political wheelhorses of the Party machine did not see a fitting successor to Ilyich either in Trotsky, who not so many years ago had been a factional opponent, or in any other member of the Politburo, all of whom seemed mere armor-bearers by comparison. The only conceivable successor to Lenin, temporarily ill or definitely removed, was a Directory of the top Party leaders, members and alternates of the Politburo and the Central Committee. This was assumed to have happened as soon as Lenin fell ill. <br /><br />[But actually a variant of this took place. The succession passed to a triumvirate, of which Zinoviev was the leader, Kamenev his alternate and Stalin the junior partner. Zinoviev thus became, for better or for worse, Lenin’s successor by virture of his plurality inside the Politburo, and he secured that plurality not because his fellow-members deemed him the ablest and most deserving, but on the contrary, because they considered him the least capable of leadership and politically the most vulnerable. Of the seven members of the Politburo, Lenin was ill; Trotsky was alone in his opinion that he was the natural successor to Lenin, a widespread opinion outside the Party machine that med him the most feared and hated fellow-member inside the Politburo and among the Party wheelhorses; Zinoviev had the solid support of Kamenev and Bukharin, who felt freest in expression and action and in the opportunity to extend their sphere of influence under his nominal leadership, the grudging support of Stalin, who was not yet ready to assert himself, and the passive support of Tomsky. It was tacitly understood by all but Zinoviev, not only in the Politburo, but on the Central Committee as well, where he likewise enjoyed a plurality, that he was merely a dummy in place of a leader, and that only for as long as he behaved himself in accordance with the secret expectation of each of the others, which was to let him enjoy the glory until the real leader felt ready to reach out for it.<br /><br />[Whom did Lenin favor as his successor? Until his second stroke, which telled him on December 16, 1922, he had not given the matter serious consideration, fully expecting to recover and resume the leadership. His Testament, written several days later, was patently an effort to offer his own frank opinion of the various candidates rather than to dictate his decision. Precisely because of tha power at his command due to his overwhelming prestige,he was reluctant to impose his will. He state his preferences and his objections, he made recommendations, particularly about the removal of Stalin from the post of General-Secretary because of “rudeness” and “disloyalty,” but he did not venture beyond advice on how his successors could work best together and beyond the warning that a serious contest between Trotsky and Stalin would be calamitous for the Party and for the Bolshevik cause. However, within two months he found it necessary to take the very definite and irrevocable step of formally severing comradely relations –which meant breaking off all political as well as personal ties –with only one of his lieutenants, Stalin. This “excommunication” took place during preparations for the Twelth Party Congress, which Lenin, prostrated by his third serious stroke, was unable to attend. It was the first congress without Lenin and the first one packed with delegates hand-picked by the General-Secretary. It marked the beginning of the end of the Leninist regime and the dawn of Stalinism as a new political orientation.<br /><br />[The break between Lenin and Stalin came to a head after patient efforts by Lenin to avert it. When] at the Eleventh Congress, toward the end of March, 1922, Zinoviev and his closest allies were backing Stalin for the post of General-Secretary, in the hope of utilizing the latter’s hostility toward me for their own ends, Lenin demurred to the candidacy [in an off-the-record discussion among his intimates] with the observation,”That cook will concoct nothing but peppery dishes.” Lenin was apprehensive about the recurrence of his illness and was anxious to utilize the period until his next attack, which might prove fatal, to establish a harmonious collective leadership by common agreement and particularly his own agreement with Stalin. [Hence the earnest effort he made to co-ordinate his own work with that of the Secretariat. He was most meticulous about upholdinig Stalin’s authority. As late as October 21, 1922, Lenin rebuffed the highly indignant protest fot he Georgian opposition against Stalin and Ordzhonikidze with a scathing telegram. Similarly, he contined to tuphold h9im or to tonoe down criticism of him to mild reproof on other issues. Matters came to a head only when Lenin became convinced that Stalin was inncorrigible. The Georgian question was only one of the issues which led to the final break.]<br /><br />The only piece of serious Marxist writing Stalin had ever contributed to the arsenal of Bolshevik theory had been on the national question. That was back in 1913. It contained presumably the summa summarum of his own observations in the Caucasus, the results of conclusions from practical revolutionary work, and a number of broad historical generalizations, whichm, as we had earlier indicated, he had cribbed from Lenin. Stalin had made them his own in a literary sense, i.e., by tying them up with his own conclusions, but without completely completely digesting them as certainly without assimilating them. This was fully exposed during the Soviet period, when the problems resolved in black and white reappeared as administrative tasks of paramount importance, and as such determined all the other aspects of policy. It was then that the the vaunted agreement of Stalin with Lenin in all things and especially their slidarity of principles on the national question, the guarantee of which was Stalin’s essay of 1913, proved in large measure to be fictitious.<br /><br />At the Tenth Congress in March, 1921, Stalin had again read his inevitable report on the national question. As often happens with him because of his empiricism, he proceeded to draw his generalizations not from the living material, not from experience of the Soviet Government, but from unrelated and unco-ordinated abstractions. In 1921, as in 1917, he still repeated the general argument that the bourgeois contries could not solve their national questions while the land of t4he Soviets had every possibility of doing so. The report aroused dissatisfaction, even perplexity. In the course of the ensuing debate the delegates most interested in the question, chiefly representatives of the national minority parties, expressed their dissatisfaction with it. Even Mikoyan, alread one of Stalin’s close political allies and subsequently one of hismot devoted armor-bearers, complained that the Party was in need of instructions as to “what changes should be made in the system, what type of Soviet system should be established in the borderlands . . . Comrade Stalin failed to point that out.” <br /><br />Principles never exerted any influence over Stalin –and on the national question perphaps less than on any other. The immediate administrative task allways loomed before him as greater than all the laws of history. In 1905 he came to notice the swelling mass movement only with the permission of his Party Committee. In the years of reaction he defended the underground movement because his nature craved a centralized political machine. After the February Revolution, when that machine was smashed along with illegality, Stalin lost sight of the difference between Menshevism and Bolshevism and was getting ready to unite with Tseretelli’s party. Finally, after the conquest of power in October, 1917, all tasks, all problems, all perspectives were subordinated to the needs of that apparatus of apparatuses, the State. As Commissar of Nationalities, Stalin no longer approached the national question from the point of view of the laws of history, to which he had paid his full tribute in 1913, but from the point of view of the convenience of the adminisrative office. Thus he necessarily found himself at loggerheads with the needs of the mopst backward and most oppressed nationalities and secured undue advantages for Great-Russian bureaucratic imperialism.<br /><br />The Georgian people, almost entirely peasant or petty bourgeois in composition, resisted vigorously the sovietization of their country. But the great difficulties thus engendered were considerably aggravated by the manner and method of militaristic arbitrariness wherewith Georgia was sugjected to sovietization. Under these conditions a double cautiousness toward the Georgian masses was required of the ruling party. It was on precisely this that the sharp disagreement developed between Lenkin, who insisted on an especially resilient, circumspect, patient policy toward Georgia and in Transcaucasia generally, and Stalin, who felt that, since the machinery of the State was in our hands, our position was secure. Stalin’s agent in the Caucasus was Ordzhonikidze, the hot-headed, impatient conqueror of Georgia, who regarded every manifestaion of resistance as a personal affront. [Stalin seemed to have forgotten that not so long ago] we had recognized the independence of Georgia and had concluded a treaty with her. [That was on May 7th, 1920. But on February 11th, 1921,] detachments of the Red Army had invaded Georgia upon Stalin’s orders and had confronted us with a fait accompli. Stalin’s boyhood friend, Iremashvili writes”<br /><br />Stalin was opposed to the treaty. He did not want to let his native land remain outside the Russian State and live under the free rule of the Mensheviks he detested. His ambition pushed him toward rulership over Georgia, where the peaceable, sensible population resisted his destructive propaganda withi icy stubbornness . . . Revenge against the Menshevik leaders, who had persistently refused to countenance his utopian plans and expelled him from their ranks, would not let him rest. Against Lenin’s will, upon his own egotistical initiative, Stalin achieved the Bolshevization or Stalinization of his native land . . . Stalin organized the expedition to Georgia from Moscow and led it from there. In the middle of July, 1921, he himself entered Tiflis as a conqueror.<br /><br />In 1921 Stalin visited Georgia in quite a different capacity from the one in which they had been accustomed to see him in his native land when he was still Soso and Later Koba. Now he was the representative of the government, of the omnipotent Politburo, of the Central Committee.Yet no one in Georgia saw in him a leader, especially in the upper tiers of the Party, where he was accorded recognition not as Stalin but as a member of the highest leadership of the Party, i.e., not on the basis of his personality, but on the basis of his office. His former comrades inillegal work regarded themselves at least as competent in the affairs of Georgia as he, freely disagreed with him, and wshen they were compelled to submit, did it reluctantly, offering sharp criticism and threatening to demand a review of the entire question in the Politburo of the Central Committee. Stalin was not yet a leader even in his own [native haunts. That touched him to the quick. He would never forgive such an affront to his authority] as a representative of the Central Committee of the Party and of the Soviet Government, as People’s Commissar of Nationalities. He considerred himself with full justification more competent than all other members of the Party Central Committee on all matters pertaining to Georgia. If in Moscow he rested his authority on the fact that he was a Georgian familiar with local conditions, in Georgia, where he appeared as the representative of Moscow independent of local national sympathies and preconceptions, he tried to behave as if he were not a Georgian but a Bolshevik delegated by Moscow, the Commissar of Nationalities, and as if to him the Georgians were just one of many nationalities. He assumed a know-nothng attitude about the national conditions of Georgia –an obvious bit of overcompenstaion for the strong national feelings of his youth. [He behaved like a Great-Russian Russifier, riding roughshod over the rights of his own people as a nation]. That was what Lenin meant by Russifying foreigners. This referred as mucn to Stalin as to Dzerzhinsky, [a Pole turned Russifier. According to Iremashvili, who obviously overstates the case]: <br /><br />* The Georgian Bolsheviks, who in the bgeginning were included in the Russian Stalinist invasion, pursued as their aim the independence of the Georgian Soviet Republic, which should have had nothing in common with Russia except the Bolshevik point of view and political friendship. They were stilll Georgians to whom the independence of their country was more important than anything else . . . But then came the declaration of war by Stalin, who found loyal assistance among the Russian Red Guardsmen and the Cheka he sent there.<br /><br />Iremashvili tells us that Stalin met with general hostility in Tiflis. At a meeting in a theater convoked by Tiflis Socialists Stalin became the object of a hostile demonstration. Presumably, the old Menshevik Iremashvili himself seized control of the meeting and flung accusations in Stalin’s face. Other orators denounced Stalin similarly, we are told. Unfortunately, no stenographic record of these proceedings has been preserved and no one is obliged to accept this part of Iremashvili’s recollections too literally:<br /><br />For hours Stalin was forced to listen in silence to his opponents and to admit the accusations. Never before and never after did Stalin have to endure such open courageous indignation.<br /><br />[Following developments can be told briefly.] Stalin again betrayed Lenin’s confidence. In order to build solid political support for himself in Georgia he instigated there behyind the back of Lenin and the entire Central Committee, with the aid of Ordzhonikidze and not without the support of Dzerzhinsky, a vertiable “revolution” against the finest members of the Party, while perfidiously covering himself with the authority of the Central Committee. Taking advantage of the fact that meetings with the Georgian comrades were not accessible to Lenin, Stalin attempted to surround him with false information. Lenin smelled a rat and instructed his private secretariat to collect complete data on the Georgian question; after studying it, he decided to come out into the open. It is hared to say what shocked Lenin most: Stalin’s personal disloyalty or his chronic inability to grasp the gist of Bolshevik policy on the national question; most likely a combination of both.<br /><br />[Gropingfor the truth, the bedridden Lenin undertook to dictate a programmatic letter that would outline his fundamental position on the national question, so that there would be no misunderstanding among his comrades as to where he stood on the issues currently under dispute. On December 30th he dictated the following note:<br /><br />I think that here the hastiness and adminnistrative impulsiveness of Stalin played a fatal role, and also his spitefulness against the notorious “social nationalism.” As a rule, spitefulness plays the worst possible role in politics. <br /><br />[And the following day he dictated in the programmatic letter itself]:<br /><br />* It is of course necessary to hold Stalin and Dzerzhinsky responsible for all this out-and-out Great-Russian nationalistic campaign. <br /><br />[Lenin was on the right track. If he realized the full seriousness of the situation, his understatement of it was monstrous, for what had actually taken place behind his back, as Trotsky characterized it eight years later, was that] Stalin’s faction routed Lenin’s faction in the Caucasus. This was the first victory of the reactionaries in the Party. It opened the second chapter of the Revolution [ -the Stalinist counter-revolution.<br /><br />[Lenin was finally constrained to write to the Georgian oppositionists on March 6, 1923]:<br /><br />* To Comrades Mdivani, Makharadze and others: (Copes to Comrades Trotsky and Kamenev).<br /> Esteemed Comrades, <br /> I am with you in this matter with all my heart. I am outraged by the arrogance of Ordzhonikidze and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. On your behalf I am now preparing notes and a speech.<br />With esteem, Lenin<br /><br />The day before he had dictated the following note to me:<br /> * Strictly Confidential. Personal<br /> Esteemed Comrade Trotsky,<br /> I earnestly ask you to undertake the defense of the Georgian matter in the Party Central Committee. It is now being “persecuted” by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, so that I cannot rely on their impartiality. Indeed, quite the contrary! Should you agree to undertake its defense, I would rest easy. If for some reason you do not agree, please return all the papers. I shall consider that a sign of your disagreement.<br />With the very best comradely greetings, Lenin<br /><br />[He also sent word by two of his personal secretaries that he wanted Trotsky to see it through at the forthcoming Twelfth Congress as well. Lenin’s request was sent by telephone, and the papers –the letter on the national question and the notes –were brought to Trotsky by Misses Glyasser and Fotieva along with a note from Misws Volodicheva, who had taken the dictation, informing him that Kamenev, who substituted for Lenin as Chairman of the Politburo as well as in the Soviet cabinet, was “going to Georgia on Wednesday, and Vladimir Ilyich asked me to find out whether you have any message of your own for him.” Lenin’s secretaries has called on Trotsky on Wednesday, March 7, 1923].<br /><br />“Having read our correspondence with you,” Glyasser told me, “Vladimir Ilyich brightened up. That makes things different. He instructed me to transmit to you the manuscript material which was supposed to have made up his bombshell for the Twelfth Congress.” Kamenev had informed me that Lenin had just written a letter breaking off all comradely relations with Stalin, so I suggested that since Kamenev was leaving that day for Georgia to attend a Party congress, it might be advisable to show him the letter on the national question so that he might do whatever was necessary. Fotieva replied: “I don’t know. Vladimir Ilyich did not instruct me to transmit the letter to Comrade Kamenev, but I can ask him.” A few minutes later she returned with the following message: “Absolutely not. Vladimir Ilyich says that Kamenev would show the letter to Stalin, who would make a rotten compromise, in order later to double-cross us.” <br /><br />“In other words, the matter has gone so far that Ilyich does not deem it possible to conclude a compromise with Stalin even along correct lines?” I inquired.<br />“Yes,” she confirmed, “Ilyich does not trust Stalin. He wants to come out openly against him before the whole Party. He is preparing a bombshell.” <br /><br />Lenin’s intention now became utterly clear. Using Stalin’s policy as an example, he wanted to expose before the Party (and to do so ruthlessly) the danger of the bureaucratic transformation of the dictatorship. But almost immediately after that, possibly within half an hour, Fotieva returned with another message from Vladimir Ilyich, who, she said, had decided to act immediately and had written the [previously-quoted] note to Mdivani and Makharadze, with instructions to transmit copies to Kamenev as well as to me.<br /><br />“How do you explain that change?” I asked Fotieva.<br />“Evidently,” she replied, “Vladimir Ilyich is feeling worse and is in a hurry to do everything he can.” <br />[Two days later Lenin had his third stroke.<br /><br />[On the eve of the Congress, at the April 16th session of the Central Committee, Stalin apparently tried to protect himself with an undercover attack on Trotsky in connection with Lenin’s notes and letter on the national question and particularly the Georgian issue. The following two documents by Trotsky shed some light on the situation]:<br /><br /> * 1. Secret #200T<br /> To the Members of the Central Committee<br /> Re: Comrade Stalin’s Declaration of April 16th<br />1) Comrade Lenin’s article was sent to me secretly and personally by Comrade Lenin through Comrade Fotieva and, notwithstanding my expressed intention to acquaint the members of the Politburo with the article, Comrade Lenin categorically expressed himself against this through Comrade Fotieva.<br />2) Since two days after I received that article Comrade Lenin’s condition became worse, further communication with him on this question naturally terminated.<br />3) After some time Comrade Glyasser asked me for the article and I returned it.<br />4) I made a copy of it for my own use (for formulating corrections to Comrade Stalin’s thesis, for writing an article, and the like).<br />5) I know nothing abgout the instructions Comrade Lenin gave with regard to his article and other documents on the Georgian matter (“I am preparing speeches and articles”); I suppose that the proper instructions are in the possession of Nadezhda Konstantinova [Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife]. Maria Ilyinishna (Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister], or Comrade Lenin’s secretaries. I did not deem it proper to question anyone about it for reasons that do not require clarification.<br />6) Only from Comrade Fotieva’s communciation to me yesterday by telephone and from her note to Comrade Kamenev did I learn that Comrade Lenin had made no arrangements about the article. Since Comrade Lenin had not formally expressed his wishes on this matter, it had to be decided on the principle of political feasibility. It stand to reason that I could not personally assume responsibility for such a decision and therefore I referred the matter to the Central Committee. I did it without wasting a minute after I learned that Comrade Lenin had not given any direct and formal instructions as to the future fate of his article, and original of which is kept by his secretaries.<br />7) If anyone thinks that I acted improperly in this matter I for my part propose that this matter by investigated by the conflict commission of the congress or by some special commission. I see no other way.<br />17/IV/23<br /><br /> * 2. Personal, written without a copy<br /> Comrade Stalin:<br /> Yesterday in personal conversation with me you said it was perfectly clear to you that in the matter of Comrade Lenin’s article I did not act improperly and that you will formulate a written declaration in that sense.<br />Until this morning (11 o’clock) I have not received such a declaration. It is possible that you were delayed by your report of yesterday.<br />In any event, your first declaration remains until the present moment unrepudiated by you and gives certain comrades a justification for spreading a corresponding version among certain of the delegates.<br />Since I cannot permet even the shadow of vagueness in this matter –for reasons which, of course, you have no difficulty in understanding –I deem it necessary to expedite its termination. If in reply to this note I do not receive from you a communication to the effect that in the course of today you will send to all members of the Central Committee a declaration that would exclude the possibility of any sort of equivocalness in this matter, then I shall conclude that you have changed your intention of yesterday and will appeal to the conflict commission, requesting an investigation from beginning to end.<br />You can understand and appreciate better than anyone else that if I have not done this so far, it was not because it could have hurt my interests in any way.<br />April 18, 1923. Number 201.<br /><br />Addressing the Congress on the 23rd of April, Stalin said in his concluding remarks on the national question: <br /><br />Here very many referred to the notes and articles of Vladimir Ilyich. I shouldn’t like to quote my master, Comrade Lenin, since he is not here, for IO fear that I may be referring to him incorrectly and not to the point . . .<br /><br />These words undoubtedly are a model of the most extraordinary Jesuitism on record. Stalin well knew how indignantly Lenin was opposed to his national policy, how his “master” was pregvented from blowing his “disciple” sky-high on this very issue only because of grave illness.Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1123836501972381522005-08-12T01:46:00.000-07:002005-08-12T01:48:22.016-07:00Trotsky's 'Stalin' - Chapt 10 Civil War ContinuedChapter 10 <br />The Civil War (Continued)<br /><br />In the spring of 1919 the Northwestern Volunteer Army under the command of General Yudenich unexpectedly assumed the offensive and threatened Petrograd. Presently the English Fleet steamed into the Bay of Finland. Colonel Bulak-Balakhovich, at the head of his unit, led the drive against Pskov, and at the same time the Estonian units came to life at the front. On the 14th of May the corpse of General Rodzyanko broke through the front of the Seventh Army, which had been considerably weakened by drafts against it for the more active fronts, occupied Yamburg and Pskov, and began a rapid simultaneous advance against Catchina, Petrograd and Luga. The Commander of the Seventh Army, stationed on the outskirts of Petrograd, entered into communication with Yudenich and organized a conspiracy among the garrisons surrounding the capital of the October Revolution –Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Krasnaya Gor’ka, Syeraya Loshad’, Krasnoye Syelo. The conspirators, according to their complot with Yudenich, made ready to ocupy the capital simultaneously with the troops of his army. They hoped for the support of the disgruntled sailors and especially the active aid of the fleet. But the sailors of the Two Soviet dreadnaughts did not support the insurrection, which the English fleet [restricted itself for the time being to watchful waiting]. THe whole enterprise proved abortive. By the 12th of June, 1919, only Krasnaya Gor’ka [and Syeraya Loshad’ remained] in the hands of the conspirators, and for four days no attempt was made to capture them. Finally, after an exchange of shots with Kronstadt, Krasnaya Gor’ka was occupied on the 16th of June by a detachment of red sailors. [Syeraya Loshad’ feel just as easily.<br /><br />[Zinoviev, the head of the Party and the government in the city and region of Petrograd, had become panicky in the face of the advancing enemy and the Politburo had sent Stalin to his rescue.]<br /><br />With special powers from the Central Committee of the Party and the Soviet Government, Stalin arrived in Petrograd in the latter party of May 1919. [His ruthlessness and resolution made themselves felt immediately. A couple of weeks after his arrival he telegraphed Lenin]:<br /><br />* After Krasnaya Gor’ka, Syeraya Loshad’ was liewise liquidated. The guns there are in complete order. Lighting mopping up and reinforcement of the forts and fortresses now in full swing. The naval specialists assure me that the capture of Krasnaya Gor’ka from the sea turns upside down all naval science. All I can do about it is to weep over so-called science. The rapid capture of Gor’ka is explained by the rudest intervention by me and by other civilians in operational matters, which reached the point of cancelling orders on land and sea and imposing out own orders. I deem it my duty to declare that in the future I shall continue to proceed similarly nowithstanding all my respect for science.<br /><br />Lenin was annoyed by this tone of provocative braggadocio. From Petrograd it was possible at any moment to communicate with the Kremlin and its staff, to replace incompetent or unreliable commanders, to strengthen the staff, i.e., to do all that everyone of the responsible military workers of the Party did time and time again at one front after another without violating the elementary rules of good taste, good manners, or the maintenance of correct relations, and without undermining the authority of the Army command and of the General Staff. But Stalin could not act in that way. He could feel his superiority over others only by insulting them. He could not derive any satisfaction from his work without giving violent vent to his contempt for all who were subordinate to him. Having no other resources at his disposal, he converted coarseness into a resource and flaunted his special tenius for contumely against institutions and persons that enjoyed the respect of others. His telegram ended with the words:<br /><br />Quickly send two million rounds of ammunition at my disposal for six divisions.<br /><br />In this postscript, so typical of Stalin, is a whole system. The Army had of course its own Chief of supplies. There was always a lack of bullets, and they were distributed upon the direct instructions of the Commander-in-Chief, depending on available reserves and the relative importance of fronts and armies. But Stalin skipped over all the intervening steps and violated every semblance of order. Ignoring the Chief of Supplies, he demanded bullets through Lenin, not even to be placed at the disposal of the Army command, but at his personal disposal, so that he might present them as a gift to a particular division commander whom he wanted to impress with his own importance.<br /><br />[Ten years later this brief trip of Stalin’s to Petrograd in the late spring of 1919 was used by Voroshilov as the germinating element for another falsification of history. By now this seed has grown into a full-blown myth called, “Stalin, the Saviour of Petrograd.” It is a cunning myth, implanted, strangely enough, in a deliberate shifting of the seasons. The fact is that] Yedenich tried to capture [Petrograd] twice in the course of 1919 –in May and again in October.<br /><br />The first raid by Yudenich with negligible forces was a mere sally, and passed practically unnoticed by the Party, which was absorbed by interest in the Eastern and Southern fronts. The Petrograd situation was brought under control in very short order, and again the entire attention of the Party and the country was transferred to the East and the South. In the meantime, Yudenich, under the cover of Estonia and with the highly intensified assistance of England, formed in the course of the next four months a fresh army provided with officers and amply equipped. This second attempt was the real campaign. It began very successfully for Yudenich. Feeling that we would not be able to manage all the fronts similtaneously, Lenin proposed to surrender Petrograd. I opposed it. The majority of the Politburo, including Stalin, decided to support me. After I had already gone to Petrograd Lenin wrote me on the 17th of October, 1919:<br /><br />Spent last night at the Council of Defense and sent you . . . the decree of the Council of Defense. As you see, your plan has been accepted. But the removal of the Petrograd workers to the South has not been repealed of course. (It is said that you developed it in conversation with Krassin and Rykov) . . . Attached is an appeal which the Council of Defense assigned to me. It came out badly. Better put my signature under yours. Greetings.<br /> Lenin<br /><br />The struggle for apetrograd acquired an extremely dramatic character. The enemy was in full view of the the capital, which was prepared to fight in the streets and squares. When the defence of Petrograd was mentioned in the Soviet press without any further explanations, it was this second, the autumn campaign of Yedenich that was understood, not the spring campaign. But in the autumn of 1919 Stalin was at the Southern front and had nothing whatever to do with the real saving of Petrograd. The official documents pertaining to this basic operation against Yudenich were published years ago. Yet nowadays both Yudenich’s campaigns have been merged into one, and the famous defense of Petrograd is represented as Stalin’s handiwork.<br /><br />[While still in Petrograd, Stalin took advantage of an opportunity to slander the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, and by implication its Chairman, as is evident from the following telegram he sent from Petrograd]:<br /><br /> * June 4, 1919.<br /> To Comrade Lenin”<br /> I am sending you a document taken from the Swiss. It is evident from the document that not only the Chief of Staff of the Seventh Army works for the Whites (remember the desertion of the 11th Division to the side of Krassnov in the autumn of last year near Borisoglebsk or the desertion of regiments at the Perm front), but also the entire staff of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, headed by Kostyayev. (The reserves are allocated and moved by Kostyayev.)<br />It is now up to the Central Committee to draw the necessary inferences. Will it have the courage to do it?<br />The analysis of the evidence continues, and new “possibilities” are opening up. I would write in greater detail, but I have not a minute to spare. Let Peters tell you.<br />My profound conviction is:<br />1. Nadezhin is not a commander.He is incapable of commanding. He will end up by losing the Western Front. <br />2. Workers like Okulov, who incite the specialists against our commissars, who are sufficiently discouraged anyway, are harmful, because they debilitate the vitality of our army. <br />Stalin<br /><br />[Lenin received this telegram while in conference. Ignoring its obviously wild charges, he wrote the following not to the Vice-Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, Sklyansky]:<br /> <br />* Stalin demands the recall of Okulov who allegedly is preoccupied with intrigues and disorganizing work.<br /><br />The ironic “allegedly” speaks for itself. Sklyansky replied on the same piece of paper:<br /> Okulov is the only decent worker there.<br /><br />[Lenin’s reaction to that, recorded immediately, was]:<br /><br />* In that case, compose a text of a telegram (exact exposition of what Okulov accuses the Seventh Army) and I shall send it by code to Stalin and Zinoviev, so that the conflict will not grow and will be adequately settled.<br /><br />[The matter was then referred to the highest Party Executive, and its decision was immediately communicated to Trotsky at Kharkov by direct wire]:<br /><br />* In view of the conflict, which at any rate is growing, between all the Petersburg central-committeemen and Okulov, and recognizing as absolutely necessary the maximum of solidarity in Petersburg military work and the necessity of an immediate victory on that front, the Politburo and the Orgburo of the Central Committee have resolved temporarily to recall Okulov and to place him at the disposal of Comrade Trotsky.<br />June 4, 1919. #2995<br />For the Politburo and the Orgburo of the Central Committee, Lenin, Kamenev, Serebryakov, Stassova.<br /><br />This was a necessary concession to Stalin and Zinoviev. There was nothing to do but accept it. [As to Kostyayev, that very] able general did not inspire me with confidence either. He gave the impression of an alien among us. However, Vatzetis stood up for him, and Kostyayev complemented that irascible and capricious Commander-in-Chief rather well. It was not easy to replace Kostyayev. [Besides] there were no facts against him. There was patently no sense in “taking the document from the Swiss,” because it never again figured anywhere. At any rate, obviously crude and forced was the attempt to link Kostyayev with the treason of any of the regiments, which had been organized under the vigilant eye of the Party itself. As for Nadezhin, he had occasion to command the Seventh Army, the army that [actually did save] Petrograd [at its most crucial moment]. As fo Okulov’s guilt, that consisted solely in his earnest endeavou to avide most faithfully by all orders and regulations and in his outright refusal to take part in any of the intrigues against the Center. [As for] Stalin’s provocatively bold and insistent tone, that is explained by the fact that he felt he had at last mustered real support in the Council of War on the Eastern Front, where dissatisfaction with the Commander-in-Chief was turning into dissatisfaction with me.<br /><br />The disagreement about the strategy on the Eastern Front was between the Commander-in-Chief Vatzetis and the commanding officer of the Eastern Front, S.S. Kamenev. Both of them had been General Staff colonels of the Tsarist Army. No doubt there was rivalry between them. And the commissars became involved in that conflict. The Communists of our General Staff supported Vatzetis, while the members of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Eastern Front, Smilga, Lashevich, Gussev –sided wholeheartedly with Kamenev. It is hard to say which one of the two colonels was the more gifted. Both undoubtedly were endowed with first-rate talents for strategy, both had wide experience in the World War and both had decidedly an optimistic turn of mind, without which it is impossible to command. Vatzetis was the more stubborn and cranky and undoubtedly prone to yield to the influence of elements hostile to the Revolution. Kamenev was easier to get along with and yielded more readily to the influence of the Communists working with him. But although an able officer and a man of imagination fully capable of taking risks, he was lacking in depth and firmness. Lenin subsequently became disappointed in him and more than once characterized his repots very sharply. [On one occasion Lenin’s comment was], “his answer is stupid and in places illiterate.”<br /><br />The Eastern Front was, so to speak, the first-born of the Red Army. It was more amply provided with all that was needed, including Communists, then any other front. [In the Autumn of 1918] Kolchak was quite justy regarded as our chief enemy. He hasd advanced as far as Kazan’, threatening Nizhni-Novgorod, from which he had a clear road to Moscow. It was natural then that the revolutionary country had skimmed the cream of everything for the Eastern Front.<br /><br />On the 7th of September unites of the Fifth Army began to attack the approaches to Kazan’. [It was] as stubborn battle. Great losses were sustained. The Czechs did not hold out and retreated. On the 10th of September the Fifth Army took Kazan’. [It was] the first great [Soviet] victory. This was the break which saved the young Republic from a complete rout. It occurred before my eyes at Kazan’. Iw as a serious and terrifying moment. After the loss of Simbirsk we had surrendered Kazan’ practically without battle. Nizhni was next. Had the Whites taken possession of Nizhni-Novgorod, they would have had a clear road to Moscow. That is why the fight for Kazan’ acquired decisive significance. The Fifth Army, created in the course of this battle, covered itself with glory. We tore Kazan’ out of the grasp of the White Guards and the Czechoslovaks. That day was the turning point in the course of the Revolution. The capture of Kazan’ started the liquidation of the counter-revolution in the East. The toilers of the entire country celebrated the capture of Kazan’ as a great victory. Even greater was the significance of this victory for the Army.<br /><br />[But in] March, 1919, with 3000 bayonets and 60,000 swords at his disposal, Kolchak moved quickly toward the Volga. The situation again became precarious. On the eve of the Eighth Party Congress it was Lenin’s opinion that I should personally supervice the operations on the Eastern Front. This detail has to be recalled now and substantiated by documentary evidence in rebuttal of the current falsification.<br /><br />1. *April 10, 1919<br />To Sklyansky for transmission to Trotsky at Nizhni-Novgorod.<br />In view of the extremely difficult situation on the Eastern Front, I think it would be the best for you to remain there, especially since there will be no serious questions on the 13th. The Orgburo of the Central Committee decided to send y ou the same telegram yesterday, but I am afraid it did not so do because of Stassova’s departure. We are considering hurriedly a series of the most extraordinary measures for aiding the Eastern Front, of which Sklyansky will inform you. Let us have your opinion.<br /> Lenin<br /><br />2. * By direct wire from Nizhni-Novgorod to Moscow, to Lenin<br />Completely agree with the necessity of my remaining on the Eastern Front, I call the attention of the Central Committee to the Left-Communistic demagogic agitation in the Third Army, where afitation is carried on against military commanders and against an alleged order introducing saluting and the like. It is necessary to send strong Partymen, contralists. Extremely important that workers support Simbirsk, where the provincial committee is extremely weak, especially in the counties.<br />April 10, 1919. #1047 Trotsky<br /><br />3. * Excerpt from the Protocol of the Session of the Politburo of the Central Committee, Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), April 18th 1919.<br />Present: Comrades Lenin, Krestinsky, Stalin, Trotsky.<br /><br />Considered: 2. Declaration by Comrade Trotsky that the Southern Group of the Eastern Front, consisting of four armies, is under the command of Comrade Frunze, who is insufficiently experienced to manage such a great undertaking and that it is necessary to reinforce the front.<br /><br />Decided: To propose to Commander-in-Chief Vatzetis that he go to the Eastern Front, so that the present commander of the front, Comrade Kamenev, may devote himself entirely to the leadership of the armies of the Southern Group.<br /><br />4. * Excert from the Protocol of the Politburo of the Central Committee, Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of May 12, 1919.<br />Present: Comrades, Lenin, Stalin, Krestinsky.<br /><br />Considered: 9. Telegram from Comrade Trotsky to Comrade Lenin about the need to devote special attention to Saratov, which due to the uprising of the [Ural] Cossacks is becoming an important strategic point.<br /><br />Decided: a. Immediately recall from Saratov Comrades Antonov, Fedor Ivanov, Ritzberg and Plaksin.<br />b. Immediately send A.P. Smirnov to work in Saratov as Chairman o the Provincial Executive Committee and member of the fortress council . . .<br />The advance against Kolchak, after two periods of retreat, was now proceeding with complete success. Vatzetis considered that the chief danger was now in the South and proposes to keep the Army of the Eastern Front in the Urals during the winter, until the danger should subside sufficiently, in order to transfer a number of divisions to the Southern Front. My general position was expounded even earlier in the telegram of January 1st. I as in favor of assuring an uniterrupted offensive against Kolchak. However, the concrete question was determined by the relation of forces and the general strategic situation. If Kolchakhad serious reserves beyond the Urals, if our advance with uninterrupted battles had seriously exhausted the Red Army, then to engage in additional battles beyond the Urals would have constituted a danger, for it would have required new replacements of fresh Communists and Commanders, while all of that was at the present necessary for the Southern Front.<br /><br />It must be added that I had, to a considerable extent, lost contact with the Eastern Front, now that it was quite safe, and that I lived with all my thoughts on the Southern Front. It was hard to judge at a distance to what extent the advancing armies of the Eastern Front had preserved their vitality, i.e. to what extent they were able to pursue a further offensive not only without the aid of the Center, but even with sacrifices to the advantage of the Southern Front, which needed the best divisions. To a certain extent, I permitted Vatzetis freedom of action, considering that if there should be resistance on the part of the Eastern Command and if it should develop that a further advance in the East was possible without harm to the Southern Front, there would then be time enough to correct the Commander-in-Chief with a decision of the government. <br /><br />Under these conditions, a confict developed between Vatzetis and Kamenev. Objecting to a number of evasive replies by the Eastern Front, which tried to conduct its own policy, Vatzetis demanded the replacement of Kamenev by Samoilov, the former Commander of the Sixth Army. [This was done. But immediately it was protested by the Commissars friendly to Kamenev. Lenin appealed to Trotsky about this and about Stalin’s complaint against Kostyayev from Petrograd, and Trotsky replied by direct wire from Kiev]:<br /><br />* I agree to the return of Kamenev to the Eastern Front in place of Somoilov, but I don’t know where Kamenev is at present. Neither am I opposed to the replacement of Kostyayev; have often raised that question myself, but the difficulty is to find someone to replace him who would not be worse. I don’t think that Lashevich is any firmer that Aralov. He simply has a different deviation of softness. Gussev is more suitable for the field staff. At any rate, in returing Kamenev, and moreover I replacing Kostyayev, it is necessary to discuss the matter beforehand with the Commander-in-Chief, so as not to disorganize the whole machinery. I suggest that a beginning should be made with the most urgent matters i.e. the return of Kamenev, and to accomplish that, first of all, to find him and call him immediately to Moscow. At the same time suggest possible substitutes for Kostyayev and Aralov, which is less urgent. Communicate the decision you make. Trotsky<br /><br />P.S. I must say, however, that Kuzmin, Orekhov, Naumov, Vatoshin, have the same opinion of Samoilov as Lashevich, Gussesv, Smilga have of Kamenev, as Aralov has of Kostyayev. Theses loyalties at the front are our common misfortune.<br />May 21, 1919.<br /><br />During the first months of 1919 the Red Army delivered a crushing blow to the Southern counter-revolution, which was composed chiefly of the Don Cossack Army under the command of General Krassnov covered by a curtain of cavalry. But behind Krassnov in the Kuban and the Northern Caucasus, the Volunteer Army of Denikin was being formed. In the middle of May our advancing and in large measure exhausted army clashed with the fresh troops of Denikin and began to roll back. We lost everything we had gained and over and above that all of the Ukraine, which had recently been liberated. Meantime, on the Eastern Front, where the former Colonel Kamenev was in command, with Smilga and Lashevich as members of the Revolutionary Council of War, the situation had improved to such an extent and matters were proceeding so well that I gave up going there altogether and almost forgot what Kamenev looked like. Intoxicated with success, Smilga, Lashevich and Gussev carried their commander on their shoulders, drank Bruderschaft with him and wrote the most enthusiastic reports about him to Moscow. When the Commander-in-Chief, I.e. Vatzetis, agreeing with me in principle, had suggested that the Eastsern Front remain for the winter in the Urals, in order to transfer several divisions to the South, where the situation was becoming threatening, Kamenev, supported by Smilga and Lashevich, had offered resolute resistance. [Kamenev contended that he could place several divisions under his command in the East at the disposal of the Southern Front, without stopping his offensive in the Urals. After that, his authority rose at the expense of Vatzetis’s, especially since the latter continued to be stubborn after his error had been completely exposed].<br /><br />Stalin pounced upon the conflict between the Eastern front and the Commander-in-Chief. He treated Vatzetis, who had officially condemned his intervention in strategic matters, with hostility and lay in wait for an opportunity to wreak vengeance upon him. Now such an opportunity presented itself. Smilga, Lashevich and Gussev proposed, obviously with the co-operation of Stalin, to appoint Kamenev Commander-in-Chief. The success on the Eastern Front bribed Lenin and broke down my resistance.<br /><br />Kamenev was appointed Commander-in-Chief, and at the morning session of July 3rd, 1919, the Central Committeed reconstituted the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic. It was now to be made up of Trotsky, Sklyansky, Gussev, Smilga, Rykov, and Commander-in-Chief Kamenev.<br /><br />--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />Part Two: Conflict on the Southern Front<br /><br /><br />The first task of the new Commander-in-Chief was to work out a plan for grouping the forces on the Southern Front. Kamenev was distinguished by optimism and a quick strategic imagination. But his outlook was still comparatively narrow. The social factors of the Southern Front –the workers, the Ukrainian peasants, the Cossacks –were not clear to him. He approached the Southern Front from the point of view of the commander of the Eastern Front.The easiest thing to do was to concentrate the divisions removed from the East along the Volga and to strike against the Kuban’, the headquarters of Denikin. This had been the basis of his plan when he promised to supply the divisions in time without stopping his advance.<br /><br />In matters of strategy I always yielded first word to the Commander-in-Chief. However, my familiarity with the Southern Front prompted me to believe that his plan was basically erroneous. Denikin had managed to transfer his base from the Kuban’ to the Ukraine. To advance against the Cossacks meant to drive them forcibly in the direction of Denikin. It was clear to me that, instead, the main blow should be delivered along the line of division between Denikin and the Cossacks, along the strip where the population was entirely against the Cossacks, against Denikin and for us. But my opposition to Kamenev’s plan was interpreted as a continuation of the conflict between the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic and the Eastern Front. Smilga and Gussev, with the collaboration of Stalin, made it look as if I were against the plan because I did not trust the new Commander-in-Chief on general principles. Lenin apparently had the same misgivings. But these misgivings were fundamentally wrong. I did not overestimate Vatzetis. I greeted Kamenev in a friendly fashion and tried in every way to lighten his burdens. But the error of the plan we so clear beyond any doubt that when it was confirmed by the Politburo, with everybody, including Stalin, voting against me, I submitted my resignation. [On the 5th of July, 1919, the highest Party executive ruled as follows] with reference to my resignation:<br /><br />The Organizational and Poliltical Bureaux of the Central Committee, having examined Comrade Trotsky’s declaration and having considered it in all its aspects, have come to the unanimous conclusion that they cannot accept Comrade Trotsky’s resignation and they are absolutely unable to grant his petition. The Organizational and Political Bureaux of the Central Committee will do everything they can to make Comrade Trotsky’s work at the Southern Front – the most difficult, the most dangerous and the most important at the present time, which Comrade Trotsky has himself chosen –as convenient as possible for him and as fruitful as possible for the Republic. As People’s Commissar of War and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, Comrade Trotsky is fully empowered to act also as a member of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Southern Front in concert with the very same Commander of the Front (Yegoryev), whom he himself has appointed and the Central Committee has confirmed. <br />The Organizational and Political Bureaux of the Central Committee offer Comrade Trotsky full opportunity to strive by any means for what he considers an improvement of the policy of the military question, and , if he so desires, will try to expedite the convocation of the Party Congress.<br />Firmly convinced that the retirement of Comrade Trotsky at the present moment is absolutely impossible and would be most detrimental to the interests of the Republic, the Organizational and Political Bureaux of the Central Committee insistently suggest to Comrade Trotsky not to raise that question again, and to carry out his functions in the future to the maximum, curtailing them in the event he so desires, while he concentrates his efforts upon the Southern Front. <br />In view of the aforesaid, the Organizational and Political Bureaux of the Central Committee likewise reject Comrade Trotsky’s resignation from the Politburo as well as from the post of Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic and People’s Commissar of War . . .<br /><br />Lenin, Kamenev, Krestinsky, Kalinin, Serebryakov, Stalin, Stassova . . .<br /><br />I withdrew my resignation and immediately went to the Southern Front. <br /><br />Three days later, while at the front in Kozlov, I received a coded telegram from the Council of People’s Commissars, from the Kremlin, kto the effect that an officer, accused of treason, confessed and made depositions from which it was possible to infer that Vatzetis had knowledge of a military conspiracy:<br /><br />R.S.F.S.R. Council of Peoples’ Commissars Strictly Secret<br />The Kremlin, Moscow July 8, 1919<br />To Trotsky at Kozlov:<br />Domozhirov, who had confessed and has been completely proved a traitor, has given factual testimony about a conspiracy in which an active part was played by Isayev, who was a long time attached on duty to the Commander-in-Chief and lived with him in the same apartment. Many other proofs, a whole lot of evidence, convict the Commander-in-Chief of knowing about the conspiracy. The Commander-in-Chief has to be arrested . . .<br /><br />This telegram was signed by Dzerzhinsky [head of the Cheka]; Krestinsky [Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party]; Lenin; and my deputy Sklyansky. It was clear from the names mentioned in the telegram that the reference was to the recently removed Commander-in-Chief. Vatzetis was thus arrested almost immediately after his removal from his post on no less a charge then suspicion of treason. That invested the controversy over strategy with sinister implications. Relations inside the Politburo became more strained, the change of the Chief Command became considerably more complicated. To this very day the exact circumstances and implications of this episode are not altogether clear to me. Since Vatzetis was soon set free and even appointeda professor at the War College, it is safe to assume that his knowledge of any military conspiracy was less than infinitesimal. It is not unlikely that, dissatisfied with his removal from the post of Commander-in-Chief, he had engaged in reckless talk with officers close to him. [However, it is decidedly[ likely that Stalin played quite a role in his arrest. Stalin had a score of old slights to settle with Valzetis. Moreover, he derived a sense of impunity and safety from the friendly influence he exerted over the head of the Cheka and from the support of the leaders of the Eastern Front and the new Commander-in-Chief. He had the added satisfaction of striking an indirect blow at the Commissar of War. One was conscious of the obvious intrigue behind this episode and of the invisible presence of Stalin behind Dzerzhinsky.<br /><br />[On the 27th of July], I was hastily called out to Kozlov by Sokolnikov “because of extraordinary circumstances.” There I discovered that the Commander of the Southern Front, Yegoryev, considered Kamenev’s plan of operations [for the South] incorrect and, although he was carrying it out, did not expect success. Such also was the attitude of the Chief of the Operational Department, Peremytov, and such also was the opinion held by Sokolnikov himself. At first I did no discuss the matter with anyone except Sokolnikov and did not ask Yegoryev to elaborate when he referred to the irrationality of the plan, [but immediately telegraphed to Lenin as Chairman of the Council of Defense]:<br /><br />* Without going into an analysis of the controversy on its merits, I consider entirely inadmissible a situation under which a plan is carried out by a person who has no faith in its success. The only course is the immediate (before the beginning of operations) replacement of the Commander of the South by a person who recognizes the operative authority of the Commander-in-Chief and agrees with his plan. Perhaps Selivachev will agree with Kamenev. In that case he should be immediately appointed Assistand Commander of the South, so that a week later he may be appointed Commander of the South.<br /> Awaiting instructions.<br /> July 27, 1919 #277/s. L.D. Trotsky<br />[The reply to this telegram was made not by Lenin but in the name of the Politburo. It bore the sole signature of the Central Committee’s technical secretary, Helen Stassova –as if to underscore its impersonal nature]:<br /><br />* To Comrade Trotsky in Penza: Secret<br />The Politburo of the Central Committee has considered your telegram No. 277/s and fully agrees with you concerning the danger of any sort of wavering in the firm execution of an accepted plan. The Politburo fully recognizes the operative authority of the Commander-in-Chief and requests that you jmake the necessary explanation to all responsible workers. The Politburo appoints as members of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Southern Front, in addition to the present members, Smilga, Serebryakov, Lashevich. By order of the Central Committee. <br />July 28, 1919 Stassova.<br /><br />[The question of strategy on the Southern Front was crucial. Yet the controversy over it, aggravated by the Vatzetis episode, had reached such a pass that it was carried on by innuendo and along exaggeratedly official channels. The immediate acknowledgement of the above instructions was addressed to Trotsky’s deputy in Moscow for transmission to the Central Committee. It read]:<br /> Secret<br /> * To Comrade Sklyansky for transmission to the Central Committee:<br /> Do not understand the sense of your telegram. In view of Yegoryev’s doubts, I suggested an assistant for him, who, if necessary could replace him. This is the least painful solution to the problem. While in Kozlov, I removed the Chief of Operations, Peremytov, who expressed disagreement with the plan of the Commander-in-Chief and replaced him with Berenda, whom I hastily summoned from the Military Inspection. Before I left, by agreement with Sokolnikov and in his presence, I bluntly confronted Yegoryev with the issue of unconditional execution of the Commander-in-Chief’s plan. He replied with the utmost categoralness and as far as I could judge without any mental reservations. Nevertheless, I consider the sending of Selivachev, as assistant, after the preliminary conversation the Commander-in-Chief had with him, extremely desirable. I have received no reply to this single proposal except the recommendation to instill (in whom?) the rule of discipline.<br />I think it is absurd to add to the Revolutionary Council of War, already overstaffed with six members (Yegoryev, Yegorov, Sokolnikov,Okulov, Vladimirov, Serebryakov) two new ones, and suggest that this decision be revoked, expecially since Lashevich has been appointed Commandant of Petrograd, while Smilga is a member of Shorin’s group.<br />Disastrous for the front is the absence of bullets and extreme lack of rifles. The Ninth Army has 20,000 fighters ready, but they are all without rifles, and only half of them expect to receive them. Bullets are issued in frightfully small quantities, which in the event of the slightest complication leads to disastrous consequences. On the basis of observing the situation in the four armies of the Southern Front and conversation with the Commander of the South, I warn you that the whole operation may fail because of lack of bullets.<br /> #284<br /> July 19, 1919 Trotsky<br /><br />[Preparations for the offensive on the Southern Front according to the plan of the new Commander-in-Chief continued under difficulties. By the end of the first week in August –that is, about a week before the offensive was actually launched –the Politburo was confronted with] several problems of grave importantce. [It was perfectly] clear that Denikin was more than likely to direct his main drive agaisnt the Ukraine rather than Eastward, in order to establish contact with Rumania and Poland and transfer his base from Ekaterinodar to Odessa and Sebastopol. Irrespective of the measures undertaken by the Commander-in-Chief to obviate this danger, which was the most serious for the moment, it was necessary to decide at once how to proceed with the impending struggle for the Ukraine. First of all it was necessary to unite the 12th Army with the 14th Army, which, owing to the absence of telegraphic connections, was cut off from the Southern Front. Not only were the rears of the two armies already merged by then but both were increasingly obliged to act against one and the same enemy, Denikin. I, therefore, proposed the removal of the 14th Army from the juridiction of the Southern Front, fusing the command of the two armies in the person of the commander of the 14th Army, Yegorov, and his staff, calling this new group the Southwestern Front, with headquarters at Konotop, and placing it directly under the jurisdiction of the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff. To maintain the fighting ability of [this proposed Southwestern Front at the barest minimum, it was necessary] to exert extraordinary effot to put a stop to banditry, the destruction of railway tracks, and the like, with the aid of Communist units temporarily transferred from more secure sectors, regional workers from Moscow and even certain absolutely reliable units of the Czech army. All available Red officers throughout the country were immediately sent to the Ukraine by special trains, irrespective of any prior assignments. All political workers, previously assigned to various other armies, had to be sent to the Ukraine, along with boots, bullets, rifles. The 12th Army was without bullets. For lack of them, it fought against the mutinous colonists in Odessa with hand grenades. The Councils of War of both armies were weak. By agreement between the Ukrainian Council of Defense and the Revolutionary Councils of War of both armies, Voroshilov was appointed to suppress the rebellion in the rears of both armies. All persons and institutions engaged in the suppression of insurrections in the Ukraine were placed under his command.<br /><br />[Analogous difficulties, as varied as the localities in which they were met yet essentially the same in nature, were confronted everywhere and on every hand. Lenin grew restive. At the very outset of the offensive he wrote to Sklyansky:<br /><br />*I am sick. Had to lie down. Therefore answer by messenger. The delay of the offensive in the direction of Voronezh (from the 1st of August to the 10th!!) is monstrous. Denikin’s success is tremendous.<br />What’s the matter? Sokolnikov said that there our forces were four times as large as theirs.<br />What then is the matter? How could we have missed the opportunity so badly?<br />Tell the Commander-in-Chief that things cannot go on like that. He must pay serious attention. <br />Hadn’t we better send this sort of telegram to the Revolutionary Council of War of the Southern Front (copy to Smilga) in code:<br />Utterly inadmissible to delay attack because such delay gives all Ukraine to Denikin and destroys us. You are responsible for every extra day and even hour of delaying the offensive. Communicate immediately your explanations and when at last you will begin a resolute offensive.<br /> Chairman of the Council of Defense, Lenin<br /><br />[The offensive on the Southern Front, according to the plan of S.S. Kamenev, began in the middle of August. Within six weeks, by the end of September], I wrote to the Politburo, which had voted against my plan, “The offensive along the line of greatest resistance has proved entirely to the advantage of Denikin, as was predicted . . . Right now our situation on the Southern Front is worse than it was when the General Staff began to carry out it’s a priori plan. It would be childish to shut one’s eyes to this.” By then the fatal error of the plan had become clear to many of its former proponents, including Lashevich, who had been transferred from the Eastern to the Southern Front. Some three weeks earlier, on the 6th of September, I had telegraphed from the front in code to the Commander-in-Chief and to the Central Committee that “the center of difficulty of the struggle on the Southern Front has shifted in the direction of Kurst-Voronezh, where there are no reserves.” I called [their] attention also to the following problems: <br /><br />The effort to liquidate Mamontov has so far yielded practically no results. The motorized machine-gun units were not formed in consequence of the non-receipt of the machine-guns or even a small number of automobiles. Mamontov is obviously proceeding to unite with his own troops through the Kursk front. Our weak and scattered infantry units hardly disturb him. Lahsevich’s command is paralyzed by the absence of means of communication. Mamontov’s unification may be regarded as assured. The danger of a break through the front at the Kursk-Voronezh sector is becoming apparent. Lashevich’s next task is to pursue the enemy in an effort to plug that hole. An attempt will be made to harass Mamontov with guerrilla raids . . . The destruction of railways interferes with transfers from the Tsaritsyn direction to the Kursk. Yet the situation insistently demands the transfer of reserves to the West.It may be possible to transfer the mounted corps of Budenny bgy forced marches. It is necessary to add that the situation is becoming increasingly worse because of the complete breakdown of the apparatus of the front. The practical tasks appear to us in the following form:<br /><br />1. Immediately appoint Selivachev commander of the Southern Front.<br />2. Selivachev’s place should be taken by the assistant commander of the Southern Front, Yegorov.<br />3. Send the reserves, including the 21st Division, after Mamontov in the direction of Kursk.<br />4. Turn the 9th Army from the direction of Novorossiisk to Starobelsk.<br />5. Transfer the corps of Budenny as far as possible to right center.<br />6. Hasten marching reserves and supplies for the 8th and 13th armies.<br /><br />[In addition], I proposed a number of army regroupings which amounted to a liquidation of the plan that had failed. [That was hardly three weeks after the offensive was launched.] Serebryakov and Lashevich signed the telegram with me. But the new Commander-in-Chief was [as] stubborn [when in error as his predecessor], and the Politburo resolutely supported him. The very same day, on the 6th of September, I received this reply by direct wire at Oryol:<br /><br />The Politburo of the Central Committee, having considered the telegram of Trotsky, Serebryakov and Lashevich, has confirmed the reply of the Commander-in-Chief and expressed its surprise with reference to efforts being made to reconsider the basic strategic plan decided upon.<br />September 6, 1919 By order of the Politburo of the Central Committee, Lenin<br /><br />Within two months the course of military operations had nullified the original plan. Moreover, during these two months of continuous fruitless battles many of the roads were utterly wrecked and the concentration of reserves became incomparably more difficult than in June and July. The radical regrouping of forces was therefore all the more necessary. I suggested that Budenny’s mounted corps be sent by forced marches to the Northeast, and that several other units be transferred in that direction. [But the Politburo, including of course Stalin, throughout this period continued to reject these and other suggestions and persistently approved] the directives of the Commander-in-Chief, [who continued to reiterate that] “the basic plan for the advance along the Southern Front remains without alterations; in other words, the main attack is to be delivered by Shorin’s special group, its task being to destroy the enemy in the Don and the Kuban’.” [Yet] the offensive had utterly bogged down in the meantime. The situation in the Kuban’, where the best troops had been sent, became extremely grave, and Deniken was moving to the North. <br /><br />“In order to evaluate the plan of operation,” I wrote at the end of September, “it would not be superfluous to consider its results. The Southern Front has received more forces than any other front has ever had; at the beginning of the offensive the Southern Front had no less than 180,000 bayonets and swords, a corresponding number of guns and machine guns. After a month and a half of battles, we are pathetically marking time in the Eastern half of the Southern Front, while in the Western half we have a difficult retreat, a loss of units, the destruction of organization . . . The cause of the failure must be sought entirely in the plan of operation . . . Unites of average resistance were directed . . . to localities populated entirely by Cossacks, who were not advancing, but were defending their villages and homes. The atmosphere of a national Don War is exerting a disintegrating influence upon our units. Under these conditions Denikin’s tanks, skillful maneuvering, and the like, give him a colossal superiority.”<br /><br />[Soon] it was no longer a question of the plan but of its disastrous conequences, material and psychological. The Commander-in-Chief, in consonance with Napoleon’s maxim, had apparently hoped, by persisting in his error, to derive from it all possible advantages and in the end to secure victory. The Politburo, losing confidence, persisted in its own decision. On the 21st of September our troops abandoned Kursk. On the 13th of October Denikin took Oryol and opened for himself the road to Tula, where the most important munitions factories were concentrated and beyond which was Moscow. I confronted the Politburo with the alternatives: either to change our strategy or eveacuate Tula, destroying the war industries there, and resist the direct threat to Moscow. By that time the stubbornness of the Commander-in-Chief, who was himself already discarding part of the old plan, and the support of the Politburo were broken. In the middle of October the new grouping of troops for the counterattack was completed. One group was concentrated to the north-west of Oryol for action against the Kurstk-Oryol railway. Another group, east of Voronezh, was headed by Budenny’s mounted corps. This was tantamount to the plan upon which I had insisted. [In view of these facts it is instructive to consider the latter-day account of the period by Stalinist historiographers]:<br /><br />* During September and the beginning of October Denikin achieved considerable success on the Southern Front. He captured Oryol on the 13th of October. In order to remedy the extremely difficult and dangerous situation which a rose in consequence of prolonged failures on the Southern Front, the Central Committee of the Party sent Comrade Stalin to the Revolutionary Council of War of the front. Comrade Stalin worked out the new strategic plan of the struggle against Denikin, which was confirmed by Lenin and by the Central Committee of the Party. The realization of this plan brought about the complete defeat and rout of Denikin.<br /><br />[Stalin’s own versions vary from time to time as to who had proposed the right plan which had been rejected and who was to blame for the wrong plan that had proved so very costly. In 1923 Stalin told the story of the Southern Front in order, estensibly, to demonstrate certain political principles, but actually in order to settle certain political scores of his own]:<br /><br />* . . . An analogy might easily be drawn between these principles of political strategy, and the principles of military strategy; for example . . . the struggle with Denikin. Everybody remembers the end of 1919, when Denikin was near Tula. At that time interesting arguments developed among the military on the question of from which direction the decisive blow against Denikin’s armies should be struck. Some of the military proposed . . . the line of Tsaritsyn-Novorossiisk . . . Others . . . the line Vornezh-Rostov . . . The first plan was . . . not advantageous because it presupposed our movement along regions . . . hostile to the Soviet Government and thus demanded heavy sacrifices; also it was dangerous, because it opened to Denikin’s armies the road to Moscow by way of Tula and Serpukhov. The second plan . . . was the only correct one, because it presupposed the movement of our basic groups along regions . . . that sympathized with the Soviet Government and therefore did not demand special sacrifices; and also, it disorganized the action of the main body of Denikin’s troops marching to Moscow. A majority of the miltary expressed themselves in favor of the second plan . . . Thus the fate of the entire war with Denikin was settled . . .<br /><br />Stalin seemed to be using this story as a chance illustration of certain conceptions in the field of political tactics. As a matter of fact, the illustration was not accidental. 1923 was under way; Stalin was [on tenderhooks], expecting a terrible attack from Lenin, and therefore he systematically tried to undermine Lenin’s authority. In the leading circles of the Party it was very well known that behind the erroneous and costly plan had been not only certain members of the “military” (like Commander-in-Chief [S.S.Kamenev] but also the majority of the Politburo headed by Lenin. However, he preferred to speak abaout disagreements among the “military” without touching upon the struggle within the Politburo. He knew that the leading Party members remembered altogether too well that it was my plan, the plan I [had been advocating since early in July], which he came to suppot only at the end of October or the beginning of November, after the Commander-in-Chief himself in actual practice completely repudiated his own original project. But on November 19, 1924, tend months after Lenin’s death, Stalin [went further. He then] made the first attempt to create a deliberately fictitious version of the struggle on the Southern Front and to direct it against me:<br /><br />* It happened in the autumn of 1919. The offensive against Denikin failed . . .Denikin takes Kursk. Denikin advances on Oryol. Comrade Trotsky is recalled from the Southern Front to a session of the Central Committee. The Central Committee recognizes the situation as alarming and decides to send new military workers to the Southern Front, recalling Comrade Trotsky. The new military workers demand “non-interference” by Comrade Trotsky in the affairs of the Southern Front. Comrade Trotsky retires from direct participation in the affairs of the Southern Front. Operations on the Southern Front all the way to the capture by us of Rostov-on-the-Don and Odessa take place without Comrade Trotsky. Let them try to deny these facts!<br /><br />True, I left the Southern Front about the 10th of October and went to Petrograd. Our counter-attack on the Southern Front should have begun on the 10th of October. Everything was prepared; the concentration of units for the attack was almost completed, and my presence was much more necessary around Petrogad, which was in mortal danger of capture by Yudenich. Looking back over three years of Civil War and examining the journals and the correspondence of my trips along the various fronts, I see that I almost never had occasion to accompany a victorious army, to participate in an attack, directly to share its victories with others, My journeys did not have a holiday character. I went only to the sectors in distress after the enemy had broken through the front. My task was to turn fleeing regiments into an attacking force. I retreated with the troops, but never advanced with them. As soon as the routed divisions wsere restored to order and the command gave the signal to advance, I bade farewell to the Army and went to another unfavourable sector, or returned for several days to Moscow, in order to solve the accumulated problems of the Center. Thus, for three years I literally did not have the occasion even once to see the happy faces of soldiers after the victory or to enter with them into the captured cities. [That was why, as Stalin could not helop knowing], I did not visit the Southern Front even once throughout the entire period of our victorious [offensive there after the middle of October. Stalin’s falsification thus consists of investing an undeniable fact with an utterly false implication.<br /><br />[But there is, as yet, no suggestion that Trotsky was the author of the plan responsible for the failure of the July-September offensive against Denikin. At this stage], everything comes down only to the hazy assertion concerning new military workers who demanded (from whom?) “non-interference” by Comrade Trotsky. As a matter of fact, the thirteen decrees issued by the Central Committee on the 15th of October were proposed by me in written form and unanimously approved by all, including Stalin, Lenin, I, Kamenev and Krestinsky, where on the Commission which, in accordance with my proposal, was charged with the task of sending new workers to the Southern Front to replace the old workers, who had grown altogether too tired in consequence of constant defeats. Stalin was not on it. Which of the new workers demanded my “non-interference,” and from whom, in particular, Stalin does not state. {In 1929. Voroshilov declared]: <br /><br />* Stalin placed before the Central Committee three main conditions: 1) Trotsky must not interfere in the affairs of the Southern Front and must not cross beyond its line of demarcation; 2) a whole series of workers whom Stalin considered incapable of restoring the situation among the troops must be immediately recalled from the Southern Front; and 3) to the Southern Front must immediately be sent new workers selected by Stalin, who would be capable of carrying out this task. These conditions were accepted fully. <br /><br />Where? How? When? By whom? [The answers to these questions concern neither Stalin nor his satellite. Yet even while] crediting Stalini with the revision of the erroneous plan, Voroshilov did not, in 1929, dare to affirm that the erroneous plan was mine. By his very silence on that point he admitted that I was an opponent of this plan. However, this oversight was likewise filled in by the newest historiography/ [We have it now on the authority of Zinaida Ordzhonikadize that]:<br /><br />* Stalin . . . categorically rejected the old plan to smash Denikin, worked out by the General Staff, headed by Trotsky . . . “This insane proposed march through a roadless, hostile country, threatens us with complete collapse,” wrote Stalin in a note to Lenin . . . Instead of the plan already rejected by life itself, Stalin worked out a plan for the advance of the Reds through proletarian Kharkov and the Donetz Basin on Rostov . . . The strategy of the Great Stalin secured victory for the Revolution.<br /><br />[There is a touch of sardonic humor in this insistance that the plan which finally brought victory on the Southern Front was Stalin’s. However, the author of this cynical prevarication is Stalin himself and the documentary evidence on which it is based is Stalin’s note to Lenin, in which] Stalin repeats almost word for word those arguments against the July-September plan which I had developed, at first orally and then in writing, and which he had rejected together with the majority of the Politburo. Since all the members of the Politburo were perfectly familiar with the development of the question, it could not, at that time, have even entered Stalin’s head to place the responsibility for the old plan on me. On the contrary, he blamed the Commander-in-Chief and the ‘strategic cockerel” attached to him, the very same Gussev on which he had relied in July, when the command was changed. [In that note Stalin argued]:<br /><br />* . . . What then impels the Commander-in-Chief to defend the old plan? Evidently, sheer stubbornness, or if you wish factionalism, most stupid and most dangerous to the Republic, fostered in the Commander-in-Chief by the strategic cockerel attached to him . . .<br /><br />Stalin’s telegram [reinforcing the note] came at the very moment that the Commadner-in-Chief himself went against his own plan, makingt a direct frontal attack with a group of shock troops instead of concentrating them in Denikin’s Cossack rear. There was nothing the Politburo could do except to sanction after the event the substitution of the new plan for the old. Whether such a decision was brought out, or whether the Politburo simply accepted the accomplished fact, rejoicing inwardly, it is impossible to establish on the basis of the published documents, nor is it of much significance. [However, there is the following document which speaks for itself]:<br /><br /> * Except<br /> From the Protocol of the Session of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) of September 14, 1919.<br />Present: Comrades Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Krestinsky.<br /><br />Considered: <br />5. Declaration by Comrades Stalin and Serebryakov concerning reinforcements for the Southern Front and concerning the transfer of certain persons, and Comrade Stalin’ telegram in support of this declaration as an ultimatum. <br /> <br />Decided: <br />5. (a) To commission Comrade Lenin to send Comrade Smilga a coded telegram with inquiry concerning one possible transfer in the opinion of the Politburo.<br />(b) To commission Comrade Trotsky to transmit to Commander-in-Chief Kamenev in the name of the Government the political-economic directive about the necessity to capture Kursk and to move upon Kharkov and the Donetz Basin, and aboaut the distribution of reinforcements on the basis of this directive between the Southern and Southeastern fronts, these reinforcements to be removed from the Eastern and Kazakhstan fronts (the exact text of the directive is herewith attached). Also, to suggest to Vladimir Illyich personally to talk matters over with the Commander-in-Chief in accordance with the contents of the above directive.<br />(c) To inform Comrade Stalin that the Politburo considers absolutely inadmissable the reinforcement of one’s business suggestions with ultimatums about resignation. <br /><br /><br />----------------------------------<br /><br />PART THREE: STALIN BETRAYS IN POLAND<br /> <br />[On December 4, 1919, Ivan Smirnov reported from the Eastern Front that] “Kolchak has lost his army . . . There will be no more battles . . . I hope to capture the entire mobilis staff before Station Taiga . . . The tempo of the pursuit is such that by the 20th December Barnaul and Novonikolyavsk will be in our hands.” [Yedenich had been completely routed in the Northwest. Denikin was on the run in the South. Defeated in his efforts to win peasant wupport through equivocal “agrarian reforms” and deprived of support among the military and the landed gentry through his disastrous defeat at the front by the Red Army, Denikin lost the confidence of the Whites. On the 26th of March, 1920, he formally relinquished the office of Commander-in-Chief in favour of Baron Wrangel, who had been successful in reforming the scattered ranks of the White Guards in the Crimea. <br /><br />[The Whites were still trouncing the Red cavlary and infantry uunite on the Caucasian Front. In the battles of the 1st and 2nd of February, 1920, Manontov repulsed the offensive of the Red Army and assumed the offensive himself in the vicinity of Novocherkassk. The ranks of the Red Army on the Caucasian Front, which included Budenny’s mounted army, had been thinned not only by losses in battles but by the typhus epidemic. The expected reinforcements and provisions had not arrived because of confusion on the railways. Strong-arm methods were needed to move reinforcements and supplies to the Caucasian Front. Lenin and Trotsky turned to Stalin, who was at the time on the Revolutionary Council of War of the Southwestern Front]:<br /><br />* The Central Committee deems it necessary, or order to save the situation, that you journey immediately to the right wing of the Caucasian Front by way of Debaltsevo, where Shorin is at present. At the same time you will have to undertake extraordinary measures for the transfer of considerable reinforcements and workers from the Southwestern Front. To stabilize that situation, you are inducted into the staff iof the Revolutionary Council of War of the Caucasian Front, remaining at the same time on the Revolutionary Council of War of the Southwestern Front.<br />#9/sh<br />February 3, 1920. Lenin. Trotsky.<br /><br />[The text of Stalin’s reply is not available, but he apparently raised objections to the new assignment, probably on the grounds of pressing duties in his present position. This drew the following rejoinder]:<br /><br />* The Central Committee does not insist upon your journey, on condition that in the course of the next few weeks you will concentrate all your attention and all your energy upon servicing the Caucausian Front in preference to the interests of the Southwestern Front. Arzhanov is being sent to Voronezh to expedite the necessary transfers. Please show him the necessary cooperation and inform us accurately about the course of the transfers.<br />#512<br />February 4, 1920<br />Chairman of the Council of Defense, Lenin<br />Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, Trotsky.<br /><br />[Two weeks later Lenin telegraphed Stalin]:<br /><br />* The Politburo cannot ask you to come in person, since it considers the mopping up of Denikin as the most important and pressing task, which is why you have to expedite reinforcements to the Caucasian Front to the best of your ability.<br />#34<br />February 19, 1920 Lenin<br /><br />[A day later Lenin elaborated further on the same theme]:<br /><br />* The situation in the Caucasus is becoming increasingly serious in character. Judging by yesterday’s situation, the possibility of our losing Rostov and Novocherkassk is not excluded, as also the enemy’s attempt to develop his success further to the North with a threat against the Don Territory. Undertake extraordinary measures for expediting the transfer of the 42nd and the Latvian divisions and for reinforcing their fighting potential. I expect that, realizing the general situation, you will exert your energy to the utmost and will achieve impressive results.<br />#36/sh Lenin<br /><br />[Stalin’s reply follows]:<br /> Absolutely Secret In Code<br /> Copy for the Central Committee of the Party<br /> It is not clear to me why the concern abaout the Caucasian Front is imposed first of all upon me. In the order of things the responsibility for the strengthening of the Caucasian Front rests entirely with the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, whose members, according to my information, are in excellent health, and not with Stalin, who is overloaded with work anyway.<br />#970<br />February 20, 1920. Stalin<br /><br />[Whereupon Lenin spanked Stalin with the following telegram]:<br /> <br /> * The concern for expediting the shipment of reinforcements from the Southwestern Front to the Caucasian Front has been imposed upon you. Generally one must try to help in every way possible and not quibble about departmental jurisdictions.<br />#37/sh<br />February 20, 1920. Lenin<br /><br /> Kursk, January 19, 1920.<br />To the Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, Comrade Trotsky, Moscow.<br /><br />I appeal to you with the urgent plea to free my from unemployment. For almost three weeks I have been for no good reason at the headquarters of the Soutwestern Front, and have done nothing for two months. I can find out neither the cause of delay nore can I secure a further appointment. If during the almost two years that I have commanded various armies I have demonstrated any merit at all, I beg you to give me the opportunity to apply my talents to actual work, and if none such can be found at the front, then please let me have something to do in transportation or in the Commissariat of War.<br />#2. Army Commander Tukhachevsky.<br /><br />[Apparently, Stalin had found no application for the talents of Tukhachevsky on the Southwestern Front where he was practically the boss by virtue of his political authority as member of the Central Committee, the Orgburo and the Politburo. Tukhachevsky was still only in his middle twenties. Until the conquest of power by the Bolsheviks, he had been a lieutenant in the Tsarist Army. The October Revolution won him over heart and soul. He not only offered his services to the Red Army but became a Communist. He distinguished himself almost immediately at the front, and within a year had become a general of the Red Army. His brilliance as a strategist was acknowledged by admiring foes who were the victims of that very brilliance. Trotsky inscribed on his telegram: “Inform Comrades Lenin and Stalin.” What immediate steps were taken after that is not clear. But one thing is definitely recorded. Tukhachevsky was put in command of the Western Front and was placed in chargte of offensive operations against Warsaw. <br /><br />[The Polish Republic was hostile to the Soviet Government from the moment of its inception. Having seized Wilno in defiance of its award to the Lithuanians by the League of Nations in 1919, the Poles invaded White-Russian territory and by the autumn occupied Minsk and considerable portions of Volhynia and Podolia. Then they froze into inactivity in the face of General Denikin’s success. They feared that the success of the White Armies, which were pledged to restore the territorial integrity of the Tsarist Empire, would prove inimical to Poland’s territorial ambitions not only in the Ukraine and White-Russia but in Poland proper as well. But as soon as the Red Armies began to deliver decisive blows against Denikin, the Polish Army sprang into activity again. Supported by the trooops of the recently-formed Latvian Republic, the Polish Armies occupied Dvinsk in January, 1920, forced the Red Army to surrent Latgalia, took Mozyr in March, and under the personal command of Poland’s Liberator, Josef Pilsudski, launched a vigorous offensive against the Ukraine in April in alliance with the forces of the defunct Petlura Government. Although the war had thus been imposed on the Red Army, the aim of the Soviet Government was not only to repulse the attack, but to carry the Bolshevik Revolution itself into Poland and thus force open a door for Communism in all Europe].<br /><br />On the 30th of April, I wrote to the Central Committee of the Party: “Precisely because it is a struggle of life and death, it will have an extremely intensive and severe character.” Hence it was necessary “to evaluate the War with Poland not as merely the task of the Western Front but as the central task of all Worker-Peasant Russia.” On the 2nd of May, I issued a general warning through the press against overly-optimistic hopes for a revolution in Poland: “That the war will end with the workers’ revolution in Poland, there can be no doubt; but at the same time there is no basis for supposing that the war will begin with such a revolution . . .It would be extremely frivolous to think that the victory . . . will simply fall into our laps.” On the 5th of May, in a report to the Joint Session of All Soviet Institutions, I said: “It would be a grave error to suppose that history will begin by opening for our sakes the Polish workers’ revolution and therefore will free us frm the necessity to wage an armed struggle.” And I concluded: “Comrades, I should like you to carry away from this meeting as your chief conclusion the thought that tthestruggle still adhead of us will be a hard and intensive struggle.” All my military orders and public declarations of that time were permeated with this idea. “At the present time the Western Front is the most important front of the Republic,” states an order of the 9th of May, signed by me at Smolensk. “The organs of supply must be prepared for no easy and brief campaign but for a prolonged and stubborn struggle.” I was opposed to the march on Warsaw because, considering the weakness of our forces and resources, it could end successfully only on condition of an immediate insurrection in Poland itself, and there was absolutely no assurance of that. I have expounded the essence of the conflict in the most general terms in my autobiography.<br /><br />The chief initiator of the campaign was Lenin. He was supported against me by Zinoviev, Stalin and even by the cautious L.B. Kamenev. Rykov was on of the Central Committee members who sided with me on the issue, but he was not yet a member of the Politburo. Radek was also opposed to the Polish adventure. All the secret documents of that time are at the disposal of the present ruling circles of the Kremlin, and if there were at least one line in these documents affirming the latter-day version of this venture, it would have been published long ago. It is precisely the unsupported character of the version, and moreover the radical contradiction of one assertion by another, which shows that there too we have to deal with the same Thermidorian mythology.<br /><br />One of the reasons that the catastrophe near Warsaw assumed such extraordinary proportions was the behavior of the command of the Western group of the Southern Armies, directed agaisnt Lwow (Lemberg). The chief political figure in the Revolutionary Council of War of the group was Stalin. He wanted at any cost to enter Lwow at the same time that Smilga and Tukhachevsky were to enter Warsaw. The rapid advance of our armies toward the Vistula had compelled the Polish command to concentrate all efforts and, with the aid of the French Military Mission, considerable reserves in the regions of Warsaw and Lublin. At this decisive moment, the line of operations on the Southwestern Front diverged at right angles from the line of operations on the main Western Front: Stalin was waging his own war. When the danger to Tukhachevsky’s army became clearly evident and the Commander-in-Chief ordered the Southwestern Front to shift its direction sharply towards Zamostye-Tomashev, in order to strike at the flanks of the Polish troops near Warsaw, the command of the Southwestern Front, encouraged by Stalin, continued to move to the West: Was it not more important to take possession of Lwow itself that to help “others” to take Warsaw? For three or four days our General Staff could not secure the execution of this order. Only after repeated demands reinforced by threats did the Southwestern command change direction, but by then the delay of several days had already played its fatal role. On the 16th of August the Poles took the counter-offensive and forced our troops to role back.<br /><br />During the secret debates on the Polish War at a closed session of the Tenth Congress of the Party, Stalin came ouit with the declaration, equally startling in its viciousness and untruthfulness, that Smilga, the leading member of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Western Front had “deceived the Central Committee” by “promising” to take Warsaw by a definite date and by failing to make good his “promise.” The actions of the Southwestern Front, i.e., Stalin himself, had presumably been determined by the “promise” of Smilga, on whom, therefore, lay the responsibility for the catastrophe. In silent hostility the Congress listened to the sullen orator with that yellow glint in his eye. With that speech of his Stalin hurt no one but himself. Not a single vote supported him. I protested on the spot against this startling insinuation: Smilga’s “promise” meant merely that he had hoped to take Warsaw; but that hope did not eliminate the element of the unexepected, which is peculiar to all wars, and under no circumstances did it give anybody the right to act on the basis of an a priori calculation instead of realistic development of operations. Lenin, terribly upset by the dissensions, joined in the discussion and expressed himself to the effect that we did not want to blame anybody personally. Why does Stalin not publish the stenographic record of this debate?<br /><br />In 1929, A. Yegorov [Commander of the Southwestern Front during the Polish Campaign, made the first public attempt to justify his action in a special monograph entitled] “Lwow-Warsaw,” [in which he was constrained to admit]:<br /><br />* . . . It is precisely in this respect that all our historians have criticized the campaign on the Southwestern Front. No one acquainted with this campaign on the basis of the writings now extant will consider it a secret that the explanation for the failure of the Western operations is directly connected with the actions on the Southwestern Front. Accusations made in this sense against the command of the front come down basically to this, that the Southwestern Front carried on a completely independent operational policy, without taking into consideration either the general situation on the entire Polish Front or the action of th4e neighboring Western Front; at the decisive moment did not rend to the latter the necessary co-operation . . . Such, in general outline, is the version reiterated in all works devoted more or less to the question of the mutual interaction of the front in 1920, without excluding excluding even those published in most recent times . . .We find, for example, in the serious and interesting work of M. Movchin, “The Subsequent Operations according to the Experience of the Marne and the Vistula” (published by the State Publishers in 1928) as direct reference to “the failure by the Southwestern Front to carry out the categorical directives of the Commander-in-Chief concerning the advance of the First Mounted Army upon the Zamostye-Tomashev” (page 74). The graduates of our War College have studied the history of the Polish Campaign on the basis of these and analogous statements, and continue to carry away with them into the ranks of our Army corresponding impressions. To put it more briefly, the legend about that disastrous role of the Southwestern Front in 1920 . . . apparently does not evoke at present any doubt and is recognized as a fact which the future generations of tacticians and strategists are supposed to study.<br /><br />It is not at all surprising that Yegorov, who as Commander-in-Chief of the Southwestern Front, bore serious responsibility for the willful strategy of Stalin, proceeds then to minimize the gravity of his mistake by offering an interpretation of the military events of 1920 less unfavorable to himself. However, suspicion is at one evoked by the fact that Yegorov made his attempt at self-defense only nine years after the event, when “the legend about the disastrous role of the Southwestern Front” had already managed, according to his own words, to find definitive confirmation and even to become a part of military history. This tardiness is explained by the fact that the Army and the country, having suffered a great deal because of the failure of the Polish Campaign, would have indignantly resented any falsification, especially by those responsible for the failure. He had to wait and keep still.<br /><br />As for me, guided by my concern for the prestige of the Government as a whole and the desire not to inject quarrels into the Army, which was sufficiently disturbed anyway, I did not remind them publicly about the sharp conflict preceding the campaign with so much as a single word. Yegorov had to wait for the establishment of the totalitarian regime before he could come out with a rebuttal. The cautious Yegorov, lacking in independence, was undoubtedly writing by direct assignment from Stalin, although that name, incredibly as it may seem, remains entirely unmentioned in the book. Let us remember that 1929 opens the first period of the systematic review of the past.<br /><br />But if Yegorov tried indirectly to miminize Stalin’s guilt along with his own, he did not yet try to place the blame on the other side. Nor was this done by Voroshilov in the thoroughly apologetic article signed by him, “Stalin and the Red Army,” published the same year, 1929. “Only the failure of our troops near Warsaw,” Voroshilov states vaguely, “interrupted the advance of the Mounted Army which had made ready to attack Lwow and was at the time ten kilometers from it.” However, the matter could not rest with mere self-justification. In such questions Stalin never stops half-way. The moment finally arrived when the responsibility for the failure of the front could be placed on those who had interfered with the march on Lwow. [In 1935 the Red professor] S. Rabinovich [in his] “History of the Civil War” [wrote};<br /><br />* The First Army, which became involved in the battle for Lwow, could not directly help the Western Front without taking Lwow. It could not have given greater aid to the Western Front because that would have entailed the transfer of large forces near Lwow. Notwithstanding that, Trotsky categorically demanded the retirement of the First Mounte Army from Lwow and its concentration near Lublin for a blow along the rear of the Polish armies advancing on the flank of the troops of the Western Front . . . In consequence of the profoundly erroneous directive of Trotsky, the First Mounted had to abandon the capture of Lwow without being able to at the same time to offer help to the armies of the Western Front.<br /><br />[Or course], thast possibility was lost only because the Budenny-Voroshilov Cavalry, in agreement with the directives of Yegorov-Stalin and contrary to the orders of the Commander-in-Chief, turned toward Lublin several days late. [But the following year, the military journal] Krasnaya Konnitsa (Red Cavalry) [went even further in the article], “The Fighting Road of the First Mounted Army.” In this the author declared that the Mounted Army . . . “not only could not prevent the Polish Army from retreating behind the River Bug, but did not even break up the counter-attack of the Poles against the flanks of the Red troops marching on Warsaw.” Stalin and Voroshilov, concerned with the new occupation of Galicia, an objective of only secondary importance, sinmply did not want to help Tukhachevshy in the main task, the advance upon Warsaw. Now Voroshilov argued that only the capture of Lwow would have enabled him “to deliver a crushing blow in the rear of the White Guard Poles and their shock troops.”<br /><br />It is quite impossible to understand how it would have been possible by the capture of Lwow, which was 300 kilometers distant from the main theater of war, to strike at the “rear” of the Polish shock formations, which in the meantime had already pursued the Red Army to within 100 kilometers east of Warsaw. In order to attempt to strike a blow at the Poles in the “rear” it would have been necessary to pursue them in the first place and therefore first of all to abandon Lwow. Why ini that case was it necessary to occupy it? The capture of Lwow, which in itself was not devoid of military significance, could have been invested with revolutionary significance only by raising an insurrection of the Galacians against Polish rule. But that required time. The tempos of the military and the revolutionary tasks did not coincide in the least. From the moment that the danger of a decisive counter-attack near Warsaw became apparent, the continuation of the advance upon Lwow became not only purposeless but downright criminal. However, at this point the jealously between the two fronts intervened. Stalin, according to Voroshilov’s [own admission], did not hesitate to violate rules and orders.<br /><br />“Our situation seemed to me utterly hopeless,” wrote Pilsudsky. “I saw the only bright spot on the dark horizon in Budenny’s failure to launch his attack on my rear . . . the weakness which was exhibited by the Twelfth Army,” i.e. the army which upon the order of Commissar Stalin had failed to support Tukhachevsky’s army and had broken away from it. [Years later, justifying Stalin’s action, the “Red Star” excalimed indignantly]: “Covering up his disgusting defeatist maneuvers, the traitor Trotsky deliberately and consciously achieved the transfer of the Mounte Army to the north, presumably to aid the Western Front.” Unfortunately, I might add, I secured this transfer too late. If Stalin and Voroshilov and the illiterate Budenny had not “had their own war” in Galacia and the Red Cavalry had been at Lublin in time, the Red Army would not have suffered the disaster which forced upon the country the Peace of Riga, which by cutting us off from Germany exerted a tremendous influence on the future developments of both countries. After the hopes awakened by the determined drive on Warsaw, the defeat reverberated as an earthquake throughout the Party, upsetting its equilibrium and finding partial expression in the so-called Trade Union Discusion.<br /><br />[Writing in Pravda of February 23, 1930, the Party historian N. Popov, acknowledging that the advance on Warsaw was a mistake of the Politburo, declared that] “Trotsky . . . was opposed to this advance as a petty bourgeois revolutionist who felt that it was inadmissable to carry the revolution into Poland from the outside. For the same reasons, Trotsky was opposed to the Red Army’s aiding the rebels in Georgia in February, 1921. Trotsky’s anti-Bolshevik, Kautskyist reasoning was emphatically rejected by the Central Committee, both in July, 1920, in the case of Poland, and in February, 1921, in the case of the Menshevik government of Georgia.” [Five years later Rabinovich in his “History of the Civil War” acribed Trotsky’s] “errors in the Polish War” [to] “the fundamental political” [position that] “on our part the war was to stimulate and hasten the revolution in Poland, bring the revolution to Europe on the bayonets of the Red Army . . . Otherwise, the victory of Socialism in Russia is impossible. That was why Trotsky in opposition to arguments of Lenin and Stalin, declared that ‘the Polish front is the front of life and death for the Soviet Republic.’” The old accusation thus reversed itself. As late as 1930 it was recognized that I was an opponent of the March on Warsaw, and the crime charged against me was disinclination to introduce Socialism on bayonets. But in 1935, it was proclaimed that I advocated the March on Warsaw, guied by my determination to bring Socialism into Poland on bayonets. <br /><br />Thus, by degrees, Stalin solved the problem in his own peculiar way. He placed the responsibility for the Warsaw campaign on me. But I, as a matter of fact, was an opponent of the campaign. The responsibility for the disaster to the Red Army, predetermined by the absence of an uprising in the country and made worse by his own independent strategy, he again placed upon me, although I had warned them of the possibility of catastrophe and called for restraint of enthusiasm over ephemeral successes like the capture of Lwow. <br /><br />To shift the blame bit by bit to his opponent is a fundamental method of political struggle with Stalin and reaches its highest development in the Moscow trials. Let us also note in passing that Stalin contributed no constructive effort to the Polish War that is worthy of any notice. The mail and telegrams of the time show with whom I had occasion to correspond from day to day in determining the daily policy in connection with the Polish War: Lenin, Chicherin, Karakhan, Krestinsky, Kamenev, Radek. Of these six persons, only Lenin managed to die betimes. Chicherin died in disgrace, in complete isolation; Radek is living out the end of his days under arrest; Karakhan, Krestinsky and Kamenev have been executed.<br /><br />The end of the Polish Campaign enabled us to concentrate our forces against Wrangel, who in the spring emerged from the Crimean Penisular and, by threatening to take the Donetz Basin, placed the coal supply of the Republic in jeopardy. Several overwhelming attacks at Nikopol and Starkhovka disloged Wrangel’s unites from their positions, and the Red Army marched ahead, demolishing at the climax of the campaign the fortifications of Perekop and the Sivash Isthmus. The Crimea again became Soviet. [As might be expected, “the basic strategic idea in the impending operation was personally determined by Comrade Stalin.” Yegorov wrote in Pravda, of November 14, 1935, on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of Wrangel’s defeat]:<br /><br />* Trotsky maintained the most harmful view that the Wrangel front was nothing else than a separate sector of third-rate significance. Against this most dangerous view Comrade Stalin was forced to come out most resolutely. The Central Committee headed by Lenin entirely supported Stalin.<br /> <br />Suffice it to say that S. Gussev, who was a genuine agent of Stalin’s in the Red Army, as Mekhlis is now, in his article, “The Rout of Wrangel” [published] in 1925, did not deem it necessary even once to mention the name of Stalin.<br /><br />Throughout the period of the Civil War, Stalin remained a third-rate figure, not only in the Army but in the field of politics as well. He presided at the congresses of the Collegium of the Commissariat of Nationalities and at the congresses of certain nationalities. He carried on negotiations with Finland, with the Ukraine, with the Bashkirs, i.e. executing essential but nevertheless secondary commissions of the government. He had nothing to do with the matters of major policy presented at the congresses of the Party, of the Sovert or of the Third International. At the Eleventh Conference of the Russian Communist Party, held in December, 1921, Yaroslavsky, in the name of the Organizational Committee, proposed the following list of names for the Praesidium: Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev, Petrovsky, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Yaroslavsky, Sulimov, Komarov, Rudzutak,I.N. Smirnov and Rukhimovich. The list is interesting both because of the composition and order of names. The authors of the list, Old Bolsheviks on the order of Yaroslavsky, placed Zinoviev in second place, so as to remind them that he was an Old Bolshevik, Outside of the first four figures, the remaining members, likewise Old Bolsheviks, were all regional leaders. There was no room for Stalin in the list, yet the calendar indicates the end of the year 1921. The Civil War was completely in the past. It had not made Stalin a leader.Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1123836327874097812005-08-12T01:44:00.000-07:002005-08-12T01:45:27.973-07:00Trotsky's 'Stalin' - Chapt 9 Civil WarCHAPTER NINE: THE CIVIL WAR<br /><br />PART ONE: STALIN’S ROLE IN THE RED ARMY<br /><br /><br />There is a riot at every step as one goes through current historical publications: in Brest-Litovsk Trotsky did not carry out Lenin’s instructions; at the Southern Front Trotsky went against Lenin’s directives; on the Eastern Front Trotsky acted contrary to Lenin’s orders, and so forth and so on. In the first place, it should be pointed out that Lenin could not give me personal directives. Relations in the Party were not like that. We were both members of the Central Committee, which settled all differences of opinion. Whenever there was a disagreement between Lenin and me, and such disagreements occurred more than once, the question was automatically referred to the Politburo of the Central Committee, which made the decision. Hence, strictly speaking, it was never in any way a question of my violating Lenin’s directives. But this is only one aspect of the matter – the formal one. Getting down to essentials, one cannot help asking: was there any sound reason for carrying out the directives of the Lenin had placed at the head of the War Department a person who committed nothing but errors and crimes; at the head of the national economy – Rykov, a “self-confessed” restorer of capitalism and future agent of Fascism; at the head of the Communist International – that future Fascist and traitor, Zinoviev; at the head of the Party’s official newspaper and among the leaders of the Communist International – that future Fascist bandit, Bukharin?<br /><br />All those who headed the Red Army during the Stalinist period –Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Bluecher, Budenny, Yakir, Uborevich, Gamarnik, Dybenko, Fed’ko, [Kork, Putna, Feldman, Alksnis, Eidemann, Primakov, and many others]’ –were each in his time advanced to responsible military posts when I was the head of the War Department, in most cases advanced personally by me during my tours of the fronts and during my direct observation of their war work. However bad, therefore, my own leadership was, it was apparently good enough to have selected the best available military leaders, since for more than ten years Stalin could find no one to replace them. True, almost all the Red Army Leaders of the Civil War, all those who subsequently built our army eventually proved to be “traitors” and “spies.” But that does not alter the case. It was they who had defended the revolution and the country. If in 1933 it developed that it was Stalin and not anyone else who had built the Red Army, then it would seem that the responsibility for selecting such a staff of commanders should fall upon him. From this contradiction official historians extricate themselves not without some difficulty, yet with aplomb. The responsibility for the appointment of traitors to commanding positions is placed entirely upon me, while the honor of the victories secured by these very traitors belongs indisputably to Stalin. Today this unique division of the historical function is known to every school boy from a History edited by Stalin himself. <br /><br />There are two aspects to military work in the epoch of the Civil War. One was to select the necessary workers, to make proper disposition to them, to establish the necessary supervision over the commanding staff, to extirpate the suspects, to exert pressure, to punish. All of these activities of the administrative machine suited Stalin’s talents to perfection. But there was also another side, which had to do with the necessity of improvising an Army out of human raw material, appealing to the hearts of the soldiers and the commanders, arousing their better selves, and inspiring them with confidence in the new leadership. Of this Stalin was utterly incapable. It is impossible, for example, to imagine Stalin appearing under the open sky before a regiment; for that he did not have any qualifications at all. He never addressed himself to the troops with written appeals, evidently not trusting his own seminarist rhetoric. His influence at those sectors of the front where he worked was not significant. It remained impersonal, bureaucratic and policemanlike.<br /><br />I remember during the Civil War asking a member of the Central Committee, Serebryakov, who at that time was working with Stalin in the Revolutionary Council of War of the Southern Front, whether he could not manage without Stalin for the sake of economizing forces? Serebryakov replied: “No, I cannot exert pressure like Stalin. It is not my specialty.” The ability to “exert pressure” was what Lenin prized so highly in Stalin. The more the state machine for “exerting pressure” gained momentum and the further the spirit of the revolution was removed from this machine, the more confident Stalin felt.<br /><br />If the front attracted Stalin, it also repelled him. The military machine guaranteed the possibility of issuing orders. But Stalin was not at the head of that machine. At first he headed only one of twenty armies; later he was at the head of one of the five or six fronts. He established severe discipline, held his hand firmly on all the levers, did not tolerate disobedience. At the same time, while at the head of the army, he systematically instigated other to violate the orders of the front. In command of the Southern or Southwestern Front, he violated orders of the Chief Command. In the Tsarist army, in addition to military subordination there existed an unwritten subordination: the Grand Dukes who held one or another commanding or high administrative post often ignored their superior officers and introduced chaos in the administration of the army and navy. I remember remaking to Lenin that Stalin, taking undue advantage of his position as member of the Central Committee of the Party, was introducing the regime of the Grand Dukes in our army. [Ten years later] Voroshilov [glibly admitted in his essay on] Stalin and the Red Army, “Stalin was ready to go counter to any regulation, any subordination.” Gendarmes are recruited from poachers. <br /><br />Conflicts between the lower and higher orders are in the nature of things. The army is almost always dissatisfied with the front, the front is always agitating against the General Staff, especially when things do not go very happily. What characterized Stalin is that he systematically exploited these frictions and developed them into bitter feuds. Drawing his collaborators into dangerous conflict, Stalin thereby welded them together and placed them in dependence upon himself. Twice he was recalled from the front by direct order of the Central Committee. But at each new turn of events he was again sent out. Notwithstanding repeated opportunities, he acquired no prestige in the Army. However, those military collaborators who were under his command, once having been drawn into the struggle against the Center, remained in the future closely connected with him. The Tsaritsyn group became the nucleus of the Stalinist faction.<br /><br />Stalin’s role in the Civil War may perhaps be measured best of all by the fact that at the end of it his personal authority had not grown in the least. It could never enter anyone’s head at that time to say or to write that Stalin “saved” the Southern Front or had played an important role on the Eastern Front or even that he had saved Tsaritsyn from falling. In numerous documents, reminiscences and anthologies devoted to the Civil War, Stalin’s name either is not mentioned at all or is mentioned among a lot of other names. Moreover, the Polish War placed on his reputation – at least, in the more well-informed circles of the Party –an ineradicable stain. He evaded participation in the campaign against Wrangel, whether actually because of illness or because of other considerations, it is difficult now to decide. In any event, he emerged from the Civil War as unknown and alien to the masses as he had from the October Revolution.<br /><br />“At that difficult period, 1918-1920,” write the latest historians, “Comrade Stalin was transferred from one front to the another, to the greatest danger spots of the Revolution.” In 1922 the People’s Commissariat of Education published an “Anthology for Five Years,” made up of fifteen articles, among them one on “Building the Red Army,” and another, “Two years in the Ukraine,” both of them dealing with the Civil War. There is not one word about Stalin in either article. The following year a two-volume anthology entitled, “The Civil War” was published. It consisted of documents and other material on the history of the Red Army. At that time no one was yet interested in giving such an anthology a tendentious character. In the whole anthology there is not one word about Stalin. In the same year, 1923, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet published a volume of four hundred pages entitled, “Soviet Culture.” In the section devoted to the Army there are numerous portraits under the title, “The Creators of the Red Army.” Stalin is not among them. In the section entitled “The Armed Forces of the Revolution During the First Seven Years of October,” [“October” is synonymous with “October Revolution,” which is her viewed as having begun in 1917, and still continuing – C.M.] Stalin’s name is not even mentioned. Yet this section is illustrated not only with my portrait and those of Budenny and Blucher, but even with Voroshilov’s. And among the Civil War leaders named are not only Antonov-Ovseyenko, Dybenko, Yegorov, Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Putna, Sharangovich, but many others, almost all of whom were subsequently proclaimed enemies of the people and shot. Of those [mentioned, only] two –Frunze and S. Kamenev – died f natural death [only, no doubt, because they managed to die before the great purge.] And a cloud still hangs over the circumstances of Frunze’s death. Among those mentioned in this volume, as commander of the Baltic Fleets during the Civil War, is Raskolnikov, [who refused to return to the Soviet Union when recalled from his post as Soviet Minister to Bulgaria in 1938, at the time that Stalin’s purge turned upon the diplomatic corps. After writing an open letter of accusation against Stalin, he died suddenly under mysterious circumstances, apparently poisoned.]<br /><br />Voroshilov contends nonchalantly that “in the period 1918-1920, Stalin was perhaps the only man in the Central Committee sent from one fighting front to another.” The word “perhaps” is designed, no doubt, as balm for Voroshilov’s conscience, for while he wrote that statement he was fully aware of the fact that any number of members and agents of the Central Committee played no less a part in the Civil War than Stalin, and others an immeasurably greater part – among them, I.N. Smirnov, Smilga, Sikolnikov, Lshevich, Muralov, Rosenholtz, Ordzhonikidze, Frunze, Antonov-Ovseyenko, Berzin, Gussev. All of these, he knew, spent the entire three years at the various fronts either as members of the Revolutionary Councils of War of the Republic, of the fronts and of armies, or at the head of armies and fronts, and even (as in the case of Sokolnikov and Lashevich) as military commanders, while Stalin’s total sojourn at all the fronts was less than one year out of the three years of the Civil War.<br /><br />In some of the official publications it is mentioned in passing, seemingly on the basis of some sort of evidence in the archives, that Stalin was at one time on the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic. No specific reference is made to the precise period of his participation in that highest military organ. In a special monograph, “The Revolutionary Council of War of the U.S.S.R. for Ten Years,’ composed by three authors in 1928, when all power was already concentrated in Stalin’s hands, it is stated:<br /> <br />On December 2nd, 1919, Comrade Gussev was included in the Revolutionary Council of War. Subsequently throughout the course of the entire period of the Civil War, Comrades Stalin, Podvoisky, Okulov, Antonov-Ovseyenko and Serebryakov were appointed to the Revolutionary Council of War at various times.<br /><br />A history of the Communist Party edited by N.L. Meshcheryakov in 1934, after glibly repeating that lie that Stalin “spent the period of the Civil War principally at the front,” declares that Stalin “was a member of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic from 1920 to 1923.” In the twentieth volume of Lenin’s Miscellany (page 9) Stalin is referred to as a “member of the praesidium of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic . . . since 1920. One of these telegrams is from Stalin as a member of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic to Budenny and Voroshilov, dated June 3rd; and second – a routine report on the situation at the front from Budenny and Voroshilov to Stalin in his above capacity, dated June 25th. The third telegram is from Frunze, in command of the Southern Front, to Lenin, as Chairman of the Council of Defense, announcing termination of military operations against Wrangel –i.e., the end of the Civil War proper –date November 15th. On the basis of these documents, the only evidence so far published, it would seem that Stalin was actually a member of the Supreme War Council for the Republic at least from June 3rd to June 25th, or for slightly more than three full weeks in 1920. No evidence of his membership is adduced before or after these two dates in June of that year. Why not? True, the five volumes published by the War Department in which my orders, appeals, and speeches were gathered, were not only confiscated Ann destroyed, but mere reference to them, let alone quotations from them, were tabooed. The Proletarian Revolution, the official historical journal of the Party, in its issue of October, 1924, wrote of these five volumes, which contained nothing but documents of the Civil War: “In these . . . volumes the historians of out revolution will find a great quantity of tremendously valuable documentary material.” <br /><br />But in the archives of the War Department remain stenographic transcripts of the sessions of the Council of War. The records of that institution were kept with scrupulous accuracy and preserved in complete security. Why are not these records cited to establish the actual period during which Stalin was a member of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic? The answer is simple enough: because Stalin is not mentioned in the minutes of its sessions as among those present, except once or twice as a petitioner on local matters, and never mentioned as an actual member of the Council, let alone its non-existent “praesidium.” Yet Stalin was appointed to membership on that body by order of the Party Central Committee in the spring of 1920.<br /><br />The explanation of this puzzling circumstance, as far as I can remember it, is rather revealing of Stalin’s character. Throughout the years of Civil War, during every conflict with Stalin, I tried to put him in the position of having to formulate his views on military problems clearly and definitely. I tried to transform his sulking and surreptitious opposition into an open one, or to replace it with his articulate participation in a leading military organ. By agreement with Lenin and Krestinsky, Who wholeheartedly supported my military policy, I finally succeeded –I no longer remember under what pretext –in securing Stalin’s appointment to the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic. There was nothing left for Stalin to do but to accept the appointment. But he found a simple way out: under the pretext of being overloaded with work he did not even once appear at any session of [that supreme military body]. <br /><br />Now it may seem strange that no one in the course of the fist twelve years of the Soviet regime ever mentioned either the alleged “leadership” of Stalin in military affairs or even his “active” participation in the Civil War. Yet this is easily explained by the simple fact that there were still many thousands of military men about who knew what had actually taken place and how. <br /><br />Even in the Red Army Anniversary issue of Pravda of 1930 the claim was not yet made that Stalin was the chief organizer of the Red Army as a whole but only of the Red Cavalry. Eight years earlier to the day, on February 23rd, 1922, Pravda had published a somewhat different account of the formation of the Red Cavalry in an article on the Civil War:<br /> <br />* Mamontov occupied Kozlov and Tambov for a time, wreaking great havoc. “Proletarians, to horse!” That slogan of Comrade Trotsky’s for the formation of the mount5ed masses was greeted with enthusiasm, and by the 19th of October, Budenny’s Army was striking blows at Mamontov under Voronezh.<br /><br />[As late as] 1926, not only after my removal from the War Department, but after I had already been subjected to cruel persecutions, the War College published a work of historic research, “How the Revolution was Fought,” in which the authors, well-known Stalinists, wrote:<br /><br />Comrade Trotsky’s slogan, “Proletarians, to horse!” was the stirring slogan for accomplishing the organization of the Red Army in that respect.<br /><br />i.e. in regard to the creation of the Red Cavalry. In 1926 there was as yet no mention of Stalin as organizer of the cavalry. <br /><br />[Voroshilov insists upon] Stalin’s great role in organizing the mounted army. “This was,” writes Voroshilov, “the first experiment in uniting cavalry divisions into a single unit as large as an army. Stalin foresaw the might of the mounted masses in the Civil War. He thoroughly understood their tremendous significance for a devastating maneuver. But in the past no one had had such a unique experience as action by mounted horse armies. There was nothing written about it in scientific works, and therefore such a measure evoked either amazement or direct opposition. Especially opposed to it was Trotsky.” [Arguing this, Voroshilov merely exposes his ignorance of military affairs, which is exceeded only by his aptitude for prevarication. The point is, that the question of whether to] unite two corps and a sharpshooting brigade into a special mounted army or to leave these three units at the disposal of the command of the front was a problem that had nothing whatever in common with the general appreciation of lack of appreciation of the significance of cavalry. The most important criterion was the question of the command: Will Budenny be able to manage such a mass of horsemen? Will he be able to rise from tactical tasks to strategic ones? Without an exceptional commander of the front, who knew and understood cavalry, and without reliable means of communication, the creation of a special mounted army would have been unwise, since an excessive massing of cavalry always threatens to lessen the unit’s basic advantage, [which is its] mobility. The disagreements on this matter had an episodic character, and if history were to repeat itself I would again repeat my doubts. [Nevertheless, the specific circumstances were such that] we did create the mounted army.<br /><br />[As a matter of fact, the] campaign for the creation of the Red Cavalry made up the major portion of my work during many months in 1919. As I have said [elsewhere], the [Red] Army was built by the worker who was mobilizing the peasant. The worker had an advantage over the peasant not only in his general level of culture, but especially in his knack of using weapons of new technique. This secured a double advantage for the worker in the Army. With the cavalry it was quite a different matter. The homeland of the cavalrymen were the Russian steppes. The best horsemen were the Cossacks. Next to the best were the sons of the rich peasants of the steppes who owned horses and know horses. The cavalry was the most reactionary part of the old army and it supported the Tsarist regime longer than any other branch of the service. It was, therefore, doubly difficult to form a mounted army. It was necessary to accustom the worker to the horse. It was necessary that the Petrograd and Moscow proletarians actually get on horse back, if only in the role of commissars or rear rank privates. Their task was to create strong and reliable revolutionary cells in the cavalry squadrons and regiments. Such was the sense of my slogan, “Proletarians, to horse!” The whole country, all the industrial cities, were covered with placards bearing that slogan. I toured the country from end to end and assigned tasks concerning the formation of [cavalry] squadrons and [cavalry] regiments by reliable Bolshevik workers. One of my secretaries, Poznansky, was personally occupied –and with great success, I might add –in the formation of the Red Cavalry units. Only this work of proletarians who got up on horseback actually transformed the wobbly guerilla detachments into well-trained units [and made possible the formation of a reliable mounted army].<br /><br /><br /><br />Three years of the Soviet regime were years of civil war. The War Department determined the government work of the entire country. All the other government activity was subsidiary to it. After it in importance came the Commissariat of Supplies. Industry worked chiefly for war. All the other departments and institutions were subjected to constant contraction or reduction and some were even completely closed. All who were active and courageous were subjected to mobilization. Members of the Central Committee, People’s Commissars, and other [leading Bolsheviks], spent most of their time at the front as members of Revolutionary Councils of War and sometimes as army commanders. The war itself was a hard school of governmental discipline for a revolutionary party which only a few months before had emerged from the underground. War with its pitiless demands, selected the wheat from the chaff within the Party and within the State machines. Very few member of the Central Committee remained in Moscow: Lenin, who was the political center; Sverdlov, who was not only President of the Central [Executive] Committee [of the Soviet], but also General Secretary of the Party, as editor of Pravda. Zinoviev, whom everyone including himself regarded as unfit for military affairs, remained in Petrograd as its political leader. Kamenev, the leader of Moscow, was several times sent to the front, although he, too, by nature was decidedly a civilian. Lashevich, Smilga, I.N. Smirnov, Sokolnikov, Serebryakov, [all leading] members of the Central Committee, were almost constantly at the front.<br /><br />It would carry us too far afield to enumerate even briefly the careers in the revolutionary underground, in October and during the Civil War of these and many other militants. Any number of them were in no way inferior to Stalin and quite a few excelled him in those values that revolutionists prize most –political clarity, moral courage, ability as agitator, propagandist and organizer. It is suffici8ent to recall that when the Red Army was being organized, other men were considered better fitted than Stalin for the task. The Supreme Council of War, created on March 4th, 1918, consisted of Trotsky as chairman, Podvoisky, Sklyansky and Danishevsy as members; Bonch-Bru-yevich as chief clear and a staff of Tsarist officers as military specialists. When it was reorganized on September 2nd, 1918, into the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, it was made up of Trotsky, as Chairman, Vatzetis as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and following as members: Ivan Smirnov, Resenholtz, Raskolnikov, Sklyansky, Muralov, and Yurenev. When on the 8th of July, 1919, it was decided to have a smaller and more compact staff, the Revolutionary Council of War was made up of Trotsky as Chairman, Sklyansky as Vice-Chairman, Rykov, Smilga, Gussev as members and Commander-in-Chief S. Kamenev. Like others, Stalin too found his place in the Army, and the Red Army found due application for his talents. What is contrary to the facts is the latter-day claim of Stalin’s pre-eminent role in the organization of the Red Army and in the conduct of the Civil War.<br /><br />The army was built under fire. The methods of building it, in which improvisation predominated, were subjected to immediate trial in action. In order to solve each now battle problem, it was necessary to organize new regiments and divisions from scratch. The army –growing chaotically by leaps and bounds –was build by the worker, who mobilized the peasant and attracted the former officer to the cause and placed them under his control. This was no easy task. The material conditions were extremely difficult. Industry and transport were completely disorganized, there were no reserve supplies, there was no agricultural economy, and all the processes of industrial disintegration were constantly deepening. Under such conditions, there could be no question if compulsory military service and compulsory mobilization. Temporarily, at least, it was necessary to resort to the volunteer system. <br /><br />Those who had military training were tired of fighting in the trenches, and to them the Revolution meant deliverance from war. It was no simple matter to mobilize them again for another war. It was easier to mobilize the youngsters who knew nothing about war, but they had to be trained, and the enemy did not allow us sufficient time for that. The number of our own officers, connected in one way or another with our Party and unconditionally trustworthy, was insignificant. They, therefore, played a great political role in the Army. But their military vision was myopic. When their knowledge proved insufficient, they often used their revolutionary and political authority unwisely and thus hampered the task of building the Army. The Party itself, with nine months ago had emerged from the Tsarist underground and several months later had been subjected to the persecution of the Provisional Government, found it difficult, after the brilliant victory of October, to adjust itself to the thought that the Civil War was still ahead. Altogether, insuperable difficulties accumulated in the way of creating the Red Army. At times it seemed that arguments were consuming all the energy spent. Will we or will we not be able to create an army? The fate of the Revolution rested on that question. <br /><br />The transition from the revolutionary struggle against the old state to the creation of a new state, from the demolition of the Tsarist Army to the creation of a Red Army, was accompanied by a Party crisis, or rather by a series of crises. At each step the old methods of thought and the old ways came into conflict with the new tasks. Rearmament of the Party was indispensable. Since the Army is the most necessary of all the organizations of the state and since during the first years of the Soviet regime the center of attention was the defense of the Revolution, it is no wonder that all the discussions, conflicts and groupings inside the Party revolved around the questions of building the Army. An opposition appeared almost from the moment we made our fist efforts to pass from disjointed armed detachments to a centralized army. The majority of the Party and of the Central Committee in the end supported the military leadership, since victory after victory spoke in its favor. However, there was no lack of attacks and waverings. The Party enjoyed full freedom of criticism and opposition in the very thick of the Civil War. Even at the front at closed Party meetings the Communists often subjected the policy of the military command to merciless attacks. It never occurred to anyone in those days to persecute the critics. The punishments at the front were very stringent –and they included Communists –but they were imposed only for the non-fulfillment of military duties. Within the Central Committee, the opposition was a of a very much weaker character, since I enjoyed the support of Lenin. In general, it must be said that whenever Lenin and I were in agreement, and we were on the majority of occasions, the remaining members of the Central Committee invariably supported us, almost always unanimously; the experience of the October Revolution had entered the life of the Party as a potent lesson.<br /><br />It must be said, however, that Lenin’s support was not unconditional. Lenin wavered more than once, and in several instances was gravely mistaken. My advantage over him was in the fact that I uninterruptedly traveled along the various fronts, came in contact with a tremendous number of people, from local peasants, prisoners of war, and deserters, to the highest Army and Party leaders at the front. This mass of varied impressions was of inestimable value. Lenin never left Moscow, and all the threads were concentrated in his hands. He had to pass judgment on military questions, which were new to all of us, on the basis of information which for the most part came from the higher-ups of the Party. No one was able to understand individual voices coming from below better than Lenin. But these reached him only on exceptional occasions.<br /><br />In August, 1919, when I was at the front near Svyazhsk, Lenin asked my opinion concerning a proposal introduced by one of the prominent Party members to replace all officers of the General Staff with Communists. I replied sharply in the negative. “True,” I replied by direct wire from Svyazhsk to the Kremlin on 233rd of August, 1918, “of the officers, many are traitors. But there is evidence of sabotage during the movement of troops on the railways as well, yet no one proposes to replace railway engineers with Communists. I consider Larin’s proposal thoroughly worthless. We are now creating conditions under which we are carrying on a ruthless selection of officers: on the one hand, concentration camps, and on the other hand, the campaign on the Eastern Front. Catastrophic measures like Larin’s are dictated only by panic . . . Victories at the front will enable us to improve our present selections and will give us cadres of reliable General Staff men . . . Those who protest most against the use of officers are either panicky people, or those far removed from the work of the military mechanism, or those Party military workers who themselves are worse than any saboteur; they don’t know how to get things done, they behave like satraps, they don’t do anything themselves, and when they fail, they place the blame on the General Staff man.” <br /><br />Lenin did not insist. Meantime, victories took their turn with defeats. Victories strengthened confidence in my military policy; reverses, multiplying inevitably the number of betrayals, evoked a knew wave of criticism and protest in the Party. In March, 1919, at the evening session of the Council of People’s Commissars, in connection with a dispatch concerning the treason of certain Red Army commanders, Lenin wrote me a note: “hadn’t we better kick out all the specialists and appoint Lashevich Commander-in-Chief?” I understood that the opponents of the policy of the War Department, and particularly Stalin, had pressed Lenin with special insistence during the preceding days and had aroused certain doubts in him. I wrote my reply on the reverse side of his query: “Childish!” Apparently the angry retort produced an impression. Lenin appreciated clear-cut formulations. The next day, with the report from the General Staff in my pocket, I walked into Lenin’s office in the Kremlin and asked him:<br /><br /> “Do you know how many Tsarist officers we have in the Army?”<br /> “No I don’t,” he answered, interested.<br /> “Approximately?”<br /> “I don’t know.” He categorically refused to guess.<br /> “No less than thirty thousand!” the figure simply astonished him. “Now count up,” I insisted, “the percentage of traitors and deserters among them, and you will see that it is not so great. In the meantime, we have built an army out nothing. This army is growing and getting stronger.”<br /><br />Several days later at a meeting in Petrograd, Lenin drew the balance sheet of his own doubts on the question of military policy: “When recently Comrade Trotsky told me that . . . the number of officers runs into several tens of thousands, I got a definite idea of how best to make use of our enemy; how to compel those who are the opponents of Communist to build it; how to build Communism out of the bricks gathered by the capitalists for use against us . . . We have no other bricks.”<br /><br />Pedantry and set patterns were alien to us. We resorted to all sorts of combinations and experiments in our pursuit of success. One army was commanded by a former non-commissioned officer with a general as chief of staff. Another army was commanded by a former general with a guerrilla fighter as second in command. One division was commanded by a former private, while a neighboring division was commanded by a colonel of the General Staff. This “eclecticism” was forced on us by the circumstances. However, the considerable percentage of educated officers exerted an exceedingly favorable influence on the general level of the command. The amateur commanders learned as they went along, and many of them became first-rate officers. In 1918, 76% of the whole command and administration of the Red Army was composed of former officers of the tsarist Army and only 12.8% consisted of fledgling Red Commanders, who naturally occupied the lower positions. By the end of the Civil War, the staff of commanders consisted of workers and peasants without any military education except direct battle experience, who had advanced from the ranks in the course of the Civil War; former soldiers and non-commissioned officers of the old army’ young commanders who had gone through the course of the Soviet military school, 34% were officers in the Tsarist Army.<br /><br />From the old officer corps that entered into the Red Army, on the one hand, progressive elements who sensed the meaning of the new epoch (they were a small minority); a broad layer of those who were inert and talentless and who joined the Army only because they did not know how to do anything else; and on the other hand active counter-revolutionists who were awaiting a favorable moment to betray us. The non-commissioned officers of the old army were recruited by means of special mobilization. From among them came a number of exceptional military commanders, the most famous of whom was the former Cavalry Sergeant-Major, Simeon Buddeny. But they, too, were not any too reliable as a class, for before the Revolution non-commissioned officers were chiefly the sons of the wealthy peasantry and city bourgeoisie. From them came a small number of deserters who played an active role in counter-revolutionary uprisings and in the White Army. A commissar, usually a worker Bolshevik with experience in the World War, was attached to each commander. We were looking forward to preparing a reliable officer corps.<br /><br />“This institution of commissars,” I declared when I was at the head of the War Department in December, 1919, “is to serve as a scaffolding . . . Little by little we shall be able to remove this scaffolding.” At that time on one foresaw that twenty years later the institution of commissars would again be revived, but this time for opposite purposes. The commissars of the Revolution were representatives of the victorious proletariat watching over commanders who had come mainly from the bourgeois classes; the latter-day commissars were representatives of the bureaucratic caste watching over officers who for the most part had come from the rank and file.<br /><br />[On the 22nd of April, 1918, a decree was published concerning the centralization of village, regional, provincial and territorial commissariats of War.] In July I reported to the Fifth Congress of Soviets –[the Congress which ratified the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the plan for creating the Red Army] –that many of the lower commissariats had not yet been organized because of lack of competent military men. Our objective was to centralize the military-administrative organs for the purpose of mobilization and the formation of Regular Army units. Each military region was headed by a Revolutionary Council of War, of three members: a representative each from the Party and the government, and one military specialist. Since a considerable number of military specialists were appointed simultaneously to the front as well as to regional, provincial, territorial and township war commissariats, we were a of course to a large extent feeling our way in the dark. We organized a military attestant committee. But that did not have at its disposal the necessary information for an adequate appraisal of the old generals and officers from the point of view of their loyalty to the new revolutionary regime. Let us not forget that the job was undertaken in the spring of 1918 –that is, a few months after the conquest of power –and that the administrative machine was being built amid the greatest chaos with the aid of the improvisations of chance assistants taken largely upon accidental recommendations. Indeed, there could have been no other way under the circumstances. The verification of the military specialists, their definitive selection and the like took place gradually.<br /><br />Among the officers there were many, perhaps a great majority, who did not know themselves where they stood. The outright reactionaries had fled in the very beginning, the most active of them to the peripheries, which were then building up the White Fronts. The rest hesitated, bided their time, could not make themselves abandon their families, did not know what would become of them, and by inertia found themselves in the military-administrative or commanding apparatuses of the Red Army. The further behavior of many of them was determined by the treatment they were accorded. Wise, energetic and tactful commissars –and such were in the minority – won over the officers at once, while they, who from force of habit had looked down on the commissars, were amazed by their resoluteness, daring and political definiteness. Such unions of commanders and commissars often lasted for a long time and were distinguished by great stability. When the commissar was ignorant and boorish and baited the military specialist, carelessly compromising him before the Red Army soldiers, friendship was out of the question, and the hesitating officer was finally inclined toward the enemy of the new regime.<br /><br />The atmosphere of Tsaritsyn, with its administative anarchy, guerrilla spirit, disrespect for the Center absence of administrative order and provocative boorishness towards military specialists, was naturally not conducive to winning the good-will of the latter and making them loyal servants of the new regime. It would be, of course a mistake to think that Tsaritzyn got along without military specialists. Every one of the improvising commanders had to have an officer who knew about the routine of military affairs. But the Tsaritsyn sort of specialists was recruited from the dregs of the officers –drunkards or those who had other wise lost all semblance of human dignity, prideless men who were ready to crawl on their belly before the new boss, flatter him, refrain from contradiction him in anything, and the like. This is the sort of specialist I found in Tsaritsyn. Voroshilov’s Chief-of-Staff was precisely that type of specialist. The name of this insignificant officer was never mentioned anywhere else and I don’t know anything about his fate. [He was] a docile and submissive former captain of the Tsarist army irresistibly addicted to alcoholic beverages. Eye to eye with this Chief-of-Staff, the Tenth Army Commander was never obliged to lower his head in embarrassment.<br /><br />In order to advance the commanders who were closest to the Soviet regime, a special mobilization of former Tsarist non-commissioned officers was made. Most of them had been promoted to non-commissioned ranks during the latter part of the war, so their knowledge of military affairs was of no great significance. However, the old non-commissioned officers, especially in the artillery and the cavalry, had an excellent comprehension of military matters and were really better informed and fare more experienced than the commissioned officers under whose command they served. To that category belonged people like Budenny, Blucher, Dybenko (a petty officer in the Navy) and a number of others. In Tsarist times these men were recruited from among the more literate, the most cultured, those more accustomed to command. Hence it was not surprising to find that these non-commissioned officers were almost exclusively the sons of rich peasants, of the petty gentry, or the city bourgeoisie, or petty officials, teachers, bookkeepers, and the like. Such types of non-commissioned officers gladly assumed command, but were not inclined to submit to and to tolerate the superior authority of commissioned officers.<br /><br />They were just as little inclined to recognize the authority of the Communist Party, knuckle down to its discipline and sympathize with its aims, especially in the sphere of agrarian affairs. Purchases at fixed prices, not to mention the expropriation of grain from the peasants, was met by them with furious enmity. To that class belonged the cavalry man, Dumenko [Note: The Stalinist historian E. Genkina on p 109 of her book “The Fight for Tsaritsyn in 1918” published by the political publications section of the All-Union Communist Party in 1940, writes of Dumenko: “Dumenko himself was a kulak by origin, had a windmill, two houses, etc. But during the imperialist war his cattle and horses were confiscated, and the Whites appropriated a few things. That pushed Dumenko temporarily into the camp of the Reds, he began to organize a cavalry detachment, but not at home, in the Cherkass Region of the Don Territory, but in the Sal Region, where he was not known as a kulak.” - C.M] the corps commander at Tsaritsyn and Budenny’s immediate superior (Budenny at that time commanded a division). Dumenko was more gifted than Budenny. But he ended up with the insurrection, killed all the Communists of his corps, attempted to join the forces of Denikin, was seized and executed. Budenny and the commanders close to him likewise experienced a period of wavering. One of the Tsaritsyn commanders of a brigade, subordinate to Budenny, revolted; many of the cavalry men joined the Greens. <br /><br />[Note: Although the Civil War was chiefly fought between the Reds and Whites, smaller groups were also involved in it. The most important of them were the Greens, peasant guerrilla detachments that would sally out of the green forests (hence, their name) to fight either the Reds or the Whites, but more often the Whites. The Greens regarded themselves as defenders of peasant democracy and were opposed to both Reds and Whites. The Green movement was most active in the Black Sea Basin, the Kuban Territory and the Crimea. As allies of the Reds in the winter of 1919-20, the Greens played an important part in the disintegration of General Denikin’s Army. The Green movement terminated about 1921, when limited freedom of trade was introduced and peasant insurrections generally were liquidated by the Soviet government – C.M.]<br /><br />The treason of the former Tsarist officer, Nossovich, who occupied a purely bureaucratic administrative post, produced of course less harm than the treason of Dumenko. But since the military opposition –the breeding ground of the Stalin faction – depended at the front on elements of the Dumenko’s type, this mutiny is not mentioned at all nowadays. [The subject is carefully avoided even in the 217-page history of the Tsaritsyn episode cited above with reference to Dumenko – C.M.]<br /><br /><br />PART TWO: STALIN AND TSARITSYN<br /><br />The reader who is not acquainted with the actual course of events and who at the present time cannot gain access to the archives will find it difficult to imagine the extent to which the proportions of events have been distorted. The whole world has heard by now about the defense of Tsaritsyn, about Stalin’s journey to the Perm front, or about the so-called Trade Union Discussion. These episodes loom today as the peaks on the historical range of events. But these alleged peaks have been artificially created. From the tremendous amount of material with which the archives are bulging, certain special episodes have been singled out, and these have been surrounded with imposing historical stage-effects. Subsequent works of official historiography piled up new exaggerations, based on the old exaggerations; to these, outright inventions have been added from time to time. The total effect is the product of stagecraft rather than of historic fact. Practically never does none meet reference to documents. The press abroad, and even learned historians, have come to regard these tall tales as original sources. In various countries one may now find specialists in history who know third-rate details of Tsaritzyn or the Trade Union Discussion but have practically no conception of events which were immeasurably more important and significant. Falsification in this matter has taken on the quality of an avalanche. [Yet it is simply] astonishing how very few documents and other authentic materials have been published concerning Stalin’s activity at the front and generally during the Civil War period.<br /><br />In accounts published during the years of the Civil War, the story of Tsaritsyn was one of the many completely unconnected with the name of Stalin. His role behind the scenes, which was very short-lived at best, was known to only a small number of people and offered absolutely no occasion for many words. In the anniversary article on the Tenth Army by Ordzhonikidze, and old pal of Stalin’s who proved faithful to him to the point of suicide, Stalin is not even mentioned. It was the same with other such articles. The Bolshevik Minin, Mayor of Tsaritsyn at the time and subsequently a member of the Tenth Army’s Revolutionary Council of War, wrote a heroic drama in 1925 entitled “The Encircled City,” which had so few references to Stalin in connection with the Tsaritsyn events that Minin ended up eventually as “an enemy of the people.” The pendulum of history had to swing very far before Stalin was raised to the heights of a hero of the Tsaritsyn epic.<br /><br />For years now it has become a tradition to represent matters as if in the spring of 1918 Tsaritsyn was of great strategic importance and Stalin was sent there to save the military situation. It was nothing of the kind. It was entirely a question of provisions. At a session of the Council of People’s Commissars on May 28, 1918, Lenin discussed with Tsuryupa, then in charge of supplies, the extraordinary methods then in vogue for supplying the capitals [Moscow and Petrograd] and the industrial centers with provisions. At the close of the meeting Lenin wrote to Tsuryapa: “This very day get in touch with Trotsky, by telephone, so that by tomorrow he can get everything started.” Further in the same communication, Lenin informed Tsuryupa of the Sovnarkom’s [a portmanteau world for the Russian equivalent of Council of People’ Commissars – C.M.] decision that People’s Commissar of Supplies Shlyapnikov was to leave immediately for the Kuban’ to co-ordinate the provisioning activities in the South for the benefit of the industrial regions. Tsuryaupa replied in part: “Stalin agrees to go to the Northern Caucasus. So send him. He knows local conditions there and Shlyapnikov will find it useful to have him around.” Lenin agreed: “Send them both off today.” During the next few days several additional decisions were made about Stalin and Shlyapnikov. Finally, as recorded in Lenin’s Miscellany, “Stalin was sent to the Northern Caucasus and to Tsaritsyn as general manager of provisioning activities in the South of Russia.” There was no mention whatever of military tasks.<br /><br />What happened to Stalin was what happened to many other Soviet officials, to droves of them. They were sent to various provinces to mobilize the collection of grain surpluses. Once there, they ran into White insurrections. Whereupon their provisioning detachments turning into military detachments. Many workers in the commissariats of Education, of Agriculture or other departments were thus sucked into the maelstrom of the Civil War in outlying regions, and, in a manner of speaking were obliged to change their various professions for the profession of arms. L. Kamenev, who next to Zinoviev was the most unmilitary member of the Central Committee, was sent in April, 1919, to the Ukraine to accelerate the movement of supplies to Moscow. He found that Lugansk had been surrendered and that danger threatened the entire Don Basin; moreover the situation in the recently-won Ukraine soon became increasingly less favorable. Just exactly as Stalin had in Tsaritsyn, Kamenev in the Ukraine found himself drawn into military operations. Lenin telegraphed to Kamenev: “Absolutely necessary that you personally . . . should not only inspect the expedite matters, but that you, yourself, should bring the reinforcements to Lugansk and to the entire Don Basin, because otherwise there is no doubt that the catastrophe will be tremendous and scarcely remediable; we will most surely perish, if we do not completely clear the Don Basin in a short time . . .” This was Lenin’s customary style in those days. On the basis of such quotations it is possible to prove that Lenin regarded the fate of the Russian Revolution as dependent on the military leadership of Kamenev in the South. At different times the very unmilitary Kamenev played a very prominent role at various fronts.<br /><br />[Note: The reference is to Lev Borisovich Kamenev, the Bolshevik leader, Trotsky’s brother-in-law, deputy chairman under Lenin in the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense (since 1922), appointed by Lenin himself as Lenin’ literary executor and editor of Lenin’s Collected Works, founder and first president of the Lenin Institute, Lenin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense, etc. who in 1919 was at the front as an extraordinary representative of the Council of Defense. This Kamenev was shot by Stalin’s order as a self-confessed traitor in 1936. He is not to be confounded with Sergei Segeyevich Kamenev, scion of a tsarist military family, who was a colonel in command of the 30th Poltlava Regiment at the time of the Revolution of 12917, was one of the tsarist officers drawn into the Red Army during Trotsky’s tenure as Commissar of War, appointed by Trotsky to the command of the Eastern Front in September, 1918, and made Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Republic in July, 1919, in succession to Joachim Joachimovich Vatzetis. S.S. Kamenev remained Commander-in-Chief until April, 1924, when the office was abolished. He subsequently became a member of the Communist Party and died a natural death. C.M,.] <br /><br />Under totalitarian concentration of all the means of oral and printed propaganda, it is impossible to crate as false a reputation for a city as for a man. Nowadays many heroic episodes of the Civil War are forgotten. Cities where Stalin played no part are scarcely remembered, while the very name of Tsaritsyn has been invested with mystic significance. It is necessary to bear in mind that our central position and disposition of the enemy in a large circle made it possible for us to act along internal operational lines and reduced our strategy to one simple idea: the consecutive liquidation of fronts depending on their relative importance. In that profoundly mobile war of maneuvers, various parts of the country acquired exceptional significance at certain important moments, and later lost it. However, the struggle for Tsaritsyn could never have attained the same significance, for example, as the struggle for Kazan’, from where the road to Moscow opened, or the struggle for Oryol, from where the was a short road by way of Tula to Moscow, or the struggle for Petrograd, the loss of which would have been a dire blow in itself and would have opened the road to Moscow from the north. Moreover, notwithstanding the assertions of latter-day historians the Tsaritsyn “was the embryo of the War Cikkegem where the cadres of the commanders for other numerous fronts were created, commanders who today are at the head of the basic units of the army,” the fact is that the most talented organizers and army leaders did not come Tsaritsyn. And I do not mean simply central figures, like Sklyansky, the real Carnot of the Red Army; or Frunze, a most talented military leader, who subsequently was placed at the head of the Red Army; or Tukhachevsky, the future reorganizer of the army; or Yegorov, the future Chief-of-Staff; or Yakir or Uborevich, or Kork, but many, many others. Every one of them was tested and trained in other armies and on other fronts. All of them had an extremely negative attitude toward Tsaritsyn, its know-nothing smugness, its constant extortions; on their lips the very word “Tsaritsynite” had a derogatory meaning. <br /><br />On May 23rd, 1918, Sergo [Ordzhonikidze] telegraphed to Lenin:<br /><br />The situation here is bad. We need resolute measures . . . The local comrades are too flabby. Every desire to help is regarded as interference in local affairs. Six trains of grain ready to move for Moscow are standing at the station and not being sent . . . I repeat again that what we need are the most resolute measures . . .<br /><br />Stalin arrived in Tsaritsyn in June, 1918, with a detachment of Red Guards, with two armored trains and with unlimited powers, in order to arrange for provisioning the hungry political and industrial centers with grain. Soon after his arrival several Cossack regiments surrounded Tsaritsyn,. The Cossack villages of the Don and the Kuban had risen against the Soviet Government. The Volunteer Army [of the Whites], which had been wandering and meandering through the steppes of the Kuban, had grown strong. The Soviet Army of the North Caucasus –the only granary of the Soviet Republic at the time –suffered heavily under the blows.<br /><br />Stalin was not supposed to stay in Tsaritsyn. He was supposed to [organize the dispatch of provision to Moscow and] proceed to the North Caucasus. But within one week of his arrival in Tsaritsyn, i.e., on June 13th, he wired to Lenin that the situation in Tsaritsyn “has sharply changed, because a detachment of Cossacks have made a sally at a point some forty versts away from Tsaritsyn.” From Stalin’s telegram of June 13th it is clear that he had been expected by Lenin to go to Novorossiisk, and take charge of the crucial developments in connection with the scuttling of the Black Sea Fleet. For at least the next two weeks he was still supposed to go to Novorossiisk. In his speech of June 28th, 1918, at the Fourth Conference of the Trade-Union and Factory Committees of Moscow [Lenin said]:<br /><br />* Comrades! I shall now . . . reply to the question about the Black Sea Fleet . . .I am going to tell you that it was Comrade Raskolnikov who acted there . . .Comrade Raskolnikov will be here himself and will tell you how he had urged that we should rather stand for the destruction of the fleet than let the German troops use it against Novorossiisk . . . This was the situation, and the People’s Commissars, Stalin, Shlyapnikov and Raskolnikov will soon come to Moscow and will tell you how everything happened.<br /><br />[However, instead of proceeding to the Northern Caucasus or, when the plans were altered by the change in the military situation, to Novorossiisk,] Stalin remained in Tsaritsyn until the latter was surrounded in July by the Whites. <br /><br />Stalin had expected to find little trouble and great glory in forwarding millions of bushels of grain to Moscow and other centers. But all he managed to send, notwithstanding his ruthlessness, was a shipment of three barges, referred to in his telegram of June 26th. Had he sent more, other telegrams to this effect would have been published and commented on long ago. Instead of that, there are inadvertent admissions of his failure as grain-deliverer in his own reports, culminating on August 4th in his statement that it was useless to expect any further provisions from Tsaritsyn. Unable to make good on his boastful promise to supply food to the Center, Stalin turned form the “food front” to the “military front.” He became dictator of Tsaritsyn and of the North Caucasian Front. He acquired extremely broad and practically unlimited powers, as the authorized representative of the Party and the Government. He had the right to carry through local mobilization, requisition property, militarize factories, arrest and try, appoint and dismiss. Stalin exercised authority with a heavy hand. All efforts were concentrated on the task of defense. All of the local Party and workers’ organizations were taken in hand, were supplemented with the new forces; the freebooting guerrillas were harnessed. The life of the entire city was suddenly squeezed in the vise of a ruthless dictatorship, “On the streets and at crossings were Red Army patrols,” writes Tarassov-Rodionov, “and in the middle of the Volga on an anchor, raising its black belly high out of the water, was a large barge, and looking askance at it was a flabby official in a faded uniform cap whispering anxiously to the little old women on shore: ‘There , , , is the Cheka!” But that was not the Cheka itself. That was only its floating prison. The Cheka was working in the center of the city, next to the Army headquarters. It was working . . . full blast. Not a day passed without bringing to light all sorts of conspiracies in what seemed the most reliable and respectable of places.”<br /><br />[on the 7th of July, approximately one month after his arrival in Tsaritsyn, Stalin wrote to Lenin (on the letter is the notation, “Hurrying to the front –writing only on business.”)]:<br /><br />* The line south of Tsaritsyn has not yet been re-established. I’m hurrying them, scolding everyone I should. I hope that soon we shall have it re-established. You may be sure that I will not spare anyone, neither myself nor others. But we will get you the grain. If our military “specialists” (the shoemakers!) were not asleep, the line would not have been broken and if the line is restored it will not by thanks to the military, but in spite of them.<br /><br />[On the 11th of July Stalin again telegraphed Lenin]: <br /><br />* Matters are complicated by the fact that the staff of the North Caucasian Military Region ;proved to be utterly unadapted to the conditions of fighting against counter-revolution. It is not only that our “specialists” are psychologically incapable of resolute struggle with counter-revolution, but also because, being staff men who know only how to sketch blueprints and how to propose plans for reformation, they are utterly indifferent to operative action . . . and generally feel themselves to be outsiders . . . I do not think that I have the right to regard this with indifference, when Kaledin’s front has been separated from the provisioning point and the north from the grain region. I will continue to straighten out these and many other deficiencies, wherever I find them; I am undertaking a number of measures and will continue to do so, even if I have to remove all the ranking men and commanders who are inimical, notwithstanding difficulties of formalities, which I will break when necessary. Let it be understood that I assume all responsibility before all the highest institutions.<br /><br />[On the 4th of August, Stalin wrote from Tsaritsyn “to Lenin, Trotsky and Tsuryaupa”]:<br /><br />* The situation in the South is not one of the best. The Council of War has received a heritage of utter disorder, due partly to the inertness of the former military leader, partly to the conspiracy of persons brought by the military leader into the various departments of the military region. We had to begin all over again . . . We repealed what I would call the old criminal order, and only after that our advance began . . .<br /><br />Similar, communications were received in those days from all parts of the country, because chaos reigned everywhere. What is surprising are the words about the “heritage of utter disorder.” The military regions were established in April and had hardly started working, so that it was rather premature to speak of a “heritage of utter disorder.” <br /><br />The task of provisioning on any sort of wide scale proved to be insoluble because of the military situation: “Contacts with the South and with its load of provisions are broken,” wrote Stalin on the 4th of August, “and the Tsaritsyn region itself, which connects the Center with the Northern Caucasus, is cut off in its turn, or practically cut off from the Center.” Stalin explained the cause of the extreme aggravation of the military situation on the one hand by the turn of the strong peasant, “who in October had fought for the Soviet government, against the Soviet government (he hates with all his heart the grain monopoly, stable prices, requisition, the struggle with the baggers); on the other hand, by the poor condition of our troops . . . In general it must be said,” he concluded, “that until we reestablish contact with the Northern Caucasus we must not rely . . . upon the Tsaritsyn sector for provisions.” <br /><br />Stalin’s assumption of the functions of manager of all the military forces at the front had obtained the confirmation of Moscow. The telegram of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, which bore the notation that it was sent by agreement with Lenin, expressly delegated Stalin “to establish order, unite all detachments into regular formations, establish proper command, after expelling all insubordinates.” Thus the rights given to Stalin were signed, and as far as one is able to judge from the text, were even formulated by me. Our common task at the time was to subordinate the provinces to the Center, to establish discipline, and to subordinate all sorts of volunteer and guerrilla units to the army and to the front. Unfortunately Stalin’s activity at Tsaritsyn took an altogether different direction. At that time I did not know that Stalin had inscribed his resolution, “to be disregarded” on one of my telegrams, since he himself never mustered sufficient courage to report the matter to the Center. My impression was that Stalin did not fight resolutely enough against local self-rule, the local guerrillas and the general insubordination of the local people. I accused him of being too lenient toward the wrong policy of Voroshilov and others, but it never entered my head that he was the actual instigator of that policy. This became evident somewhat later from his own telegrams and from admissions of Voroshilov and others.<br /><br />Stalin spent several months at Tsaritsyn. His underhanded work against me, which even then made up an essential part of his activity, went hand in hand with the homespun opposition of Voroshilov who was his closest associate. However, Stalin bore himself so that at any moment he would be able to jump back, his skirts clear. Lenin knew Stalin better than I and apparently suspected that the stubbornness of the Tsaritsynites could be explained by Stalin’s activity behind the scenes. I made up my mind to set things right at Tsaritsyn. After a new clash with the command there I decided upon the recall of Stalin. This was accomplished through the good offices of Sverdlov, who went himself in a special train to bring Stalin back. Lenin wanted to reduce the conflict to a minimum, and was of course right in that respect.<br /><br />At the time, while the Red Army had already managed to win big victories on the Eastern Front, almost completely clearing the Volga, matters continued to go badly in the South, where everything was in chaos because orders were not carried out. On the 5th of October, at Kozlov, I issued an order concerning the unification of all armies and groups of the Southern Front under the command of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Southern Front, consisting of the former General [Sytin and three Bolsheviks –Shlyapnikov, Mekhonoshin and Lazimir]: “All orders and instructions of the Council are subject to unconditional and immediate execution.” The order threatened the insubordionates with dire punishments. Then I telegraphed Lenin:<br /><br />I insist categorically on Stalin’s recall. Things are going badly at the Tsaritsyn Front in spite of superabundant forces. Voroshilov is capable of commanding a regiment, not an army of 50,000. However, I shall leave him in command of the Tenth Army at Tsaritsyn, provided he reports to the Commander of the Army of the South, Sytin. I have required reports of reconnaissances and operations sent twice daily. If that is not done by tomorrow, I shall remand Voroshilov and Minin to court martial and shall publish the fact in an Army Order. According to the statutes of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, Stalin and Minin, as long as they remain in Tsaritsyn, are nothing more than members of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Tenth Army. We have only a short time left for taking the offensive before the autumn mud sets in, when the local roads will be impassable for either infantry or mounted troops. No serious action will be possible without coordination with Tsaritsyn. There is no time to lose on diplomatic negotiations. Tsaritsyn must either submit or take the consequences. We have a colossal superiority of forces, but there is utter anarchy at the top. I can put a stop to it in twenty-four hours, provided I have your firm and clear-cut support. At all events, this is the only course I can see.<br /><br />[This was followed the next day by this direct wire to Lenin]:<br /><br />* I have received the following telegram: “Stalin’s military order #118 must be cancelled. I have issued full instructions to the Commander of the Southern Front, Sytin. Stalin’s activities undermine all my plans . . . Vatzetis, Commander-in-Chief; Danishevsky, member of the Revolutionary Council of War.”<br /><br />[Stalin was recalled from Tsaritsyn in the second half of October. This is what he] wrote in Pravda (30th October, 1918) [about the Southern Front]:<br /><br />* The point of the greatest attack by the enemy was Tsaritsyn. That was understandable, because the capture of Tsaritsyn and the interruption of communications with the South would have assured the achievement of all the tasks of the enemy. It would have united the Don counter-revolutionists with the upper layer of the Cossacks of the Astrakhan and the Ural armies, creating a united front of the counter-revolution from the Don to the Czecho-Slovaks. It would have secured the South and the Caspian for the counter-revolutionists, internally and externally. It would have left the Soviet troops of the Northern Caucasus in a state of helplessness . . .<br /><br />[Was Stalin “confessing” that he was guilty of having aggravated the situation by his intrigues and insubordination? Hardly. However, on his way back to Moscow from Tsaritsyn, Sverdlov inquired] cautiously about my intentions and then proposed to me that I have a talk with Stalin, who it developed was on his train.<br /><br />“Do you really want to dismiss all of them?” Stalin asked me in a tone of exaggerated subservience. “They’re fine boys.” <br />“Those fine boys will ruin the Revolution, which can’t wait for them to grow up.” I answered him. “All I want is to draw Tsaritsyn back into Soviet Russia.” <br /><br />Thereafter, whenever I had occasion to tread on the corns of personal predilections, friendships or vanities, Stalin carefully gathered up all the people whose corns had been stepped on. He had a lot of time for that, since it furthered his personal ends. The leading spirits of Tsaritsyn became from that time on his principal tools. As soon as Lenin fell ill Stalin, through his henchmen, had Tsaritsyn renamed Stalingrad.<br /><br />[The Tsaritsyn oppositionists were a curious lot. The man who most detested the military specialists was Voroshilov –“the locksmith of Lugansk,” as he came to be called by latter-day chroniclers –a hearty and impudent fellow, not overly-intellectual but shrewd and unscrupulous. He never could make head or tail of military theory, but he was a gifted browbeater and had no compunction about unitizing the ideas of brighter subordinates and no false modesty about taking full credit for them. His intellectual naivete in both military theory and Marxism was to be amply demonstrated in 1921, when,] following uncritically the lead of some obscure ultra-Leftist, he argued that aggressiveness and the tactic of the offensive was a consequence of “the class nature of the Red Army,” at the same time offering “proof” of the necessity of the offensive in the form of the quotations from the French military regulations of 1921. <br /><br />His “loyal right hand” was Shchadenko [the political commissar of the Tenth Army, a tailor by trade, whom later chroniclers were to immortalize they]; “Angrily frowning under his eagle-like eyebrows, his militant eyes squinting, he ran around the front, burning up with the effort to be Klim’s loyal right hand.”<br /><br />Equally zealous but quite different from both was Sergei Minin. [He was a curious mixture of poet and demagogue who had given himself heart and soul to the cause and suffered from a blinding phobia of all tsarist officers.] Popular among the workers of Tsaritsyn since his participation as a young student in the Revolution of 1905, Tsaritsyn was proud of him as its leading and most impassioned orator. He was by far the most honest of the lot, but also perhaps the most unreasonable. Sincere in his intransigence, he contributed his full share of earnest mischief to the aggravation of the military situation in Tsaritsyn. [He was an innocent but all the more effective tool of Stalin’ s Tsaritsyn intrigue and was cast aside as soon as his usefulness came to an end.]<br /><br />Then there was the engineer Rukhimovich, former “People’s Commissar of War of the Donetz-Krivorog Republic” –[one of the mushroom Red republics of the early days of the Revolution –who had given Voroshilov his first mandate to organize a proletarian army. Placed in charge of supplies, the provincial-minded] Rukhimovitch could conceive of no needs except the needs of the Tenth Army. No other army swallowed as many rifles and bullets, and at the fist refusal he yelled about the treason of the specialists in Moscow. [He, like the youngest member of the Council of War, Valerii] Mezhlauk, rose subsequently to second-rank heights in the Stalinist hierarchy, to disappear from view [for reasons unknown. There were] Zhloba, Kharchenko, Gorodovik, Savitsky, Parhomenko and others, whose contributions to the Red Army and the Soviet State did not rank above that of hundreds of thousands of others, but whose names were saved from utter oblivion only because of their early association with Stalin at Tsaritsyn.<br /><br />“Trotsky,” [Tarassov-Rodionov wrote later], “spoke at the Revolutionary Council of War haughtily and irritably. He let loose a hail-storm of stinging rebukes for the tremendous waste of material . . . Trotsky was not interested in explanations . . .” On November 1st I telegraphed to Sverdlov and Lenin from Tsaritsyn:<br /> <br /> The situation with the Tenth Army is as follows: There are many forces here but no operational leadership. The staff of the Southern Front and Vatzetis are inclined to favor changing the commander. I would not consider it possible to keep Voroshilov by giving him an experienced operational staff. He objects to that, but I don’t doubt that the question could be settled. . . The only serious obstacle is Minin, who carries on an extremely harmful policy. I insist in every way on his transfer. When will the medals be ready?<br /><br />After inspecting all the sectors of the Tsaritsyn Army, in a special order of November 5th, 1918, I recognized that services of many of the units and their commanders, at the same time noting that parts of the army consisted of units calling themselves divisions which actually were not such in substance; that “political work in certain units has not even been started yet”; that “the disposition of military reserves does not always proceed with military caution”; that “in certain instances the commander, not wishing to carry out an operational order, would pass it on for the consideration of a meeting . . .” and the like. “As citizens,” the order stated, "the soldiers are free during their leisure hours to hold meetings on any question. As soldiers, they must carry out military orders without any objections.”<br /><br />After visiting the Southern Front, including Tsaritsyn, I reported to the Sixth Congress of Soviets on the 9th of November, 1918: “Not all Soviet workers have understood that our administration has been centralized and that all orders issued from above must be final . . . We shall be pitiless with those Soviet workers who have not yet understood; we will remove them, cast them out of our ranks, pull them up with repressions.” This was aimed at Stalin to a much greater extent than at Voroshilov, against whom these words were ostensibly directed at the time. Stalin was present at the Congress and kept silent. He was silent at the session of the Politburo. He could not openly defend his behavior. All the more did he store up his anger. It was in those days – recalled from Tsaritsyn, with deep anger and a thirst of vengeance in his heart –that he wrote his piece on the First Anniversary of the Revolution. The purpose of the article was to strike a blow at my prestige, turning against me the authority of the Central Committee headed by Lenin. In that anniversary article, dictated by suppressed anger, Stalin was nevertheless forced to write:<br /><br />All the work of practical organization of the insurrection was conducted under the immediate leadership of the President of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It was possible to declare with certainly that the swift passing of the garrison to the side of the Soviet, and the bold execution of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Party owes principally and first of all to Comrade Trotsky. <br /><br />On the 30th of November, acting on the proposal of the Commissariat of War to organize a Council of Defense, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which had already proclaimed the Soviet Republic to be a military camp, passed a resolution calling for the convocation of the Council of Defense, composed of Lenin, myself, Krassin, the Commissar of Ways of Communication, the Commissar of Supplies and the Chairman of the Praesidium of the Central Executive Committee, Sverdlov. By agreement with Lenin I proposed that Stalin be also included. Lenin wanted to give Stalin some satisfaction for removing him from the Army in Tsaritsyn; I wanted to give Stalin the chance to formulate openly his criticisms and proposals, without wetting the powder in the War Department. The first session, which outlined our tasks in a general way, was held in the daytime of the first of December. From Lenin’s notes at the session, it appears that Stalin spoke six times. Each orator was allowed no more than two minutes. The leadership in the work of the Council of Defense, not only on major questions, but even on details, was concentrated entirely in the hands of Lenin. To Stalin was assigned the task of formulating a thesis on the struggle against regionalism and another on fighting red tape. There is no evidence that either thesis was ever composed. Moreover, in the interest of expediting the work, it was decided that “the decrees of the commission appointed by the Council of Defense, signed by Lenin, Stalin and the representatives of the appropriate department, will have the force of a decree by the Council of Defense.” But as far as Stalin was concerned the whole matter boiled down to another title instead of actual work.<br /><br />[Notwithstanding these concessions, Stalin continued to support the Tsaritsyn opposition secretly, nullifying the efforts of the War Department to enforce order and discipline in that sector. At Tsaritsyn, his principal tool was Voroshilov; in Moscow, Stalin himself exerted all the pressure he could must upon Lenin. It therefore became necessary to send the following telegram from Kursk on December 14th]:<br /><br />* To the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin. The question of recalling Okulov cannot be decided by itself. Okulov was appointee as a counterbalance to Voroshilov, as guarantee that military orders would be carried out. It is impossible to let Voroshilov remain after he has nullified all attempts at compromise. Tsaritsyn must have a new Revolutionary Council of War with a new commander and Voroshilov must go to the Ukraine.<br />Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, Trotsky.<br /><br />[Voroshilov was then transferred to the Ukraine. The fighting capacity of the Tenth Army rose by leaps and bounds. Not only the new commander but Stalin’s successor on the Council of War, Shlyapnikov, proved immeasurably more efficient, and the military situation at Tsaritsyn soon improved.]<br /><br />----------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />PART THREE: STALIN AGAIN CAUGHT IN THE ACT!<br /><br />[Several days after Voroshilov’s removal, and after the months of enforced abstention from the extremely tempting business of intervening in military affairs following upon his own removal from Tsaritsyn, Stalin go another opportunity to work at the front –this time, for a couple of weeks. He utilized it for sticking a knife into Trotsky’s back. The incident began with the following exchange of telegrams between Lenin and Trotsky]:<br /><br />1. * Coded Telegram to Comrade Trotsky at Kursk or any other place where the Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic may be: <br /> Moscow, December 13, 1918.<br /> Extremely alarming news from vicinity of Perm. It is in danger. I am afraid we have forgotten about the Urals. Are the reinforcements to Perm and the Urals being sent with sufficient energy? Lashevich told Zinoviev that only units that had been under fire should be sent. Lenin.<br /><br />2. * To Trotsky at Kozlov or wherever the Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic may be:<br /> Moscow, December 31, 1918.<br /> There are several Party reports from around Perm about the catastrophic condition of the Army and about drunkenness. I am forwarding them to you. They ask that you come there. I thought of sending Stalin. I am afraid Smilga will be too soft with Lasevich, who it is said drinks himself and in unable to restore order. Telegraph your opinion. Lenin<br /> #66847<br /><br />3. By direct wire in code to Moscow, Kremlin, for the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin.<br /> Reply to #66847<br /> Voronezh, January1, 1919, 19 o’clock [7.pm]<br /> From the reports of the operations of the Third Army I concluded that the leadership there is completely at a loss and proposed a change of command. The decision was postponed. Now I deem replacement unpostponable.<br /> I completely share your misgivings concerning the excessive softness of the Comrade who has gone there. I agree to Stalin’s journey with powers from both the Party and the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic for restoring order, purging the staff of Commissars, and severely punishing the guilty. The new commander will be appointed upon agreement with Serpukhov. I propose that Lshevich be appointed a member of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Northern Front, where we do not have a responsible Party man, and the front may soon acquire greater significance.<br /> #9. Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, Trotsky.<br /><br />[The matter was then referred to the Central Committee, which decided[]:<br /><br /> * to appoint a Party investigating committee of the Central Committee members Stalin and Dzerzhinsky to conduct a detailed investigation into the reasons for the surrender of Perm and the latest defeats on the Ural Front, and also to elucidate all the circumstances surrounding the above facts.<br /><br />[The Third Army had surrendered Perm to the advancing troops of Admiral Kolchak and took up its position at Vyatka, where it held its ground precariously. Stalin and Dzerzhinsky reached Vyatka while the Third Army was holding it against the attacks of the enemy. On the day of their arrival there, January 5th, 1919, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky telegraphed to Lenin]:<br />[Note: The following three excerpts, found in Trotsky’s notes for this book, are from the works of S. Dmitrievsky, whom Trotsky quotes in other places. They tell the story. How accurately, is another question. The possibility that Trotsky might have challenged some of the statements Dmitrievsky ascribes to Stalin is not excluded – C.M.]<br /><br /> * The investigation begun. We shall inform you from time to time about the course of the investigation. Meantime we deem it necessary to inform you about such needs of the Third Army as do not bear postponement. The point is, that out of the Third Army of more than 30,000 men, there remain only 11,000 weary, exhausted soldiers, who can hardly withstand the pressure of the enemy. The units sent by the Commander-in-Chief are unreliable, partly even hostile to us, and are in need of serious filtering. In order to save the remnants of the Third Army and to prevent the rapid movement of the enemy upon Vyatka (according to information secured from the commanding staff of the front and of the Third Army, the danger is quite real), it is absolutely necessary at once to transfer from Russia and place at the disposal of the army commander at least three entirely reliable regiments. We insistently urge that you exert the proper pressure in this direction upon the corresponding military institution. We repeat: without this measure the fate of Perm awaits Vyatka.<br /><br /><br />[On the 15th of January Stalin and Dzerzhinsky informed the Council of Defense]:<br /><br /> * 1200 reliable bayonets and swords were sent to the front; the next day two squadrons of cavalry. On the 10th and 62nd Regiment of the4 3rd Battalion (previously thoroughly filtered) was sent. These units made it possible for us to check the advance of the enemy, to raise the morale of the Third Army and to begin our advance upon Perm, so far successful. A thorough purge of Soviet and Party institutions is going on in the rear of the Army. Revolutionary committees have been organized in Vyatka and at county seats. Strong revolutionary organizations have begun to be set up and continue to be set up in villages. The entire Party and the Soviet work is being reconstructed along new lines. The military control has been cleaned up and reorganized. The provincial Cheka has been purged and staffed with new workers . . .<br /><br />[After investigating the causes of the catastrophe, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky reported to Lenin that these were]:<br /> <br />* The fatigue and exhaustion of the army at the moment of the enemy’s advance, our lack of reserves at that moment, the staff’s lack of contact with the army, the mismanagement of the army commander, and inadmissibly criminal methods of administering the front by the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic, which paralyzed the possibility of offering timely aid to the Third Army, the unreliability of reinforcements sent from the rear due to old methods of recruitment, absolute unsteadiness of the rear due to the complete helplessness and inability of Local Soviet and Party organizations.<br /><br />[Almost every statement in this report was a blow at Trotsky. Had Lenin, the Council of Defense, the Central Committee and its Politburo taken these charges against Trotsky seriously, they would have had no alternative but to remove him from office. However, Lenin knew Stalin well enough to consider this report by him and his associate in Vyatka as less factual than recriminative –and act of revenge for the recall from Tsaritsyn, and for Trotsky’s refusal to give him another chance at the Southern Front, where he could rejoin Voroshilov and the other Tsaritsynites.]<br /><br />[Meantime in the Ukraine, utilizing his political prerogatives and his rank as Army Commander, Voroshilov continued to antagonize the military specialists, disrupted staff work and interfered with directives from General Headquarters. With the support of Stalin and others, he soon made his presence at the Southern Front to intolerable that on the 10th of January, 1919, it was necessary to telegraph]:<br /><br /> * To Moscow<br /> To the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, Sverdlov.<br />. . . I must state categorically that the Tsaritsyn policy, which has led to the complete disintegration of the Tsaritsyn army, cannot be tolerated in the Ukraine . . .Okulov is leaving for Moscow. I propose that you and Comrade Lenin give the utmost attention to his report on Voroshilov’s work. The line of Stalin, Voroshilov and Rukhimovich means the ruin of everything we are doing.<br /> Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic. Trotsky.<br /><br />{While Stalin with the aid of Dzerzhinsky was conniving in Vyatka], Lenin insisted that it was necessary for me to conclude a compromise with Stalin:<br /><br />* Stalin would very much like to work on the Southern Front . . .Stalin hopes that on the job he will succeed in convincing us of the correctness of his views . . . In informing you, Lev Davidovich, about all these declarations of Stalin, I beg you to give them your most thoughtful consideration and to answer me: in the first place, whether you agree to let Stalin explain the matter to you in person, for which he is willing to report to you, and in the second place, whether you deem it possible on the basis of certain concrete conditions to adjust the previous conflict and to arrange to work together, which is what Stalin desires so very much. As for me, I think that it is necessary to make every effort for joint work with Stalin. Lenin. <br /><br />Lenin’s letter was obviously written under the influence of Stalin’s insistence. Stalin was seeking agreement, conciliation, further military work, even at the cost of temporary and insincere capitulation. The front attracted him, because here for the first time he could work with the most finished of all the administrative machines, the military machine. As a member of the Revolutionary Council of War who was at the same time a member of the Central Committee of the Party, he was inevitably the dominant figure in every Council of War, in every army, on every front. When others hesitated, he decided. He could command, and each command was followed by a practically automatic execution of his order –not as in the collegium of the Commissariat of Nationalities, where he had to hide from opponents in the commandant’s kitchen. <br /><br />On the 11th of January I replied by direct wire to Lenin:<br /><br />Compromise is of course necessary, but not a rotten one. The fact of the matter is, that all the Tsaritsynites have now congregated at Kharkov. You can gather what the Tsaritsynites are from Okulov’s report, which throughout consists solely of factual material, and the reports of commissars. I consider Stalin’s patronage of the Tsaritsyn tendency a most dangerous ulcer, worse than any treason or betrayal by military specialists . . . Rukhimovich is only another name for Voroshilov. Within a month we shall again have to choke on the Tsaritsyn mess, only this time we will not have the Cossacks against us but the English and French. Nor is Rukhimovich the only one. They firmly hang on to each other, raising ignorance to a principle. Voroshilov plus the Ukrainian guerrillas plus the low cultural level of the population plus demagogy –we cannot tolerate that under any conditions. Let them appoint Artem, but not Voroshilov or Rukhimovich . . . Once again I urge a careful reading of Okulov’s report on the Tsaritsyn Army and how Voroshilov demoralized it with Stalin’s cooperation.<br /><br />Concerning this first period of Stalin’s work on the Southern Front no materials have been published. The point is that this period did not last very long and ended up quite sadly for him. It is a pity that I cannot rely on any material to supplement my memory of this episode, for it left no traces whatever in my personal archives. The official archives have naturally remained in the Commissariat of War. On the Revolutionary Council of War of the Southern Front, with Yegorov commanding, were Stalin and Berzin, who subsequently devoted himself entirely to military work and played a prominent if not a leading role in the military operations of Republican Spain. Once, at night –I regret I cannot state anything with regard to the exact date –Berzin called me to the direct wire and asked me whether he was “obliged to sign an operative order by the Commander of the Front Yegorov.” According to the rules, the signature of the commissar or political member of the Council of War on an operative order meant merely that the order did not have any hidden counter-revolutionary significance. As for the operative meaning of the order, that was entirely the responsibility of the commander. In this particular case, the order of the Front Commander was merely a matter of passing on an operative order of the Commander-in-Chief, a transmission and interpretation of that Army order to the army under his command. Stalin declared that Yegorov’s order was not valid and that he would not sign it. In view of the refusal of a member of the Central Committee to sign the order, Berzin did not dare to place his own signature on it. At the same time, an operative order signed only by the officer in command had no actual force. <br /><br />What argument did Stalin advance against an order which, as far as I remember, was of secondary importance and the nature of which I cannot now recall? No argument at all. He simply would not sign it. It would have been quite possible for him to have called me to the direct wire and explained his reasons to me, or, if he preferred, to have called Lenin to the direct wire. The Commander of the Front, if he were in disagreement with Stalin, by the same rule could have expressed his own considerations to the Commander-in-Chief or to me. Stalin’s objection would have been immediately discussed in the Politburo, and the Commander-in-Chief would have been requested to submit supplementary explanations. But just as in Tsaritsyn, Stalin preferred a different form of action: “I won’t sign it,” he declared, in order to show off his importance to h is collaborators and to his subordinates. I replied to Berzin: “The order of the Commander-in-Chief certified by a commissar is obligatory for you. Sign it immediately: otherwise, you will be turned over to the Tribunal.” Berzin immediately attached his signature to the commander’s order.<br /><br />The question passed to the Politburo. Lenin said, not without embarrassment: “What can we do about it? Stalin again caught in the act!” It was decided to recall Stalin from the Southern Front. This was his second important misfire. I remember, he came back sheepish but apparently not resentful. On the contrary, he even said that he had achieved his purpose, that he had wanted to call attention to improper relations between the chief command and the command at the front, that although the order of the Commander-in-Chief contained nothing inimical, it was issued without previously sounding out the opinion of the Southern Front, which was not right. That, he said, was what he was really protesting against. He felt quite satisfied with himself. My impression was that h e had bitten off more than he could chew. Caught in the trap of a chance swaggering remark, he had been unable to extricate himself. At any rate, it was perfectly obvious that he was doing everything possible to cover up his t races and to make believe that nothing had happened. [To save his face, it was then proposed, probably upon Lenin’s initiative, to shift him to the Southwestern Front. But Stalin replied]:<br /><br /> * February 4, 1919.<br /> To the Central Committee of the Party.<br /> To Comrades Lenin and Trotsky.<br />. . .My own profound conviction is: no change in the situation can possibly be effected by my going there . . . Stalin.<br /><br />[For three or four months after that he held on leash his eagerness to work in the military machine and resumed his contributions to The Life of the Nationalities.<br /><br />[The liquidation of the Tsaritsynites was less real than apparent. Actually, Stalin and his allies had merely changed the field and methods of attack. The new field was the Party, and the methods were adapted accordingly.] As in 1912-13 with reference to the Conciliators and as during the pre-October days with reference to the opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev, so at the Eighth Congress [of the Party, Stalin, ostensibly in no way connected with the Military Opposition, worked hard on building it up, and used it as leverage against Trotsky].<br /><br />The military opposition consisted of two groups. There were the numerous underground workers who were utterly worn out by prison an exile, and who now could not find a place for themselves in the building of the Army and the State. They looked with great disfavor on all sorts of upstarts –and there was no lack of them in responsible posts. But in this opposition there were also very many advanced workers, fighting elements with a fresh reserve of energy, who trembled with political apprehension when they saw yesterday’s engineers, officers, teachers, professors, once again in commanding positions. This Workers’ Opposition reflected, in the final analysis, lack of confidence in its own powers and uncertainty that the new class which had come to power would be able to dominate and control that broad circles of the old intelligentsia.<br /><br />During the first period, when the Revolution was spreading from the industrial centers toward the periphery, armed fighting detachments were organized of workers, sailors and soldiers, to establish the Soviet regime in various localities. These detachments frequently had to wage minor wars. Enjoying as they did the sympathy of the masses, they easily became victorious. They received a certain tempering, and their leaders a certain authority. There was no proper liaison between these detachments. Their tactics had the character of guerrilla raids, and as far as they went that was sufficient. But the overthrown classes, with the aid of their foreign protectors, began to take the offensive. Accustomed to easy victories, the guerrilla detachments at once displayed their worthlessness; they did not have adequate intelligence sections; they had no liaison with each other; nor were they ever able to execute a complex maneuver. Hence –at various times, in various parts of the country –guerrillaism met with disaster. It was no easy task to include these separate detachments in a centralized system. The military ability of the commanders was not high, and they were hostile to the old officers, partly because they had no political confidence in them and partly to cover up lack of confidence in themselves. Yet as late as July, 1918, at the Fifth Congress of Soviets the Left Essars still insisted that we could defend ourselves with guerrilla detachments and has no need of a centralized army. “This is tantamount to being told,” I replied to them, “that we don’t need railways and can get along with horse-carts for transportation.”<br /><br />Our fronts had a tendency to close into a ring of more than eight thousand kilometers in circumference. Our enemies themselves selected the direction, created a base on the periphery, received aid from abroad and delivered the blow in the direction of the center. The advantage of our situation consisted in this, that we occupied a central position and acted along internal operational lines. As soon as the enemy selected his direction for the attack, we were able to select our direction for the counter-attack. We were able to move our forces and mass them for thrusts in the most important directions at any given moment. But this advantage was available to us on the sole condition of complete centralization in management and command. In order to sacrifice temporarily certain of the more remote or less important sectors for the sake of saving the closer and more important ones, we had to be in a position to issue orders and have them obeyed instead of arguing about them. All of this is too elementary to require explanation here. Failure to understand this was due to those centrifugal tendencies which were aroused by the Revolution, the provincialism of the vast land of isolated communities, the elemental spirit of independence that had not yet had the time or the opportunity to mature. Suffice it to say that in the beginning not only provinces but even region after region had its own Council of People’s Commissars with its very own Commissar of War. The successes of regular organization induced these scattered detachments to adapt themselves to certain norms and conditions, to consolidate themselves into regiments and divisions. But the spirit and the method often remained as of old. A chief of a division, not sure of himself, was very easy-going with his colonels. Voroshilov, as an army commander, was very indulgent with the chiefs of his divisions. But all the more resentful was their attitude towards the Center, which was not satisfied with the outward transformation of the guerrilla detachments into regiments and divisions, but insisted on the more fundamental requirements of military organization. In an argument with one of Stalin’s guerrilla partisans I wrote in January, 1919:<br /><br />In one of our armies, it was considered a mark of the highest revolutionism not so very long ago to jeer rather vulgarly and stupidly at “Military specialists,” i.e., at all who had studied in military schools; yet in this very same army practically no political work was carried on. The attitude there was no less hostile, perhaps more so, toward Communist commissars than toward the specialists. Who was sowing this hostility? The worst kind of the new commanders –military know-nothings, half-guerrillas, half-Party people who did not want to have anyone around, be they Party workers or serious military workers . . . Hanging on for dear life to their jobs, they fiercely execrated the very mention of military studies . . . Many of them, getting finally into a hopeless mess, ended up by simply rebelling against the Soviet Government.<br /><br />At a moment of grave danger, the Second Petrograd Regiment, occupying a crucial sector, abandoned the front upon its own initiative and, headed by its commander and commissar, seized a river steamer and sailed down the Volga from the vicinity of Kazan in the direction of Nizhni-Novgorod. The boat was stopped by my order and the deserters were placed on trial. The commander and commissar of the regiment were shot. This was the first instance of the shooting of a Communist, Commissar Panteleyev, for violation of military duty. In the Party there was a lot of talk and gossip about this incident. In December, 1918, Pravda published an article which, without mentioning me by name but obviously hinting at me, referred to the shooting of “the best comrades without a trial.” The author of the article, a certain A. Kamenesky, was in himself a figure of little importance –obviously, a mere pawn. It seemed incomprehensible that an article containing such dire and weighty accusations could appear in the central organ. Its editor was Bukharin, a Left Communist and therefore opposed to the employment of “generals” in the Army. But, especially at that time, he was utterly incapable of intrigue. The riddle was solved when I discovered upon investigation that the author of the article, or rather the man who signed it, A. Kamensky was on the staff of the Tenth Army and at the time under the direct influence of Stalin. It is beyond doubt that Stalin surreptitiously assured the publication of the article. The very terminology of the accusation: the brazen reference to the shooting of “the best” comrades, and moreover, “without a trial,” was astonishing because of the monstrosity of the fabrication as well as its inherent absurdity. But it was precisely this crude exaggeration of the accusation that revealed Stalin, the organizer of the future Moscow trials. The Central Committee settle the matter. I recall that Kamensky and the editorial board were reprimanded, but Stalin’s manipulating hand remained invisible.<br /><br />[Later, while at the Southern Front, Stalin continued to utilize this disecredited story through his tools at the Party Congress. When news of this reached Trotsky, who was away at the front during the sessions of the Eighth Congress, he was obliged to appeal to the Central Committee a second time with the request “to institute an investigation in the case of the shooting of Panteleyev,” as the minutes of the Central Committee session for April 18, 1919, state, “in view of the fact that the matter was again brought up at the Party Congress.” With Stalin present at the Central Committee session, the request was unanimously referred to the Orgburo, where again with Stalin present (he was a member of both bodies), the Orgburo once more unanimously] appointed a commission composed of Krestinsky, Serebryakov and Smilga, all three members of both the Orgburo and the Central Committee, to look into the entire question. The Commission reached, of course, the conclusion that Panteleyev was shot after a trial and not as a Communist and a [commissar], but as a vicious deserter –“not because his regiment abandoned its position, but because he abandoned the position together with his regiment,” [in the words of Army Commander Slavin, commanding officer if the Army to which Panteleyev’s regiment belonged]. Ten years later this episode would again play a part in Stalin’s campaign against me under the very same title: “The Shooting Of The Best Communists Without A Trial.”<br /><br />The Eighth Congress of the Party as in session from the 18th to the 23rd of March, 1919, in Moscow. On the very eve of the Congress we received a strong blow from the White near Ufa. I decided, regardless of the Congress, to go immediately to the Eastern Front. After suggesting the immediate return to the front of all the military delegates, I made read to go to Ufa. Part of the delegates were dissatisfied; they had come to the capital for a few day’s furlough and did not want to leave it. Someone started the rumor that I wanted to avoid debates on military policy. That lie surprised me. I introduced a proposal in the Central Committee on March 16, 1919, to repeal the directive about the immediate return of the military delegates, assigned the defense of the military policy to Sokolnikov and immediately went East. He discussion of the military question at the Eighth Congress, notwithstanding the presence of quite a significant opposition, did not deter me; the situation at the front seemed to me much more important than electioneering at the Congress, especially since I had no doubt that the policy I considered the only correct one was bound to win on its own merits. The Central Committee approved the thesis I had previously introduced and appointed Sokolnikov its official reporter. The opposition’s report was to be presented by V.M. Smirnov, an Old Bolshevik and a former artillery officer of the World War. Smirnov was one of the leaders of the Left Communists, who were determined opponents of the Brest-Litovsk Peace and had demanded the launching of a guerrilla war against the German regular army. This continued to be the basis of their platform even as late as 1919, although true enough, they had somewhat cooled off in the interim. The formation of a centralized and regular army was impossible without military specialists and without the substitution of proper and systematic leadership for improvisation. The Left Communists, having managed to cool off to some extent, tried to adapt their views of yesterday to the growth of the State machine and the needs of the regular army. But they retreated step by step, utilizing all they could out of their old baggage, and camouflaging their essentially guerrilla tendencies with new formulas.<br /><br />A minor but very characteristic episode took place at the beginning of the Congress with regard to the composition of the praesidium. It indicated to a certain extent the nature of the Congress, if only in its preliminary stage. On the order of the day was the trying military question. It was no secret to Lenin that behind the scenes Stalin was in fact at the head of the opposition on that issue. Lenin had come to an agreement with the Petrograd delegation concerning the composition of the praesidium. The oppositionists proposed several supplementary candidatures under various pretexts, naming not only oppositionists but others as well. For example, they proposed the candidature of Sokolnikov, the chief spokesman of the official point of view. However, Bukharin, Stassova, Oborin, Rykov and Sokolnikov declined, honoring as a personal obligation the agreement that had been concluded unofficially concerning the praesidium. But Stalin did not decline. That flagrantly revealed his oppositionist status. He seemed to have been hard at work trying to pack the Congress with his partisans, and electioneering among the delegates. Lenin was aware of this, yet to forestall embarrassment he did his utmost to spare Stalin the test of a vote either for or against him. Through one of the delegates Lenin put the preliminary question: “Are supplementary candidates for members of the praesidium necessary at all?” And without an effort he secured a negative answer to that question. Stalin suffered a defeat, which Lenin had made as impersonal and inoffensive as was humanly possible. Today the official version is that Stalin supported Lenin’s position on the military question at the Eighth Congress. Why then are not the protocols published now when there is no longer any need to preserve [such] military secrets?<br /><br />At the Ukrainian conference in March, 1920, Stalin formally defended me, appearing as the reporter representing the Central Committee; at the same time, through trusted people, he exerted no little effort to achieve the failure of his theses. At the Eighth Congress of the Party such a maneuver was difficult, since all the proceedings were directly under the observation of Lenin, several other members of the Central Committee and responsible military workers. But essentially, here too Stalin played quite the same role as at the Ukrainian conference. As a member of the Central Committee he either spoke equivocally in defense of the official military policy or kept quiet; but through his closest friends –Voroshilov and Rukhimovich and other Tsaritsynites, who were the shock troops of the opposition at the Congress –he continued to undermine not so much the military policy, it is true, as its chief spokesman. He incited these delegates to the vilest kind of personal attack against Sokolnikov, who had assumed the defense of the War Commissariat without any reservations. The nucleus of the opposition was the Tsaritsyn group and most prominent among them was Voroshilov. For some time preceding the Congress they were in constant contact with Stalin, who instructed them and held in leash their premature hastiness, at the same time centralizing the intrigue against the War Department. This was the sum of the substance of his activity at the Eighth Congress.<br /><br />“A year ago,” Sokolnikov reported to the Eighth Congress of the Party, “at the moment of the complete collapse of the Army, when there was no military organization to defend the proletarian revolution, the Soviet Government resorted to the system of voluntary army formations, and in its day this volunteer army played its part. Now, looking back at this period, as at a stage we have passed, we should take into consideration both the positive and the negative aspects. The essence of the positive side was that the best elements of the working class participated . . . But in addition to these bright aspects of the guerilla period there were also the dark sides, which in the end outweighed whatever was good in it. The best elements left, died, or were taken prisoner . . . What remained was a conglomeration of the worst elements . . . These evil elements were supplemented by those who chose to enlist in the Volunteer Army because they had been cast out in the street in consequence of the catastrophic collapse of the entire social order . . . These were, finally, supplemented by the demobilized riffraff of the Old Army. That is why during the guerrilla period of our military organization such forces developed as compelled us to liquidate this guerrilla system. In the end it has resulted in a system in which small, independent detachments grouped themselves around separate leaders. These detachments in the final reckoning were devoted not only to the struggle in defense of the Soviet Government, in defense of the victories of the Revolution, but also to banditry and marauding. They turned into guerrilla detachments that were the bulwark of adventurism . . .” On the other hand, “in the present period,” Sokolnikov continued, “the building of the State . . . the Army . . . goes forward.”<br /><br />“A great deal of heated discussion,” Sokolnikov said, turning to another phase of his report, “arose around the question of military specialists . . . Now this question has been essentially solved both theoretically and practically. Even the opponents of the use of military specialists themselves admit that this question is out of date . . . Military specialists were used in the reorganization of the guerrilla army into the regular army . . . Thus we achieved the stability of the front, thus we achieved military success. Conversely, where the military specialists were not used, we frittered away our forces to the point of utter disintegration . . . In the problem of the military specialists, we are confronted not with a purely military problem but with a general special problem. When the question was brought up of inviting engineers to the factories, of inviting the former capitalist organizers, do you remember how the ultra-Red Left Communists taunted us with their merciless ‘super-Communist’ criticism . . . that to return the engineers to the factories meant to return the commanding staff of the bourgeoisie? And here we have an analogous criticism, applied now to the building of the Army. We are told that by returning former officers to the Army we will restore the former officer class and the former army. But these comrades forgot that side by side with these commanders there are commissars, the representatives of the Soviet Government; that these military specialists are in the ranks of the army which is entirely at the service of the proletarian revolution . . . This Army, which has tens of thousands of old specialists, has shown in practice that it is the army of the proletarian revolution.”<br /><br />By the time of the Eighth Congress, the disagreement on the military question was considerably less pronounced than it had been previously. The opposition no longer put the question as frankly as it had the year before. Then the centralized army was proclaimed to be characteristic of the imperialist State and in its place the opposition advocated the system of guerrilla detachments, rejecting the utilization of contemporary technical means of struggle, such as airplanes and tanks. This time they came out against the “imperialistic” principle of maneuverability: the corps, the division, even the brigade, were declared to be units too heavily weighted. It was proposed to reduce all of the armed forces of the Republic into distinct units of the combined services, each unit about the size of a regiment. This was essentially the ideology of guerrillaism slightly masked. The use of the old officer corps, especially in commanding positions, was declared incompatible in action with loyalty to the revolutionary military doctrine.<br /><br />The actual work of organizing the military forces of the workers’ government proceeded along entirely different lines. We tried, especially in the beginning, to utilize as much as possible the experience, method, knowledge and means remaining from the old army. We built the revolutionary Army from the human and technical material at hand, striving always and everywhere to secure in it the dominance of the proletarian vanguard. The institution of commissars was under the circumstances an indispensable instrument of proletarian control. We combined the old commanding staff with the new, and only thus were we able to achieve the required results. This had become crystal-clear to a majority of the delegates by the time the Congress convened. No one any longer dared to reject in principle the foundations of the military policy. The opposition turned to criticism of occasional errors and excesses, regaling the Congress with all manner of sad anecdotes.<br /><br />The reporter of the opposition, Smirnov, replying directly to Sokolnikov’s statement that “some presumably stand for a guerrilla army and others for the regular army,” pointed out that on the question of using military specialists “there was no disagreements among us over the dominant trend in our military policy.” He basic disagreement was over the necessity of broadening the functions of commissars and members of the Revolutionary Council of War so as to ensure their greater participation in the management of the Army and in decisions pertaining to operational matters, and thereby reduce the role of the commanding staff. The Congress met this criticism about half way. It was decided to continue the recruiting of the old military specialists in full force, but on the other hand, it was emphasized that it was necessary to prepare a new commanding staff as an absolutely reliable instrument of the Soviet system. That this and all the other decisions were adopted unanimously with one abstaining vote is explained by the fact that the opposition had in the meantime repudiated most of its principal prejudices. Powerless to counterpose its own line to that of the majority of the Party, it had to join in the general conclusion. Nevertheless, some of the effects of the guerrillaism of the preceding period were evident throughout all of 1919, particularly in the South –in the Ukraine, in the Caucasus and in Transcaucasia, where the elimination of the guerrilla tendency proved no easy task.<br /><br />In 1920 a prominent military worker wrote: “Notwithstanding all the pain, outcries and noise raised concerning our military policy, concerning the recruitment of military specialists in the Red Army and so forth, the head of the War Department, Comrade Trotsky, proved to be right. With an iron hand he carried through the indicated military policy, disdaining all threats . . . The victories of the Red Army on all the fronts is the best proof of the correctness of the military policy.” Yet to this very day in innumerable books and articles that hoary tales of the treason of the “generals” whom I appointed persist without abating. These accusations sound particularly silly when one remembers that twenty years after the October Revolution Stalin accused of treason and exterminated almost the entire commanding staff appointed by himself. It might also be added that Sokolnikov, the official reporter, and V.M. Smirnov, the oppositionist co-reporter, both active participants in the Civil War, subsequently fell victims of the Stalinist purge.<br /><br />A special military conference was held during the Congress, the minutes of which were kept but never published. The purpose of this conference was to give an opportunity to all participants, especially the dissatisfied members of the opposition, to express themselves fully, freely and frankly. Lenin delivered an energetic speech at this conference in defense of the military policy. What did Stalin say? Did he speak in defense of the Central Committee’s position? It is hard to answer this question categorically. There is no doubt that he acted behind the scenes, inciting various oppositionists against the Commissariat of War. There can be no doubt of that because of the circumstances and the recollections of the participants of the Congress. A flagrant piece of evidence is the very fact that the protocols of the military conference of the Eighth Congress have not yet been published –either because Stalin did not speak at it, at all, or because his speech on that occasion would be too embarrassing for him now. [Stalin, along with Zinoviev, was also a member of a] special commission of conciliation for working out the final resolutions. What he did there remains unknown beyond the bare fact that a satellite of his, Yaroslovsky, was advanced at its reporters.<br /><br />Soon after the Eighth Congress I replied to the declaration of Zinoviev, who, undoubtedly by agreement with Stalin, had taken it upon himself to defend the “insulted” Voroshilov, in a letter to the Central Committee. I said: “The only guilt that I can charge against myself with reference to him [Voroshilov] is that I spent too long, notably two or three months, on the effort to act by means of negotiations, persuasions, personal combinations, when in the interests of the cause, what was necessary was a firm organizational decision. For, in the end, the task in connection with the Tenth Army did not consist of convincing Voroshilov, but in attaining military successes in the shortest possible time.” [And that of course depended on the maximum co-ordination of plans throughout the] country, which was divided into eight military districts composed of 46 provincial and 344 regional military commissariats.<br /><br />[Stalin did his utmost to poison the mind of the Congress on the position taken by the Commissariat of War on the military question.] All documents on hand fully prove that by virtue of his position in the Central Committee and in the Government, Stalin headed the opposition. If I had previously suspected it, now I am fully convinced, that Stalin’s machinations with the Ukrainians, his wire-pulling in the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and the like, are directly connected with the maneuvers of the military opposition. [Having] reaped no laurels at Tsaritsyn, he tried to reap his revenge [in the dark].<br /><br />---------------------------------------------<br /><br />Next Chapter 10 The Civil War (Continued)Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1123836129143705872005-08-12T01:39:00.000-07:002005-08-16T22:07:48.090-07:00People's Commissar - Chapter 8 of Trotsky's 'Stalin'Stalin : An appraisal of the man and his influence.<br /><br />Chapter 8<br /><br />PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR<br /><br />[The Bolsheviks had laid the groundwork of winning over the armed forces of the country so thoroughly that their final victory on November 7th was achieved practically by default. The October coup was “easier than lifting a feather” –to us Lenin’s own words. Not a single regiment rose to defend Russian democracy. With the former police force scattered, the Kerensky Government in Petrograd had practically no one other than the military students and the very amateurish women’s battalions to oppose the detachments of armed workmen, soldiers and sailors under the command of Bolshevik professional revolutionists. The struggle for supreme power over an empire that comprised one-sixth of the terrestrial globe was decided between amazingly small forces on both sides in the provinces as well as in the two capital cities.<br /><br />[The civilized democratic West, heading into its forth year of war, refused to believe the accomplished fact. After the Bolsheviks had been in power for nearly a week, Kerensky sincerely assured the astonished world that Bolshevism “as an organized force . . . no longer exists, even in Petrograd.” The Bolshevik victory had been easier and more secure in Petrograd than in Moscow and in the provinces. The Cossacks stationed in Petrograd were “neutral” –even as General Headquarters and all the avowed reactionaries –refraining from extending aid to the Provisional Government and reserving the right to act at their own discretion, while General Krasnov was marching upon the capital with an unknown number of troops. The officials and clerks of the banks, the ministries, and practically all public administration institutions had walked out on strike. The Menshevik-led railway, telephone, telegraph and postal workers’ unions threatened to strike and tie up all communication and transportation services unless the victors agreed to a coalition government of all the socialist parties, but without the participation of Lenin and Trotsky. That threat produced a crisis more apparent than real in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party itself.]<br /><br />Immediately after the insurrection, upon the insistence of the Bolshevik Right Wing –Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Lunacharsky and others – negotiations were begun with the Mensheviks and the Populists concerning a coalition government. Among the conditions, the parties overthrown by the uprising demanded a majority for themselves, and over and above that, the removal from the government of Lenin and Myself as the persons responsible for the October “adventure.” The Rightist members of the Central Committee were inclined to accept this demand. The question was considered in the Central Committee during the session of the first (the 14th) of November. This is what the protocol states: “Proposed to expel Lenin and Trotsky. This is a proposal to behead our Party, and we do not accept it.” The readiness of the Rightists to go as far as an actual surrender of power was condemned by the Central Committee as “fear of the Soviet Majority to utilize its own majority.” The Bolsheviks did not refuse to share their power with other parties, but would share it only on the basis of the proper relations of forces in the Soviets. Lenin declared that the negotiations with the petty bourgeois parties had sense only as a cover for military actions. [As far as Lenin was concerned the negotiations were not in earnest and were meant rather as a political decoy.]<br /><br />My motion to terminate the negotiations with the Compromisers was passed. Stalin took no part in the debates. But he voted with the majority. In protest, the representatives of the Rightists resigned from the Central Committee and the Government. The majority of the Central Committee addressed the minority with the demand to submit unconditionally to the discipline of the Party The ultimatum was signed by ten members and candidates of the Central Committee: Lenin, myself, Stalin, Sverdlov and others. Concerning the origin of the document, one of the members of the Central Committee, Bubnov, states: “After writing it he (Lenin) invited into his office individually each of the members of the Central Committee, acquainting them with the text of the declaration and suggesting that they sign it.” The story is interesting in so far as it enables us correctly to evaluate the significance of the order of the signatures. Lenin first of all showed the ultimatum to me, having secured my signature, called out the others, beginning with Stalin. It was always thus, or almost always. Had the document not been directed against Zinoviev and Kamenev, their signatures would probably have stood before Stalin’s signature.<br /><br />Pestkovsky tells how during the October days “it was necessary to select from among the Central Committee the leadership of the insurrection. Selected were Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky.” In assigning the leadership to these three, let us note in passing Stalin’s collaborator definitely buries the practical “center,” of which neither Lenin or I were members. In Pestkovsky’s testimony there is this time a kernel of truth. Not during the days of the uprising but after its victory in the important centers, yet before the establishment of any kind of stable regime, it was necessary to create a compact Party staff, that could enforce locally all the necessary decisions. As the protocol states, on the 29th of November, (12th of December) 1917, the Central Committee elected for the solution of pressing questions a bureau composed of four persons: “Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky and Sverdlov.” This foursome was given the right to decide all extraordinary affairs, but with the obligation of drawing into the decision all members of the Central Committee who were present at the time at Smolny.” Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, because of their sharp disagreement, had resigned from the Central Committee. This explains the composition of the foursome. Sverdlov, however, was absorbed by the Secretariat of the Party, spoke at meetings, settled conflict and was seldom at the Smolny. The foursome practically came down to a threesome.<br /><br />[On the night of February 19th-20th, 1918, the coalition Bolshevik-Left Essar Council of the People’s Commissars] elected an executive committee [made up of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Proshyan and Karelin, which was authorized to carry on all current work in the interim between the sessions of the Council. [This executive committee of the Government was made up of the same three Bolsheviks and the two Left Essars. Nevertheless, there is no ground for imagining that these three made up] a “triumvirate.” The Central Committee met frequently and decided all the important and particularly debatable questions. The threesome was necessary for unpostponable practical decisions in connection with the course of the uprising in the provinces, Kerensky’s attempts to enter Petrograd, food supply for the capital, and the like. This threesome existed, at least nominally, only until the transfer of the government to Moscow.<br /><br />Lashing out against the policy of the Bolsheviks in 1917, Iremashvili writes: “The triumvirate, filled with unappeasable vengeance, began to exterminate with inhuman cruelty everything living and dead,” and the like. In the triumvirate Iremashvili includes Lenin, myself and Stalin. It maybe said with assurance that this idea of the triumvirate arose in the mind of Iremashvili only considerably later, after Stalin had advanced to the first plane of importance. There is, however, a grain of truth –or, at any rate, a semblance of truth –in these words of Iremashvili’s. In connection with the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk, Lenin’s words, “I’ll consult Stalin and give you an answer” are cited time and time again. The point is that such a threesome did actually exist at certain moments, although not always with the participation of Stalin. Dmitrievsky likewise refers to this threesome, although in a somewhat different tone and point of reference:<br />Even Lenin at that period felt the need of Stalin to such as extent that when communications came from Trotsky at Brest and an immediate decision had to be made while Stalin was not in Moscow, Lenin would inform Trotsky: “I would like first to consult with Stalin before replying to your question.” And only three days later Lenin would telegraph: “Stalin has just arrived. I will consider it with him and we will at once give your our joint answer.”<br /><br />The most important decisions of that period were not infrequently arrived at by Lenin in agreement with me. But in this case, when such agreement was not reached, a third person was needed. Zinoviev was in Petersburg, Kamenev was not always in Moscow. Besides, he, like other members of the Politburo and the Central Committee, devoted a considerable portion of their time to agitation. Stalin had more free time that all the other members of the Politburo from agitation, leadership of the Soviets, and the rest. That was why prior to his departure from Tsaritsyn he usually carried out the duties of the “third one.” Lenin was a stickler for form and therefore naturally did not take it upon himself to reply in his own name alone. Generally, the not infrequent remarks in recent literature to the effect that Lenin directed, ordered and the like, are inspired solely by analogy with the Stalinist regime. As a matter of fact, such a state of affairs didn’t exist at all. Directives were actually given, and moreover orders issued, only by the Politburo, and during the absence of the complete staff, by the threesome, which made up the quorum of the five members of the Bureau. When Stalin was away, Lenin would consult with Krestinsky, Secretary of the Central Committee, with the same scrupulousness, and in the archives can be found any number of recorded references to such consultations.<br /><br />But at the time there was far more talk of a “duumvirate.” During the Civil War the Soviet “poet laureate” Demyan Byedny wrote verses about “our twosome.” No one then spoke of a triumvirate. At any rate any one using that term then would have selected as the third person not Stalin, but Sverdlov, who was the very popular Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, and who signed all the more important decrees. I remember speaking to him several times about the insufficient authority of certain of our directives in the provinces. On one such occasion Sverdlov remarked: “Locally, they accept only three signatures: Ilyich’s, yours and to a small extent mine.” [Sverdlov was a person of truly remarkable organizational talents and a prodigious capacity for hard work –head and shoulders above Stalin.] “No one could so unite in himself alone organizational and political work as Sverdlov as able to do,” Lenin said at the Party Congress in 1920, “and we had to try to replace his activity with the work of a collegium.”<br /><br />When I arrived in Petrograd at the beginning of May, I hardly remembered Stalin’s name. I probably ran across it in the Bolshevik press, signed to articles which hardly held my attention. My first meetings were with Kamenev, Lenin, Zinoviev. With them were carried on negotiations about fusion. Neither at the sessions of the Soviets, nor of its Central Executive Committee, nor at the numerous meetings which consumed a considerable part of my time, did I meet Stalin. Upon arrival, I immediately came into close contact with all the leading figures by virtue of my work in the Central Executive Committee, but I did not notice Stalin even among the second-rate members of the Central Committee, such as Bubnov, Miliutin, Nogin and others. [After the fusion of the Inter-districters (Mezhraiontsy) with the Bolsheviks, Stalin continued to remain an obscure figure.] “In the Praesidium of the Pre-parliament,” state the protocols of the Party Central Committee, “Trotsky and Kamenev represented the Bolsheviks.” [When the time came to send leading representatives of the Party to the repeatedly deferred Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to determine in a democratic parliamentary manner the future government of Russia, Stalin was used as the spokesman of the Party Central Committee to nominate them. As the record shows, Stalin’s words were:] “Comrades, I propose as candidates to the Constituent Assembly Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, Kollontai, Trotsky and Lunarcharsky.” These were the five persons who were put forth in the name of the entire Party. Let us recall that [according to the official historiography] only two weeks before I, together with the Mensheviks and the Essars, had presumably demanded Lenin’s appearance in court.<br /><br />In the complete list of Bolshevik delegates to the Constituent Assembly headed by Lenin, Stalin’s name stands in eighth place. The twenty-five nominees were first official candidates of the Central Committee. The list was worked over by a commission under the leadership of three members of the Central Committee: Uritsky, Sokolnikov and Stalin. Lenin sharply protested against the list: there were too many doubtful intellectuals on it, too few reliable workers.<br /><br />*Utterly inadmissible also was the disproportionate number of candidates from insufficiently-tested persons who had joined our party quite recently (like U. Larin). Filling the list with such candidates who should have really worked months and months in the Party, the Central Committee opens the door wide for careerism, for the seeking of places in the Constituent Assembly. It is necessary to have an extraordinary review and correction of the list . . . It is self-evident that from among the Inter-districters [Meshraiontsy] altogether little tested in proletarian work and the direction of our Party no one would contest, or example, such a candidature as that of L. D. Trotsky, for in the first place, Trotsky immediately upon arrival assumed the position of the internationalists; in the second place, he fought among the inter-districters for fusion; in the third place, during the difficult July Days he proved fully equal to the tasks and was loyal champion of the Party of the revolutionary proletariat. It is clear that this cannot be said about many of the members who joined the Party yesterday, whose name appears on the list . . .*<br /><br />Of the twenty-five [Bolshevik representatives], thirteen were subsequently meted out punishment by Stalin or were condemned after death.<br /><br />After the conquest of power, Stalin began to fell more sure of himself, remaining, however, a figure of the second rank. I soon noticed that Lenin was “advancing” Stalin, valuing in him his firmness, grit, stubbornness, and to a certain extent his slyness, as attributes necessary in the struggle. He did not expect of him any independent ideas, political initiative or creative imagination. Stalin proceeded slowly and cautiously; wherever possible he kept still. But the victory in Petrograd and later in Moscow convinced him. He began to accustom himself to power. “After October,” writes Alliluyev, “Stalin moved into the Smolny and settled there in two small rooms on the ground floor.” [He was a member of the first Council of People’ commissars as Commissar of Nationalities.] After the Revolution the first session of the Bolshevik Government took place in Smolny, in Lenin’s office, where an unpainted wooden partition segregated the cubbyhole of the telephone girl and the typist. Stalin and I were the first to arrive. From behind the partition we heard the thick basso of Dybenko. He was speaking by telephone with Finland, and the conversation had a rather tended character. The twenty-nine-year-old, black-bearded sailor, a jolly and self-confident giant, had recently become intimate with Alexandra Kollontai, a woman of aristocratic antecedents who know half a dozen foreign languages and was approaching here forty-sixth year. In certain circles in the Party there was undoubtedly a good deal of gossip about this. Stalin, with whom until then I had not carried on a personal conversation, came up to me with a kind of unexpected jauntiness and, pointing with his shoulder toward the partition, said, smirking: “That’s he with Kollontai, with Kollontai!” His gestures and his laughter seemed to me out of place and unendurably vulgar, especially on that occasion and in that place. I don’t remember whether I simply said nothing, turning my eyes away, or answered dryly, “That’s their affair.” But Stalin sensed that he had a mistake. His face changed, and in his yellow eyes appeared the same glint of animosity that I had noticed in Vienna. From that time on he never again attempted to engage me in conversation on personal themes.<br /><br />At the end of January, 1018, as a representative of the Party, Stalin participated in a conference of representatives of several foreign Left Socialist parties. That conference, which decided to convoke the Left Internationalist Conference, came to the conclusion that “an international Socialist conference . . . should be convoked under the following conditions: firstly, that the parties and organizations agree to take the path of revolutionary struggle against ‘their own governments’ or immediate peace; and secondly, that they support the Russian October Revolution and the Soviet Government.<br /><br />At the time of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. The initiative was Lenin’s, who also took the lead in working out the corresponding device. During the same days was published “The Declaration of the Rights of Toilers and the Exploited Peoples.” On the text of these historical documents are corrections introduced by Bukharin and Stalin. “Most of there corrections,” states a footnote to the Works of Lenin “do not have a principled character.”<br /><br />The posts that Stalin occupied during the first years after the Revolution and the sundry assignments, predominantly of an organizational and diplomatic character, which he carried out, were exceedingly varied. But such was the portion of the majority of responsible functionaries of those times. Directly or indirectly, everybody was occupied with the Civil War; routine duties were usually placed on the shoulders of the closest assistants. Stalin was listed as a member of the editorial board of the central organ, but as a matter of fact had practically nothing to do with Pravda. He carried out more systematic work, interrupted by journeys to the front, in the Commissariat of Nationalities. The Soviet state was just forming itself, and it was not easy to determine in the new fashion this inter-relationship of the various nationalities. The general guidance of this work, not to mention the initiative, was completely Lenin’s, who since time immemorial had accorded to the national question a tremendous significance, second in importance only to the agrarian question. It is evident from the diary of his secretariat how often he received all sorts of national delegations and addressed letters, inquiries and instructions with reference to one or another national group. All the more principal measures had to pass through the Politburo; the less important ones were considered by telephone with Lenin. On the Commissariat of Nationalities was imposed the technical performance of decisions already made.<br /><br />Information concerning the work of this Commissariat can be found in the memoirs of Pestkovsky, published in 1922 and 1930. He was Stalin’s closest assistant during the first twenty months of the Soviet regime. An old Polish revolutionist who had been condemned to hard labor in Siberia, and a participant of the October insurrection who held the most varied positions after the victory, including among them the post of Soviet Minister to Mexico in 1924-26, Pestkovsky was for a long time in one of the oppositional groups, but managed to repent in time. The brand of recent repentance lies on the second edition of these memoirs, but it does not deprive them either of freshness or interest.<br /><br />The initiative in their collaboration was taken by Pestkovsky, who knocked on various doors, seeking and not finding application for his modest talents.<br />*“Comrade Stalin,” said I, “are you the People’s Commissar for the affairs of the nationalities?”<br />“Yes.”<br />“But have you a Commissariat?”<br />“No”<br />“Well then, I will make you a Commissariat.”<br />“All right, but what do you need for that?”<br />“For the present, merely a mandate.”<br />At this point Stalin, who hated to waste words, went to the executive offices of the Council of People’s Commissars and several minutes later returned with a mandate.<br /><br />In one of the rooms of the Smolny already occupied Pestkovsky found a vacant table and placed it against the wall, pinning above it a sheet of paper with the inscription: “People’s Commissariat for the Affairs of the Nationalities.” To all this two chairs were added.<br />*“Comrade Stalin,” said I, “we haven’t a farthing to our name.” In those days the new government had not yet taken possession of the State bank.<br />“Do you need much?” asked Stalin.<br />“To begin with a thousand roubles will do.”<br />“Come in an hour.”<br />When I appeared an hour later Stalin ordered me to borrow three thousand roubles from Trotsky. “He has money. He has found it in the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” I went to Trotsky and gave him a formal receipt for three thousand roubles. As far as I know, the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities has not yet returned this money to Comrade Trotsky.<br /><br />[Stalin was at the side of Lenin] on the 9th (22nd) of November, 1917, from two to half past four in the morning, when Vladimir Ilyich, carrying on negotiations by direct wire with Commander-in-Chief General Dukhonnin, issued orders about the immediate beginning of peace negotiations with all countries at war. After Dukhonnin’s refusal, he wrote the order for his removal and the appointment of N. V. Krylenko, as Commander-in-Chief. [Apropos of incidents such as this] Pestkovsky writes that Stalin became “Lenin’s deputy in the leadership of fighting revolutionary actions. He was in charge of watching after military operations on the Don, the Ukraine, and in other parts of Russia.” The word “deputy” does not fit here; it would be more correct to say “technical assistant.” Since observation of the course of the Civil War in the country was carried on principally through the intermediacy of direct telegraphic wire, this function too was carried on by Stalin, because he had more time from his duties than any other member of the Central Committee.<br /><br />Stalin’s conversations by direct wire were essentially semi-technical, semi-political in character. He was carrying out instructions. Extremely interesting is one of his very first conversations by direct wire on the 17th (30th) of November, 1917, with the representative of the Ukrainian Rada, Porsh. The Ukrainian Rada was similar to the government of Kerensky. It was supported by the top layer of the petty bourgeoisie. No doubt it also had the support of the upper bourgeoisie and the Allies against the Bolsheviks. The Ukrainian Soviets were at the same time falling under the influence of the Bolsheviks and were in direct opposition to the Rada. A clash between the Soviets and the Rada was unavoidable, especially after the October Revolution in Petrograd and Moscow. Porsh, in the name of the Rada, asked what was the attitude of the Petrograd government toward the national question in general and the fate of the Ukraine and its internal regime in particular. Stalin answered with generalities. “The power in the Ukraine, as in other regions,” said Stalin, “should belong to the entire totality of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, including in it also the organization of the Rada. In that sphere there is a broad field of agreement between the Central Rada and the Soviet of People’s Commissars.” This was precisely the combination that the Mensheviks and Essars demanded after the October Revolution, and it was on this question that the negotiations conducted by Kamenev had broken down.<br /><br />At the direct wire in Kiev, alongside the Ukrainian Minister Porsh, was the Bolshevik Sergei Bakinsky, who likewise demanded answer to questions. They controlled one another. Bakinsky represented the Soviets. He stated that the Central Rada did not deem it possible to transfer the power locally to the Soviets. Replying to Bakinsky, Stalin said that if the Central Rada should refuse to convoke a Congress of Soviets with the Bolsheviks, then “convoke it without the Rada.” Further: “The government of the Soviets must be accepted locally. This is the one revolutionary commandment we cannot repudiate, and we do not understand how the Ukrainian Central Rada can argue against an axiom.”<br /><br />A quarter of an hour earlier Stalin had declared that it was possible to combine the Soviets with the democratic organizations of the Rada; now he was declaring for the government of the Soviets without any sort of combination as an axiom. How to explain this contradiction? We have no documents to hand. But the mechanics behind the conversation are quite clear. During the negotiations Stalin was sending the tape from the lower story of the Smolny to the upper story, to Lenin. Having read Stalin’s proposal about combining the Soviets with the organizations of the Rada, Lenin could not have done otherwise than to send him a severe note. Perhaps he even ran downstairs into the telegraph room in order to tell Stalin what he thought about it. Stalin did not argue, and in the second part of his conversation gave an instruction directly opposed to the one which he had given in the first part.<br /><br />As a member of the Politburo, Stalin was included in the delegation from the Russian Communist Party to the Congress of the Finnish Socialist Party. But this inclusion was purely nominal in character. Stalin did not take part in the work of the Congress. “When at the end of December, 1917, the Congress of the Finnish Socialist Party took place,” writes Pestkovsky, “there arose the question as to whom the working class of Finland would follow. The Central Committee of the Bolsheviks sent to that Congress as its representative, Stalin.” Neither Lenin nor I nor Sverdlov could leave Petrograd; on the other hand, Zinoviev and Kamenev were not suitable at that period for the task of raising an insurrection in Finland. Stalin’s candidature appeared the most suitable. It was at that Congress that Stalin evidently met for the first time Tanner, with whom 22 years later he was to carry on negotiations on the eve of the Soviet0-Finnish War.<br /><br />The same Pestkovsky refers to close collaboration between Lenin and Stalin. “Lenin could not get along without Stalin even for a single day. Probably for that reason our office in the Smolny was ‘under the wing’ of Lenin. In the course of the day, he would call Stalin out an endless number of times, or would appear in our office and lead him away. Most of the day Stalin spent with Lenin. What they did there, I don’t know, but on one occasion, upon entering Lenin’s office, I discovered an interesting picture. On the wall hung a large map of Russia. Before it stood two chairs. And on them stood Ilyich and Stalin, moving their fingers over the northern party, I think across Finland. At night when the commotion in the Smolny subsided a bit, Stalin would go to the direct wire and spend hours there. He carried on the longest negotiations either with our military leaders (Antonov, Pavluovsky, Muravyov, and others) or with our enemies, with the War Minister of the Ukrainian Rada, Porsh. Occasionally, when he had some pressing business and he was called out, he would send me to the wire.”<br /><br />The facts here are given more or less correctly; the interpretation is one-sided. At that period, Lenin had great need of Stalin. There can be no doubt about that. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been waging a struggle against Lenin; I spent my time either at meetings or in Brest-Litovsk, principally in Brest-Litovsk; Sverdlov carried the responsibility for the entire organizational work of the Party. Stalin really had no definite duties. The Commissariat of Nationalities, especially in the beginning, took very little of his time. He, therefore, played the role of chief-of-staff or a clerk on responsible missions under Lenin. The conversations by direct wire were essentially technical, although very responsible, and Lenin could entrust them only to an experienced man who was fully informed of all the tasks and cares of Smolny.<br /><br />[Even after the removal from Petrograd to Moscow, Lenin continued to abide by the axiomatic rule of not issuing personal orders. Practically three years later, when] on the 24th of September, 1920, Ordzhonikidze by direct wire from Baku asked for his permission to send a destroyer to Enzeli (Persia), Lenin wrote over the dispatch: “I’ll ask Trotsky and Krestinsky.” Actually there is a countless number of such inscriptions on telegrams, letters and reports. Lenin never decided himself, always turned to the Politburo. Two of three of its members, and sometimes no more than two, were usually in Moscow. From these hundreds of notations about asking members of the Politburo, only those have been extracted which bore the inscription to “ask Stalin,” and these interpreted to mean that Lenin did not take a step without Stalin.<br /><br />-------------------------------<br />PART TWO<br /><br />[With reference to the Brest-Litovsk negotiations] Stalin’s historiographers have had a veritable holiday. ]They had genuine documents to quote in support of their myth-making, documents from the archives of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, presided over at the time by Trotsky. Thus, in 1935, a certain Sorin wrote]:<br />*In a letter to Lenin from Brest, Trotsky proposed the following essentially profoundly adventuristic plan: not to sign an annexationist peace, but not to continue the war, while demobilizing the army. On the 15th (2nd) of January, in a conversation by direct wire with Trotsky, who asked for an immediate reply, Vladimir Ilyich characterized Trotsky’s plan as “disputable” and postponed the final answer until the arrival of Stalin, who at that time was not in Petrograd and whom Vladimir Ilyich wanted to consult. We quote the complete record of these conversations:<br /><br />15 (2) January –the following conversations by direct wire took place between Trotsky and Lenin: Trotsky asks Lenin whether he received a letter sent to him through a Latvian soldier. Trotsky must have an immediate answer to that letter. The answer should be expressed in words of agreement or disagreement.<br />“Lenin at the apparatus. I have just now received your special letter. Stalin is not here, and I have not yet been able to show it to him. Your plan seems disputable to me. It is not possible to postpone taking the final decision until after a special session of the Central Executive Committee here? As soon as Stalin returns I will show the latter to him. Lenin”<br />“We shall try to postpone the decision as long as possible, awaiting communication from you. Please try to hurry. The Rade delegation is carrying on a flagrantly treacherous policy. The consideration of the plan in the Central Committee seems to me inconvenient, since it may evoke a reaction before the plan is carried out. Trotsky”<br />Reply to Trotsky: “I should like to consult first with Stalin before replying to your question. Today a delegation of the Kharvov Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, which assures me that the Kiev-Rada was breathing its last, has departed to visit you. Lenin”<br />When the negotiations of the 18th (5th) January reached a critical moment, L.D. Trotsky asked for a directive by direct wire and received one fate the other the following two notes:<br />1. “To Trotsky –Stalin has just arrived. I shall consider with him and we shall give you our joint answer. Lenin”<br />2. “Inform Trotsky he is requested to set a recess and come to Petrograd. Lenin. Stalin”<br /><br />[The official History of the Bolshevik Party, published in 1939, goes completely overboard. It declares]:<br />* On the 10th of February, 1918, the peace negotiations of Brest-Litovsk were interrupted. Notwithstanding the fact that Lenin and Stalin in the name of the Central Committee of the Party insisted on signing peace, Trotsky, who was the Chairman of the Soviet delegation in Brest, treacherously violated the explicit directives of the Bolshevik Party. He declared that the Soviet Republic refused to sign peace on the basis of the conditions proposed by Germany and at the same time informed the Germans that the Soviet Republic would not carry on the war, and would continue to demobilize the army.<br />This was monstrous. The German imperialists could ask for no more from this traitor to the interests of the Soviet fatherland.<br /><br />[Turning from page 207 to 208 of the same book, we find the following elaboration]:<br />* Lenin called this decision “strange and monstrous.”<br />At this time it was not yet clear to the Party that was the real reason for this anti-Party behavior of Trotsky and of the “Left Communists.” But as has been recently established by the trial of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” (beginning of 1938), Bukharin and the group of “Left Communists,” headed by him, jointly with Trotsky and the “Left” Essars, were already then in a secret conspiracy against the Soviet Government. Bukharin, Trotsky and their fellow-conspirators, it has developed, aimed to annul the Brest Peace Treaty, to arrest V.I. Lenin, J.V. Stalin, Ya.M. Sverdlov, kill them, and form a new government of Bukharinites, Trotskyites and the “Left” Essars.<br /><br />[Now let us examine the record. Sixty-three Bolsheviks were present at the conference of January 21st (8th), 1918, of whom an absolute plurality (32) voted in favor of waging a revolutionary war. Trotsky’s position –neither war nor peace –received 16 votes; Lenin’s –peace with Imperial Germany –15 votes. The question was considered again three days later by the Party Central Committee. The protocols recording the session of January 24th (11th), 1918 read as follows]:<br />* Comrade Trotsky moves that the following formula be put to the vote:<br />“We terminate the war, we do not conclude peace, we demobilize the army.”<br />This is put to the vote. Ayes 9, Nayes 7.<br />Lenin’s proposition was put to the vote: “we drag out the signing of the peace in every way” (Ayes 12, Nayes 1). L.D. Trotsky’s “do we intend to issue a call for a revolutionary war?” (Ayes 2, Nayes 11, not voting 1); and “we stop the war, do not conclude peace, demobilize army: )Ayes 9, Nayes 7).<br /><br />At that session Stalin based the necessity to sign a separate peace on this argument: “There is no revolutionary movement in the West; there are no facts: there are only potentialities, and we cannot take into account potentialities.” “Cannot take into account?” Lenin at once repudiated Stalin’s support; it is true that the revolution in the West has not yet begun’ “however, if we should change our tactics because of that, we would be traitors to international socialism.”<br /><br />The following day, the 25th (12th) of January, the question of peace was considered at the joint session of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks and the Left Social Revolutionaries [Left Essars]. By a majority of votes, it was resolved to propose for the consideration of the Congress of Soviets the formula: “Not to wage war, not to sign peace.”<br /><br />What was Stalin’s attitude towards this formula? This is what Stalin declared a week after that session at which the formula was accepted by nine votes against seven:<br />Session of February 1 (January 19) 1918; Comrade Stalin: . . . “The way out of this difficult situation was provided us by the middle point of view –the position of Trotsky.”<br /><br />Stalin’s words will become wholly comprehensible if one takes into consideration that throughout that entire critical period the preponderant majority of Party organizations and Soviets stood for revolutionary war and that consequently Lenin’s position could only be carried through by way of a party and state revolution (which of course was utterly out of the question). Thus, far from being mistaken, Stalin merely acknowledged an indisputable fact, when he said that my position was at that time the only way out of the situation for the party.<br /><br />[On the 10th of February] the Soviet delegation at the Peace Conference in Brest0-Litovsk made public the official declaration of the refusal of the Soviet Government to sign the annexationist peace and of the termination of the war with the powers of the Quadruple Alliance. [Two days later there was published] the order of Supreme Commander-in-Chief, N.V. Krylenko, for the termination of military activity against the same powers and for the demobilization of the Russian Army.<br />[Referring to these events a year later, Lenin wrote:]<br /><br />* How did it happen that not a single tendency, not a single direction, not a single organization of our party was not opposed to that demobilization?<br />What was the matter with us –had we completely lost our minds? Not in the least. Officers, not Bolsheviks, were saying even before October that the Army cannot fight, that it cannot be kept at the front another few weeks. After October this became self-evident to everyone who wanted to look facts in the face, who wanted to see the unpleasant bitter reality, and not hide himself or pull h is hat over his eyes and be satisfied with proud phrases. There was no army. It was impossible to hold onto it. The best that could be done was to demobilize as soon as possible.<br />This was the sick part of the Russian State organism that could not endure any longer the burden of war. The sooner we demobilized it, the sooner it was dissolved among parts which were not yet sick, the sooner would the country be able to get ready for its new difficult tasks. This is what we felt when unanimously, without the slightest protest, we passed the resolution, the decision which from the point of view of outward events was absurd –to demobilize the army. It was the right thing to do. We were saying that to keep the army is a frivolous illusion. The sooner we demobilize the army, the sooner will begin the convalescence of the entire social organism as a whole. That is why the revolutionary phrases, “the German cannot advance,” from which followed the second, “We cannot declare the state of war terminated; neither war nor the signing of peace,” was such a profound error, such an overestimation of events. But suppose the German advances? “No, he will be unable to advance.”<br /><br />Actually the advance of the German troops lasted fourteen days, from the 18th of February to the 3rd of March. The whole of the 18th of February the Central Committee devoted to the question of how to react to the German advance that had begun.<br /><br />After the breaking off of negotiations in Brest on the 10th of February and the publication by the Russian delegation of the declaration of the termination of the war and the refusal to sign peace with Germany, the “military party” –the party of extreme annexation –had finally won out. At a conference in Hamburg on the 13th of February, which took place under the chairmanship of Emperor Wilhelm, the following statement proposed by him was accepted: “Trotsky’s refusal to sign the peace treaty automatically leads to the termination of the Armistice.” On the 16th of February the German military Kommando officially informed the Soviet Government of the termination of the Armistice with the Soviet Republic, beginning at twelve noon of the 18th February, thus violating the stipulated agreement that notice of termination of the Armistice must be given seven days before the beginning of military action.<br /><br />The question of how to react to the German advance was first broached at the session of the Central Committee of the Party on the evening of the 17th of February. Germany’s immediate proposal to enter into new negotiations for the signing of peace was rejected by six votes against five. On the other hand, no one voted “for revolutionary war,” while N.I. Bukharin, G.I. Lomov, and A.A Joffe “declined to vote on such a posing of the question.” By a majority of votes a resolution was passed “to postpone the renewal of peace negotiations until the advance shows itself in a sufficient degree and until its influence on the labor movement becomes evident.” With three not voting, the following decision was passed unanimously: “When the German advance is as a fact, and yet no revolutionary upsurge begins in Germany and Austria, we shall conclude peace.”<br /><br />On the 18th of February, with the Germans advancing, the Central Committee of the Party was in session throughout the day, with brief interruptions (in one of the Protocols the time indicated is “in the evening,” the two others are not dated more precisely). At the first session, after speeches by Lenin and Zinoviev in favor of signing peace, and by me and N.I. Bukharin against, the motion: “to offer immediately a proposal to renew peace negotiations,” was voted down by seven to six. At the second, or evening session, after speeches by Lenin, Stalin Sverdlov and Krestinsky in favor of renewing peace negotiations, Uritsky and Bukharin against, and a speech by me proposing that we do not renew negotiations but ask the Germans for their formulated demands, the following question was put to the vote: “Shall we immediately offer the German Government a proposal to conclude a peace at once?” This proposal passed by seven votes (Lenin, Smilga, Stalin, Sverdlov, G. Sokolnikov, myself, Zinoviev) against five (Uritsky, Lomov, Bukharin, Joffe, Krestinsky), with one not voting (Stassova). Then it was decided immediately to make out a precise statement of the accepted decision and to work out the text of the communication to the German Government. Lenin’s proposal about the points of which the telegram should be composed was put to the vote. All but two abstainers voted for registering and referring to the extortionism of the peace terms; for readiness to sign the old conditions, with the indication that there was no refusal to accept worse conditions: Ayes seven; Nayes four; not voting, two. The task of working out the text itself was delegated to Lenin and me. The radiogram was then and there written by Lenin, and, with minor corrections which I made, approved at the joint session of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks and the Left Essars, and sent over the signatures of the Council of People’s Commissars to Berlin on the 19th of February.<br /><br />At the session of the Council of People’s Commissars on the 21st of February, the representatives of the Left Essars voted against utilizing the help of the Entente for counteraction the German advance. Negotiations with the Allies about military and technical help had begun soon after the October Revolution. They were carried out by Lenin and me, with General’s Lavergne and Colonel Raymond Robbins representing the Americans. On the 21st of February, in connection with the continued advance of the Germans, the French Ambassador Noulens telegraphed to me: “In your resistance to Germany you may count on the military and financial cooperation of France.” Of course, the difference between German militarism and French militarism was not for us a question of principle. It was only a question of securing the necessary neutralization of certain forces antagonistic to us in order to save the Soviet Government. [But the French Government did not keep its word.] Clemenceau proclaimed a holy war against the Bolsheviks. Then we were forced to conclude the peace of Brest-Litovsk.<br /><br />The reply to the Soviet radiogram which outlined the German conditions of peace was received in Petrograd at 10.30 in the morning [of February 23rd.] By comparison with the conditions of peace presented on the 10th of February, these terms were considerably worse. Livonia and Estonia had to be cleared immediately of the Red Army, and the German police was to occupy them; Russia obligated itself to conclude peace with the bourgeois Ukrainian and Finnish governments; and the like. The question of accepting the German terms of peace was discussed [the same day], first at the session of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, then at the joint session of our Central Committee and Central Committee of the Left Essars, and finally at the Plenary Session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee itself.<br /><br />At the session of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin, Zinoviev, Sverdlov and Sokolnikov spoke in favor of accepting these conditions and signing the peace. Bukharin, Dzerzhinsky, Uritsky and Lomov spoke against it. I declared that “if we had unanimity, we could have taken upon ourselves the task of organizing our defense. We could have managed it . . . But that would require the maximum of unity. Since that was lacking, I will not take upon myself the responsibility of voting for war.” The Central Committee resolved by seven votes to four, with four not voting, immediately to accept the German proposal, prepare for a revolutionary war and (unanimously, with three not voting) carry out a poll of the Soviet electors of Petrograd and Moscow, in order to determine the attitude of the masses toward the conclusion of peace.<br /><br />At the session of the Central Committee on the 23rd of February Stalin declared: “We need not sign, but we must begin peace negotiations.” To which Lenin replied. If you do not sign them, then you will sign the death sentence of the Soviet Government within three weeks.” [And the protocol further states]: “Comrade Uritsky argued against Stalin that the conditions had either to be accepted or rejected, but that it was no longer possible to carry on negotiations.”<br /><br />To everyone familiar with the state of affairs at that moment –[even to an ardent Ann consistent advocate of a revolutionary war against Imperial Germany like Uritsky] it was clear that resistance was hopeless. Stalin’ statement was due entirely to the utter lack of any kind of thought-out position. As far back as the 18th of February the German [Army had taken] Dvinsk. Its advance was developing with extraordinary rapidity. The policy of holding back had been exhausted to the very dregs. [Yet] Stalin proposed [five days later], on the 23rd of February, not to sign peace, but . . . to carry on negotiations.<br /><br />Stalin spoke a second time at the session of the 23rd of February, this time in defense of the necessity to sign the peace treaty. He took advantage of the occasion to correct himself likewise on the question of the international revolution, [in view of] Lenin’s [criticism of him. Said Stalin] “We, too, place out bets on the revolution, but you reckon in weeks, while we reckon in months.” This fully corresponded to the moods of those days and to the words of Sergeyev (Artem) [at the session of January 24th, 1918] that all members of the Central Committee were agreed on one thing, that without the victory of the international revolution in the nearest possible time (according to Stalin during the next few months) the Soviet Republic would perish. Thus, “Trotskyism” at that time prevailed unanimously in the Central Committee of the Party.<br /><br />Essentially, Stalin did not assume any kind of independent position in the period of the Brest negotiations. He hesitated, bided his time, kept his mouth shut – and schemed. “The Old Man is still hoping for peace,” he said to me, quite probably he went to Lenin and made the same sort of remarks about me. Stalin never really came into the open. True, no one was particularly interested either in his view or his contradictions. I am sure that my main task, which was to make our attitude toward the question of peace as understandable as possible to the world proletariat, was a secondary consideration with Stalin. He was interested in “peace in one country,” just as subsequently he was to become interested merely in “socialism” in one country. During the decisive balloting he joined with Lenin. It was only several years later, in the interests of the struggle with Trotskyism, that he took the trouble to work out for himself a certain semblance of a “point of view” about the Brest events. [Compare his attitude with that of Lenin who, addressing he Seventh Congress of the Party on the 8th of March, immediately after the bitter struggle of factions, said]:<br />* Further I must touch upon the position of Comrade Trotsky. It is necessary to distinguish two aspects of his activity; when he began negotiations at Brest, splendidly utilizing them for agitation, all of us were in agreement with Comrade Trotsky . . . Trotsky’s tactic in so far as it aimed at procrastination, was correct. It became incorrect when the state of war was declared to be terminated while peace had not been signed. . . But since history has swept this aside, it is not worth while to recall it.<br /><br />There was of course a profound difference between the policy of Lenin throughout the Brest-Litovsk crisis and the policy of Stalin, who stood closer to Zinoviev. It must be said that Zinoviev alone had the courage to demand the immediate signing of the peace, prophesying that putting off the negotiations would increase the severity of the peace conditions more truly, frightening us with it. None of us doubted that from the “patriotic” point of view it would have been more advantageous to sign the conditions immediately, but Lenin thought that the procrastination of the peace negotiations was revolutionary agitation and that the tasks of the international revolution stood above patriotic considerations – above the territorial and all other conditions of the peace treaty. To Lenin it was a question of securing a breathing spell in the struggle for the international revolution. Stalin felt that the international revolution was a “potential” with which we could not reckon. True, later he did amend these words, in order to set himself up against others, but essentially the international revolution in those days, just as considerably later, remained for him a lifeless formula which he did not know how to use in practical politics.<br /><br />It was precisely at the time of this crisis that it became clear that the factors of world politics were so many unknown quantities to Stalin. He did not know anything about them, and he was not interested in them. In the German working class passionate debates were raging among the progressive layers as to why the Bolsheviks had entered into negotiations and were preparing to conclude peace. There were not a few who voiced the opinion that the Bolsheviks and the government of Hohenzollern were playing a comedy in which the cues were pre-arranged. The struggle for the revolution required that we make clear to the workers that we could not act other wise, that the enemies were walking all over us, that we were forced to sign the peace treaty. Precisely for that reason, the German advance was our best proof of the forced character of the treaty. An ultimatum from Germany would hot have been enough; an ultimatum might likewise have been part of a rehearsed play. Quite a different matter was the actual movement of German troops, the seizure of cities, of military property. We were losing tremendous wealth, but we were winning the political confidence of the working class of the whole world. Such was the sense of the disagreement.<br /><br />--------------------------------------------------<br /><br />PARTY THREE: COMMISSAR FOR NATIONALITIES<br /><br />According to the text of the Constitution, a People’s Commissariat was made up of the chairman (the People’s Commissar) and of the collegium, which in turn consisted of a half dozen and sometimes even a dozen members. It was no easy task to guide a department. According to Pestkovsky, “all members of the Collegium on the National Question were in opposition to Stalin, frequently leaving their People’s Commissar in the minority. The repentant author hastens to add: “Stalin decided to re-educate us and worked at it persistently. In this he displayed a lot of gumption and wisdom.” Unfortunately Pestkovsky does not go into details on this aspect of the matter. But we do learn from him about the original manner in which Stalin would terminate conflicts with his collegium. “At times he would lose patience,” relates Pestkovsky, “but he never made it evident during the sessions. On these occasions, when in consequence of our endless discussions at conferences his patience would be exhausted, he would suddenly disappear, doing it with extraordinary skill; ‘just for moment’ he would disappear from the room and hide in one of the recesses of the Smolny, and later the Kremlin. It was impossible to find him. In the beginning, we used to wait for him. But finally we would adjourn. I would remain alone in our common office, patiently awaiting his return, but to no avail. Usually at such moments the telephone would ring; it was Vladimir Ilyich calling for Stalin. Whenever I replied that Stalin had disappeared, he would invariably tell me: ‘Find him at once.’ It was no easy task. I would go out for a long walk through the endless corridors of the Smolny and the Kremlin in search of Stalin. I would find him in the most unexpected places. A couple of times I found him in the apartment of the sailor, Comrade Vorontsov, in the kitchen, where Stalin was lying on a divan smoking a pipe and thinking over his thesis.”<br /><br />Since the best forces of the Party had gone in for military or economic work, the Collegium of the Commissariat of Nationalities consisted of people of minor importance. Nevertheless they indulged in the practice of marshalling arguments to counter Stalin’s contentions and putting questions to him to which he could not find answers. He had power. But that power was utterly insufficient for compulsion; he had to convince or persuade. Stalin could not cope with that situation. The contradictions between his overbearing nature and his insufficient intellectual resources created an insufferable situation for him. He did not enjoy authority in his own department. When his patience would be exhausted he would simply hide “in the most unexpected places.” It may be doubted that he was thinking over his thesis in the kitchen of the commandant. It is more likely that he was nursing his hurt inside of himself and brooding on how good it would be it those who disagreed with him would not dare to object. But in those days it did not even enter his head that a time would come when he would merely command and all others would obey in silence.<br /><br />No less colorful is Pestkovsky’s description of the search for the Commissariat’s quarters in Moscow, where the government moved the following March from Petrograd. A fierce struggle for the private houses of merchants raged between the departments. The People’s Commissariat of Nationalities had absolutely nothing in the beginning. “I brought pressure to bear on Stalin.” On whom Stalin brought pressure to bear, I don’t know. “After a while, the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities was in possession of several private houses. The Central Office and the Byelo-Russians were located on the Povarskya, the Latvians and Estonians on the Mikitskaya, the Poles on the Arbat, the Jews on Prechistenka, while the Tartars were somewhere on the Moscow River Quay. Besides that Stalin and I had offices in the Kremlin. Stalin proved to be quite dissatisfied with this situation. ‘Now it is quite impossible to keep an eye on you at all. We ought to find one large house and get eve3ryone together there.’ This idea did not desert him for a single minute. Several days later he said to me: ‘We have been given the Great Siberian Hotel, but the Supreme Council of National Economy has willfully taken possession of it. However, we shall not retreat. Tell Alliluyeva to type out the following on several pieces of paper: “These quarters occupied by the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities.” ‘And take along some thumb tacks.’”<br /><br />Alliluyeva, Stalin’s future wife, was a typist in the Commissariat of Nationalities. Armed with the magic bits of paper and the thumb tacks, Stalin and his assistant went by automobile to the Zlatoustensky Lane. “It was already getting dark. The main entrance to the hotel was closed. The door was decorated by a piece of paper which read –“This dwelling occupied by the Supreme Council.’ Stalin tore it off, and we fastened our decoration in its place. ‘All we have to do now is get inside,’ Stalin said. It was no easy task. With great difficulty we found the back-door entrance. For some inexplicable reason the electricity was not working. We lighted our way with matches. On the second floor we stumbled into a long corridor. We fastened our notices on a number of doors at random. When it was time to go back, we had no more matches. Going down in pitch darkness, we landed in the basement and nearly broke our necks. At long last we did manage to make our way to the automobile.”<br /><br />It takes a certain effort of imagination to visualize the figure of a member of the government under cover of darkness breaking into a building occupied by another ministry, tearing off one set of notices and posting another. It may be said with certainty that is would not have occurred to any of the other People’s Commissars or members of the Central Committee to anything like that. Here we recognize Koba of the Baku prison days. Stalin could not fail to know that the debatable question of a building would be decided in the final reckoning by the Council of People’s Commissars or in the Politburo. It would have been simpler in the very beginning to apply to one of these institutions. Apparently Stalin had reason for supposing that the contest would be decided not in his favor, and tried to confront the Council of People’s Commissars with an accomplished fact. The attempt failed; the building was assigned to the Supreme Council of National Economy, which was a more important ministry. Stalin had to hid another grudge against Lenin.<br /><br />[Footnote: By 1930 Stalin’s power was no longer challengeable. But the State Cult of his personality was just then beginning to be established. Thus is to be explained the circumstances that in these memoirs, notwithstanding their general panegyric tone, one still hears a note of familiarity, and even a shade of good-natured irony is permitted. Several years later, when the purges and executions would establish the necessary sense of distance, tales of how Stalin hid in the kitchen of the commandant or took possession of a house at night, would already sound unseemly and render the document taboo. It is likely that this author paid a cruel penalty for violating etiquette. – L.T.]<br /><br />The majority of the Collegium reasoned, according to Pestkovsky’s story, in this fashion: every oppression was merely one of the manifestations of class oppression. The October Revolution had destroyed the basis of class oppression. Therefore, there was no need to organize in Russia national republics and autonomous regions. Territorial division should be exclusively along economic lines, “ . . .The opposition to the Leninist policy was, strange though it may seem at first glance, especially strong among the non-Russian Bolsheviks (Letts, Ukrainians, Armenians, Jews and the like). The Bolsheviks in the borderlands that suffered oppression had been brought up in a struggle with local nationalistic parties and were inclined to reject not only the poison of chauvinism but even progressive social demands. The Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities consisted of these Russified non-Russians, who counterposed their abstract internationalism to the real needs of development of the oppressed nationalities. Actually this policy supported the old tradition of Russification and was in itself a special danger under the conditions of civil war.”<br /><br />The People’s Commissariat of Nationalities was created to organize all the formerly oppressed nations of Russia through national commissariats –such as the Armenian, the Byelo-Russian, the Jewish, the Latvian, the Mussulman (which was later renamed the Tataro-Bashkir), the Polish –and the departments of the Mountaineers of the Caucasus, the German, the Kirghiz, the Ukrainian, the Chuvash, the Estonian, the Kalmyk, the Southern Slavs, the Czechoslovaks (for serving the Czech military prisoners), the Votyak and the Komi. The Commissariat tried to organize the education of the nationalities on a Soviet basis. It published a weekly newspaper, The Life of the Nationalities, in Russian and a number of publications in various national languages. But it devoted itself chiefly to organizing national republics and regions, to find the necessary cadres or leaders from among the nationals themselves, to general guidance of the newly-organized territorial entities, as well as to caring for the national minorities which were for the first time called upon by the Revolution to lead an independent existence the Commissariat of Nationalities had an undoubted authority. It opened to them the doors leading to an independent existence within the framework of the Soviet regime. In that sphere Stalin was an irreplaceable assistant to Lenin. Stalin knew that life of the aboriginal people of the Caucasus intimately –as only a native could. That aboriginality was in his very blood. He loved the society of primitive people, found a common language with them, was not afraid they would excel him in anything, and therefore with them behaved in a democratic, friendly way. Lenin valued these attributes of Stalin’s, which were not shared by others, and in every way tried to bolster Stalin’s authority in the eyes of all sorts of national delegations. “Talk it over with Stalin. He knows that question well. He knows the conditions. Discuss the question with him.” Such recommendations were repeated by him scores and hundreds of times. On all those occasions when Stalin had serious conflicts with the national delegates, or in his own collegium, the question was referred to the Politburo, where all the decisions were invariably brought out in favor of Stalin. This should have reinforced his authority even more in the eyes of the ruling circles of the backward nationalities; in the Caucasus, on the Volga, and in Asia. The new bureaucracy of the national minorities later became a not unimportant bulwark of Stalin’s power.<br /><br />On the 27th November, 1919, the Second All-Russian Congress of Mussulman Communist Organizations and Peoples of the East was held in Moscow. The Congress was opened by Stalin in the name of the Central Committee of the Party. Four persons were elected honorary members: Lenin, myself, Zinoviev and Stalin. The president of the Congress, Sultan-Galiyev, one of those who subsequently ended up badly, proposed that the Congress greet Stalin as “one of those fighters who burned with a flame of hatred for international imperialism.” Yet it is extremely characteristic of the gradation of leaders at that time that even at this Congress the report of Sultan-Galiyev on the general political revolution concludes with the greeting: Long Live the Russian Communist Party! Long Live Its Leaders, Comrades Lenin and Trotsky.” Even this Congress of the Peoples of the East which was held under Stalin’s direct leadership did not deem it necessary to include Stalin among the leaders of the Party.<br /><br />Stalin was People’s Commissar of Nationalities from the moment of the Revolution until the liquidation of the Commissariat in 1923 in connection with the creation of the Soviet Union and the Council of Nationalities of the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. It may be considered firmly established that at least until May, 1919, Stalin was not very busy with the affairs of the Commissariat. At first Stalin did not write the editorials in The Life of the Nationalities, but later, when the journal began to come out in large format, Stalin’s editorials began to appear in one issue after another. But Stalin’s literary production was not great, and it decreased from year to year. In 1920-21, we find only two or three articles by him. In 1922 not even a single article. By that time Stalin had completely gone over to machine politics.<br /><br />In 1922 the editorial board of the journal stated: “In the beginning of the publication of The Life of the Nationalities Comrade Stalin, the People’s Commissar for the Affairs of the Nationalities, took an active part. He wrote during that period not only editorial articles, but often made up the informational review, contributed notes to the department of Party life and the like.” Reading these contributions, we recognize the old editor of the Tiflis publications and the editor of the Petersburg Pravda of 1913.<br /><br />Thus, in a number of issues he devoted his attention to the East. This was Lenin’s guiding idea. It may be followed in a number of his articles and speeches. No doubt Stalin’s interest in the East was in large measure personal in character. He was himself a native of the East. If, before representatives of the West, he, who was familiar neither with the life of the West nor with its languages, felt himself always at a loss, with representatives of the backward nations of the East, he, the Commissar who in large measure decided their fate, felt himself incomparably more confident and on firmer ground. The basic idea was Lenin’s. But with Lenin both the Eastern and Western perspectives were closely inter-related. In the foreground in 1918 were the problems of the West, not of the East; the war was coming to an end, there were upheavals in all the countries, revolutions in Germany and Austro-Hungary and elsewhere. Thus, Stalin’s article entitled “Don’t Forget the East” appeared in the issue of the 24th of November, 1018, i.e. at the very time of the Revolution in Austro-Hungary and Germany. All of us had regarded these revolutions as forerunners of the socialist revolution of Europe. At that time Stalin wrote that “without the revolutionary movement in the East, it is useless even to think about the final triumph of socialism impossible not only in Russia, but even in Europe without a revolutionary awakening of the East. This was a repetition of Lenin’s guiding idea. However, in this repetition of ideas, there was a division not only of labor, but also of interests. Stalin had absolutely nothing to say with reference to the revolutions in the West. He did not know Germany, did not know its life or its language, and other wrote about it with much greater knowledge. Stalin concentrated on the East.<br /><br />On the 1st of December, 1918, Stalin wrote in The Life of the Nationalities an article entitled “The Ukraine is Being Freed.” It as the same old seminarist rhetoric. Repetition takes the place of other resources: “We do not doubt that the Ukrainian Soviet Government will be able to offer proper resistance to the new unwelcome guests, the enslavers from England and France. We do not doubt that the Ukrainian Soviet Government will be able to expose their reactionary role,” and so on ad nauseam. In an article in the same magazine on December 22nd, 1918, Stalin wrote: “With the help of the best Communist forces, the Soviet state machine (in the Ukraine) is being re-established. The members of the Central Committee of the Soviets in the Ukraine are headed by Comrade Pyatakov . . . The best Communist forces which composed the government of the Ukraine were: Pyatakov, Voroshilov, Sergeyev (Artem) Kviring, Zatonsky, Kotsubinsky.” Of these only Voroshilov remained alive and became a Marshal. Sergeyev (Artem) died in an accident; all the others were either executed outright or disappeared without a trace. Such was the fate of “the best Communist forces.”<br /><br />On the 23rd February, he published an editorial entitled “Two Camps,” in which he said in part: “The world has divided itself resolutely and irrevocably into two camps –the camp of imperialism and the camp of socialism . . . The waves of the socialist revolution are growing without restraint, assailing the fortresses of imperialism . . . Their resonance resounds in the land of the oppressed peoples . . . The ground under the feet of imperialism is catching fire . . .” Notwithstanding the waves, the images are cliches and not in agreement with each other. In all of this there is the unmistakable ring of insincerity under the bathos of bureaucratic fishiness. On the 9th of March, 1919, The Life of the Nationalities published an article by Stalin entitled “After Two Years,” which expressed his conclusions: “The experience of the two years’ struggle of the proletariat has completely confirmed what Bolshevism had foreseen . . . the inevitability of the world proletarian revolution . . .” In those days the perspective of Bolshevism had not yet been reduced to socialism in a separate country. Of the same type were all the other articles, all of them utterly devoid of originality of thought or attractiveness of form. The articles were formally education in character, dry, flabby, and false.<br /><br />The first Congress of the Chuvash Communists took place in April, 1920, and therefore, more than two years after the establishment of the Soviet Government. The h honorary praesidium consisted of the same four persons: Lenin, myself, Zinoviev and Stalin. Describing the opening of the congress, the journal of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities pointed out that the walls were decorated with portraits of the leaders of the world revolution –Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev. At that time there were as yet no portraits of Stalin in existence; they were not hung anywhere and it never occurred to anyone to decorate even the Hall of the Congress with one of them. Yet this occasion was wholly in Stalin’s own sphere of activity.<br /><br />On the 7th of November –that is, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution – we find Stalin in Baku, where he spoke at the solemn session of the Soviets, delivering a report entitled “Three Years of the Proletarian Dictatorship.” At the Congress of the People of Daghestan on the 13th of November, Stalin proclaimed the autonomy of Daghestan, “Comrade Stalin’s speech,” as the journal of the Commissariat of Nationalities informs us, “was in many places interrupted by thunderclaps of applause, the Internationale, and ended in a stormy ovation.” On the 17th of November at the Congress of the People of the Terik Territory at Vladikavkaz, Stalin personally “proclaimed the Soviet autonomy of the Gurian people” and appeared with a report about the aforementioned autonomous Gurian Republic. Between the 18th and 21st of December, 1920 there took place the first All-Russian Conference of Representatives of Autonomous republics, territories and regions. Kaminsky transmitted to the Conference greetings in the name of Stalin, who could not be present because of illness. The motion to send greetings to Stalin was adopted unanimously. But at that Congress of the Peoples of the East the record reads: “. . . Honorary Chairmen of the Congress were elected: Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev and Trotsky . . . storms of applause . . .Honorary members of the Praesidium were elected . . . and Djugashvili-Stalin . . .” Again in the last place!<br /><br />--------------------------------<br />PART FOUR STALIN INVADES GEORGIA TO CREATE SOVIETS<br /><br />In Vienna, under the guidance of Lenin, Stalin had written a valuable work on the national problem, but his attempt to continue this work independently in Siberia produced such a result that Lenin deemed it impossible even to publish his article. At the March conference of 1917 Stalin was developing the view that national oppression is the product of feudalism, utterly losing sight of imperialism as the main factor of national oppression in our epoch. In 1923 he was to place on the same plane with Great-Russian nationalism, which had behind it age-old traditions and the oppression of weak nations, the defensive nationalism of these latter nations. These crude errors, Stalinist errors, taken together, are explicable, as has already been pointed out, by the fact that not on a single question does he rise to a systematic conception. He utilizes disjointed propositions of Marxism as he needs them at the moment, selecting them just as shoes are selected according to size in a shoe store. That is why at each turn of events he so easily contradicts himself. Thus, even in the field of the national problem, which became his special sphere, Stalin could not rise to an integrated conception.<br /><br />“Recognition of the right to secede does not mean the recommendation to secede,” he wrote in Pravda of October 10, 1920. “The secession of the borderlands would have undermined the revolutionary might of Central Russia, which stimulated the liberation movement of the West and the East. The seceded borderlands would have inevitably fallen into slavery to international imperialism. It is enough to take a look at Georgia, Armenia, Poland, Finland, etc., which have separated from Russia, and which have preserved merely the appearance of independence, while actually having become transformed into unconditional vassals of the Entente. It is sufficient to recall the recent history of the Ukraine and of Azerbajan, the former ravished by German capitalism and the latter by the Entente, in order to understand fully the counter-revolutionism of the demand for the secession of a borderland under contemporary international conditions.”<br /><br />“The revolutionary wave from the north,” wrote Stalin on the first anniversary of the October Revolution, “has spread over all of Russia, pouring over one borderland after another. But at this point it met with a dam in the form of the ‘national councils’ and ‘territorial governments’ (Don, Kuban, Siberia) which had been formed even before October. Bourgeois in nature, they did not at all desire to destroy the old bourgeois world. On the contrary, they deemed it their duty to preserve and fortify it with all their strength . . . They naturally became the hearths of reaction, drawing around themselves all that was counter-revolutionary in Russia . . .But the struggle of the ‘national’ and territorial ‘governments’ (against the Soviet Center) proved to be an unequal struggle. Attacked on both sides, from the outside by the Soviet Government and on the inside by their own workers and peasants, the ‘national governments’ had to retreat after the first battle . . . Completely routed, the ‘national governments’ were obliged to turn for help against their own workers and peasants to the imperialists of the West.”<br /><br />Thus began the wave of foreign intervention and the occupation of the borderlands, populated predominantly by non-Russian nationalities, which could not help hating Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel, or their imperialistic and Russifying policy. In a report Stalin made at Baku on the 8th of November, 1920, under the title, “Three Years of the Proletarian Revolution,” we find the following concluding words: “There is no doubt that our road is not one of the easiest, but there is equally no doubt that we are not afraid of difficulties . . .” Paraphrasing certain words of Luther, Russia might have said: “Here I stand on the border between the old capitalistic and the new socialistic world; here on this border I unite the efforts of the proletarians of the West with the efforts of the peasantry of the East, in order to demolish the old world. May the God of History help me in this!”<br /><br />[According to Pestkovsky:<br />* In the strong of 1918 the Central Committee decreed to create the Tartar-Bashkir Republic. In order to work out this decision more concretely, a special conference was convoked in May at Moscow, composed of representatives of Party and Soviet organizations of the Ural Territory, representatives of the Tartar and Bashkir nationalities, and officials of the People’ Commissariat of Nationalities.<br />The delegates to this conference from the Ural Territory were Comrades Syromolotov and Tintul, and they brought with them a “real” Bashkir Communist, Comrade Shamigulov. All three were resolute opponents of the creation of the Tartar-Bashkir Republic, regarding it as something in the nature of a concession to Pan-Islamistic nationalism. Having received such unexpected support, we “Leftists” in the collegium of the Commissariat of Nationalities perked up in spirit and resolved on firm resistance to Stalin’s “opportunism.” In this way those who were in favor of creating a republic found themselves in a minority. The only one who resolutely supported Stalin was Nur-Vakhitov, leader of the Tartar Communists, and Ibragimov, a Left Essar and representative of the Ufa Tartars. The one Bashkir Communist, Shamigulov, expressed himself against the Republic, considering it an unnecessary concession to nationalism. Even worse was the action of another Bashkir, Manatov. At the session he voted for the republic, not wishing to “quarrel with his superiors,” but in the hall he urged us to fight resolutely against its establishment because according to him the Bashkirs did not want to be in the same republic with the Tartars.<br />After that Stalin convoked a session of the conference and declared that in view of the fact that the question had already been decided beforehand by the Central Committee, we must vote in favor of organizing a republic. But we did not yield, and, making a protest against the decision of the question before the convocation of the conference, we left the fraction meeting and refused to participate in the further deliberations of the council. At the same time we teased Stalin, saying that he “was left with a Left Essar.” For that we subsequently received a written reprimand from the Central Committee.<br /><br />After the proclamation of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic in November, 1917, sympathy for the Soviet Government sprang up among the masses. The leadership of these Bashkir masses passed into the hands of the nationalistic elements headed by Zak-Validov who represented the interests of the bourgeois-kulak portion of the population. Gradually this group degenerated into an outpost of anti-Soviet activity and established contact with Dutov and Kolchak. However, under the pressure of the masses, after the liquidation of Bashkir autonomy by Kolchak, Zak-Validov was compelled to begin negotiations with the Soviet Government. In February, 1919, after the liquidation of Kolchak, the Bashkir government went over to the side of the Soviet Government and toward the end of the same month at Simbirsk, at the staff headquarters of the Eastern Front, the delegation of the Bashkir government signed a preliminary agreement which guaranteed autonomy to the Bashkir people on condition that it establish a government on the basis of the Soviet constitution, open common action of Bashkir detachments with the Red Army against the Whites, and the like.<br /><br />In the beginning of March, 1919, Stalin commenced negotiations in Moscow with the Bashkir delegation about the formation of the Bashkir Soviet Republic. The result of these negotiations was the agreement of the Central Soviet Government with the Bashkir Government concerning Soviet Autonomous Bashkiria, concluded on the 20th of March, 1919. In the beginning of March, I was obliged to leave Moscow, having declined to participation in the Eighth Congress of the Party in view of military reverses near Ufa. Stalin calmly remained in Moscow at the Congress and until the 20th of March carried on the negotiations with the Bashkir delegation. Nevertheless, Stalin is hardly remembered in connection with the matter by contemporary historians of Bashkiria. [The two quotations below –the first by Antagulov, the second by Samoilov –are typical]:<br /><br />* The struggle between the Russian and the Bashkir comrades deepened; complete anarchy began. In one place Russians were arrested in the name of the Bashkir government; in another, Bashkirs were arrested in the name of the local government. Comrade Trotsky’s journey to Ufa happened to coincide with this movement (March, 1920). The Bashkir officials again began to carry on negotiations with the Soviet Government in the person of Comrade Trotsky achieved a degree of agreement.<br /><br />* Meanwhile, as a result of information received from Bashkiria, the Center accorded no little attention to the Bashkir question. In the middle of March Comrade Trotsky, who had arrived in Ufa with special powers, called us there for a conference on Bashkir affairs. To that conference from Sterlitamak, representing the Bashkirs, came Validov, Tukhvatulin, Rakhamatuvin, and Kaspransky; representing the Territorial Committee and the officials of the Center, Dudnik, Samoilov, Sergeyev (Artem), Treobrazhensky, and the Chairman of the Ufa Provisional Executive Committee, Eltsin.<br /><br />During the initial years of the Soviet regime Bolshevism in the Ukraine was weak. The cause of it is to be sought in the national and social structures of the country. The cities, the population of which consisted of Great-Russians, Jews, Poles, and only to a small extent of Ukrainians, were to a considerable extent colonies in character. Among the industrial workers of the Ukraine, a considerable percentage were Great-Russians. Between the city and the village lay a yawning, almost impassable abyss. Those Ukrainian intellectuals who interested themselves in the village, the Ukrainian language and culture, met with semi-ironical treatment in the city, and that of course pushed them resentfully in the direction of chauvinism. The non-Ukrainian Socialist factions in the cities had no sense of kinship with the life of the masses in the villages. In the Ukrainian cities they represented the culture of the Great-Russians with which most of them, especially the Jewish intellectuals, were not any too well acquainted. Hence, to a considerable extent, the exotic character of Ukrainian Bolshevism, the absence of it during the period when it should have been sending down deep roots, its profound independence, and the multitudinous conflicts, quarrels and constant internal factional struggles.<br /><br />It was Stalin’s duty as People’s Commissar of Nationalities to keep the development of the nationalist movement in the Ukraine under constant observation. By virtue of that alone, he was more closely connected than other with the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party. That closer connection began as far back as 1917, soon after the October Revolution, and continued for several years. In the Ukraine, Stalin represented the Russian Central Committee of the Bolsheviks. On the other hand, at certain general Party congresses he represented the Ukrainian organizations. This was customary at that time. He took part in the conferences of the Ukrainian Communist Party as one its actual leaders, and since the life of the Ukrainian organization was wasted on considerable part on constant squabbles, conflicts, factional groupings, Stalin felt in this atmosphere like a fish out of water.<br /><br />His Ukrainian period was full of failures, and therefore remains completely unrevealed. [Official Stalinist histories, compelled to record failure after failure in the effort to put across the Party line in the Ukraine throughout Stalin’ tenure as People’s Commissar of Nationalities, carefully avoid mention of his name in connection with this epidemic of failures. They do not state that in the final reckoning “the errors on the peasant and national questions which had been committed in the Ukraine in the beginning of 1919, and which contributed to the fall of the Soviet Government there” were due to Stalin’s wholly inadequate defense of the policy laid down by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. In castigating that failure, Lenin said: “Only a very small part of the well-managed farms ought to be turned into Soviet farms, otherwise we will not get a bloc with the peasantry . . . We need a policy similar to the one we needed at the end of 1917 and during many months in 1918 . . .We must therefore now assign a large number of Soviet farms for general land distribution.”<br /><br />[Appearing at the Fourth All-Ukrainian Party Conference on March 16, 1920, as the fully-empowered representative of the Central Committee, armed with the explicit resolution of that body on the Ukrainian question, Stalin was again confronted with a motley opposition, the spearhead of which were the followe3rs of Sapronov’s “Democratic Centralism” tendency, which had been routed in debate at the All-Russian Party Conference the previous December. This time all the arguments of that opposition were know beforehand, and the People’s Commissar of Nationalities set forth the rebuttals written out for him in advance by Trotsky, that task having been assigned to the latter by the Politburo. Yet he suffered defeat on the floor of the Ukrainian Conference. The Central Committee had to intervene by dissolving the Ukrainian Central Committee elected by the Fourth Conference and by recalling from the Ukraine a number of officials addicted to Great-Russian chauvinism, before it could introduce its policy, which insisted on unswerving enforcement of the principle of “the self-determination of nations.” The cardinal point of the Central Committee’s resolution adopted at the All-Russian Conference in December, 1919, declared]:<br /><br />In view of the fact that Ukrainian culture . . . Has for centuries been suppressed by Tsarism and the exploiting classes of Russia, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party makes it obligatory for all members of the Party to help in every way to get rid of all obstacles to the free development of the Ukrainian language and culture. Owing to the centuries of oppression, nationalist tendencies are to be found among the backward sections of the Ukrainian masses, and in view of this fact, it is the duty of members of the Party to treat them with the utmost forbearance and discretion, putting before them a comradely explanation of the identity of interests of the toiling masses of the Ukraine and Russia. Members of the Party . . .must actually enforce the right of the toiling masses to study in the Ukrainian language and to use it in all Soviet institutions . . . striving . . . to render the Ukrainian language a weapon for the Communist education of the toiling masses. Steps must immediately be taken to assure a sufficient number of employees in all Soviet institutions who know the Ukrainian language and to see that in the future all employees should be able to speak Ukrainian.<br /><br />This should have proved an extremely easy thesis to defend. Even though as a rule Stalin was not a successful debater, considering the relation of forces, his defeat still seems surprising. It is quite possible that, having felt previously that the mood of the conference was unfavorable to his thesis, Stalin decided to play at he who loses wins, letting it be understood through intermediaries that he was defending the thesis not from his own conviction, but only from a sense of discipline. He could count in this way of killing two birds with one stone –acquire the sympathy of the Ukrainian delegates and transfer the odium of defeat to me as the author of the thesis. Such an intrigue was quite in the spirit of the man!<br /><br />The Georgian Social-Democracy not only led the impoverished peasantry to little Georgia, but aspired also, and not without a measure of success, to the leadership of the movement “of the revolutionary democracy of the whole of Russia.” During the first months of the Revolution, the leading circles of the Georgian intelligentsia regarded Georgia not as a national father land but as a Gironde, a chose southern province called upon to supply leaders to the whole country. But this continued only as long as there was s till hope of harnessing the revolution within the framework of bourgeois democracy. When the danger that Bolshevism would win became definitely clear, the Georgian Social-Democracy immediately broke its ties with the Russian Compromisers and united with the reactionary elements of Georgia itself. When the Soviets won, the Georgian champions of a single indivisible Russia became equally ardent champions of separatism . . .<br /><br />[The following documents of the time shed new light on the Sovietization of Georgia]:<br /><br />(1) * To the Revolutionary Council of War of the Caucasian Front. For Ordzhonikidze.<br />Received your complaining letter. You were mistaken in regarding my inquiry, which is my duty, as lack of confidence. I hope that before a personal meeting between us, you will abandon this unbecoming tone of injury. #96 April 3, 1920. Lenin<br /><br />(2) * To Baku via Rostov.<br />To the Member of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Caucasian Front Ordzhonikidze:<br />(To be delivered through responsible persons and the delivery reported toy Sklyansky of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic.)<br />The Central Committee orders you to remove all units from the territory of Georgia to the border and to refrain from incursion into Georgia. After negotiations with Tiflis, it is clear that peace with Georgia is not excluded.<br />Immediately report all the most accurate facts about the rebels.<br />By order of the Politburo: Lenin. Stalin #004/109 May 5, 1920.<br /><br />(3) [A letter typed on stationary of the commander-and-chief of all the armed forces of the Republic dated Moscow, February 17, 1921, #864, superscribed “Secret, Personal,” addressed to the Vice-Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of War of the Republic. It bore two inscriptions on the margin – one by Sklyansky, forwarding it to Lenin; the other by Lenin, returning it to Sklyansky. The essence of the text was]:<br /><br />* Upon the initiative of the command of the Second Army, we are confronted with the accomplished fact of incursion into Georgia: the borders of Georgia were crossed and the Red Army has already clashed with the Army of Georgia . . .<br />Commander-in-Chief, S. Kamenev,<br />Military Commissar of the Staff, [S.] Danilov.<br />Chief of Staff of the Revolutionary Council of War, [P.] Lebedev.<br /><br /><br />(4) Ekaterinburg, Secret<br /><br />*To Moscow, To Sklyansky.<br />Please write me a brief memorandum on the question of military operations against Georgia, when these operations began, by whose order, and the rest. I need the memorandum for the plenum. Trotsky.<br />#16 February 21, 1921.<br /><br />(5) * (written by Lenin; copy of a secret document)<br />(typed, signed by Comrade Sklyansky)<br />Absolutely Secret.<br />The Central Committee was inclined to permit Army II to support actively the uprising in Georgia and the occupation of Tiflis, while maintaining the international norms, and on condition that all the members of the Revolutionary War Council II, after seriously considering all the evidence, are certain of success. We warn you that we are sitting without bread, because of the transport, and therefore we will not give you a single train or a single car. We are compelled to obtain from the Caucasus only grain and oil. We demand an immediate reply by direct wire under the signature of all the members of the Revolutionary War Council II, as well as Smilga, Sytin, Trifonov, Frumkin. Until our reply to the telegrams of all these persons, do not undertake anything decisive.<br />By order of the Central Committee: Krestinsky. Sklyanksy.<br /><br />(6) * Comrade Sklyansky, immediately in your own presence have this coded arch-carefully, after photographing the original, and send to Smilga, so that he should personally stand at the direct wire and personally decode it. (Tell the Commander-in-Chief about it without showing it to him.)<br />Stalin himself will send Ordzhonikidze.<br />And so, a threefold and manifold carefulness. Under your responsibility.<br />Lenin. (written in the hand of Comrade Lenin)<br />February 14, 1921<br /><br />Menshevik Georgia could not hold out. That was clear to all of us. However, there was no certainty as to the movement and methods of sovietization. I stood for a certain preparatory period of work inside Georgia, in order to develop the uprising and later come to its aid. I felt that after the peace with Poland and the defeat of Wrangel there was no direct danger from Georgia and the denouement could be postponed. Ordzhonikidze, supported by Stalin, insisted the Red Army should immediately invade Georgia, where the uprising had presumably ripened. Lenin was inclined to side with the two Georgian members of the Central Committee. The question in the Politburo was decided on the 14th of February, 1921, when I was in the Urals.<br /><br />The military intervention passed quite successfully and did not provoke any international complications, if one does not take into account the frantic campaign of the bourgeoisie and the Second International. And yet, the method of the sovietization of Georgia had tremendous significance during the next few years. In regions where the toiling masses prior to the Revolution had managed in most cases to go over to Bolshevism, they accepted subsequent difficulties and sufferings as connected with their own cause. This was not so in the more backward regions, where the sovietization was carried out by the Army. There the toiling masses considered further deprivations a result of the regime imposed form the outside. In Georgia, premature sovietization strengthened the Mensheviks for a certain period and led to the broad mass insurrection in 1924, when, according to Stalin’s own admission, Georgia had to be “replowed anew.”Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1117242539478798002005-05-27T17:04:00.000-07:002005-05-27T18:38:09.753-07:00Rosdolsky on Marx's 'use-value'<span style="font-weight: bold;">Karl Marx and the Problem of Use-Value in Political Economy.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Chapter 3 from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Pp.74-95. Pluto Press, London 1977.</span><br /><br />[1. originally published in the Swiss Journal <span style="font-style: italic;">Kyklos</span>, 1959]<br /><br />Before proceeding to a presentation of the contents of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Rough Draft</span> we want to raise a methodological question which has been very neglected in previous marxist literature, [2. We can name two works which constitute an exception: first, the work of the Russian economist I.I. Rubin on <span style="font-style: italic;">Marx’s Theory of Production and Consumption</span> of 1930, which was unfortunately unavailable to the author; second (at least in part) Grossman’s last work on <span style="font-style: italic;">Marx, die klassische Nationalokonomie und das Problem der Dynamik,</span> (mineographed) New York.] the answer to which, however, contributes fundamentally to our knowledge of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Rough Draft.</span> The issue is that of the role of use-value in Marx’s economics.<br /><br />I.<br /><br />Among Marx’s numerous critical comments on Ricardo’s system the most striking can be found only in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Rough Draft</span>, namely that Ricardo abstracts from use-value in his economics, [3. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse</span>, Penguin, 1973 p.267] that he is only ‘exoterically concerned’ [4. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span> p.647] with this important category, and that consequently for him it ‘remains lying dead as a simple presupposition’. [5. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.320]<br /><br />We should now examine this criticism more closely. Strangely enough, it concerns not only Ricardo, but also many of Marx’s pupils, as it has been a tradition among marxist economists to disregard use-value, and place it under the scope of ‘knowledge of merchandise’ (Warenkunde). For example, Hilferding in his reply to Bohm-Bawerk: ‘The commodity is the unity of two different aspects. As a natural thing it is the object of a natural science –as a social thing, it is an object of a social science, political economy.<br /><br />The object of economics is the social aspect of the commodity, of the good, insofar as it is a symbol of social inter-connection. On the other hand the natrual aspect of the commodity, its use-value, lies outside the domain of political economy.’ [6. R. Hilferding, <span style="font-style: italic;">Bohm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx</span>, Lifton NJ, Kelley, 1949, p.130]<br /><br />At first glance this appears to be simply a paraphrase of the well-known section from Marx’s Contribution. However, how does this passage actually read in Marx?<br />‘To be a use-value is evidently a necessary prerequisite of the commodity, but it is immaterial to the use-value whether it is a commodity. Use-value as such, since it is independent of the determinate economic form, lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. It belongs to this sphere only when it is itself a determinate form.’ [7. <span style="font-style: italic;">Contribution</span>, p.28]<br /><br />It must be conceded that the original differs considerably from the copy,<br />[8. Bernstein notices this immediately and chafes Hilferding ih his discussion of the latter’s text (in <span style="font-style: italic;">Dokumenten des Sozialismus 1904</span> Heft 4, pp.154-570) on the subject of the discrepancy between his formulation of the question and Marx’s own. He writes, ‘Marx is not so daring as to throw use-value completely out of political economy’, and if Hilferding does this, ‘then he stumbles from his lofty position as an interpreter of Marx into depths far below those of the university professors whom he holds in such low regard’. However, these sarcastic remarks do not obscure the fact that Bernstein himself had no idea how to deal with the discrepancy, and was only able to solve it through a convergence of Marx’s theory with the economists of the ‘psychological school’.<br />Hilferding’s reply turned out to be very weak. ‘Use-value can only be designated a social category when it is the conscious aim of society, when it has become an object of its conscious social action. It becomes this in a socialist society, whose conscious management sets as its aim the preodcuction of use-values; however, this is in no way the case in capitalist society . . . However, although use-value can be designated as a social category in a socialist society it is not an economic category, not an object of theoretical economic analysis, since a consciously directed relation of production does require this analysis.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Neue Zeit </span>No 4, 1904, pp.110-11)]<br />and that Hilferding’s arbitrary reproduction of these sentences is tantamount to clumsy distortion of Marx’s real view.<br /><br />Or, we can take a more recent marxist author, P.M. Sweezy. In his work the <span style="font-style: italic;">Theory of Capitalist Development,</span> which is intended to popularise Marx’s economics, we read: ‘Marx excluded use-value (or as it would now be called, ‘utility’) from the field of investigation of political economy on the ground that it does not directly embody a social relation. He enforces a strict requirement that the categories of economics must be social categories, i.e. categories which represent relations between people. It is important to realise that this is in sharp contrast to the attitude of modern economic theory . . .’ [9. <span style="font-style: italic;">op.cit</span>. p.26]<br /><br />Sweezy’s presentation does not differ substantially from that normally found in popularisations of marxist economics. [10. The Philospher Marcuse goes to the other extreme when he writes, ‘when Marx declares that use-value lies outside the scope of economic theory, he is at first describing the actual state of affairs in classical political economy. His own analysis begins by accepting and explaining the fact, that, in capitalism, use-values appear only as the “material bearers of exchange-value” (<span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> 1, p.126 (36)). His critique then refutes the capitalist treatment of use-values and sets its goals on an economy in which this relation is entirely abolished.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Reason and Revolution</span>, p.304).<br /><br />The arbitraryness of this interpretation is immediately obvious. In the first place the passage quoted from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Contribution</span> is not conerned exclusively with classical political economy, but with political economy in general. Secondly, Marx nowhere states that use-values are only ‘material depositories of exchange-value’, but rather that they are so ‘at the same time’, which is quite another question. Finally, Marx never set himself the task of combating the capitalist treatment of use-values, but rather of scientifically explaining the fact, peculiar to capitalism (and to commodity production in general), that for use-values to be able to satisfy human needs, they must first prove themselves as exchange-values.]<br /><br />However, in his case the mistake is even less forgivable, as not only did he have access to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Theories of Surplus-Value</span>, but also the <span style="font-style: italic;">Marginal Notes on A. Wagner</span>, [11. Marx’s last economic work, printed in <span style="font-style: italic;">MEW</span> Vol. 19, pp.335-89. An English translation was published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Theoretical Practice</span>, Issue 5, spring, 1971.] where Marx discusses the role of use-value in his economic theory in great detail.<br /><br />He says there on Wagner, ‘Only a <span style="font-style: italic;">vir obscurus</span>, who has not understood a word of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> could conclude: Because Marx dismisses all the German professional twaddle on “use-value” in general in a footnote on “use-value” in the first edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> and refers the reader who would like to know something about real use-value to “manuals dealing with merchandise’” [12. See<span style="font-style: italic;"> Contribution</span>, p.28] therefore use-value plays no role for him . . . If one is concerned with analysing the “Commodity”, the simplest concrete economic entity, all relations which have nothing to do with the object of analysis must be kept at a distance. However, what there is to say about the commodity, as far as use-value is concerned, I have said in a few lines; but, on the other hand, I have called attention to the characteristic form in which use-value –the product of labour – [13. this should read, ‘insofar as it is the product of labour’.] appears in this respect; namely, “A thing can be useful and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfied his own needs with the product of his own labour creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values . . .” [14. Quoted from <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> I. p.131 (40).]<br /><br />Hence use-value itself – as the use-value of a “commodity” – possesses a historically specific character . . .It would therefore be sheer wordspinning to use the opportunity provided by the analysis of the commodity – because it presents itself as, on the one hand a use-value or good, and on the other a “value” – to add on all kinds of banal reflections about use-values or goods which do not form part of the world of commodities [in the way that standard university economics does.] . . .<br /><br />On the other hand the <span style="font-style: italic;">vir obscurus</span> has overlooked the fact that I do not stop short in my analysis of the commodity at the double manner in which it present itself, but immediately go on to say that in the double being of the commodity there is represented the twofold character of labour, whose product the commodity is useful labour, i.e. the concrete modes of labour which create use-values, and abstract labour, labour as the expenditure of labour-power, irrespective of whatever “useful” was it is expended (on which my later representation of the production process is based); that in the development of the value-form of the commodity, in the last instance of its money-form and hence of money, the value of the commodity is represented in the use-value of the other, i.e. in the natural form of the the other commodity; that surplus-value itself is derived from a “specific” and exclusive use-value of labour-power, etc. etc. That is, use-value plays a far more important part in my economics, than in economics hitherto, [15. Marx refers here, of course, to the economics of Smith and Ricardo.] but N.B. that it is only ever taken into account when this arises from the analysis of given economic forms, and not out of arguing backwards and forwards about the concepts of words “use-value” and “value”. [16. <span style="font-style: italic;">MEW</span> Vol. 19, p.371]<br /><br />This then is Marx’s view. It is clear from this that the traditional marxist interpretation of Hilferding, Sweezy et al. Cannot possibly be correct, and that in this instance the authors mentioned above –without knowing it – do not follow their teacher, Marx, but rather Ricardo, the man he criticises.<br /><br />II.<br /><br />However, what is the basis of Marx’s critique, and how should we actually interpret the objections to Ricardo which are mentioned at the beginning? To answer this we have to go back to the basic methodological assumptions of the marxist system.<br /><br />We know that, in contrast to the Classical school, Marx’s entire theoretical effort was directed at uncovering the ‘particular laws which govern the emergence, existence, development and death of a given social order, and its replacement by another higher one’. [17. J.J. Kaufman’s description of Marx’s method of investigation –quoted by Marx in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Afterword</span> to the Second Edition of Volume I of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span>, p.102 (19)]<br /><br />He thus regarded the capitalist mode of production as ‘merely a historical mode of production, corresponding to a certain limited epoch in the development of the material conditons of production’, [18. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital,</span> III, p.259.] and the categories of bourgeois economics as ‘forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production’. [19. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span>, I, p.169 (76).]<br /><br />But how can a theory arrive at a knowledge of such particular laws, which have only a historical claim to validity? And how can these laws be brought into consonance with the general economic determinants which apply to all social epochs since ‘all epochs of production have certain features in common’, a fact which ‘arises already from the identity of the subject, humanity, with the object, nature’.<br />[20. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse</span>, p.85. Hence, ‘no society can go on producing, in other words, no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production, or elements of fresh products’. (<span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> I p.711 (566). For this purpose, therefore it must maintain a certain production between the growth of the industries producting the means of production, and those producing the means of consumption (Departments I and II in Marx’s schemes of reproduction), accumulate reserves etc. On the other hand, in any society, a certain quantity of surplus labour has to be carried out by the members of that society in order that it may have ‘at its disposal, so to speak, a fund for development, which the very increase in population makes necessary’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Theories </span>I, p.102), ‘If we strip both wages and surplus-value, both necessary and surplus labour, of their specifically capitalist character, then certainly there remain not these forms, but merely their rudiments, which are common to all social modes of production,’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> III, p.876). And finally, ‘No society can prevent the disposable labour-time of society one way or another from regulating production.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">MEW</span> Vol 32, p.120. And consequently this material basis of the determination of value will also have considerable significance under socialism. (Cf. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital </span>III, p.851.)]<br /><br />Consequently, nothing is easier that ‘to confound or extinguish all historical differences under the general human laws’, by picking out these common characteristics. [21.<span style="font-style: italic;"> Grundrisse</span>, p.87.]<br /><br />For example, ‘even though the most developed languages have laws and characteristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless, those things which determine their development’ must express ‘the distinction between what they have in general and what they have in common’. Similarly the task of political economy is, above all, the investigation of the laws of development of the capitalist period, which it studies ‘so that in their unity’ (the unity between this period with earlier ones through the features which they have in common), ‘the essential difference is not forgotten’. [22. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid.</span> p.85.]<br /><br />But what constitutes development in the sphere of the economy? It is precisely that process in which it expresses its specific social character! ‘To the extent that the labour-process is solely a process between man and nature, its simple elements remain common to all forms of social development. However, each definite historical form of this process marks a further development in its material basis and social forms.’ [23. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> III, p.883.]<br /><br />Here it is the social forms which are the decisive factor – as distinct from their naturally given ‘content’. They alone represent the active, forward-moving element, [24. Cf. Hegel’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Science of Logic</span>, Volume II, p. 79. ‘Matter is determined as indifferent: it is the passive as against the active . . . Matter must be formed and Form must materialise itself – must in Matter give itself self-identity and persistence.’] for ‘natural laws cannot be abolished at all. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves.’ [25. ‘Marx’s letter to Krugelmann’, 11 July 1868. <span style="font-style: italic;">Selected Correspondence</span>, p.196.]<br /><br />We cannot go any more closely here into the fundamental marxian distinction between ‘Form’ and ‘Content’ in economics. (The influence of Hegel’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Logic</span> is easily discernible here. [26. The Russian political economist I.I. Rubin wrote in another context: ‘One cannot forget that, on the question of the relation between content and form, Marx took the standpoint of Hegel and not of Kant. Kant treated form as something external in relation to the content, and as something which adhere to the content from the outside. From the standpoint of Hegel’s philosophy, the content is not in itself something to which form adheres from the outside. Rather, through its development, the content itself gives birth to the form which was already latent in the content. Form necessarily grows from the content itself.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value</span>, Detroit: Black and Red 1972, p.117.)])<br /><br />One fact though is certain: for Marx it is the economic forms which serve to distinguish the particular modes of production, and in which the social relations of economic individuals are expressed. For example, as he says when criticising Rossi : ‘the “forms of exchange” seem [to Rossi] to be a matter of complete indifference. This is just as if a physiologist were to say that the different forms of life are a matter of complete indifference, since they are all only forms of organic matter. It is precisely specific character of a mode of social production. A coat is a coat. But have it made in the first form of exchange, (a: the form in which the tailor produces the coat for sale ready-made.) and you have capitalist production and modern bourgeois society; in the second, (b: the form in which the tailor is provided with the material and a wage by the person who wants the coat.) and you have a form of handicraft which is even compatible with Asiatic relations of those of the Middle Ages etc.’ [27. Marx’s comments here refer to the following sentence from Rossi: ‘Whether one buys ready-made clothes from a tailor, or whether one gets them from a jobbing-tailor who had been given the material and a wage, as far as the results are concerned the two actions are perfectly similar.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span> I, p.295.)]<br /><br />For, ‘in the first case the jobbing tailor produces not only a coat, he produces capital; therefore also profit; he produces his master as a capitalist and himself as a wage-labourer. When I have a coat made for me at home by a jobbing tailor, for me to wear, that no more makes me my own entrpreneur (in a sense of an economic category) than it makes the entrepreneur tailor an entrepreneur when he himself wears and consumes a coat made by his workmen.’[28. <span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span> I, pp.295-96.]<br /><br />And in another passage: ‘The agricultural labourers in England and Holland who receive wages which are “advanced” by capital “produce their wages themselves” just like the French peasant or the self-sustaining Russian serf. If the production process is considered in its continuity, there the capitalist advances the worker as “wages” today only a part of the product which he produced yesterday. Thus the difference does not lie in the fact that, in one case, the worker produces his own wage, and does not produce them in the other . . . The whole difference lies in the change of form, which the labour fund produced by the worker undergoes, before it returns to him in the form of wages . . .’ [29. <span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span> III, p.424. (Cf. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse,</span> p.87.)]<br /><br />Hence it is the specific social forms of production and distribution which, in Marx’s view, constitute the real object of economic analysis; and it is just this ‘lack of the theoretical understanding needed to distinguish the different form of economic relations’ combined ‘with a crude obsession with the material’ which characterises previous economics, even in its best representatives. [30. <span style="font-style: italic;">Theories </span>I, p.92 and <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital </span>I, p.682 (542); <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> III, p.323.]<br /><br />Only R. Jones and Sismondi are exempt from this criticism.<br />[31. ‘What distinguishes Jones from the other economists (except perhaps Sismondi) is that he emphasises that the essential feature of capital is its socially determined form, and that he reduces the whole difference between the capitalist and other modes of production to this distinct form.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span> III, p.424.)]<br /><br />With this we come to the end of our methodological excursus. Meanwhile the reader will have noticed that we have simultaneously answered – in very general terms – the question of the role of use-value in Marx’s economics. How did that passage run which we quoted at the beginning, from Marx’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Contribution</span>? In its ‘independence from the determinate economic form’ use-value ‘lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. It belongs in this sphere only when it is a determinate form itself.’<br /><br />In other words, whether use-value should be granted economic significance or not can only be decided in accordance with its relation to the social relations of production. It is certainly an economic category to the extent that it influences these relations, or is itself influenced by them. However, apart from that – in its raw ‘natural’ characteristics – it falls outside the scope of political economy. Or, as it says in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse</span> : ‘Political economy has to do with the specific social forms of wealth or rather the production of wealth. The material of wealth, whether subjective, like labour, or objective, like objects for the satisfaction of natural or historical needs, initially appears as common to all epochs of production.<br /><br />This material therefore appears initially as mere presupposition, lying quite outside the scope of political economy, and falls within its purview only when it is modified by the formal relations or appears as modifying them.’<br />[32.<span style="font-style: italic;"> Grundrisse,</span> p 852. Cf. The parallel section on p.881. ‘The first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity. The commodity itself appears as the unity of two aspects. It is use-value, i.e. object of the satisfaction of any system whatever of human needs. This is its material side, which the most disparate epochs of production may have in common, and whose examination therefore lies beyond political economy. Use-value falls within the realm of political economy as soon as it becomes modified by the modern relations of production, or as it in turn intervenes to modify them.’]<br /><br />III.<br /><br />Regarded in this way, the question of the difference between Marx and Ricardo on the role of use-value in economics no longer presents any difficulties. It cannot be related to their basic theories of value since both subscribed to the labour theory of value. From the standpoint of the labour theory of value the utility or use-value of the products of labour cannot be granted any influence in the creation of value; their use-value must rather appear as a simple presupposition of their exchangeability. However, it in no way follows from this that use-value has no economic significance at all, and that it should simply be excluded from the sphere of economics.<br /><br />In Marx’s view this is only correct in the case of simple commodity circulation (the exchange form C-M-C). Simple circulation ‘consists at bottom [33. In original, ‘au fond’.] only of the formal process of positing exchange-value, sometimes in the role of the commodity, at other times in the role of money’. [34. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse,</span> p.256.]<br /><br />How exactly the commodities to be exchanged were produced (i.e. whether they originated in a capitalist or pre-capitalist economy), and how they will be consumed after exchange is incidental to the economic study of simple commodity circulation. The protagonists here are simply buyers and sellers, or rather the commodities put up for sale by them, which establish their social connection on their behalf. The real aim of exchange –the mutual satisfaction of the needs of the commodity producers – can only be fulfilled if the commodities simultaneously prove themselves to be values, if they are successfully exchanged for the ‘universal commodity’, money. Consequently the social change of matter takes place in the change of form of the commodities themselves.<br /><br />And in this situation the change of form is the only social relationship between the commodity owners – ‘the indicator of their social function, or their social relation to each other’. [35. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid.</span> p.241.] However, as far as the content outside the act of exchange is concerned, this ‘content can only be . . . 1) the natural particularity of the commodity being exchanged 2) the particular natural need of the exchangers of both together, the different use-values of commodities being exchanged’. [36. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.242.] However the content as such does not determine the character of the exchange relation. In fact, use-value simply constitutes ‘the material basis in which a specific economic relation presents itself’ and ‘it is only this specific relation which stamps the use-value as a commodity . . . Not only does the exchange-value not appear as determined by use-value, but rather, furthermore, the commodity only becomes a commodity, insofar as its owner does not relate to it as use-value.’ [37. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.881.] Hence in this situation, where exchange ‘takes place only for the reciprocal use of the commodity, the use-value . . . the natural peculiarity of the commodity as such, has no standing as an economic form’, - is not ‘a content of the relation as a social relation’. [38. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.267.] Consequently only the change of form of the commodity and money has economic significance, and the presentation of simple commodity exchange has to be confined to this change of form alone. [39. ‘If we want to examine the social relation of individuals within their economic process, we must keep to the characteristic form of this process itself.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse,</span> German edn. P.914.)]<br /><br />However, although this is correct for simple commodity exchange, nothing would be more erroneous, states Marx, than to conclude ‘that the distinction between use-value and exchange-value, which falls outside the characteristic economic form in simple circulation, . . . falls outside it in general . . . For example, Ricardo, who believes that the bourgeois economy deals only with exchange-value, and is concerned with use-value merely exoterically, derives the most important determinations of exchange-value precisely from use-value, from the relation between the two of them: for instance, ground-rent, the minimum level of wages, and the distinction between fixed and circulating capital, to which he imputes precisely the most significant influence on the determination of prices; likewise in the relation of demand to supply etc.’ [40. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse</span>, pp.646-47.]<br /><br />Ricardo was indeed right to say that ‘exchange-value is the predominant aspect. But of course use does not come to a halt because it is determined only by exchange; although of course it obtains its direction thereby’. [41. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid.</span> p.267.] ‘To use is to consume, whether for production or consumption. Exchange is the mediation of this act through a social process. Use can be posited’ through exchange and be a mere consequence of exchange; then again exchange can appear merely as a moment of use, etc. From the standpoint of capital (in circulation), exchange appears as the positing of use-value, while on theother hand its use (in the act of production) appears as positing for exchange, as positing for exchange-value. Similarly with production and consumption. In the bourgeois economy (as in any) they are posited in specific distinctions and specific unities. The point is to understand these specific distinguishing characteristics . . . and not, as Ricardo does, to completely abstract from them, or like the dull Say, to make a pompous fuss about nothing more than the presupposition of the word “utility”.’ For ‘Use-value itself plays a role as an economic category. Where it plays this role . . . the degree to which use-value exists outside economics and its determinate form and not merely as presupposed matter . . . is something which emerges from the development itself.’ [42. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. pp.646, 267.]<br /><br /><br />IV.<br /><br />So when, according to Marx, does use-value as such become modified by the formal relations of bourgeois economy, and when, in its turn, does it intervene to modify these formal relations – that is, as a ‘determinate economic form’ itself?<br /><br />In the <span style="font-style: italic;">Marginal Notes on A. Wagner</span>, which have already been cited, Marx points out that even in simple commodity circulation, with the development of the money-form of the commodity, the value of a commodity must be represented in ‘use-value, i.e. in the natural form of the other commodity’. In Marx’ view this does not only mean that money must be a commodity as a matter of course, i.e. possess use-value in its material, but also, that this use-value is connected to quite specific physical properties of the money-commodity which make it capable of fulfilling its function. We read in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Rough Draft</span> : ‘The study of the precious metals as subjects of the money relation as incarnations of the latter, is therefore by no means a matter lying outside the realm of political economy, as Proudhon believes, any more than the physical composition of paint, and of marble lie outside the realm of painting and sculpture. The attributes possessed by the commodity as exchange-value, attributes for which its natural qualities are not adequate, express the demands made upon those commodities which are the material of money par excellence. These demands at the level at which we have confined ourselves up to now [i.e. the level of pure circulation of metals] are most completely satisfied by the precious metals.’ [43.<span style="font-style: italic;"> ibid</span>. p.174.]<br /><br />The commodities which fulfill the function of the universal equivalent, can double their use-value precisely because of their specific attributes, which make them the only material for money. They contain ‘besides their particular use-value as a particular commodity’, a ‘universal’ or ‘formal’ use-value. [44. ‘The formal use-value [of money] unrelated to any real individual need,.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Contribution</span>, p.89)]<br /><br />This latter use-value is itself a characteristic form, i.e. it arises from the specific role, which it [the money-commodity] plays as a result of the all-sided action exerted on it by the other commodities in the process of exchange.’ [45. <span style="font-style: italic;">Contribution</span>, p.47.] With this, the ‘material change and the change of form coincide, since in money the content itself is part of the characteristic economic form.’ [46. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse</span>, p.667.]<br /><br />The second example which Marx refers to in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Marginal Notes</span> is of decisive importance – the exchange between capital and labour. If we look, for example, at simple commodity circulation, as it occurs ‘on the surface of the bourgeois world’, in retail trade, ‘a worker who buys a loaf of bread, and a millionaire who buys the same thing, seem, in this act, to be simply buyers, as the grocer who confronts them is simply a seller. The content of these purchases, like their extent, here appears as completely irrelevant compared with the formal aspect.’ [47. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.251]<br /><br />However the matter looks quite different if we proceed from this exchange on the surface, to the exchange which determines the essence of the capitalist mode of production – that between capital and labour. For, if in simple circulation, ‘commodity A is exchanged for money B, and the latter then for the commodity C, which is destined for consumption – the original object of the exchange for A – then the use of commodity C, its consumption, falls entirely outside circulation; is irrelevant to the form of the relation . . . is of purely physical interest, expressing no more than the relation of the individual in his natural quality ot an object of his individual need.<br />What he does with commodity C is a question which belongs outside the economic relation,’ [48. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.274.]<br /><br />In contrast to this, in the exchange between capital and labour, it is precisely the use-value of the commodity purchased by the capitalist (i.e. labour-power) which constitutes the presupposition of the capitalist production process and the capital relation itself. In this transaction the capitalist exchanges a commodity whose consumption ‘coincides directly with the objectification (Vergegenstandlichung) of labour i.e. with the positing of exchange-value’. [49. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse</span>, German ed. P.944.] Consequently, if ‘the content of use-value was irrelevant in simple circulation’ here, by contrast, ‘the use-value of that which is exchanged for money appears as a particular economic relation . . . falls within the economic process because the use-value here is itself determined by the exchange-value’. [50. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse,</span> pp.274-75, 311.]<br /><br />Hence if the creation of surplus-value, as the incvrease in the exchange-value of capital, is derived from the specific use-value of the commodity labour-power, then political economy must in turn restrict the share of the value-product acccruing to the worker to the equivalent of the goods necessary to maintain him, and consequently must allow this share to be determined at bottom by means of use-value. [51. ‘Ricardo regards the product of labour in respect of the worker only as use-value – only the part of the product which he needs to be able to live as a worker. But how it comes about that the worker suddenly only represent use-value in the exchange, or only draws use-value from the exchange is by no means clear to him.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.551)] In this instance, too, the category of use-value has an impact on the economic relations of the capitalist mode of production.<br /><br />We can confirm now use-value constantly influences the forms of economic relations in the circulation process of capital. We disregard here the many ways in which the material nature of the product affects the duration of the working period and the circulation period, [52.Cf. especially Chapters V, XII, and XIII of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> II.] and proceed directly to the distinction which is basic to the circulation process –that between fixed and circulating capital, which Marx refers to in his polemic against Ricardo, which we have already cited.<br /><br />As far as fixed capital is concerned, it only circulates ‘as value to the degree that it is used up or consumed as use-value in the production process. But the time in which it is consumed and in which it must be repreoduced in its form as use-value depends on its relative durability. Hences its durability, or its greate or lesser perishability –the greater or smaller amount of time during which it can continue to perform its function within the repeated production processes of capital – this aspect of its use-value here becomes a form-determining moment i.e. a determinant for capital as regards its form, not as regards its substance. The necessary reproduction of fixed capital, together with the proportion of the total capital consisting of it, here modify, therefore, the turnover time of the total capital and thereby its valorisation.’ [53. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse</span>, p.685. Cf. Capital II, pp.170-71.]<br /><br />Thus, in the categories of fixed and circulation capital, ‘the distinction between the [three] elements [of the labour process] as use-values . . . appears as a qualitative distinction within capital itself, and as the determinant of the complete movement (turnover).’ [54. <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse,</span> p.692.] This therefore represents yet another instance where use-value enters into the process of capital as an economic factor.[55. In this regard we should refer to the instruments of labour which, ‘as capital united with the land’, function in the form of factory buildings, railways, bridges, tunnels, docks etc. The fact that such instruments of labour are ‘localised, attached to the soil by their roots, assigns to this portion of fixed capital a peculiar role in the economy of nations. They cannot be sent abroad, cannot circulate as commodities in the world market. Title to this fixed capital may change, it may be bought and sold, and to this extent may circulate ideally. These titles of ownership may even circulate in foreign markets, for instance, in the form of stocks. But a change of the persons owning this class of fixed capital does not alter the relation of the immovable, materially fixed part of the national wealth to its movable part.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> II, p.166.)]<br /><br />However, the role of use-value is seen most clearly in the reproduction process of aggregate social capital, as it is presented in Part III of Volume II of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span>. At the beginning of this section Marx points out that as long as the analysis was simply one of the reproduction process of an individual capital (i.e. as in Volume I), ‘the natural form of the commodity-product was completely irrelevant to the analysis . . . whether it consisted of machines, corn or mirrors’. In Volume I it was simply ‘presupposed on the one hand that the capitalist sells the product at its value, and on the other that he finds within the sphere of circulation the objective means of production for restarting the process’. For, ‘the only act within the sphere of circulation on which we have dwelt was the purchase and sale of labour-power as the fundamental condition of capitalist production’. [56. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. pp.356-57.] However, ‘This merely formal [57. i.e. bearing in mind the form of the process.] manner of presentation is no longer adequate in the study of an aggregate social capital’, in the reproduction of which the problem is not merely the replacement of value, but also the replacement of material, and consequently everything depends on the material shape, on the use-value of the value-product. [58. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> II, p.398. The well-known schemes of reproduction of Tugan-Baranovsky and Otto Bauer suffer precisely from not having observed this methodological postulate.]<br /><br />The same point is made in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span>, the difference being that Marx expressly refers to the significance of use-value as an economic category: ‘In considering surplus-value as such, the original form of the product, hence of the surplus-product, is of no consequence. It becomes important when we consider the actual process of reproduction, partly in order to understand its forms, and partly in order to grasp the influence of luxury production etc. on reproduction.’ [59. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> II, p.407.] ‘Here’, Marx stresses, ‘is another example of how use-value as such acquires economic significance.’ [60. <span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span> III, pp.251-52. In another passage in the same work Marx examines the question as to whether ‘a part of the surplus-value can be directly transformed into constant capital . . . without first having been alienated’. He writes: ‘In industrial areas there are machine-builders who build whole factories for the manufacturers. Let us assume one-tenth is surplus-product, unpaid labour, whether this tenth, the surplus-product, consists of factory buildings which are build for a third party and are sold to them, or of factory buildings which the producer builds for himself – sells to himself – clearly makes no difference. The only thing that matters here is whether the kind of use-value in which the surplus labour is expressed can re-enter as means of production into the sphere of production of the capitalist to whom the surplus belongs. This is yet another example of how important is the analysis of use-value for the determination of economic phenomena.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span> II, pp.488-89.)]<br /><br />We now proceed to those subjects dealt with in Volume III of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span>. We can find numerous examples here of the significance of use-value as an economic category. This is obvious in the case of ground-rent, which Marx (like Ricardo) derives ultimately ‘from the relation of exchange-value to use-value. The importance of use-value is shown in relation to the rate of profit, insofar as this is dependent on fluctuations in the value of raw materials. For, ‘it is especially agricultural produce proper, i.e. raw materials taken from organic nature, which . . . is subject to fluctuations of value in consequence of changing yields etc. Owing to uncontrollable natural conditions, favourable or unfavourable seasons etc. the same quantity of labour may be represented in very different quantities of use-values, and a definite quantity of these use-values may therefore have very different prices’. [61. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> III, pp.117-18.]<br /><br />Such variations in price, ‘always affect the rate of profit, even if they loeave the wage untouched and hence the rate and amount of surplus-value too’. [62.<span style="font-style: italic;"> ibid</span>. p.115. Another example is provided by the uneven development of the different spheres of production in the capitalist economy. We read in Volume III, ‘The fact that the development of productivity in different lines of industry proceeds at substantially different rates and frequently even in opposite directions, is not due merely to the anarchy of competition and the peculiarities of the bourgeois mode of production. Productivity of Labour is also bound up with natural conditions, which frequently become less productive as productivity grows – inasmuch as the latter depends on social conditions. Hence the opposite movements in these different spheres – progress here, retrogression there. Consider only the influence of the seasons, for instance, which determines the available quantity of the bulk of raw materials, the exhaustion of forest lands, coal and iron mines etc.’ (<span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.260.)]<br /><br />We should also devote special attention to the influence of use-value on the accumulation of capital.<br /><br />Grossman writes : ‘In Marxist literature up till now stress has been laid merely on the fact that the mass of the value of the constant capital grows both absolutely, and in relation to the variable capital in the course of capitalist production and the accumulation of capital, with the increase in the productivity of labour, and the transition to a higher organic composition of capital. However this phenomenon only constitutes one side of the process of accumulation, in that it is regarded from the aspect of value. In fact, it cannot be repeated too often that the reproduction process is not merely a process of valorisation but also a labour process – it produces not merely values, but also use-values’. And, ‘looked at from the aspect of use-value, the increase in productive capacity does not only operate in the direction of the devaluation of existing capital, but also in the direction of a quantitative increase in the objects of use.’ [63. Grossman, <span style="font-style: italic;">Das Akkumulations-un Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalistischen Systems,</span> pp.326-28.] The effect that this has on the accumlation of capital can be read in Volume III of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span>. [64. Cf. In addition <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> I, pp.752-53. (604-05)]<br /><br />It states there : ‘The increase in productive power can only directly increase the value of the existing capital, if by raising the rate of profit it increases that portion of the value of the annual product which is reconverted into capital . . . Indirectly however, the development of the productivity of labour contributes to the increase of the value of existing capital by increasing the mass and variety of use-values [65. ‘If one has more elements of production (even of the same value) the technical level of production can be expanded; then, at the same mass of value of capital more workers can be employed in the production process, who, will therefore produce more value in the next cycle of production.’ (Grossman, <span style="font-style: italic;">op. cit</span>. P.330.)] in which the same exchange-value is represented and which form the material substance i.e. the material elements of capital, the material objects making up the constant capital directly and the variable capital at least indirectly. More products which may be converted into capital, whatever their exchange-value, are created with the same capital and the same labour, hence also additional surplus labour and therefore create additional capital.’ For ‘the amount of labour which a capital can command does not depend on its value, but on the mass of raw and auxiliary materials, machinery and elements of fixed capital and necessities of life, all of which it comprises whatever their value may be. As the mass of labour employed and that of surplus labour increases, there is also a growth in the value of the reproduced capital and in the surplus-value newly added to it.’ [66. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> III. P.248.]<br /><br />V.<br /><br />The problem of supply and demand is dealt with in particular detail in Volume III of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital.</span> This problem is closely related to that of the much discussed question of socially necessary labour-time, which has already bgeen broached in Chapter 2 above. [67. Cf. p.51.]<br /><br />Right at the beginning of Volume I we read, ‘Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production mormal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent in that society.’ And, that ‘which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.’ [68. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> I, p.129 (39).]<br /><br />We encounter this ‘technological’ meaning of the concept of socially necssary labour-time again and again in <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital,</span> and in other of Marx’s works. However, we also encounter another meaning, according to which labour can only count as ‘socially necessary’ if it corresponds to the aggregate requirements of society for a particular use-value.<br /><br />In Volume I of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> we read, ‘Let us suppose that every piece of linen in the market contains nothing but socially necessary labour-time. In spite of all this all these pieces taken as a whole may contain superfluously expended labour-time. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard this proves that too great a portion of the total social labour-time has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each individual weaver had expended more labour-time upon his particular product than was socially necessary. As the German proverb has it : caught together, hanged together. All of the linen on the market counts as one single article of commerce, and each piece of linen is only an aliquot part of it. And in fact the value of each single yard is also nothing but the materialisation of the same socially determined quantity of homogeneous human labour.’ [69.<span style="font-style: italic;"> ibid.</span> p.202 (107).]<br /><br />Marx expresses the same idea in numerous other passages. And Engels even combined both meanings in one definition when he stated in the course of an attack on Rodbertus, ‘If he had investigated by what means and how labour creates value and therefore also determines and measures it, he would have arrived at socially necessary labour, necessary for the single product, both in relation to other products of the same kind, and also in relation to society’s total demand.’ [70. Engel’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Preface to Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy,</span> p.20.]<br /><br />The amalgamation of these two meanings of ‘socially necessary labour’ has been seen as an intolerable contradiction by numerous writers. [71. See the review of the relevant literature in the instructive study by T.Grigorovici. <span style="font-style: italic;">Die Wertlehre bei Marx and Lassalle.</span> Beitrag zur Geschichte eines wissenschaftlichen Misverstandnisses 1908. Cf., also Diehl’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Sozialwissenshaftliche Erlauterungen zu D. Ricardo Grundgesetzen</span>, I, 1905, pp.125-28.]<br />In reality the contradiction is only apparent; it is in fact a question of different levels of analysis, which require operating with two different, but mutually complementary concepts.<br /><br />Volume III of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> states on this : ‘To say that a commodity has a use-value is merely to say that is satisfied some social need. So long as we dealt with individual commodities only,k we could assume that there was a need for a particular commodity – its quantity already implied by its price – without inquiring further into the amount of the need which has to be satisfied. This quantity is, however, of essential importance, as soon as the product of an entire branch of production is placed on one side, and the social need for it on the other. It then becomes necessary to consider the extend i.e. the amount of this social need.’ [72. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> III, p.185. The same line of thought can also be found in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Rough Draft</span> pp.404-05.]<br /><br />In other words : The analysis so far has proceeded from a series of simplifying assumptions. First it was assumed that commodities are exchanged at their values, and second, that they always find a buyer. Only in this way was it possible to outline the production and circulation process of capital in pure form, without the influence of distrubing ‘accompanying circumstances’. Now is the time, however, to bring into the economic analysis the moment of supply and demand which has so far been neglected, but which must at last be given its due.<br /><br />As far as supply is concerned, this mean, in the first instance, that instead of one individual commodity (or the amount of commodities produced by a single capitalist), we now have to posit the aggregate product of an entire branch of production. For the individual commodity the determination of socially necessary labour-time proceeeds from the fact that ‘the individual value of the commodity (and what amounts to the same under the present assumption, its selling price) should coincide with its social value’. [73. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital </span>III, p.182.] However, the matter is quite different when it is a question of the aggregate product of a branch of production. Here the requirement of socially necessary labour-time can only apply for the entire mass of commodities; and so consequently the individual value of commodities has to be distinguished from their social value. Social value assumes the form of market value, which represents the average value of the sum of commodities, from which, consequently, the individual values of some commodities must always diverge : they must either stand above or below the stated market value.<br /><br />This is because we can generally distinguish three categories of producers in each branch of production : producers who produce under above-average, average and below-average conditions. ‘Which of the categories has a decisive effect on the average value, will in particular depend on the numerical ratio or the proportional size of the categories.’ [74. <span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span> II, p.204.] As a rule this will be the average category. In this case that part of the total amount of commodities produced under the poorer conditions will have to be sold off below their individual value, whereas the commodities produced under the above average can secure an extra amount of profit. However, it may be the case that either the class producing under the better conditions, or that under the worse conditions will predominate. In the first instance the commodities produced under the better conditions will determine the market value; in the second instance, those produced under the poorer conditions.<br /><br />The determination of market value appears in this way if we look exclusively at the mass of commodities thrown on to the market, ignoring the possibility of an imbalance between supply and demand. Hence, ‘provided that the demand is large enough . . . to absorb the whole mass of the commodities at the values which have been fixed [by competition among the buyers] . . . the commodity will still be sold at its market value, no matter which of the three above-mentioned cases regulate the market value. The mass of commodities not only satisfied a need but satisfies it to its full social extent. [75. Capital <span style="font-style: italic;">III</span>, p.185.]<br /><br />However, we know that in the capitalist mode of production, ‘there exists an accidental rather than a necessary connection between the total amount of social labour applied to a social article . . . on the one hand, and the extent of the demands made by the society for the satisfaction of the need gratified by the article in question, on the other. Every individual article, or every definite quantity of a commodity may, indeed, contain no more than the social labour required for its production, and from this point of view the market value of this entire commodity represents only necessary labour, but it this commodity has been produced in excess of the existing social needs, then so much of the social labour-time is squandered and the mass of the commodity come to represent a much smaller quantity of social labour in the market than is actually incorporated in it . . . the reverse applies if the quantity of social labour employed in the production of a certain kind of commodity is too small to meet the social need for that commodity.’ [76. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.187.]<br /><br />In both cases the ‘determination of market value which we [previously] outlined abstractly’ is modified, in the sense that ‘of the supply is too small, the market value is always regulated by the commodities produced under the least favourable circumstances and if the supply is too large, always by the commodities produced under the most favourable conditions; that therefore it is one of the extremes which determines the market value, in spite of the fact that if we proceed only from the relation between the amounts of the commodity produced under different conditions, a different result should obtain.’ [77. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid</span>. p.185.]<br /><br />So it can be seen that which of the categories (of producers) determines market value depends not only on their proportional strength, but also, in a certain sense, on the relation of supply and demand. But doesn’t this completely invalidate Marx’s theory of value? Not at all. This would only be true if each time demand out-weighed supply, or vice versa, this led to a proportional increase or fall in market value itself. However, in this case the market value would be identical with the market price, or it would –as Marx expressed it – ‘have to stand higher than itself’. [78.<span style="font-style: italic;"> ibid</span>. pp.279-71.] For, according to Marx’s conception, market value can only move within the limits set by the conditions of production (and consequently by the individual value) of one of the three categories.<br /><br />We read in the section of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Theories</span> devoted to ground-rent that : ‘A difference between market value and individual value arises in general not because products are sold absolutely above their value, but only because the value of the individual product may be different from the value of the product of the whole sphere . . . The difference between the market value and the individual value of a product can therefore only be due to the fact that the definite quantities of labour with which different parts of the total product are manufactured have different degrees of productivity. It can never be due to the value being detemined irrespective of the quantity of labour altogether employed in this sphere.’ [79. <span style="font-style: italic;">ibid.</span> pp.270-71.]<br /><br />Thus, if as a consequence of the market situation, the mass of commodities is sold above the individual value of the commodities produced under the worst conditions, or alternatively below the individual value of those produced under the best conditions, the market price would indeed diverge from the market value. [80. Cf.<span style="font-style: italic;"> ibid.</span> p.268. ‘This market value itself can never be greater than the value of the product of the least fertile class’ (the coal mine). ‘If it were higher this would only show that the market price stood above the market value. But the market value must represent real value.’] This regulation of the occasional fluctuations of market price is, or course, the main function allotted to the relation of supply and demand in the system of bourgeois economics.<br /><br />It is evident that our interpretation of Marx’s theory of market value diverges very considerably from that normally presented in marxist literature. The following passage by Grigorovici could serve as an example. ‘ “If the demand is large enough to absorb commodities at their market value”, says marx, “this commodity will be sold at its market value, no matter which of the three aformentioned cases regulates it. This mass of commodities does not merely satisfy a need, but satisfies it to its full social extent. Should their quantity be smaller or greater, however, than the demand for them, the market prices will diverge from the market value”, i.e. the market price will exceed or fall below the market value; market price and market value will not coincide.’ The author concludes, ‘Thus, what affects the relation of supply and demand, or in other words the demand-moment is not a change in market value, but simply a divergence of market price from the market value of the commodity, although in both the first and second cases it seems as if the market value itself has changed, as a result of the change in the relation of supply and demand; because in the first case the commodity produced under the poorer conditions seems to regulate market value, and in the second the commodity produced under the better,’ [81. Grigorovici, <span style="font-style: italic;">op.cit</span>. P.37.]<br /><br />This then is Grigorovici’s view. However, what does the passage from Volume III, which we have already cited in part, actually say on this point?<br /><br />‘Should demand for this mass also remain the same, this commodity will be sold at its market value, no matter which of the three aforementioned cases regulates this market value . . . Should their quantity be smaller or greater, however, than the demand for them, there will be divergencies between the market price and the market value. And the first divergence is that if the supply is too small, the market value is always regulated by the commodities produced under the least favourable circumstances, and, if the supply is too large, always by the commodities produced under the most favourable conditions; that therefore it is one of the extremes which determines the market value, in spite of the fact that if we proceed only from the relation between the amounts of the commodity produced under different conditions, a different result should obtain.’ [82. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> III, p.185.]<br /><br />The formulation is not at all clear, and consequently can give rise to uncertainties. However, Marx expresses himself more precisely on p.179 of Volume III. He writes: ‘At a certain price, a commodity occupies just so much place on the market. This place remains the same in case of a price change only if the higher prices accompanied by a drop in the supply of the commodity, and a lower prices by an increase of supply. And if the demand is so great that it does not contract when the prices is regulated by the value of commodities produced under the least favourable conditions, then these determine the market value. This is only possible if demand is greater than usual, or if supply drops below the usual level. Finally, if the mass of commodities produced exceeds the quantity disposed of at average market values, the commodities produced under the most favourable conditions regulate the market value.’<br /><br />We in no way want to deny that there are passages in Marx which seem to prove the opposite of what has just been said. [83.It should not be forgotten, as Engels remarked, that the manuscript for Volume III only represents a ‘first extremely incomplete draft’.] What is important, however, is not to ‘explain’ thse unclarities away on the basis of a falsely conceived marxist orthodoxy, but rather to understand and interpret the true meaning of Marx’s explanations in terms of their ‘inner logic’. And we consider that our interpretation of the passages on market value corresponds better with Marx’s theory as a whole, in particular with his theory of ground-rent, than the interpretations which are to be found in Grigorovici and others.<br /><br />However, this is not the place to to into this special problem in detail. Our point was only to show that Marx, in strictly logical fashion, deals with the problem of ‘socially necessary labour-time’ on two different levels, and that his aim in doing this was to place the moment of social demand, i.e. use-value, in its true light.<br /><br />In another passage in Volume III we read: ‘It continues to be a necessary requirement that the commodity represent use-value. But if the use-value of individual commodities depends on whether they themselves satisfy a particular needs, then the use-value of the mass of the social product depends on whether it satisfies the quantitatively determined social need for each particular kind of product in an adequate manner, and whether the labour is therefore proportionately distributed among the different spheres in keeping with these social needs, which are quantitatively circumscribed . . . The social need, that is the use-value on a social scale, appears here as a determining factor for the amount of total social labour-time which is expended in various specific spheres of production is but a more developed expression of the law of value in general, although the necessary labour-time assumes a different meaning here. Only just so much of it is necessary for the satisfaction of social needs. It is use-value which brings about this limitation.’ [84. <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> III, pp.635-36. Cf.<span style="font-style: italic;">Theories </span>I, p.204.]<br /><br />And so we can see again how use-value operates as such in the relations of the bourgeois economy, which is based on exchange-value, and consequently how it becomes an economic category itself.<br /><br />With this last example, we come to the end of our analysis. Future research into Marx will decide whether the extracts which we have cited from the<span style="font-style: italic;"> Rough Draft</span> prove us correct, and actually lead to a partial revision of previous interpretations of Marx’s economic theory, as we believe they must. We can, however, allow ourselves one final remark; that it was clearly Marx’s own unique method of analysis which enabled him to elaborate his opposition to Ricardo in such an original and logical fashion. Engels was surely right when he perceived in Marx’s treatment of use-value, and its role in political economy, a classic example of the use of the ‘German dialectical method’. [85. See his review of Marx’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Contribution</span> (1859) in <span style="font-style: italic;">MEW</span> Vol.13, p.476.]Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1115203515264081552005-05-04T03:24:00.000-07:002005-05-07T04:17:43.216-07:00John Stone on Zionism<span style="font-weight: bold;">Polemic: Against Zionism</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">By John Stone</span><br /><br />Israel has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. The 'peace settlements' have pushed the PLO leadership, Egypt and Jordan to recognise Israel. It seems that Syria and other Arab states will do the same. There are almost 4 million Jews in the State of Israel and many elements of a Hebrew-speaking nation. Is it the time to abandon our demand for the destruction of the Israeli state and its replacement with a secular, multi-ethnic, democratic and Soviet Palestine, and to advocate a united front with the PLO and the Zionist left in order to achieve a bi-national state or a two-state solution to the Arab- Israeli conflict? This article will examine the programmatic positions of the most left-wing Zionists. We will explain what the Marxist position on the Palestine question must be and why we cannot recognise any national rights of Israel.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Left Zionism's backward evolution.</span><br /><br />In the early years of the Communist International, Poalei Zion (Workers Zion) participated as observers in some of its activity. This current tried to fuse Marxism with Jewish nationalism. For them the Jews where a nation without a territory. In order to make a socialist revolution the Jews needed first to create its own state and multi-class society.<br /><br />Poalei Zion initially accepted the possibility of a bi-national Arab-Hebrew state but later they backed the division of Palestine and the creation of a pure Jewish state. Poalei Zion became one of the pillars of the MAPAM, which achieved around one fifth of the votes in the first Israeli elections. The MAPAM initially combined Marxist and Leninist phraseology with its active integration in the Hagana (Israeli army), the Histadrut (Israeli anti-Palestinian corporate union) and the Labour Zionist cabinets. They built many kibutzim and they believed that these islands of rural collectivism where the seeds of socialism.<br /><br />MAPAM survived as the left wing of Zionism and many Labour governments. It backed Israel in all its wars against the Arabs. In the late 1940s the MAPAM capitalised on the pro-Moscow sentiment that was created all over the world resulting from Hitler's defeat and Stalin’s backing the creation of Israel. Before the creation of the Israeli state many thought that the Jews where in general an oppressed people despite that the Zionists wanted to transform them into colonial settlers against the Arab native population. However, Israel became an oppressor whose existence was based in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians, and the founding of a US pillar against all the anti- imperialist movements in the Middle East.<br /><br />A "Marxist" movement that adapts to forms of third-world nationalism can survive with some radical proposals. However, a socialist movement that became an apologist of an expansionist and colonialist power would become more and more reactionary. Moving to the right MAPAM was loosing its initial roots and became confused with the pragmatic Zionists.<br /><br />Around ten years ago MAPAM, Shilumit Aroni's Ratz and Shinui created Meretz, a political front that in 1997 became officially a united party. Ratz was a movement in favour of constitutional rights and Shinui was an ultra-liberal organisation committed to Thatcherite economics in a context of liberal concessions to the Palestinians. The Shinui believed that the best way to develop an open `free market' was to allow Israel to be a county at peace with its neighbours and with the capacity to export capital to them.<br /><br />On February 1997 the founding convention of the new Meretz Party adopted its `Basic Principles'. In it there is no mention of the struggle against imperialism or for socialism and for a working class based party. MAPAM simply abandoned any class reference. Meretz proclaimed the combination of `the values of enlightened liberalism and democratic socialism'. A few countries had already experienced the fusion between their political extremes on economic issues. Just as it is impossible to fuse oppressive nationalism with any form of socialism, nor is it possible to combine Thatcherite economics with any form of progressive economic reforms. The former Zionist collectivists abandoned their initial goals and accepted a neo-liberal agenda.<br /><br />MAPAM gave up all its former demands for state intervention and rural collective expansions. Now it accepts neo-conservative economics. `Initiative, profitability, and fair competition between all sections of the economy will be facilitated'. Meretz is in favour of privatising some of the companies that the `left Zionists' put under public ownership. They only oppose privatisation of natural monopolies, education, postal service and the welfare state. The rest, transport, communications, industries, arm production, etc. could be sold.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">For an exclusionist state</span><br /><br />In all of its Basic Principles Meretz does not mention the struggle against anti-Semitism. The main purpose of Zionism is to "struggle against assimilation which threatens the existence of the Jewish people in the Diaspora". Assimilation means that Jews should abandon their religious-cultural values and became assimilated into the nations in which they live. They want to stop that process. In places in which the Jewish workers are struggling alongside their own class brothers and sisters against the bosses, they want to divide the workers. The Jews have abandoned other workers to migrate to Israel in order to help Zionist capitalists to build their own state.<br /><br />"The Zionist objective of the State of Israel is to provide an open door for any Jew. Aliya [mass Jewish emigration to Israel] is also a source of reinforcement for the State of Israel. Meretez sees Aliya to Israel, with the goal of gathering the majority of the Jewish people in the state".<br /><br />Meretz wants to move the majority of the fifteen million Jews all over the planet to Israel. Eight million Jews in Israel would be a strong basis for maintaining a state. Its aim is doubly reactionary. On the one hand they try to dislocate many Jews (some of which were the basis of many socialist and progressive movements in their own countries) from their own homelands and to divide the working classes. On the other hand they want to use the Jewish as colonial tools to consolidate a state founded on the expulsion of its native population.<br /><br />Regarding the Arabs, Meretz is the most `heretical' of all the Zionists. It is in favour of granting the right to create a weak state in a minority of their former lands for `the Palestinian Arab people, which has lived in this land for generations and which is now beginning to realise its right to national self-determination'. The ones who are starting `to realise its right to national self-determination' are, precisely, Meretz. The Palestinians fought for their own state in the 1947-48 wars and even before (like in the 1936 upheavals). It was the Zionists who destroyed their aspirations.<br /><br />In which territories will Meretz grant a Palestinian state? "In a context of the permanent settlement, Israel will be obliged to vacate most of the territories occupied during to the Six Day War." Before the mass expulsions of Palestinians after the creation of Israel, two thirds of Palestine where inhabited by Arabs. In 1947 the UN resolved to divide that land in around two halves. In 1947 Israel managed to conquer around 40% of the Palestinian half. Therefore the territories that Israel occupied after 1967 represents a small fraction of Palestine.<br /><br />For the left Zionists the Palestinians should accept not only the loss of the majority of their land but also of some of the post-1967 occupied territories as well as their historically claimed capital. For the Palestinians Jerusalem is their capital. For the Christian and Islamic Arabs it is one of their holy cities where they were the majority of its population from the beginning of the first millennium until 1948. Until 1967 Eastern Jerusalem (where is the historical city) was in Arab hands. Since then the Zionists have tried to buy Arab land or to expel Palestinians. For Meretz "Jerusalem, Israel's capital, will never again be divided."<br /><br />First the Zionists expelled the Palestinians. Next its left wing `discovered' that they want national rights. Now, its most radical wing is prepared to concede a sort of independent Bantustan for them. For Meretz the new Palestinian State should occupy less than a half of that half of Palestine that the UN undemocratically resolved to give them in 1947. The Palestinians should give up 100% of Jerusalem and at least 75% of the land in which they where the majority of the population when the British left 50 years ago.<br /><br />The new Palestinian State should not have a contiguous territory and between its two main areas (Gaza and the West Bank) Israel should be allowed to maintain a heavily guarded territory. The Palestinian State not only would have to accept the ethnic cleansing of its own people by Israel but also to be an impotent and unarmed scattered country surrounded and patrolled by Middle East's main Nuclear Power.<br /><br />Meretz is also in favour of keeping and developing the strength and superiority of the Israel army: "The protective might provided by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is the main guarantee for Israel's security, even in an era of peace. The strength of the IDF and its technological and personal superiority over all the other armies in the region must be ensured."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Israel a reactionary military machine</span><br /><br />Israel has one of the most reactionary military machines. It destroyed the Palestinian State in 1948 and led to millions of Palestinians being forced to live in the worst humanitarian conditions. Israel sided with France and the UK against Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal. It invaded Egypt in 1956,19 67 and 1973; Jordan and Syria in 1967 and 1973. It helped the Kingdom of Jordan's bloody repression of the Palestinians in 1970. It occupied southern Lebanon in the 1980s.<br /><br />It unconditionally supported every US and NATO reactionary movements against any regime that has had clashes with imperialism in the Middle East (Libya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, etc.). It backed Turkey against the Kurds, the largest nation without a state. It was one of the main enemies of all the de-colonising and anti-imperialist movements through the entire planet. It legalised torture and killed many Arab children in the Intifada and in its terrorist bombing and incursions into Lebanon. It helped the anti-`terrorist' commands in Somoza's Nicaragua and in Peru. And what does it mean to "ensure" IDF's "superiority"? Perhaps to develop more nuclear and bio-chemical weapons which can be used to make a holocaust that could be a thousand times more devastating than Der Yasin?<br /><br />In a country that has a very strong Jewish colonialist-fundamentalist camp, Meretz appeared as the most extreme Zionist force concerning civic rights. In the state of Israel every Jew who was born in any other part of the globe can have citizenship automatically. However, a Palestinian whose family inhabited that land for centuries, is a second class citizen and does not have the right to return to the land or home from which he/she was expelled in 1948 or 1967.<br /><br />No Palestinian occupies any leading position in any Israeli government, the state or the army. Who decides who is a Jew? It is not a secular entity or even any Jewish religious congregation. That right is in the hands of the most orthodox and archaic rabbinate. This is such a reactionary body, that even the US Conservative Jews are to its left. The State of Israel does not have a constitution because it is based on a Jewish religious code.<br /><br />Meretz 'radicalism' is limited to "the separation of religious institutions from the institutions of the state". Israel should be "governed by the rule of law, rather than by the rule of the Halakha." Nevertheless, Meretz vindicates that "Jewish heritage and the Jewish legal core are a cornerstone of our national culture and a source of inspiration in our lives and in creativity".<br /><br />As we saw, Meretz' programme does not have any reference to the working class. It has very reactionary goals. It wants to keep a Jewish identity based in elements of Jewish religion. It tries to separate progressive Jews from their non-Jewish compatriots and to transform them into colonial settlers, dispossessing a native population. It wants to maintain a purely Jewish exclusionist state. It has a neo-liberal anti-working class economic programme. It differs from the hard-liners only in the sense that it is prepared to soften the rabbinical influence on the state institutions and allow Palestinian 'self-determination' in the form of a fragmented and powerless 'independent' Bantustan.<br /><br />The peace accords, instead of pushing 'socialist Zionists' to the left, are causing a backward evolution towards neo-liberalism and reaction. Despite the possibility of organising common demonstrations and actions with them against the colonialist settlers and hard-liners, it is impossible to make any kind of anti-imperialist united front with currents that are advocating an imperialist and segregationist solution to the Palestinian question.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Zionism has no single progressive aspect</span><br /><br />The doctrine of Zionism was created by Theodor Hertzl. He wanted to convince the Tsar and all the great powers that the best solution to the `Jewish question' was to provide the Jews with a state. Instead of being persecuted, the Jews could `expand ‘Western civilisation'’ against `barbarians'. Hertzl offered his services to transform the Jews into a colonialist tool against native peoples.<br /><br />When Zionism was born (one century ago) hundreds of thousands of Jews were very active in the labour and anti-capitalist movement and many socialists were Jews (as was Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Zinoviev, Kamenev etc). Zionism was also used to divide the Jew workers from their fellow classmates. If Marxists advocate the unity of all the workers of all nations and communities against the capitalists, the Zionists advocated the unity of the Jewish workers with and behind the capitalist Jews and their imperialist associates against other peoples. The Zionist emigration to Palestine had a reactionary goal. Jewish capitalists, unions and co-operatives excluded the natives from their ranks. Arab lands where purchased and given to Jewish colonial settlers. The Arab population felt that they were being driven away from a new colonialist movement.<br /><br />After the holocaust the imperialist powers and the USSR where prepared to give the Jews a state in Palestine. In 1947 the UN partitioned British Palestine and created two states. In its war against its neighbours, Israel captured many Arab lands and the rest of the Palestinian lands where taken by Egypt and the Transjordan kingdom (since then it became Jordan). Comprising less than 10% of the world's Jewish population Israel was created as the homeland for all the Jews. The Jewish minority in Palestine (most of them where settlers born in Europe) took most of the country. Zionism managed to transform a persecuted people into Western colonialists. Zionism did not end with anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it produced the expulsion of most of the Jews from the Arab world (a region which had a much less anti-Jewish traditions than the West). Zionism became another form of anti-Semitism. A new state was created expelling and oppressing a Semitic people (the Palestinian Arabs).<br /><br />Marxists need to address the Israeli Jewish working class. A big difference that we have with the Arab nationalists and fundamentalists is that they don't want to create a bridge or form an alliance with the Jewish proletariat. We should support the Hebrew workers struggles for better wages and labour conditions, against privatisation and for de-militarisation and civic rights.<br /><br />However, we need to understand that imperialism can create communal privileges amongst one ethnic section of the working class against another section. In South Africa and Northern Ireland the White or Unionist workers achieved better social conditions than the Black and Republican workers. Some of the most reactionary terrorist forces where recruited amongst that layer of privileged workers.<br /><br />We need to address the most oppressed sections of the proletariat. The anti-Unionists in the six counties and the Black workers in South Africa are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist movement. The actions of these layers should influence workers from the privileged communities. The only way to win the workers from the oppressor states is to win them to solidarity with the most oppressed sections of society and to show them that, instead of maintaining their privileges, they need to fight together with all the working class against their common enemies: the capitalists.<br /><br />Marxists are champions of the right of self-determination for every nation. However, we can deny such rights in some concrete circumstances, like when the national right of one community would clash with the rights of another community. In Northern Ireland and South that would mean an attack on the oppressed population. The same principle we apply to Israel. The Africa we are against the right of the Protestant Unionists and the Afrikaners to form their own states because, like the Israeli nation, they would have their inception in the oppression of the native population.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A society created around discrimination</span><br /><br />While the Boers and Ulster Protestants can show that they were the majority of the population of some part of their lands for many centuries and that they had some historical-territorial continuity, the Israeli Jews only started to arrive to Palestine in this century. They arrived from all the corners of the planet. The Jews from Western or Eastern Europe, Yemen, Mesopotamia, Maghreb, Central Asia, Kurdistan, the Caucasus, South Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Australasia, India or Ethiopia had different histories, cultures, histories, traditions, religious practices, languages and races. Some of them evolved in a near complete isolation from other Jewish communities. There are tens or even hundreds of different Jewish religious congregations. The only thing that unites all of them is their common belief in the first Testament and in a common vindication of the old Jerusalem faith.<br /><br />Hebrew, a 'dead' classical language only used for religious rituals and education, was modernised and transformed into the new `national' language. In order to develop Hebrew, Zionists undermined Ladino, the traditional Jewish mother tongue of the Jews in the Ottoman empire based in old Spanish, and Yiddish, the traditional European Jewish language based in old German. The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, massively promoted Yiddish Publications, Higher Education institutions, schools and even set up a territory (Birobidjan) for the development of the Yiddish culture and language.<br /><br />Arabic was the language spoken by the overwhelmingly majority of the population in Palestine until 1948. Around half of the Jews that came to Israel after 1948 came from Oriental countries where most of them had Arabic as their mother tongue. Like all discriminatory society Israel had a system based in different levels of privileges. The Arabs are the most oppressed. Among the Jews, Oriental Jews are oppressed by Azkanazim Jews of European origins. The Black Jews (Falasha) suffer racism and discrimination. The Chief rabbinate does not fully recognise Falasha as having Jewish status. They are a sort of inferior Jew.<br /><br />Israeli society is also divided amongst religious believers. The most orthodox minority (like the small Naturei Carta) is against the Israeli state because they think that a Jewish state could only be created with a Messiah and that the actual one tries to eliminate the Jewish traditional community in order to create a modern secularised state. The majority of the orthodox (the `crows') wants a fundamentalist Talmudic and segregationist state. They even attack non-orthodox Jews when they drive cars on the Sabbaths (holy Saturdays) or when they see women with `improper' clothes. Many Israelis wants a modern and secularised life.<br /><br />Most nation-states were created claiming the continuity of a people that lived in the assigned territory for many centuries. Most of the nations, despite having an official religion, adopted some secular and non-confessional legal basis. Pakistan was divided from India around religious allegiances. However, most of the people that inhabited Pakistan where the native population. In India Marxists are against the creation of Khalistan. A Sikh state could be based in a community that is the majority of the population of certain parts of the Punjab. However, it would be created under religious and segregationist/communalist basis and would became a reactionary tool against the most secularised Sikhs and the Indian population.<br /><br />The Israeli nation cannot offer any territorial-historic continuity. Until the last century less than 5% or even 1% of Palestine where Jews. The Jews which arrived in that land had different histories and they and their immediate ancestors lived mainly in other countries or continents. Their only territorial claim to that land was that of descent from the old Israelis who inhabited that land 2,000 years ago. The Welsh, Gaelic and Bretons could claim Britain and even most of Western Europe because the Celts where the majority of the population 2,000 years ago. Different regions in the Balkans and Eastern Europe could have been claimed by Albanians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Germans, Hungarians, Turks or Polish because<br />only one century ago they used to be the majority of the population. With this kind of territorial claims the Canaanites or the Philistines, who inhabited Palestine before the Jews -as the Bible related- bloodily invaded them, could have better claims. In fact, The Palestinians can claim to be the direct descendants of them.<br /><br />A Jewish state can be created only around some religious allegiances because that is the only thing in common that all Jews share. A secular state would mean a republic based on a constitution in which every citizen has equal rights. In the Bolshevik Soviet Union, Jews, who were only 2% of the people, were allowed to lead the Red Army, the two main Soviets and the ruling International Party. Would an Israeli entity allow an Arab to become Prime Minister, mayor of Jerusalem or chief of the army? This is impossible because the state is founded on religious segregation. A Jewish state in a territory that was populated by a heterogeneous Jewish minority for less than half a century and founded on the expulsion and oppression of its native population, can only survive by means of its Apartheid character.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Can we recognise the right of a Jewish nation?</span><br /><br />Palestinians (and progressive Jews) should not recognise the right of Israel to exist. A two-state solution would imply that the Palestinians must renounce most of their lands from which they were pushed in the last five decades.<br /><br />In Argentina, Australia and the USA the native population was largely wiped out and new modern White settler nations where created on the basis of massive European emigration. We cannot demand that these big countries should be given back to their original peoples. The indigenous populations where reduced to few hundreds of thousands. On the other side tens of millions now constitute industrialised societies. In these countries we defend the First Nations rights to use their mother tongue in their education and every day life, to have lands and even to achieve self-government in the areas that remain under their control.<br /><br />Palestine does not offer the same scenario. The Zionists could not annihilate large chunks of the local population. There are more than four million Palestinians living under Israeli control or in neighbouring countries. The Palestinian working class and intelligentsia are among the Middle East's most enlightened and militant ones. Palestinian fighters are at the forefront of the region's anti-imperialist struggles. Palestinian demonstrations are a major source of inspiration especially for the hundreds of millions of Arab and Muslim masses.<br /><br />The idea that the Arabs have to accept the colonist entity as a nation with the right to have its own state, is a demand to surrender made by the most pro-imperialist wings of the ruling classes. The left-wing Palestinians are resisting that capitulation. If the Arab left came to terms with Israel it would reinforce the Islamic fundamentalist attempt to monopolise the anti-Zionist Arab sentiment. That would be a colossal tragedy.<br /><br />A bi-national Israeli/Arab State would be an unworkable contradiction. Palestine is the historical denomination of a territory. It does not have an exclusive, segregationist or religious connotation. Christians and Muslims, and even some non-Zionist Jews, also use that name. Israel means by its name the desire to create a separate and pure Jewish communalist state. It is possible to talk about a bi-national or bi-lingual country in Belgium or Wales. In these places different linguistic-cultural communities developed alongside each other without any strong degree of discrimination.<br /><br />In Spain, Iran, the Andes, India and other countries it is possible to argue in favour of the right of self-determination for all its components or even for a multi-national federation. Basque, Kurds, Quechuas, Tamils are oppressed nationalities which had historical roots in territories in which they were the majority of the population for centuries.<br /><br />A bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state would not be based on the equality of both communities. The Arabs have the worst jobs and not have the same rights as the Zionists. Israel and Aliya are inseparable. Israel needs to grant citizenship to every Jew no matter if he/she was born in Argentina or Australia and has never been before in the country. Israel provides housing, jobs and benefits to theJewish emigrants while the Arab native population are denied their rights to return to their lands or homes and they cannot have important positions in the state, the police or the army.<br /><br />Marxists oppose Aliya. We are, of course, in favour of free frontiers and against people's displacement. We want open borders for all the Jews, Gypsies and other peoples who suffer discrimination. However, we have to oppose colonialist emigration. We opposed the French or Italian attempts to resettle poor peasants or workers as colonial tools in Northern Africa. We rejected the Rabat's kingdom mass march on Western Sahara because they wanted to solve a land problem in Morocco at the expenses of the Sarahui local population. A democratic secular Palestine should welcome citizens from all countries but they could not accept émigrés that try to create a segregationist state at the expense of the original people.<br /><br />In Ecuador the Council of Indian Nations (CONAI) demand that this state should accept its multi-national character. The achievement of that goal would imply a great conquest for all the Indian peoples. In Palestine the native population is not fighting to be considered just one of several cultural and national components of the state. Israel is, by definition, based in a Jewish supremacist and segregationist platform and in the necessity to ethnically cleanse Palestine. The Palestinians are claiming their land back. Their historical aim was to refuse to recognise the state that deprived them of their lands and citizenship.<br /><br />We are not in favour of a bi-cultural Northern Ireland or of a bi-national White/Black South Africa. It does not mean that we are in favour of a clerical Catholic all-Ireland or for expelling all the Whites from South Africa. It means that the former privileged community has to accept that they should stop considering the rest of the population as inferior and to accept that they should be an equal minority.<br /><br />We are for the destruction of a purely Jewish segregationist and confessional state. But that does not mean that we want to drive all Jews into the sea or to support yet another genocide. We want to convince as many Jews as we can that the best thing for them is to unite with the Arab workers in order to create a secular non-religious and non-racist egalitarian republic.<br /><br />The communists promoted the Yiddish culture and they designated a territory for Jewish colonisation. The Jews did not arrive in Birobidjan as a racist segregationist colonist who tried to exclude the native peoples. They coexisted peacefully with the locals. Today, for example, Birobidjan's Slav majority is very keen in maintaining the Jewish identity of that country as a means of attracting investment, technology and people.<br /><br />In countries where the Jews constituted a compact oppressed majority in some territories (like the Falasha in Ethiopia) it was possible to advocate their right of self-determination, including autonomy or separation. However that right could not be extended to a group of people that wants to come into a new country to ethnically cleanse the local population.<br /><br />Zionism needs to trample on the rich cultural and linguistic traditions of the Arab, Ladino, Yiddish, Falasha and other Jewish communities in order to create a new Hebrew oppressive nation which is forged in bloodiest battles against the Arab natives. We need to emphasise the fact that the Israeli Jew community is, in fact, a multi-ethnic amalgam. Zionists try to unite them against a common enemy: the native Arab peoples. We should not help them in doing that.<br /><br />We need to defend many of these communities against the Zionists attempts to deny some of their most progressive traditions (like the Yiddish working class movements) and its discriminatory conditions in Israel. Begin and Likud tried to use the Oriental Jew resentment against the Azkenazim in a reactionary way: trying to transform them into the most patriotic anti-Arab pro-Israeli force. We should address the oriental Jews explaining that their enemies are not the Arab neighbours or natives but the capitalists and Zionists.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A socialist, secular, multi-ethnic Republic.</span><br /><br />Our demand is for a socialist, secular, multi-ethnic and democratic Palestinian republic. In that country there live scores of communities: non-religious Jews and Arabs, secularised Russian-speaking Jews, Ladino-speaking Jews, Yiddish-speaking Jews, Arab-speaking Jews, Hebrew-speakers; non-Talmudic Jews (Samaritans, Falasha, Karaite), as well as Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews; various Christian congregations (Armenians, Copts, Catholics (Roman and Orthodox); Maronnites, Protestants, etc.); Muslims (Shias, Sunni, etc.); Druses, Bedouins, Bahai, etc.<br /><br />All these communities should have equal rights. No single community should impose its own religion onto the state. A secular constitution with a secular civic code should regulate their activities. There would not be special treatment for those of the same religion that come from other countries. Palestinians should have the right to return.<br /><br />A democratic multi-ethnic Palestine could only be achieved as a result of a socialist revolution based on workers councils and militias. It would also be part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. In that context not only Palestinians would have the right to return but also Arab Jews would have the right to return to Syria, Morocco, Iraq and other Arab countries. Kurds, Assyrian and other nationalities would achieve self-determination and equal rights.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">LCMRCI December 1998</span>Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1112672049287420032005-04-04T20:32:00.000-07:002016-12-29T02:42:52.069-08:00Trotsky's Stalin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Trotsky’s biography of Stalin</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Stalin</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence</span><br />
<br />
By Leon Trotsky<br />
<br />
Grosset & Dunlap – New York. 1941<br />
Edited and Translated from the Russian by Charles Malamuth.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Introduction</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">followed by Chapter VII The Year 1917</span><br />
<br />
[Editor’s Note. Leon Trotsky wrote and revised in the original Russian the first seven chapters and appendix of this book. He checked in the English translation the first six chapters and the appendix but not the seventh chapter. The first seven chapters were to have been cut and condensed after the writing of the book had been completed. Like most authors, Trotsky was more optimistic than accurate about the expected date of completion, and his case was aggravated not only by the excessive optimism of the revolutionist and the military leader but by continual harassments and attempts on his life. The date of completion was therefore deferred from time to time. Finally, he set August, 1940 as the “deadline”, to use his own expression. But his manuscript was not complete on the twentieth of August, when he was struck down by his assassin. Two days later he died. The editor therefore left the first seven chapters and the appendix un-revised, except for a few deletions or repetitious material.<br />
<br />
Some of the manuscript of the unfinished portion was in Trotsky’s study, strung out in enormously long strips of many sheets pasted end to end, at the time of the murderous attack upon him, and in the struggle with the assassin portions of the manuscript were not only spattered with blood but utterly destroyed. Moreover, no part of this posthumous manuscript had been put in final form by the author. It was made up of notes to be more fully developed, of excerpts from the works of other writers, of various documents, of dictated material not yet corrected by the author, all tentatively grouped for further use. Some of it war roughly blocked out under tentative chapter headings. Most of it was undigested material filed under eighty-one subheadings in more than twice that many folders. Out of this largely raw material the Introduction, the chapters from eight to twelve inclusive, and the two supplements have been edited.<br />
<br />
Under the circumstances, extensive interpolations by the editor were unavoidable but were, nevertheless, kept down to a minimum consistent with achieving the maximum of clarity and fluency. In every case, including the editor’s introduction of single words, these are set off from the author’s text by brackets. Of course, the lists of Stalin’s aliases, of Communist Party Congresses, the glossary and chronological guide are entirely the work of the editor. Portions of the author’s notes summarized by the editor are distinguished from the main body of the text by closer printing. Wherever quoted material found in Trotsky’s portfolio on the Stalin biography is not a component part of Trotsky’s text, such quoted material is marked by a star. In many cases that material bore identifying notations in Trotsky’s handwriting.<br />
<br />
The editorial policy in regard to the unfinished portion of the manuscript was to publish Trotsky’s text entire except for repetitions and utterly extraneous material which he obviously would have cut had he survived. Many of the documents are published here for the first time, without benefit of censorship either by Trotskyists or be Stalinists…<br />
<br />
<h4>
<span style="font-size: small;">Introduction</span></h4>
<br />
The reader will note that I have dwelt with considerably more detail on the development of Stalin during the preparatory period than on his more recent political activities. The facts of the latter period are known to every literate person. Moreover, my criticisms of Stalin’s political behaviour since 1923 are to be found in various works. The purpose of this political biography is to show how a personality of this sort was formed, and how it came to power by usurpation of the right to such an exceptional role. That is why, in describing the life and development of Stalin during the period when nothing, or almost nothing, was known about him, the author has concerned himself with a thoroughgoing analysis of isolated facts and details and the testimony of witnesses; whereas in appraising the latter period, he has limited himself to a synthetic exposition, presupposing that the facts – at least, the principal ones – are sufficiently well known to the reader.<br />
<br />
Critics in the service of the Kremlin will declare this time, even as they declared with reference to my History of the Russian Revolution, that the absence of bibliographical references renders a verification of the author’s assertions impossible. As a matter of fact, bibliographical references to hundreds and thousands of Russian newspapers, magazines, memoirs, anthologies and the like would give the foreign reader very little and would only burden the text. As for Russian critics, they have at their disposal whatever is available of the Soviet archives and libraries. Had there been factual errors, misquotations, or any other improper use of material in any of my works, that would have been pointed out long ago. As a matter of fact, I do not know of a single instance of any anti-Trotskyist writings that contain a single reference to incorrect use of source material by me. I venture to think that this fact alone is sufficient guarantee of authenticity for the foreign reader.<br />
<br />
In writing my History [of the Russian Revolution] I avoided personal reminiscences and relied chiefly on data already published and therefore subject to verification, including only such of my own testimony, previously published, as had not been controverted bgy anyone in the past. In this biography I ventured a departure from this too stringent method. Here, too, the basic warp of the narrative is made up of documents, memoirs and other objective sources. But in those instances where nothing can take the place of the testimony of the author’s own memories, I felt that I had the right to interpolate one or another episode from my personal reminiscences, many of them hitherto unpublished, clearly indicating each time that in the given case I appear not only as the author but also as witness. Otherwise, I have followed here the same method as in my History of the Russian Revolution.<br />
<br />
Numerous of my opponents have concluded that the latter book is made up of facts arranged in a scholarly way. True, a reviewer in the New York Times rejected the book as prejudices. But every line of his essay showed that he was indignant with the Russian Revolution and was transferring his indignation to its historian. This is the usual aberration of all sorts of liberal subjectivists who carry on a perpetual quarrel with the course of the class struggle. Embittered by the results of some historical process, they vent their spleen on the scientific analysis that discloses the inevitability of those results. In the final reckoning, the judgement passed on the author’s method is far more pertinent than whether all or only part of the author’s conclusions will be acknowledged to be objective. And on that score this author has no fear of criticism. This work is built of facts and is solidly grounded in documents. It stands to reason that here and there partial and minor errors or trivial offences in emphasis and misinterpretation may be found. But what no one will find in this work is an unconscious attitude towards facts, the deliberate disregard of documentary evidence or arbitrary conclusions based only on personal prejudices. The author did not overlook a single fact, document, or bit of testimony redounding to the benefit of the hero of this book. If a painstaking, thoroughgoing and conscientious gathering of facts, even of minor episodes, the verification of the testimony of witnesses with the aid of the methods of historical and biographical criticism, and finally the inclusion of facts of personal life in their relation to our hero’s role in the historical process – if all of this is not objectivity, then, I ask, What is objectivity?<br />
<br />
Again, new times have brought a new political morality. And, strangely enough, the [swing of the pendulum of history has] returned us in many respects to the epoch of the Renaissance, even exceeding it in the extent and depth of its cruelties and bestialities. Again we have political condottieri, again the struggle for power has assumed a grandiose character, its task – to achieve the most that is feasible for the time being by securing governmental power for one person, a power denuded to a merciless degree [all restraints previously formulated and hitherto deemed necessary]. There was a time when the laws of political mechanics painstakingly formulated by Machiavelli were considered the height of cynicism. To Machiavelli the struggle for power was a chess theorem. Questions of morality did not exist for him, as they do not exist for a chess player, as they do not exist for a bookkeeper. His task consisted in determining the most practicable policy to be followed in regard to a given situation and in explaining how to carry that policy through in a nakedly ruthless manner, on the basis of experiences tested in the political crucibles of two continents. This approach is explained not only by the task itself but also by the character of the epoch during which this task was posed. It proceeded essentially from the state of development of feudalism and in accordance with the crucial struggle for power between the masters of two epochs – dying feudalism and the bourgeois society which was being born.<br />
<br />
But throughout the nineteenth century, which was the age of parliamentarism, liberalism and social reform (if you close your eyes to a few international wars and civil wars), Machiavelli was considered absurdly old-fashioned. Political ambition was confined within the parliamentary framework, and by the same token its excessively venturesome trends were curbed. It was no longer a matter of outright seizure of power by one person and his henchmen but of capturing mandates in as many electoral districts as possible. In the epoch of the struggle for ministerial portfolios Machiavelli seemed to be the quaint ideologist of a dimly distant past. The advent of new times had brought a new and higher political morality. But, amazing thing, the twentieth century –that promised dream of a new age for which the nineteenth had so hopefully striven –has returned us in many respects to the ways and methods of the Renaissance!<br />
<br />
This throw-back to the most cruel Machiavellism seems incomprehensible to one who until yesterday abided in the comforting confidence that human history moves along a rising line of material and cultural progress. [Nothing of course is further from the truth. That is too clearly apparent today to require verbal proof. But whatever our qualifications or disagreements on this] score, all of us, I think, can say now: No epoch of the past was so cruel, so ruthless, so cynical as our epoch. Politically, morality has not improved at all by comparison with the standards of the Renaissance and with other even more distant epochs. [No social order dies gently and willingly when the day of its usefulness passes. All epochs of transition have been epochs of violent social struggles free of traditional moral restraints, epochs of life and death struggles.] The epoch of the Renaissance was an epoch of struggles between two worlds: the bourgeois-capitalistic, which is suffering agony, and that new world which is going to replace it. Social contradictions have again achieved exceptional sharpness.<br />
<br />
Political power, like morality, by no means develops uninterruptedly towards a state of perfection, as was thought at the end of the last century and during the first decade of the present century. Politics and morals suffer and have to pass through a highly complex and paradoxical orbit. Politics, like morality, is directly dependent on the class struggle. As a general rule, it may be said that the sharper and more intense the class struggle, the deeper the social crisis, and the more intense the character acquired by politics, the more concentrated and more ruthless becomes the power of the State and the more frankly [does it cast off the garments of morality].<br />
<br />
Some of my friends have remarked that too much space in this book is occupied by references to sources and my criticism of these sources. I fully realize that inconvenience of such a method to exposition. But I have no choice. No one is obliged to take on faith the assertions of an author as closely concerned and as directly involved as I have been in the struggle with the person whose biography he has been obliged to write. Our epoch is above all an epoch of lies. I do not therewith mean to imply that other epochs of humanity were distinguished by greater truthfulness. The lie is the fruit of contradictions, of struggle, or the class of classes, of the suppression of personality, of the social order. In that sense it is an attribute of all human history. There are periods when social contradictions become exceptionally sharp, when the lie rises above the average, when the lie becomes an attribute of the very acuteness of social contradictions. Such is our epoch. I do not think that in all of human history anything could be found even remotely resembling the gigantic factory of lies which was organised by the Kremlin under the leadership of Stalin. And one of the principal purposes of this factory is to manufacture a new biography for Stalin…Some of these sources were fabricated by Stalin himself…Without subjecting to criticism the details of progressively accumulating falsifications, it would be impossible to prepare the reader for such a phenomenon, for example, as the Moscow trials…<br />
<br />
Hitler is especially insistent that only the vivid oral word marks the leader. Never, according to him, can any writing influence the masses like a speech. At any rate, it cannot generate the firm and living bond between the leader and his millions of followers. Hitler’s judgement is doubtless determined in large measure by the fact that he cannot write. Marx and Engels acquired millions of followers without resorting throughout their life to the art of oratory. True, it took them many years to secure influence. The writer’s art ranks higher in the final reckoning, for it makes possible the union of depth with height of form. Political leaders who are nothing but orators are invariably superficial. An orator does not generate writers. Yet it is true that for direct contact with the masses living speech is indispensable. Lenin became the head of a powerful and influential party before he had the opportunity to turn to the masses with the living word. His public appearances in 1905 were few and passed unnoticed. As a mass orator Lenin did not appear on the scene until 1917, and then only for a short period, in the course of April, May and July. He came to power not as an orator, but above all as a writer, as an instructor of the propagandists who had trained his cadres, including also the cadres of orators.<br />
<br />
In this respect Stalin represents a phenomenon utterly exceptional. He is neither a thinker, a writer nor an orator. He took possession of power before the masses had learned to distinguish his figure from others during the triumphal processions across Red Square. Stalin took possession of power, not with the aid of personal qualities, but with the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him. That machine, with its force and its authority, was the product of the prolonged and heroic struggle of the Bolshevik Party, which itself grew out of ideas. The machine was the bearer of the idea before it became an end in itself. Stalin headed the machine from the moment he cut off the umbilical cord that bound it to the idea and it became a thing unto itself. Lenin created the machine through constant association with the masses, if not by oral word, then by printed word, if not directly, then through the medium of his disciples. Stalin did not create the machine but took possession of it. For this, exceptional and special qualities were necessary. But they were not the qualities of the historic initiator, thinker, writer, or orator. The machine had grown out of ideas. Stalin’s first qualification was contemptuous towards ideas. The ideas had . . .<br />
<br />
[On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was struck a mortal blow on the back of his head with a pickaxe and his brain wrenched out while he was reading a manuscript brought to him by the assassin. That is why this and other portions of this book remain unfinished.]<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4>
Chapter VII</h4>
<h4>
<br /></h4>
<h4>
The Year 1917</h4>
<br />
This was the most important year in the life of the country and of Joseph Djugashvili’s generation of professional revolutionists. As a touchstone, that year tested ideas, parties, men.<br />
<br />
At Petersburg, now called Petrograd, Stalin found a state of affairs he had not expected. Bolshevism had dominated the labor movement prior to the war’s outbreak, especially in the capital. In March, 1917, the Bolsheviks in the Soviet were an insignificant minority. How had that happened? The impressive mass that had taken part in the movement of 1911-1914 actually amounted to no more than a small fraction of the working class. Revolution had made millions, not mere hundreds of thousands, spring to their feet. Because of mobilization, nearly forty per cent of these workers were new. The old-timers were at the front, playing there the part of the revolutionary yeast; their places at the factories were taken by nondescript newcomers fresh from the country, by peasant lads and peasant women. These novices had to go through the same political experiences, however briefly, as the vanguard of the preceding period. The February Revolution in Petrograd was led by class-conscious workers, Bolsheviks mostly, but not by the Bolshevik Party. Leadership by rank-and-file Bolsheviks could secure victory for the insurrection but not political power for the Party.<br />
<br />
Even less auspicious was the state of affairs in the provinces. The wave of exultant illusions and indiscriminate fraternization, coupled with the political naivete of the recently-awakened masses, swept in the natural conditions for the flourishing of petty bourgeois socialism, Menshevism and Populism. Workers –and following their lead, the soldiers, too –were electing to the soviet those who, at least in words, were opposed not only to the monarchy but to the bourgeoisie as well. The Mensheviks and the Populists, having gathered very nearly all the intellectuals into their fold, had a countless number of agitators at their disposal, all of them proclaiming the need for unity, fraternity and other equally attractive civic virtues. The spokesmen for the Army were for the most part the Essars, [SRs or Social Revolutionaries] those traditional guardians of the peasantry, which alone sufficed to bolster that party’s authority among the proletarians or recent vintage. Hence, the dominance of the compromisers’ parties seemed assured –at least, to themselves.<br />
<br />
Worst of all, the course of events had caught the Bolshevik Party napping. None of its tried and trusted leaders were in Petrograd. The Central Committee’s Bureau there consisted of two working men, Shlyapnikov and Zalutsky, and one college boy, Molotov. The “manifesto” they issued in the name of the Central Committee after the victory of February called upon “the workers of plants and factories, and the insurrectionary troops as well, immediately to elect their chosen representatives to the provisional revolutionary government.” However, the authors of this “manifesto” themselves attached no practical significance to this call of theirs. Furthest from their intentions was the launching of an independent struggle for power. Instead, they were getting ready to settle down to the more modest role of a Leftist opposition for many years to come.<br />
<br />
From the very beginning the masses repudiated the liberal bourgeoisie, deeming it no different from the nobility and the bureaucracy. It was out of the question, for example, that either workers or soldiers should vote for a Kadet. The power was entirely in the hands of the Socialist Compromisers, who had the backing of the people in arms. But, lacking confidence in themselves, the Compromisers yielded their power to the bourgeoisie. The latter was detested by the masses and politically isolated. The regime based itself on quid pro quo. The workers, and not only the Bolsheviks, looked upon the Provisional Government as their enemy. Resolutions urging the transfer of governmental power to the Soviets passes almost unanimously at factory meetings. The Bolshevik Dingelstead, subsequently a victim of the purge, has testified: “There was not a single meeting of workers that would have refused to pass such a resolution proposed by us…” But, yielding to the pressure of the Compromisers, the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party stopped this campaign. The advanced workers tried their utmost to throw off the tutelage at the top, but they did not know how to parry the learned arguments about the bourgeois nature of the revolution. Several shades of opinion clashed in Bolshevism itself, but the necessary inferences from the various arguments were not drawn. The Party was in a state of abysmal chaos. “No one know what were the slogans of the Bolsheviks,” the prominent Saratov Bolshevik Antonov subsequently recalled, “It was a most distasteful spectacle.”<br />
<br />
The twenty-two days that elapsed between Stalin’s arrival from Siberia [Sunday, March 12/25] and Lenin’s from Switzerland [Monday, April 3/16] are exceptionally significant for the light they throw on Stalin's political complexion. He was suddenly thrust into a wide-open field of action. Neither Lenin nor Zinoviev was yet in Petrograd. Kamenev was there, the Kamenev compromised by his recent behaviour in court and generally renowned for his opportunistic tendencies. There was also young Sverdlov, scarcely known in the Party, more of an organizer than a politico. The furious Spandaryan was no more: he had died in Siberia. As in 1912, so now again Stalin was for the time being, if not the leading, at least one of the two leading, Bolsheviks in Petrograd. The disoriented party expected clear instructions. It was no longer possible to evade issues by keeping still. Stalin has to give answers to the most urgent questions –about the Soviets, the government, the war, the land. His answers were published; they speak for themselves.<br />
<br />
As soon as he reached Petrograd, which was one vast mass meeting in those days, Stalin went directly to Bolshevik headquarters. The three members of the Central Committee Bureau, assisted by several writers, were deciding Pravda’s complexion. Although the Party leadership was in their hands, they went about the job helplessly. Letting others crack their voices addressing workers’ and soldiers’ meetings, Stalin entrenched himself at headquarters. More than four years ago, after the Prague conference, he had been co-opted into the Central Committee. Since then much water had run over the dam. But the exile from Kureika had the knack of keeping his hold on the Party machine: he still regarded his old mandate as valid. Aided by Kamenev and Muranov, he first of all removed from the leadership the “Leftist” Central Committee Bureau and the Pravda editorial board. He went about it rather rudely, the more so since he had no fear of resistance and was in a hurry to show that he was boss.<br />
<br />
“The comrades who arrived,” Shlyapnikov wrote later, “were critical and negative in their attitude toward our work.” They did not find fault with its colourlessness and indecisiveness, but, on the contrary, with its persistent effort to draw the line between themselves and the Compromisers. Like Kamenev, Stalin stood closer to the Soviet majority. Pravda, after passing into the hands of the new editorial board, declared as early as March 15 (28) that the Bolsheviks would resolutely support the Provisional Government “insofar as it fights reaction or counter-revolution.” The paradox of this declaration was that the only important agent of counter-revolution was the Provisional Government itself. Stalin’s stand on the war showed the same mettle: as long as the German Army remained subservient to its Emperor, the Russian soldier should “staunchly stand at his post, answering bullet for bullet and salvo for salvo.” As if all there was to the problem of imperialism was the Emperor! The article was Kamenev’s, but Stalin raised not the slightest objection to it. If he differed at all from Kamenev in those days, it was in being more evasive than his partner. “All defeatism,” Pravda explained, “or rather what the venal press stigmatised by that name under the aegis of tsarist censorship, died the moment the first revolutionary regiment appeared on the streets of Petrograd.” This was an outright disclaimer of Lenin, who had preached defeatism out of reach of the tsarist censorship, and at the same time a reaffirmation of Kamanev’s declaration at the trial of the Duma fraction. But on this occasion it was counter-signed by Stalin. As for “the first revolutionary regiment,” all its appearance meant was a step from Byzantine barbarism to imperialist civilization.<br />
<br />
“The day the transformed Pravda appeared…” recounts Shlyapnikov, “was a day of triumph for the Defensists. The whole Tauride Palace, from the businessmen of the Duma Committee to the Executive Committee, the very heart of the revolutionary democracy, buzzed with but one news item –the triumph of the moderate and sensible Bolsheviks over the extremists. In the Executive Committee itself we were greeted with malicious smiles . . . When that issue of Pravda reached the factories, it created confusion and indignation among our Party members and sympathizers, spiteful satisfaction among our opponents . . . The indignation in the outlying districts was stupendous, and, when the proletarians found out that Pravda had been taken in tow by three of its former managing editors recently arrived from Siberia, they demanded the expulsion of the latter from the Party.”<br />
<br />
Shlyapnikov’s account was retouched and softened by him in 1925 under the pressure of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, the “triumvirate” that then rule the Party. Yet it does record clearly enough Stalin’s initial steps in the arena of the Revolution and the reaction to them of class-conscious workers. The sharp protest of the Viborgites, which Pravda was soon obliged to publish in its own columns, forced the editorial board henceforth to formulate its opinions more circumspectly but not to change its policy.<br />
<br />
Soviet politics was shot through and through with compromise and equivocation. The great need of the masses was above all to find someone who would call a spade a spade; that is, of course, the sum and substance of revolutionary politics. Everybody shied from that, for fear of upsetting the delicate structure of dual power.<br />
<br />
The greatest amount of falsehood accumulated around the war issue. On March 14 (27) the Executive Committee proposed to the Soviet its draft of the manifesto “To the Peoples of the World.” This document called upon the workers of Germany and Austria-Hungary to refuse “to serve as a tool of conquest and violence in the hands of kings, landowners and bankers.” But the Soviet leaders themselves had not the slightest intention of breaking with the kings of Great Britain and Belgium, the Emperor of Japan, or the bankers and landowners, their own or those of all the Entente countries. The newspaper of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Miliukov noted with satisfaction that “the appeal is blossoming into an ideology shared by us and our allies.” That was quite right –and quite in the spirit of the French Socialist ministers since the outbreak of war. During practically the very same hours, Lenin was writing to Petrograd by way of Stockholm that the revolution was threatened with the danger of having the old imperialist policy camouflaged behind new revolutionary phrases. “I shall even prefer to split with anyone at all in our Party rather than yield to social-patriotism . . .” But in those days Lenin’s ideas did not have a single champion.<br />
<br />
Besides marking a victory for the imperialist Miliukov over the petty bourgeois democrats, the unamimous adoption of this manifesto by the Petrograd Soviet meant the triumph of Stalin and Kamenev over the Left Wing Bolsheviks. All bowed their heads before the discipline of patriotic hypocrisy. “We welcome wholeheartedly,” Stalin wrote in Pravda, “the Soviet’s appeal of yesterday . . . This appeal, if it reaches the broad masses, will undoubtedly bring back hundreds and thousands of workers to the forgotten slogan: Workers of the world, unite!” There was really no lack of similar appeals in the West, and all they did was to help the ruling classes preserve the mirage of a war for democracy.<br />
<br />
Stalin’s article on the manifesto is not only highly revealing as to his stand on this particular issue but also of his way of thinking in general. His organic opportunism, forced by time and circumstance to seek temporary cover in abstract revolutionary principles, made short shrift of these principles when it came to an issue. He began his article by repeating almost word for word Lenin’s argumentation that even after the overthrow of tsarism, Russia’s participation in the war would continue to be imperialistic. Nevertheless, when he came to draw his practical conclusions, he not only welcomed the social-patriotic manifesto with equivocal qualifications, but, following Kamenev’s lead, rejected out of hand revolutionary mobilization of the masses against war. “First of all,” he wrote, “it is undeniable that the bare slogan, ‘Down with War!’ is utterly inapplicable as a practical solution . . .” And his suggested solution was: “pressure on the Provisional Government with the demand that it immediately express its readiness to start peace negotiations . . .” With the aid of friendly “pressure” on the bourgeoisie, to whom conquest was the whole purpose of war, Stalin wanted to achieve peace “on the basis of the self-determination of nations.” Since the beginning of the war Lenin had been directing his hardest blows against precisely this sort of philistine utopianism. No amount of “pressure” can make the bourgeoisie stop being the bourgeoisie: it must be overthrown. But Stalin stopped short before this conclusion, in sheer fright –just like the compromisers.<br />
<br />
No less significant was Stalin’s article, “On the Abolition of National Limitations.” [in Pravda, April 7 (March 25), 1917.] His basic idea, acquired from propagandist pamphlets as far back as Tiflis Seminary days, was that national oppression was a relic of mediaevalism. Imperialism, viewed as the domination of strong nations over weak ones, was a conception quite beyond his ken. “The social basis of national oppression,” he wrote, “the force that inspires it, is the degenerating landed aristocracy . . . In England, where the landed aristocracy shares its power with the bourgeoisie . . . national oppression is softer, less inhuman, provided of course we do not take into consideration the special consideration that during the war, when the power passed into the hands of the landlords, national oppression increased considerably (persecution of the Irish, the Hindus).” The absurd assertions with which this article bristles –that supposedly racial and national equality is secure in the democracies; that in England during the war the power had passed to the landlords; that the overthrow of the feudal aristocracy would mean the abolition of national oppression –are shot through and through with the spirit of vulgar democratism and parochial obtuseness. Not a word to the effect that imperialism was responsible for national oppression on a scale of which feudalism was utterly incapable, if only because of its indolent provincial make-up; more than that, he seemed to have entirely forgotten his own work on the national question, written early in 1913 under Lenin’s [guidance].<br />
<br />
“To the extent that the Russian Revolution has won,” the article concluded, “it has already created actual conditions [for national freedom] by having overthrown the sovereignty of feudalism and serfdom . . .” As far as our author was concerned the Revolution was already completely a thing of the past. In prospect, quite in the spirit of Miliukov and Tseretelli, were “the drafting of laws” and “their statutory ratification.” Yet still untouched was not only capitalistic exploitation, the overthrow of which had not even occurred to Stalin, but even the ownership of the land by the landed gentry, something he himself had dsignated as the basis of national oppression. The government was run by Russian landlords like Rodzianko and Prince Lvov. Such was –hard though it is to believe even now! –Stalin’s historical and political slant a mere ten days before Lenin was to proclaim the course toward socialist revolution.<br />
<br />
The All-Russian Conference of Bolsheviks, convoked by the Central Committee Bureau, opened in Petrograd on March 28, simultaneously with the conference of representatives of Russia’s most important Soviets. Although fully a month had elapsed since the Revolution, the Party was still in the throes of utter confusion, which was further enhanced by the leadership of the past two weeks. Differentiation of political trends had not yet crystallised. In exile that had needed the arrival of Spandaryan; now the Party had to wait for the arrival of Lenin. Rabid chauvinists like Voitinsky and Eli’ava, among others, continued to call themselves Bolsheviks and took part in the Party Conference alongside those who considered themselves internationalists. The patriots vented their sentiments far more explicitly and boldly than the semi-patriots, who constantly backed down and apologized. Since the majority of delegates belonged to the Swamp [middle-of-the-roaders of unstable views], their natural spokesman was Stalin. “We all feel alike about the Provisional Government,” said the Saratov delegate Vassilyev. “There are no differences as to practical steps between Stalin and Voitinsky,” Krestinsky chimed in with pleasure. The very next day Voitinsky joined the Mensheviks and seven months later he led a detachment of Cossacks against the Bolsheviks.<br />
<br />
It seems that Kamenev’s behavior at the trial had been forgotten.It is possible that there was also talk among the delegates about the mysterious telegram to the Grand Duke. Perhaps Stalin took the trouble to remind others of these errors by his friend. Anyway, it was not Kamenev but the far lesser known Stalin who was delegated to present the chief political report, on the policy toward the Provisional Government. The protocol record of that report has been preserved; it is a priceless document to historians and biographers. Its subject was the central problem of the revolution –the relations between the Soviets, directly supported by the armed workers and soldiers, and the bourgeois government, existing only by the grace of the Soviet leaders. “The government,” said Stalin in part, “is split into two organs, neither of which has full sovereignty . . . The Soviet has indeed taken the initiative in revolutionary changes; the Soviet is the sole revolutionary leader of the insurgent people –the organ that controls the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government has undertaken the task of actually fortifying the achievements of the revolutionary people. The Soviet mobilizes the forces and exercises control, while the Provisional Government, baulking and bungling, takes upon itself the role of defender of those achievements of the people which the latter have already actually made.” This excerpt is worth a whole program!<br />
<br />
The reporter presented the relationship between the two basic classes of society as a division of labor between two “organs”. The Soviets, i.e.., the workers and soldiers, make the Revolution; the government, i.e. capitalists and liberal landed gentry, “fortify” it. During 1905-1907 Stalin himself wrote over and over again, reiterating after Lenin: “The Russian bourgeoisie is anti-revolutionary; it cannot be the prime-mover, let alone the leader, of the Revolution; it is the sworn enemy of revolution, and a stubborn struggle must be waged against it.” Nor was this guiding political idea of Bolshevism in any sense nullified by the course of the February Revolution. Miliukov, the leader of the liberal bourgeoisie, said at the conference of his party a few days before the uprising: “We are walking on a volcano . . . Whatever the nature of the government –whether good or bad –we need a firm government now more than ever before.” When the uprising began, notwithstanding the resistance of the bourgeoisie, there was nothing left for the liberals to do except take their stand on the ground prepared by its victory. It was none other than Miliukov who, having declared only yesterday that a Rasputinite monarchy was better than a volcanic eruption, was now running the Provisional Government which, according to Stalin, was supposed to be “fortifying” the conquests of the revolution but which actually was doing its utmost to strangle it. To the insurgent masses the meaning of the Revolution was in the abolition of the old forms of property, the very forms the Provisional Government was defending. Stalin presented the irreconcilable class-struggle which, defying all the efforts of the Compromisers, was straining day after day to turn into civil war, as a mere division of labor between two political machines. Not even the Left Menshevik Martov would have put the issue in such a fashion. This was Tseretelli’s theory –and Tseretelli was the oracle of the Compromisers –in its most vulgar expression: “moderate” and more “resolute” forces perform in an arena called “democracy” and divide the act between them, some “conquering” and others “fortifying.” Here ready-made for us is the formula of future Stalinist policy in China (1924-27), in Spain (1934-39) as well as generally in all his ill-starred “popular fronts.”<br />
<br />
“It is not to our advantage to force the course of events now,” the reporter continued, “accelerating the secession of the bourgeois layers . . . We have to gain time by checking the secession of the middle bourgeois layers, in order to get ready for the struggle against the Provisional Government.” The delegates listened to these arguments with vague misgivings. “Don’t frighten away the bourgeoisie” had ever been Plekhanov’s slogan, and in the Caucasus, Jordania’s. Bolshevism attained its maturity in fierce combat with that trend of thought. It is impossible to “check the secession” of the bourgeoisie without checking the proletariat’s class struggle; essentially, both are merely the two aspects of the same process. “The talk about not frightening away the bourgeoisie . . .” Stalin himself had written in 1913, shortly before his arrest, “evoked only smiles, for it was clear that the task of the Social-Democracy was not merely ‘to frighten away’ the very same bourgeoisie but to dislodge it in the person of its advocates, the Kadets.” It is even hard to understand how any old Bolshevik could have so forgotten the fourteen-year-old history of his faction as to resort at the most crucial moment to the most odious of Menshevik formulae. The explanation is to be found in Stalin’s way of thinking: he is not receptive to general ideas, and his memory does not retain them. He uses them from time to time, as they are needed, and casts them aside without a twinge, almost as a reflex. In his 1913 article he was referring to Duma elections. “To dislodge” the bourgeoisie meant merely to take mandates away from the liberals. The present reference was to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie. That was the job that Stalin relegated to the remote future. For the present, quite like the Mensheviks, he deemed it necessary “not to frighten them away.”<br />
<br />
After reading the Central Committee’s resolution, which he had helped to draw up, Stalin declared rather unexpectedly that he was not in complete accord with it and would rather support the resolution proposed by the Krasnoyarsk Soviet. The secret significance of this maneuver is not clear. On his way from Siberia Stalin might have had a hand in drafting the resolution of the Krasnoyarsk Soviet. It is possible that, having sensed the attitude of the delegates, he thought it best to edge away from Kamenev ever so little. However, the Krasnoyarsk resolution ranked even lower in quality than the Petersburg document: “. . . to make completely clear that the only source of the Provisional Government’s power and authority is the will of the people, to whom the Provisional Government must wholly submit, and to support the Provisional Government . . . only in so far as it pursues the course of satisfying the demands of the working class and of the revolutionary peasantry.” The nostrum brought out of Siberia proved quite simple: the bourgeoisie “must wholly submit” to the people and “pursue the course” of the workers and peasants.<br />
<br />
Several weeks later the formula of supporting the bourgeoisie “in so far as” was to become the butt of general ridicule among Bolsheviks. But already several of the delegates protested against supporting the government of Prince Lvov: the very idea ran too drastically counter to the whole tradition of Bolshevism. Next day the Social-Democrat Steklov, himself a supporter of the “in as far as” formula, and at the same time as a member of the “contact commission” close to the ruling spheres, was careless enough at the conference of the Soviets to draw such a dismal picture of the Provisional Government’s actual machinations –opposition to social reforms, efforts on behalf of the monarchy and annexations – that the conference of Bolsheviks recoiled in alarm from the formula of support. “It is now clear,” was the way the moderate delegate Nogin expressed the feeling of many others, “that it is not support we should be discussing but counter-action.” The Left Wing delegate Skrypnik expressed the same thought: “Much has changed since Stalin’s report yesterday . . . The Provisional Government is plotting against the people and the revolution . . . yet the resolution speaks of support.” The crestfallen Stalin, whose appraisal of the situation could not stand the test of time even to the extent of twenty-four hours, moved “to instruct the committee to alter the clause about support.” But the conference went one better: “By a majority against four, the clause about support is stricken from the resolution.”<br />
<br />
One might think that henceforth the reporter’s whole schema about the division of labour between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would be cast into oblivion. Actually, only the phrase was stricken from the resolution, not the thought. The dread of “frightening away the bourgeoisie” remained. In substance the resolution was an appeal exhorting the Provisional Government to wage “the most energetic struggle for the total liquidation of the old regime” at the very time it was busy waging “the most energetic struggle for the restoration of the monarchy. The conference did not venture beyond friendly pressure on the liberals. No mention was made of an independent struggle for the conquest of power –if only for the sake of democratic objectives. As if intent upon exposing in the most lurid light the true spirit behind the resolutions passed, Kamenev declared at the conference of Soviets, which was going on simultaneously, that on the issue of power he was “happy” to add the vote of the Bolsheviks to the official resolution which had been moved and sponsored by the Right Menshevik leader Dan. In the light of these facts, the split of 1903, made permanent by the Prague conference of 1913, must have seemed a mere misunderstanding.<br />
<br />
Hence it was not by chance that at the next day’s session the Bolsheviks conference was deliberating the proposal of the Right Menshevik leader Tseretelli to merge the two parties. Stalin reacted to this in the most sympathetic manner: “We ought to do it. It is necessary to define our proposals as to the terms of unification. Unification is possible along the line of Zimmerwald-Kienthal.” The reference was to the “line” of two socialist conferences in Switzerland at which moderate pacifists had been preponderant. Molotov, who two weeks earlier had been punished for his Leftism, came out with timid objections: “Tseretelli wants to unite divergent elements . . .Unity along that line is wrong . . .” “More resolute was Zalutsky’s protest: “Only a philistine can be motivated by the mere desire for unity, not a Social-Democrat . . .It is impossible to unite on the basis of superficial adherence to Zimmerwald-Kienthal . . .It is necessary to advance a definite platform.” But Stalin, who had been dubbed a philistine, struck to his guns: “We ought not to run ahead and anticipate disagreements. Party life is impossible without disagreements. We will live down these trivial disagreements inside the Party.” It is hard to believe one’s eyes: Stalin declared differences with Tseretelli, the inspirer of the dominant Soviet bloc, to be petty disagreements that could be “lived down” inside the Party. The discussion took place on April first (April 14, o.s.). Three days later Lenin was to declare war unto death against Tseretelli. Two months later Tseretelli was to disarm and arrest Bolsheviks.<br />
<br />
The conference of March, 1917, is extraordinarily important for insight into the state of mind of the Bolshevik Party’s leading members immediately after the February Revolution –and particularly of Stalin as he was upon his return from Siberia after four years of brooding on his own. He emerges from the scanty chronicle of the protocols as a plebeian democrat and oafish provincial forced by the trend of the times to assume the Marxist tinge. His articles and speeches of those weeks cast a faultlessly clear light on his position during the years of war: had he drawn the least bit toward Lenin’s ideas during his Siberian sojourn, as memoirs written twenty years after the fact avow, he could not have gotten as hopelessly stuck in the morass of opportunism as he did in March, 1917. Lenin’s absence and Kamenev’s influence made it possible for Stalin to show himself at the outbreak of the revolution for what he really was, revealing his most deeply rooted traits –distrust of the masses, utter lack of imagination, short-sightedness, a penchant for the line of least resistance. These characteristics continued to reassert themselves in later years whenever Stalin had occasion to play a leading role in important developments. That is why the March conference, at which Stalin revealed himself so utterly as a politician, is today expunged from Party history and its records are kept under lock and key. In 1923, three copies were secretly prepared for the members of the “triumvirate” –Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev. Only in 1926, when Zinoviev and Kamenev joined the opposition against Stalin, did I manage to procure from them this remarkable document, which enabled me to have it published abroad in Russian and English.<br />
<br />
But after all, this record does not differ in any essential from his Pravda articles and merely supplements them. Not a single declaration, proposal, protest in which Stalin more or less articulately counter-posed the Bolshevik point of view to the policy of the petty bourgeois democrats has come down to us from those days. An eye-witness of those times, the Left Wing Menshevik Sukhanov –author of the already-mentioned manifesto, “To the Toilers of the World” –wrote in his invaluable “Notes on the Revolution”: “In addition to Kamenev, the Bolsheviks then had Stalin on the Executive Committee . . .During his nondescript tenure . . .[he] made –and not only on me –the impression of a gray spot which was occasionally dimly apparent and left no trace. There is really nothing more that can be said about him.” For that description, which was admittedly rather one-sided, Sukhanov later paid with his life.<br />
<br />
On the third [16] of April, having traversed belligerent Germany, Lenin, Krupskaya, Zinoviev and others crossed the Finnish border and arrived in Petrograd . . . A group of Bolsheviks headed by Kamenev had gone to meet Lenin in Finland. Stalin was not one of them, and that little fact shows better than anything else that there was nothing even remotely resembling personal intimacy between him and Lenin. “The moment Vladimir Llyich came in and sat down on the couch,” relates Raskolnikov, an officer of the Navy and subsequently a Soviet diplomat, “he opened up on Kamenev: ‘What have you people been writing in Pravda? We saw several issues and were very angry with you . . .’”. During his years working with Lenin abroad Kamenev had grown quite used to such cold showers. They did not deter him from loving Lenin, even worshiping him, his passion, his profundity, his simplicity, his witticisms, at which Kamenev laughed before they were uttered, and his handwriting, which he involuntarily imitated. Many years later somebody remembered that on the way Lenin had asked about Stalin. That natural question (Lenin undoubtedly inquired about all the members of the old Bolshevik staff) later served as the starting point for the plot of a Soviet motion picture.<br />
<br />
An observant and conscientous reporter of the revolution later wrote the following about Lenin’s irst public appearance before the foregathered Bolsheviks: “I shall never forget that speech which, like thunder, shook and astonished not only me, a heretic who had accidentally wandered in, but even all the faithful. Decidedly, no one expected anything of the kind.”<br />
<br />
It was not a question of oratorical thunder, with which Lenin was sparing, but the whole trand of his thought. “We don’t want a parliamentary republic, we don’t want a bourgeois democracy, we don’t want any government except the Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Poor Peasants’ Deputies!” In the coalition of socialists with the liberal bourgeoisie – i.e. in the “popular front” of those days –Lenin saw nothing by treason to the people. He jeered fiercely at the fashionable phrase “revolutionary democracy.” Which lumped into one workers and petty bourgeoisie, Populists, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The compromisist parties which ruled in the Soviets were not allies to him but irreconcilable enemies. “That alone,” remarks Sukhanov, “sufficed in those days to make the hearer’s heads spin!”<br />
<br />
The Party was as unprepared for Lenin as it had been for the February Revolution. All the criteria, slogans, turns of speech accumulated during the five weeks of revolution were smashed to smithereens. “He resolutely attacked the tactics of the leading Party groups and individual comrades prior to his arrival,” wrote Raskolnikov, referring first and foremost to Stalin and Kamenev. “The most responsible Party workers were on hand. Yet even to them Ilyich’s speech was something utterly new.” There was no discussion. All were too stunned for that. No one wanted to expose himself to the blows of this desperate leader. In corners, they whispered among themselves that Ilyich’s had been too long abroad, that he had lost touch with Russia, that he did not understand the situation, and worse than that, that he had gone over to the position of Trotskyism. Stalin, yesterday’s reporter at the Party Conference, was silent. He realized that he had made a frightful mistake, far more serious than on that occasion at the Stockholm Congress when he had defended land division, or a year later, when for a while he was one of the boycottists. Decidedly, the best thing to do was to make himself scarce. No one cared to know Stalin’s opinion on the question anyway. Subsequently, no one could remember anything, from his memoirs, about what Stalin did during the next few weeks.<br />
<br />
Meantime Lenin was far from idle: he surveyed the situation with his sharp eyes, tormented his friends with questions, sounded out the workers. The very next day he presented the Party with a short resume of his views. These came to be the most important document of the revolution, famous as “The Theses of April Fourth.” Lenin was not only unafraid “to frighten away” liberals but even members of the Bolshevik Central Committee. He did not play hide and seek with the pretentious leaders of the Bolshevik Party. He laid bare the logic of class war. Casting aside the cowardly and futile formula, “in as far as”, he confronted the Party with the task of seizing the government. But first and foremost it was necessary to determine who was the enemy. The Black Hundred Monarchists cowering in their nooks and corners were of no consequence whatever. The staff of the bourgeois counter-revolution was made up of the central committee of the Kadet Party and the Provisional Government inspired by it. But the latter existed by grace of the Social-Revolutionists and the Mensheviks, who in their turn held power because of the gullibility of the masses. Under these conditions, application of revolutionary violence was out of the question. First of all the masses had to be won. Instead of uniting and fraternizing with the Populists and the Mensheviks, it was necessary to expose them before the workers, soldiers and peasants as agents of the bourgeoisie. “The real government is the Soviet of Workers’ Delegates . . . Our Party is a minority in the Soviet . . . That can’t be helped! It is up to us to explain –patiently, persistently, systematically –the erroneousness of their tactics. As long as we are a minority, our job is to criticize in order to undeceive the masses.” Everything in that program was simple and reliable and every nail was driven in firmly. These theses bore only one single signature: “Lenin.” Neither the Party Central Committee nor the editorial board of Pravda would countersign this explosive document.<br />
<br />
On that very Fourth of April Lenin appeared before the same Party Conference at which Stalin had expounded his theory of peaceful division of labour between the Provisional Government and the Soviets. The contrast was too cruel. To soften it, Lenin, contrary to his custom, did not subject the resolutions that had been passed to analysis but merely turned his back on them. He raised the conference to a much higher plane. He forced it to see new perspectives –perspectives at which the makeshift leaders had not even guessed. “Why didn’t you seize power?” the new reporter demanded, and proceeded to recapitulate the current explanations: the revolution was presumably bourgeois; it was only in its initial stage; the war created unforeseen difficulties; and the like. “That’s all nonsense. The point is that the proletariat is not sufficiently conscious and not sufficiently organized. That should be admitted. The material force is in the hands of the proletariat, but the bourgeoisie is wide awake and ready.” Lenin shifted the issue from the sphere of pseudo-objectivism, where Stalin, Kamenev and others tried to hide from the tasks of the revolution, into the sphere of awareness and action. The proletariat failed to seize power in February, not because seizure of power was forbidden by sociology, but because their failure to seize power enabled the Compromisers to deceive the proletariat in the interests of the bourgeoisie –and that was all! “Even our Bolsheviks,” he continued, so far without mentioning any names, “display confidence in the government. That can be explained only by intoxication with the revolution. This is the end of socialism . . . If that’s the case, I cannot go along. I would rather remain in a minority.” It was not hard for Stalin and Kamenev to recognize the reference to themselves. The entire conference understood to whom the speech referred. The delegates had no doubt that Lenin was not joking when he threatened to break away. This was a far cry from the “in so far as” formula and from the generally homespun policy of the preceding days.<br />
<br />
The axis of the war issue was no less resolutely shifted. Nicholas Romanov had been overthrown. The Provisional Government had half promised a republic. But did this change the nature of the war? France had long been a republic, and more than once. Yet its participation in the war remained imperialistic. The nature of war is determined by the nature of the ruling class. “When the masses declare that they do not want any conquests, I believe them. When Guchkov and Lvov say that they do not want any conquests –they are liars.” This simple criterion is profoundly scientific and at the same time understandable to every soldier in the trenches. Lenin then delivered a direct blow, calling the Pravda by its right name. “To demand from a government of the capitalists that is should repudiate annexation is nonsense, crying mockery . . .” These words struck directly at Stalin. “It is impossible to end this war without a peace of violence unless capitalism is overthrown.” Yet the Compromisers were supporting the capitalists, and Pravda was supporting the Compromisers. “The appeal of the Soviet –not a single word of it has a semblance of class consciousness. It is all phrasemongering.” The reference is to the very manifesto that had been welcomed by Stalin as the voice of internationalism. Pacifist phrases, while preserving the old alliances, the old treaties, the old aims, were meant only to deceive the masses. “What is unique for Russia is the incredibly rapid transition from uncontrollable violence to the most subtle deception.” Three days ago Stalin had declared his readiness to unite with Tseretelli’s party. “I hear,” said Lenin, “that there is a unification tendency afoot in Russia: unity with a Defensist is treason to Socialism. I think that it is better to remain alone, like Liebknecht, one against a hundred and ten!” It was no longer permissible even to bear the same name as the Mensheviks, the name of Social Democracy. “I propose for my part that we change the Party name, that we call ourselves the Communist Party.” Not a single one of the participants of the conference, not even Zinoviev, who had just arrived with Lenin, supported this proposal, which seemed a sacrilegious break with their own past.<br />
<br />
Pravda, which continued to be edited by Kamenev and Stalin, declared that Lenin’s theses were his personal opinion, that the Central Committee Bureau did not share his opinion, and that Pravda itself pursued its old policy. That declaration was written by Kamenev. Stalin supported him in silence. He would have to be silent for a long time. Lenin’s ideas seemed to him the phantasmagoria of an émigré, yet he bided his time to see how the Party machine would react. “It must be openly acknowledged,” wrote subsequently the Bolshevik Angarsky, who had passed through the same evolution as the other, “that a great many of the Old Bolsheviks . . . maintained the Old Bolshevik opinions of 1905 on the question of the character of the Revolution of 1917 and that the repudiation of these views was not easily accomplished.” As a matter of fact, it was not a question of “a great many of the Old Bolsheviks” but of all of them without exception. At the March conference, at which the Party cadres of the entire country met, not a single voice was heard in favor of striving to win the power for the Soviets. All of them had to re-educate themselves. Out of the sixteen members of the Petrograd Committee, only two supported the theses, and even they did not do it at once. “Many of the comrades pointed out,” Tsikhon recalled, “that Lenin has lost contact with Russia, did not take indo consideration present conditions, and so forth.” The provincial Bolshevik tells how in the beginning the Bolsheviks condemned Lenin’s agitation, “which seemed Utopian and which was explained by his prolonged lack of contact with Russian life.”<br />
<br />
One of the inspirers of such judgements was undoubtedly Stalin, who always had looked down at the “emigres”. Several years later Raskolnikov recalled that “the arrival of Vladimir Ilyich laid down a sharp Rubicon in the tactic of our Party . . . The task of taking possession of the power of the State was conceived of as a remote ideal . . .It was considered sufficient to support the Provisional Government with one or another kind of qualification. . . The party had no leader of authority capable of welding it together into a unit and leading it.” In 1922 it could not have occurred to Raskonikov to see Stalin as the “leader of authority”. Wrote the Ural worker Markov, whom the revolution had found at his lathe, “Our leaders were groping until the arrival of Vladimir Ilich . . .Our Party’s position began to clarify with the appearance of his famous theses.” “Remember the reception given to Vladimir Ilyich’s April Theses,” Bukharin was saying soon after Lenin’s death, “when part of our own Party looked upon them as a virtual betrayal of accepted Marxist ideology.” This “part of our party” consisted of its entire leadership without a single exception. “With Lenin’s arrival in Russia in 1917,” wrote Molotov in 1924, “our Party began to feel firm ground under its feet . . . Until that moment it had merely feld its way weakly and uncertainly . . . The Party lacked the clarity and resoluteness required by the revolutionary moment . . .” Earlier than the others, more precisely and more clearly, did Ludmilla Stahl define the change that had taken place: “Until Lenin’s arrival all the comrades wandered in darkness. . .” she said on April 4th [17], 1917, at the time of the sharpest moment of the Party crisis. “Seeing the independent creativeness of the people, we could not help taking it into consideration . . . Our comrades were content with mere preparations for the Constituent Assembly through parliamentary methods and did not even consider the possibility of proceeding further. By accepting Lenin’s slogans we shall be doing that which life itself urges us to do.”<br />
<br />
The Party’s rearmament of April was a hard blow to Stalin’s prestige. He had come from Siberia with the authority of an Old Bolshevik, with the rank of a member of the Central Committee, with the support of Kamenev and Muranov. He too began with his own kind of “rearmament,” rejecting the policy of the local leaders as too radical and committing himself through a number of articles in Pravda, a report at the conference, and the resolution of the Krasnoyarsk Soviet. In the midst of this activity, which by its very nature was the work of a leader, Lenin appeared. He came into the conference like an inspector entering a classroom. After having heard several sentences, he turned his back on the teacher and with a wet sponge wiped off the blackboard all of his futile scrawls. The feelings of astonishment and protest among the delegates dissolved in the feeling of admiration. But Stalin had no admiration to offer. His was a sharp hurt, a sense of helplessness and green envy. He had been humiliated before the entire party far worse than at the closed Crakow conference after his unfortunate leadership of Pravda. It was useless to fight against it. He, too, now beheld new horizons at which he had not even guessed the day before. All he could do was to grit his teeth and keep his peace. The memory of the revolution brought about by Lenin in April, 1917, was stamped forever on his consciousness. It rankled. He got hold of the records of the March Conference and tried to hide them from the Party and from history. But that in itself did not settle matters. Collections of the Pravda of 1917 remained in the libraries. Moreover, those issues of Pravda came out in a reprint edition –and Stalin’s articles spoke for themselves. During the first years of the Soviet regime innumerable reminiscences about the April crisis filled all the historical journals and the anniversary issues of newspapers. All this had to be gradually removed from circulation, counterfeited, and new material substituted. The very word, “rearmament” of the Party, used by me casually in 1922, became subject in time to increasingly ferocious attacks by Stalin and his satellite historians.<br />
<br />
True, as late as 1924, Stalin still deemed it the better part of wisdom to admit, with all due indulgence for himself, the error of his ways at the outset of the revolution: “The Party. . . ,” he wrote, “accepted the policy of pressure by the Soviets on the Provisional Government in the question of peace, and did not at once decide to take a forward step . . . toward the new slogan of power to the Soviets . . . That was a profoundly erroneous position, for it multiplied pacifist illusions, poured water into the mill of defensism and hampered the revolutionary education of the masses. I shared that erroneous position at that time with other comrades in the Party and repudiated it completely only in the middle of April, after subscribing to Lenin’s theses.” This public admission, necessary in order to protect his own rear in the struggle against Trotskyism, which was then beginning, proved too circumscribing two years later. In 1926 Stalin categorically denied the opportunist character of his policy in March, 1917 –“This is not true, comrades, this is gossip!” –and admitted merely that he had “certain waverings . . . but who among us did not have momentary waverings?” Four years later, Yaroslavsky, who in his capacity as historian mentioned the fact that Stalin at the beginning of the revolution has assumed “an erroneous position,” was subjected to ferocious persecution from all sides. It was no longer permissible so much as to mention the “passing waverings.” The idol of prestige is a voracious monster! Finally, in the “history” of the Party edited by himself Stalin ascribes to himself Lenin’s position, reserving his own views as the portion of his enemies. “Kamenev and certain workers of the Moscow organization, as for example, Rykov, Bubnov, Nogin,” proclaims this remarkable history, “stood on the semi-Menshevik position of conditional support for the Provisional Government and the policy of the Defensists. Stalin, who had just returned from exile, Molotov and others, together with the majority of the Party, defended the policy of no confidence to the Provisional Government, came out against defensism,” and the like. Thus, by way of gradual change from fact to fiction, black was transformed into white. This method, which Kamenev called “doling out the lie,” runs through Stalin’s entire biography, finding its culminating expression, and at the same time its collapse, in the Moscow trials.<br />
<br />
Analysing the basic ideas of the two factions of the Social Democracy in 1909,. I wrote: "The anti-revolutionary aspects of Menshevism are already apparent in all their force; the anti-revolutionary characteristics of Bolshevism are a threat of tremendous danger only in the event of a revolutionary victory." In March, 1917, after the overthrow of Tsarism, the old cadres of the Party carried these anti-revolutionary characteristics of Bolshevism in their extreme expression: the very differentiation between Bolshevism and Menshevism appeared to have been lost. Imperative was a radical rearmament of the Party. Lenin, the only man big enough for the job, accomplished that in the course of April. Apparently, Stalin did not want to come out publicly against Lenin. But neither did he come out for him. Without much ado he shook clear from Kamenev, just as ten years before he had deserted the Boycottists and just as at the Cracow Conference he quietly abandoned the Conciliators to their fate. He was not in the habit of defending any idea that did not promise immediate success. The conference of the Petrograd organization was in session from teh fourteenth to the twenty-second of April. Although Lenin;s influence already predominated, the debates were pretty sharp now and then. Among those who participated were Zinoviev, Tomsky, Molotov, and other well known Bolsheviks. Stalin did not even show up. Obviously, he sought to be forgotten for a while.<br />
<br />
The All-Russian Conference convened in Petrograd on April twenty-fourth. It was supposed to clear up any matters left over from the March conference. About 150 delegates represented 79,000 Party members,. of whom 15,000 were in the capital. This was not at all a bad record for an anti-patriotic party that had emerged from the underground only yesterday. Lenin's victory became clear from the very start, with the elections to the Praesidium of five members, for among those elected were neither Kamenev nor Stalin, the two men responsible for the opportunist policy in March. Kamenev had sufficient courage to demand the privilege of a minority report at the conference. "Recognising that formally and factually the classic remnant of feudalism, the ownership of land by the landed gentry, had not yet been liquidated. . . it is too soon to assert that bourgeois democracy has exhausted all of its possibilities." Such was the basic thought of Kamenev and of Rykov, Nogin, Dzerzhinsky, Angarsky and others. "The impetus for social revolution, " Rykov was saying, "should have come from the West." The democratic revolution has not ended, the orators of the opposition insisted, supporting Kamenev. That was true. However, the mission of the Provisional Government was not to complete the revolution but to reverse its course. Hence it followed that the democratic revolution could be completed only under the rule of the working class. The debates were animated yet peaceful, since in all essentials the issue had been decided beforehand and Lenin did everything possible to make his opponents' retreat easy.<br />
<br />
During these debates Stalin came out with a brief statement against his ally of yesterday. In his minority report Kamenev had argued that since we were not calling for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government, we must demand control over it; otherwise the masses could not understand us. Lenin protested that the proletariat's "control" of a bourgeois government, especially under revolutionary conditions, would either be fictitious or amount to no more than mere collaboration with it. Stalin decided this was a good time to register his disagreement with Kamenev. To provide some semblance of an explanation for the change in his own position, he took advantage of a note issued on the nineteenth of April by Minister of Foreign Affairs Miliukov. The latter's extreme imperialist frankness literally drove the soldiers into the street and caused a government crisis. Lenin's conception of the revolution was based on the interrelationship of classes, not on some isolated diplomatic note, which differed little from other acts of the government. But Stalin was not interested in general ideas. All he needed was some obvious pretext in order that he might make his shift with the least damage to his vanity. He was "doling out" his retreat. At first, as he put it, "it was the Soviet that outline the program, while now it is the Provisional Government." After Miliukov's note "the government is advancing upon the Soviet, while the Soviet is retreating. After that to speak of control is to speak nonsense." It sounded strained and false. But it turned the trick: Stalin managed thus to separate himself in time from the opposition, which got only seven votes when the ballots were cast.<br />
<br />
In his report on the question of the nationalities, Stalin did whatever he could to bridge the gap between his March report, which saw the source of national oppression solely in the landed aristocracy, and the new position, which the Party was now assimilating. "National oppression," he said, unavoidably arguing against himself, "is not only supported by the landed aristocracy but also by another force - the imperialistic groups, which apply the method of enslaving nations learned in the colonies to their own country as well . . ." Moreover,the big bourgeoisie is followed by the "petty bourgeoisie, part of the intellectuals and part of the labour aristocracy, who also enjoy the fruits of this robbery." This was the very theme Lenin had so persistently harped upon during the war years. "Thus," his report continued, "there is a whole chorus of social forces that supports national oppression." In order to put an end to this oppression, it was necessary "to remove this chorus from the political scene." By placing the imperialist bourgeoisie in power, the February Revolution certainly did not lay the ground for the liberation of national minorities. Thus, for example, the Provisional Government resisted with all its might all efforts to broaden the autonomy of Finland. "Whose side should we take? It is clear that it mjust be the side of the Finnish people. . ." he Ukrainian Pyatakov and the Pole Dzerzhinsky came out against the program of national self-determination as Utopian and reactionary. "We should not advance the national question," Dzerzhinsky was saying naively, "since that retards the moment of social revolution. I would therefore suggest that the question of Poland's independence should be removed from the resolution." "The social democracy," Stalin replied, "insofar as it pursues a course directed toward a socialist revolution, should support the revolutionary movement of nationalities against imperialism." Here for the first time in his life Stalin said something about "a course directed toward a socialist revolution." The sheet of the Julian calendar that day bore the date: April 20, 1917.<br />
<br />
Having assumed the prerogatives of a congress, the Conference elected a new Central Committee, which consisted of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Milutin, Nogin, Sverdlov, Smilga, Stalin, Fedorov; and the alternates: Teodorovich, Bubnov, Glebov-Avilov and Pravdin. Of the 133 delegates, for some reason only 109 took part in the secret balloting with full vote; it is possible that part of them had already left town. Lenin got 104 votes (was Stalin perhaps one of the five delegates who refused to support Lenin?), Zinoviev 101, Stalin 97, Kamenev 95. For the first time Stalin was elected to the Central Committee in the normal party way. He was going on 38. Rykov, Zinoviev and Kamenev were about 23 or 24 when first elected by party congresses to teh Bolshevik general staff.<br />
<br />
At the Conference an attempt was made to leave Sverdlov out of the Central Committee. Lenin told about it after the latter's death, treating it as his own glaring mistake. "Fortunately," he added, "we were corrected from below." Lenin could hardly have had any reason for o9pposing Sverdlov's candidacy. He know him only through correspondence as a tireless professional revolutionist. It is not unlikely that the opposition came from Stalin, who had not forgotten how Sverdlov had had to straighten things out after him in Petersburg and reorganise <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda</span>; their joint life in Kureika had merely enhanced his enmity. Stalin never forgave anything. He apparently tried to take his revenge at the conference, and in one way or another, we can only guess how, managed to win Lenin's support. But his attempt did not succeed. If in 1912 Lenin met with the resistance of the delegates when he tried to get Stalin onto the Central Committee, he now met with no less resistance when he tried to keep Sverdlov off. Of the members of this Central Committee elected at the April Conference, only Sverdlov managed to die a natural death. All the others - with the exception of Stalin himself - as well as the four alternates, have either been officially shot or have been done away with unofficially.<br />
<br />
Without Lenin, no one had known what to make of the unprecedented situation; all were slaves of old formulae. Yet clinging to the slogan of democratic dictatorship now meant, as Lenin put it, "actually going over to the petty bourgeoisie." It may well be that Stalin's advantage over the others was in his lack of compunction about going over and his readiness for rapprochement with the Compromisers and fusion with the old Mensheviks. He was not in the least hampered by reverence for old formulae. Ideological fetishism was alien to him: thus, without the least remorse he repudiated the long-held theory of the counter-revolutionary role of the Russian bourgeoisie. As always, Stalin acted empirically, under the pressure of his natural opportunism, which has always driven him to seek the line of least resistance. But he had not been alone in his stand; in the course of the three weeks before Lenin's arrival, he had been giving expression to the hidden convictions of very many of the "Old Bolsheviks."<br />
<br />
It should not be forgotten that the political machine of the Bolshevik Party was predominantly made of the intelligentsia, which was petty bourgeois in its origin and conditions of life and Marxist in its ideas and in its relations with the proletariat. Workers who turned professional revolutionists joined this set with great eagerness and lost their identity in it. The peculiar social structure of the Party machine and its authority over the proletariat (neither of which is accidental but dictated by strict historical necessity) were more than once the cause of the Party's vacillation and finally became the source of its degeneration.<br />
<br />
The Party rested on the Marxist doctrine, which expressed the historical interests of the proletariat as a whole; but the human beings of the Party machine assimilated only scattered portions of that doctrine according to their own comparatively limited experience. Quite often, as Lenin complained, they simply learned ready-made formulae by rote and shut their eyes to the change in conditions. In most cases they lacked independent daily contact with the labouring masses as well as a comprehensive understanding of the historical process. They thus lef themselves exposed to the influence of alien classes. During the War, the higher-ups of the Party were largely affected by compromisist tendencies, which emanated from bourgeois circles, while the rank and file Bolshevik working-men displayed far greater stability in resisting the patriotic hysteria that had swept the country.<br />
<br />
In opening a broad field of action to democratic processes, the revolution was far more satisfying to "professional revolutionists" of all parties than to soldiers in the trenches, to peasants in villages and to workers in the munition factories. The obscure underground men of yesterday suddenly became the leading political figures. Instead of parliaments they had Soviets, and there they were free to argue and to rule. As far as they were concerned, the very class contradictions that had caused the revolution seemed to be melting away under the rays of the democratic sun. That was why almost everywhere in Russia Bolsheviks and Mensheviks joined hands. Even where they remained apart, as in Petrograd, the urge for unity was decidedly compelling in both organisations. At the same time, in the trenches, in the villages and in the factories, the chronic antagonisms assumed an ever more open and more intense character, foreboding civil war instead of unity. As often happens, a sharp cleavage developed between the clases in motion and the interests of the party machines. Even the Bolshevik Party cadres, who enjoyed the benefit of exceptional revolutionary training, were definitely inclined sto disregard the masses and to identify their own special interests with the interests of the machine on the very day after the monarchy was overthrown. What, then, could be expected of these cadres when they became an all-powerful state bureaucracy? It is unlikely that Stalin ave this matter any thought. He was flesh of the flesh of the machine and the toughest of its bones.<br />
<br />
But by what miracle did Lenin manage in a few short weeks to turn the Party's course into a new channel? The answer should be sought simultaneously in two directions - Lenin's personal attributes and the objective situation. Lenin was strong not only because he understood the laws of class struggle but also because his ear was faultlessly attuned to the stirrings of the masses in motion. He represented not so much the Party machine as the vanguard of the proletariat. He was definitely convinced that thousands from among those workers who had borne the brunt of supporting the underground Party would now support him. The masses at the moment were more revolutionary than the Party, and the Party more revolutionary than its machine. As early as March the actual attitude of the workers and soldiers had in many cases become stormily apparent, and it was widely at variance with the instructions issued by all the parties, including the Bolshevik. Lenin's authority was not absolute, but it was tremendous, for all of past experience was a confirmation of his prescience. On the other hand, the authority of the Party machine, like its conservatism, was only in the making of that time. Lenin exerted influence not so much as an individual but because he embodied the influence of the class on the Party and of the Party on its machine. Under such circumstances, whoever tried to resist soon lost his footing. Vacillators fell in line with those in front, the cautious joined the majority. Thus, with comparatively small losses, Lenin managed in time to orient the Party and to prepare it for the new revolution.<br />
<br />
Every time the Bolshevik leaders had to act without Lenin they fell into error, usually inclining to the Right. Then Lenin would appear like a <span style="font-style: italic;">deus ex machina </span>and indicate the right road. Does it mean then that in the Bolshevik Party Lenin was everything and all the others nothing? Such a conclusion, which is rather widespread in democratic circles, is extremely biased and hence false. The same thing might be said about science. Mechanics without Newton and biology without Darwin seemed to amount to nothing for many years. This is both true and false. It took the work of thousands of rank and file scientists to gather the facts, to group them, to pose the problem and to prepare the ground for the comprehensive solutions of a Newton or a Darwin. That solution in turn affected the work of new thousands of rank and file investigators. Geniuses do not create science out of themselves; they merely accelerate the process of collective thinking. The Bolshevik Party had a leader of genius. That was no accident. A revolutionist of Lenin's makeup and breadth could be the leader only of the most fearless party, capable of carrying its thoughts and actions to their logical conclusion. But genius in itself is the rarest of exceptions.<br />
<br />
A leader of genius orients himself faster, estimates the situation more thoroughly, sees further than others. It was unavoidable that a great gap should develop between the leader of genius and his closest collaborators. It may even be conceded that to a certain extent the very power of Lenin's vision acted as a brake on the development of self-reliance among his collaborators. Nevertheless, that does not mean that Lenin was "everything" and that the Party without Lenin was nothing. Without the Party Lenin would have been as helpless as Newton and Darwin without collective scientific work. It is consequently not a question of the special sins of Bolshevism, conditioned presumably by centralisation, discipline and the like, but a question of the problem of genius within the historical process. Writers who attempt to disparage Bolshevism on the grounds that the Bolshevik Party had the good luck to have a leader of genius merely confess to their own mental vulgarity.<br />
<br />
The Bolshevik leadership would have found the right line of action without Lenin, but slowly, at the price of friction and internal struggles. The class conflicts would have continued to condemn and reject the meaningless slogans of the Bolshevik Old Guard. Stalin, Kamenev, and other second-raters had the alternative of giving consistent expression to the tendencies of the proletarian vanguard or simply deserting to the opposite side of the barricades. We must not forget that Shlyapnikov, Zalutsky, Molotov, tried to take a more Leftist course from the very beginning of the revolution.<br />
<br />
However, that does not mean that the right path would have been found anyway. The factor of time plays a decisive role in politics - especially, in a revolution. The class struggle will hardly bide its time indefinitely until the political leaders discover the right thing to do. The leader of genius is important because, in shortening the learning period by means of object lessons, he enables the party to influence the development of events at the proper moment. Had Lenin failed to come at the beginning of April, no doubt the Party would have groped its way eventually to the course propounded by his "Theses". But could anyone else have prepared the Party in time for the October denouement? The question cannot be answered categorically. One thing is certain: in this situation - which called for resolute confrontation of the sluggish Party machine with masses and ideas in motion - Stalin could not have acted with the necessary creative initiative and would have been a brake rather than a propeller. His power began only after it became possible to harness the masses with the aid of the machine.<br />
<br />
It is hard to trace Stalin's activities during the next two months. He was suddenly relegated to a third-rate position. Lenin himself was now directly in charge of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda</span> editorial board day in and day out - not merely by remote control, as before the War - and <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda</span> piped the tune for the whole Party. Zinoviev was lord and master in the field of agitation. Stalin still did not address any public meetings. Kamemev, half-hearted about the new policy, represented the Party in the Soviet Central Executive Committee and on the floor of the Soviet. Stalin practically disappeared from that scene and was hardly ever seen even at Smolny. Sverdlov assumed paramount leadership of the most outstanding organizational activity, assigning tasks to Party workers, dealing with the provincials, adjusting conflicts. In addition to his routine duties on the Pravda and his presence at sessions of the Central Committee, Stalin was given occasional assignments of an administrative, technical or diplomatic nature. They are far from numerous. Naturally lazy, Stalin can work under pressure only when his personal interests are directly involved. Otherwise, he prefers to suck his pipe and bide his time. For a while he felt acutely unwell. Everywhere he was superseded either by more important or more gifted men. His vanity was stung to the quick by the memory of March and April days. Violating his own integrity, he slowly reversed the trend of this thoughts. But in the final reckoning it was a half-hearted turn.<br />
<br />
During the stormy "April Days", when soldiers went out into the streets in protest against Miliukov's imperialistic note, the Compromisers were busy as always with exhortations addressed to the government and soothing promises addressed to the masses. On the twenty-first the Central Executive Committee sent one of its Pastoral telegrams, under the signature of Chkheidze, to Kronstadt and other garrisons, conceding that Miliukov's militant note was undeserving of approval, but adding that "negotiations, not yet concluded, have begun between the Executive Committee and the Provisional Government" (by their very nature these negotiations could never come to an end). [It continued], "recognising the harm of all scattered and unorganized public appearances, the Executive Committee asks you to restrain yourself," and so forth.<br />
<br />
From the official protocols we note, not without surprise, that the text of the telegram was composed by a commission that consisted of two Compromisers and one Bolshevik, and that this Bolshevik was Stalin. It is a minor episode (we find no important episodes pertaining to him throughout that period), but decidedly a typical one. The reassuring telegram was a classic little example of dual power. The slightest Bolshevik contact with that policy of futility was denounced by Lenin with particular vehemence. If the public appearance of the Kronstadtites was not opportune, the commission should have told them so in the name of the Party, in its own words, and not taken upon itself responsibility for the "negotiations" between Chkheidze and Prince Lvov. The Compromisers placed Stalin on the commission because the Bolsheviks alone enjoyed any authority in Kronstadt. This was all the more the reason for declining the appointment. But Stalin did not refuse it. Three days after the telegram of reassurance, he spoke at the Party conference in opposition to Kamenev, selecting none other than the controversy over Miliukov's note as particularly cogent proof that "control" was senseless. Logical contradictions never disconcerted that empiricist.<br />
<br />
At the conference o the Bolshevik military organizations in June, after the basic political speeches be Lenin and Zinoviev, Stalin reported on "the nationalist movement in the nationalist regiments." In the active army, influenced by the awakening of the oppressed nationalities, there was a spontaneous regrouping of army units in accordance with nationality. Thus there sprang up Ukrainian, Musselman, Polish regiments, and the like. The Provisional Government openly combated this "disorganisation of the army," while here, too, the Bolsheviks came out in defence of the oppressed nationalities. Stalin's speech was not preserved. But it could hardly have added anything new.<br />
<br />
The first All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which opened on the third of June, dragged on for almost three weeks. The score or two of Bolshevik delegates from the provinces, lost in the mass of Compromisers, constituted a group far from homogeneous and still subject to the moods of March. It was not easy to lead them. It was to this Congress that an interesting reference was made by a Populist already known to us, who had at one time observed Koba in a Baku prison. "I tried in every way to understand the role of Stalin and Sverdlov in the Bolshevik Party," wrote Vereshchak in 1928. "While Kamenev, Zinoviev, Nogin and Krylenko sat at the table of the congress Praesidium, and Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were the main speakers, Sverdlov and Stalin silently directed the Bolshevik Fraction. They were the tactical force. It was then for the first time that I realized the full significance of the man." Vereshchak was not mistaken. Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes in preparing the Fraction for balloting. He did nots always resort to arguments of principle. However he did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders, especially the provincials. But even on that job the pre-eminent place was Sverdlov's, who was permanent chairman of the Bolshevik Fraction at the Congress.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the Army was being treated to "moral" preparation for the offensive, which unnerved the masses at home as well as at the front. The Bolshevik Fraction resolutely protested against this military venture and predicted a catastrophe. The Congress majority supported Kerensky. The Bolsheviks decided to counter with a street demonstration, but while this was being considered differences of opinion arose. Volodarsky, mainstay of the Petrograd Committee, was not sure that the workers would come out into the streets. The representatives of the military organisations insisted that the soldiers would not come out without arms. Stalin thought it "a fact that there is ferment among the soldiers, while there is no such definite mood among the workers," yet he nevertheless supposed that it was necessary to offer resistance to the Goverment. The demonstration was finally set for Sunday, June tenth. The Compromisers were alarmed and in the name of the Congress forbade the demonstration. The Bolsheviks submitted. But frightened by the bad impression of their own interdict against the masses, the Congress itself appointed a general demonstration for the eighteenth of June. The result was unexpected: all the factories and all the regiments came out with Bolshevik placards. An irreparable blow had been struck at the authority of the Congress. The workers and soldiers of the capital sensed their own power. Two weeks later they attempted to cash in on it. Thus developed the "July Days," the most important borderline between the two revolutions.<br />
<br />
On May fourth Stalin wrote in <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda: </span>"The Revolution is growing in bredth and depth . . . The provinces are marching at the head of the movement. Just as Petrograd marched in front during the first days of the Revolution, so now it is beginning to lag behind." Exactly two months later the "July Days" proved that the provinces were lagging considerably behind Petrograd. What Stalin had in mind when he made his appraisal were the organizations, not the masses. "The Soviets of the capital," Lenin observed as early as the April conference, "are politically more dependent upon the bourgeoise central government than the provincial Soveits." While the Central Executive Committee tried with all its might to concentrate thepower in the hands of the government, the Soviets in the provinces, Menshevik and Essar in their composition, in many cases took over the local governments against their will and even attempted to regulate economic life. But the "backwardness" of the Soviet institutions in the capital was due to the fact that the Petrograd proletariat had advanced so far that the radicalism of its demands frightened the petty bourgeois democrats.<br />
<br />
When the July demonstration was under discussion, Stalin argued that the workers were not eager for the fray. That argument was disproved by the July Days themselves, when, defying the proscription of the Compromisers and even the warnings of the Bolshevik Party, the proletariat poured out into the street, shoulder to shoulder with the garrison. Both of Stalin's mistakes are notably characteristic of him: he did notbreathe the air of workers' meetings, was not in contact with the masses and did not trust them. The information at his disposal came through the machine. Yet the masses were incomparably more revolutionary than the Party, which in its turn was more revolutionary than its committeemen. As on other accasions, Stalin expressed the conservative inclinations of the Party machine and not the dynamic force of the masses.<br />
<br />
By the beginning of July Petrograd was already completely on the side of the Bolsheviks. Acquainting the new French Ambassador with the new situation in the capital, the journalist Claude Anet pointed across the Neva to the Vyborg district, where the largest factories were concentrated. "There Lenin and Trotsky reign as masters." The regiments of the garrison were either Bolshevik or wavering in the direction of the Bolsheviks. "Should Lenin and Trotsky desire to seize Petrograd, who will deter them from it?" The characterisation of the situation was correct. But it was not yet possible to seize power because, notwithstanding what Stalin had written in May, the provinces lagged considerably behind the capital.<br />
<br />
On the second of July, at the All-City Conference of the Bolsheviks, where Stalin represented the Central Committee, two excited machine-gunners appeared with the declaration that their regiments had decided to go out into the street immediately, fully armed. The conference went on record against this move. Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee, upheld this decision of the conference. Thirteen years later Pestkovsky, one of Stalin's collaborators and a repentant oppositionist, recalled this conference. "There I first saw Stalin. The room in which the conference was taking place could not hold all those present: part of the public followed the course of the debates from the corridor through the open door. I was among that part of the public, and therefore, I did not hear the report very well . . . Stalin appeared in the name of the Central Committee. Since he spoke quietly, I did not make out much of what he said from the corridor. But there was one thing I noticed: each of Stalin's sentences was sharp and crisp, his statements were distinguished by their clarity of formulation . . ."<br />
<br />
The members of the conference parted and went to their regiments and factories in order to restrain the masses from a public demonstration. "About five o'clock," Stalin reported after the event, "at the session of the Central Executive Committee I declared officially in the name of the Central Executive Committee at the conference that we decided not to come out." Nevertheless, the demonstration developed by about six o'clock. "Did the Party have the right to wash its hands . . . to stand apart? . . . As the party of the proletariat we should have intervened in its public demonstration and given it a peaceful and organised character, without aiming at armed seizure of power." Somewhat later Stalin told about he July Days at a Party congress: "The Party did not want the demonstration, the Party wanted to bide its time until the policy of the offensive at the front should be discredited. Nevertheless, the elemental demonstration, evoked by the chaos in the country, by the orders of Kerensky, by the dispatch of detachments to the front, took place." The Central Committee decided to make the demonstration peaceful in character. "To the question posed by the soldiers whether it was permissible to go out armed, the Central Committee answered no. But the soldiers said that it was impossible to go out unarmed . . . that they would take their arms only for self-defence."<br />
<br />
At this point, however, we come across the enigmatic testimony of Dyemyan Byedny. In a very exultant tone, the poet laureate told in 1929 how in the quarters of the Pravda Stalin was called to the telephone from Kronstadt and how in reply tso the question adked of him, whether to go out with arms in hand or without arms, Stalin replied: "Rifles? . . . You comrades know best! . . As for us scribblers we always take our arms, pencils, everywhere with us . . . As for you and your arms, you know best! . . ." The story was probably stylized. But one senses a grain of truth in it. In general, Stalin was inclined to underestimate the readiness of the workers and soldiers to fight: he was always mistrustful of the masses. But wherever a fight started, whether on a square in Tiflis, in the Baku prison, or on the streets of Petrograd, he always strove to make it as sharp in character as possible. The decision of the Central Committee? That could always be cautiously turned upside down with the parable about the pencils. However, one must not exaggerate the significance of that episode. The question probably came from the Kronstadt Committee of the Party. As for the sailors, they would have gone out with their arms anyway.<br />
<br />
Without developing into an insurrection, the July Days broke through the framework of a mere demonstration. There were provocative shots from windows and rooftops. There were armed clashes without plan or clear purpose but with many killed and wounded. There was the accidental half-seizure of the Tauride Palace. The Bolsheviks proved themselves complete masters in the capital, yet deliberately repudiated the insurrection as an adventure. "We could have seized power on the Third and Fourth of July," Stalin said at the Petrograd Conference. "But against us would have risen the fronts, the provinces, the Soviets. Without support in the provinces, our government would have been without hands and feet." Lacking a direct goal, the movement began to peter out. The workers returned to their factories, the soldiers to their barracks.<br />
<br />
There remained the problem of the Peter and Paul Fortress, still occupied by the Kronstadtites. "The Central Committee delegated me to the Peter and Paul Fortress," Stalin has told, "where I managed to persuade the sailrs present not to accept battle . . . As a representative of the Central Executive Committee I went with the [Menshevik] Bogdanov to [the Commanding Officer] Kozmin. He was ready for battle . . . We persuaded him not to resort to armed force . . . It was apparent to me that the Right Wing wanted blood in order to teach a 'lesson' to the workers, soldiers and sailors. We made it impossible for them to attain this wish." Stalin was able to carry out such a delicate mission successfully only because he was not an odious figure in the eyes of the Compromisers: their hatred was directed against other people. Besides, he was able, like no one else, to assume in these negotiations the tone of a sober and moderate Bolshevik who avoided excesses and was inclined to compromise. He surely did not mention his advice about "the pencils" to the sailors.<br />
<br />
In the teeth of the obvious facts, the Compromisers proclaimed the July demonstration an armed uprising and accused the Bolsheviks of conspiracy. When the movement was already over, reactionary troops arrived from the front. In the press appeared news, based on the "documents" of the Minister of Justice Pereverzev, that Lenin and his collaborators were outright agents of the German General Staff. Then began days of calumny, persecution and rioting. The <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda</span> offices were demolished. The authorities issued an order for the arrest of Lenin, Zinoviev and other responsible for the "insurrection". The bourgeois and Compromisist poress ominously demanded that the guilty surrender themselves to the hands of justice. There were conferences in the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks: should Lenin appear before the authorities, in order to give open battle to the calumny, or should he hide? Would the matter go as far as a court trial? There was no lack of wavering, inevitable in the midst of such a sharp break in the situation.<br />
<br />
The question of who "saved" Lenin in those days and who wanted to "ruin" him occupies no small place in the Soviet literature. Dyemyan Byedny told some time ago how he rushed to Lenin by car and argued with him not to imitate Christ who "gave himself up into the hands of his enemies." Bonch-Bruyevich, the former office manager of the Sovnarkom [People's Council of Commisars], completely contradicted his friend telling in the press how Dymyan Byedny passed the critical hours at his country place in Finland. The implication that the honor of having convinced Lenin he "belonged to other comrades" clearly indicates that Bonch was obliged to annoy his close friend in order to give satisfaction to somebody more influential.<br />
<br />
In her reminiscences Krypskaya states: "On the 7th I visited Ilyich at his quarters in the apartment of the Alliluyevs together with Maria Ilyinchna [Lenin's sister]. This was just at the moment was wavering. He marshalled arguments in favor of the necessity to appear in court. Maria Ilyinichna argued against him hotly. 'Gregory [Zinoviev] and I have decided to appear. Go and tell Kamenev about it,' Ilyich told me. I made haste. 'Let's say good-bye,' Vladimir Ilyich said to me, 'we may never see each other again.' We embraced. I went to Kamenev and gave him Vladimir Ilyich's message. In the evening Stalin and other persuaded Ilyich not to appear in court and thereby saved his life."<br />
<br />
These trying hours were described in greater detail by Ordzhonikidze. "The fierce hounding of our Party leaders begin . . .Some of our comrades took the point of view that Lenin must not hide, that he must appear . . .So reasoned many prominent Bolsheviks. I met Stalin in the Touride Palace. We went together to see Lenin. . . " The first thing that strikes the eye is the fact that during those hours when "a fierce hounding of our Party leaders" was going on, Ordzhonikidze and Stalin calmly meet in the Tauride Palace, headquarters of the enemy, and leave it unpunished. The same old argument was renewed at Alliluyev's apartment: to surrender or to hide? Lenin supposed that there would be no open trial. More categorical than any against surrender was Stalin: "The Junkers [military students, equivalent of West Pointers] won't take you as far as prison, they'll kill you on the way . . ." At that moment Stassova appeared and informed them of a new rumor - that Lenin was, according to the documents of the Police Department, a provocateur. "These words produced an incredibly strong impression on Lenin. A nervous shudder ran over his face, and he declared with the utmost determination that he must go to jail." Ordzhonikidze and Nogin were sent to the Tauride Palace, to attempt to persuade the parties in power to guarantee "that Ilyich would not be lynched . . .by the Junkers." But the frightened Mensheviks were seeking gaurantees for themselves. Stalin in his turn reported at the Petrograd Conference: "I personally posed the question of making a declaration to Lieber and Anissimov [Mensheviks, members of the Soviet Central Executive Committee], and they replied to me that they could not give guarantees of any kind." After this feeler in the camp of the enemy, it was decided that Lenin should leave Petrograd and hide securely underground. "Stalin undertook to organize Lenin's departure."<br />
<br />
To what extent the opponents of Lenin's surrender to the authorities were right was proved subsequently by the story of the officer commanding the troops, General Polovtsev. "The officer going to Terioki [Finland] in the hopes of catching Lenin asked me if I wanted to receive that gentleman whole or in pieces. . .I replied with a smile that people under arrest very often try to escape." For the organisers of judicial forgery it was not a question of "justice" but of seizing and killing Lenin, as was done two years later in Germany with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Stalin was more convinced than the others of the inevitability of a bloody reprisal; such a solution was quite in accord with his own cast of thought. Moreover, he was far from inclined to worry what "public opinion" might say. Others, including Lenin and Zinoviev, wavered. Nogin and Lunarcharsky became opponents of surrender in the course of the day, after having been in favor of it. Stalin held out more tenaciously than others and was proved right.<br />
<br />
Let us see now what the latest Soviet historiography has made of this dramatic episode. "The Mensheviks, the Essars and Trotsky, who subsequently became a fascist bandit," writes an official publication of 1938, "demanded Lenin's voluntary appearance in court. Also in favor of it were those who have since been exposed as enemies of the people, the Fascist hirelings Kamenev and Rykov. Stalin fought tooth and nail," and so on. As a matter of fact, I personally took no part in these conferences, since during these hours I was obliged myself to go into hiding. On the tenth of July, I addressed myself in writing to the Government of the Mensheviks and Essars, declaring my complete solidarity with Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and on the twenty-second of July I was arrested. In a letter to the Petrograd Conference Lenin deemed it necessary to note particularly that "during the difficult days (Trotsky) proved himself equal to the situation." Stalin was not arrested and was not even formally indicted in this case for the very simple reason that he was politically non-existent as far as the authorities or public opinion were concerned. During the fierce persecution of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, myself and others, Stalin was hardly ever mentioned in the press, although he was an editor of <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda </span>and signed his articles. No one paid the slightest attention to these articles and no one was interested in their author.<br />
<br />
Lenin hid at first in Alliluyev's apartment, then moved to Sestroretsk, where he stayed with the worker Emelyanov, whom he trusted implicitly and to whom he refers respectfully without mentioning him by name in one of his articles. "At the time of Vladimir Ilyich's departure for Sestroretsk - that was in the evening of July 11 - Comrade Stalin and I," relates Alliluyev, "escorted Ilyich to the Sesrorestsk station. During his sojourn in the tent at Razliv, and later in Finland, Vladimir Ilyich sent notes to Stalin through me from time to time. The notes were brought to me at my apartment; and, since it was necessary to answer them immediately, Stalin moved in with me in the month of August and lived with me in the very room in which Vladimir Ilyich hid out during the July days." Here he evidently met his future wife, Alliluyev's daughter Nadezhda, who was a mere adolescent at the time. Another of the veteran Bolshevik workers, Rahia, a Russified Finn, told in print how Lenin instructed him on one occasion "to bring Stalin the next evening. I was supposed to find Stalin in the editorial office of <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda</span>. They talked very long." Along with Krupskaya, Stalin was during that period an important connecting link between the Central Committee and Lenin, who undoubtedly trusted him completely as a cautious conspirator. Besides, all the circumstances naturally pushed Stalin into that role: Zinoviev was in hiding, Kamenev and I were in jail, Sverdlov was in charge of all the organisational work. Stalin was freer than others and less in the eye of the police.<br />
<br />
During the reaction after the July movement, Stalin's role grew considerably more important. Pestkovsky wrote in his apologetic reminiscences about Stalin's work during the summer of 1917: "The laboring masses of Petrograd know Stalin very little then. Nor was he seeking popular acclaim. Having no talent as an orator, he avoided addressing mass meetings. But no Party conference, no serious organisational conclave got along without a political speech by Stalin. Because of that, the Party activists knew him well. When the question arose about the Bolshevik candidates from Petrograd to the Constituent Assembly, the candidacy of Stalin was advanced to one of the foremost places upon the initiative of the Party activists." Stalin's name in the Petrograd list was in the sixth place . . . As late as 1930, in order to explain why Stalin did not enjoy popularity, it was still deemed necessary to point out that he lacked "the oratorical talent." Now such an expression would be utterly impossible: Stalin has been proclaimed the idol of the Petrograd workers and a classic orator. But it is true that, although he did not appear before the masses, Stalin, alongside Sverdlov, carried out in July and August extremely responsible work at headquarters, at conclaves and conferences, in contacts with the Petersburg Committee and the like.<br />
<br />
Concerning the leadership of the Party during that period, Lunacharsky wrote in 1923: ". . .Until the July days Sverdlov was, so to speak, at the chief headquarters of the Bolsheviks, in charge of all that happened, together with Lenin, Zinoviev and Stalin. During the July days had advanced to the forefront." That was true. In the midst of the cruel devastation which fell upon the Party that little dark man in eye-glasses behaved as if nothing untoward had happened. He continued to assign people to their tasks, encouraged those who needed encouragement, gave advice, and when necessary gave orders. He was the authentic "General Secretary" of the revolutionary year, although he did not bear that title. But he was a secretary of a party whose unchallenged political leader, Lenin, remained underground. From Finland Lenin sent articles, letters, drafts of resolutions, on all the basic questions of policy. Although the fact that he was at a distance led him not infrequently into tactical errors, it enabled him all the more to define the Party's strategy. The daily leadership fell to Sverdlov and Stalin, as the most influential members of the Central Committee remaining at liberty. The mass movement had in the meantime weakened considerably. Half of the Party had gone underground. The preponderance of the machine had rown correspondingly. Inside of that machine, the role of Stalin grew automatically. That law operates unalterably through his entire political biography and forms, as it were, its mainspring.<br />
<br />
It was the workers and soldiers of Petrograd who suffered the direct defeat in July. In the final reckoning, it was their impetuousness that was smashed to pieces against the relative backwardness of the provinces. The defeatist mood among the masses of the capital was therefore deeper than anywhere else. But it lasted only a few weeks. Open agitation was resumed in the middle of July, when at small meetings in various parts of the city three courageous revolutionists appeared: Slutsky, who was later killed by the White Guards in Crimea; Volodarsky, killed by the Essars in Petrograd; and Yevdokimov, killed by Stalin in 1936. After losing accidental fellow-travelers here an there, by the end of the month the Party again began to grow.<br />
<br />
On the twenty-first and twenty-second of July and exceptionally important conference, which remained unnoticed by the authorities and by the press, was held in Petrograd. After the tragic failure of the adventurous offensive, delegates from the front began to arrive at the capital more and more often with protests against the suppression of liberties in the army and against continuation of the war. They were not admitted to the Central Executive Committee, because the Compromisers had nothing to tell them. The soldiers from the front got acquainted with one another in the corridors and reception rooms, and exchanged opinions on the grandees of the Central Executive Committee in vigorous soldierly words. The Bolsheviks, who had the knack of insinuating themselves everywhere, advised the bewildered and irate delegates to confer with the workers, soldiers and sailors of the capital. The conference that thus originated was attended by representatives of 29 front-line regiments, of 90 Petrograd factories, of Kronstadt sailors and of several surrounding garrisons. The front-line soldiers told about the senseless offensive, about the carnage, and about the collaboration between the Compromisist commisars and the reactionary officers, who were again getting cocky. Although most of the front-line soldiers continued to regard themselves as Essars, the sharply-worded Bolshevik resolution was passed unanimously. From Petrograd the delegates went back to the trenches as matchless agitators for a workers' and peasants' revolution. It would seem that the leading roles in the organization of this remarkable conference were played by Sverdlov and Stalin.<br />
<br />
The Petrograd Conference, which had tried in vain to kep the masses from demonstrating, dragged on, after considerable interruption, until the night of the twentieth of July. The course of its activities sheds considerable light on Stalin's role andhis place in the Party. The organizational leadership on behalf of the Central Committee was borne by Sverdlov, who unpretentiously and without any false airs of modesty, left the sphere of theories and important questions of policy to others. The conference was mainly concerned with appraising the political situation as it developed after the havoc of July. Volodarsky, leading member of the Petrograd Committee, declared in the very beginning: "On the current moment only Zinoviev can be the reporter . . .It would be well to hear Lenin. . ." No one mentioned Stalin. The conference, cutshort by the mass movement, was resumed only on the sixteenth of July.<br />
<br />
By that time Zinoviev and Lenin were in hiding, and the basic political report fell to Stalin, who appeared as a substitute for Zinoviev. "It is clear to me," he said, "that at the given moment the counter-revolution has conquered us. We are isolated and betrayed by the Mensheviks and the Essars, lied about. . . " The reporter's chief point of view was the victory of the bourgeois counter-revolution. However, it was an unstable victory; as long as the war continued, as long as the economic collapse had not been overcome, as long as thepeasants had not received their land, "there are bound to be crises, the masses will repeatedly come out on the streets, and more, there will be bolder battles. The revolution's peaceful period is over . . ." Hence the slogan, "All power to the Soviets," was no longer practical. The Compromist Soviets had helped the militaristic bourgeois counter-revolution to crush the Bolsheviks and to disarm the workers and soldiers, and in that way they themselves had forfeited actual power. Only yesterday they could have removed the Provisional Goverment with a mere decree; within the Soviets the Bolsheviks could have secured power in simple by-elections. But now this was no longer possible. Aided by the Compromisers, the counter-revolution had armed itself. The Soviets themselves had become a mere camouflage for the counter-revolution. It would be silly to demand power for these Soviets! "It is not the institution, but what class policy an institution pursues that matters." Peaceful conquest of power was out of the question now. There was nothing left to do but prepare for an armed uprising, which would become possible as soon as the humblest villagers, and with them the soldiers at the fronts, turned toward the workers. But this bold strategic perspective was followed by an extremely cautious tactical directive for the impending period. "Our task is to gather forces, to strengthen the existing organizations and to restrain the masses from premature demonstrations . . .That is the tactical line of the Central Committee."<br />
<br />
Although quite elementary in form, this report contained a thoroughgoing appraisal of the situation that had developed within the last few days. The debates added comparatively little to what the reporter had said. In 1927 the editorial board of the protocols recorded: "The basic propositions of this report had been agreed upon jointly with Lenin and developed in accordance with Lenin's article, 'Three Crises', which had not yet had time to appear in print." Moreover the delegates knew, most likely through Krupskaya, that Lenin had written special theses for the reporter. "The group of conferees," declares the protocol, "requested that Lenin's theses be made public. Stalin stated that he did not have the theses with him . . ." The demand of the delegates is all-too understandable: the change in orientation was so radical that they wanted to hear the authentic voice of their leader. But Stalin's reply is incomprehensible: had he had simply left the theses at home, they could have been presented at the next session; however, the theses were never delivered. The impression thus created was that they had been hidden from the conference.<br />
<br />
Even more astonishing is the fact that the "July Theses", quite unlike all other documents written by Lenin in the underground, have not been published to this day. Since the only copy was in Stalin's possession, we must presume that he lost them. However, he himself said nothing of having lost them. The editorial board of the protocols expresses the supposition that Lenin's theses were composed by him in the spirit of his articles, "Three Crises" and "About Slogans", written before the conference but published after it at Kronstadt, where there was still freedom of the press. As a matter of fact the juxtaposition of the texts shows that Stalin's report was no more than a simple exposition of these two articles, without a single original word added by him. Evidently Stalin had not read the articles themselves and did not suspect their existence; but he used the theses, which were identical with the articles in the tenor of their thought, and that circumstance sufficiently explains why the reporter "forgot" to bring Lenin's theses to the conference and why that document was never preserved. Stalin's character make that hypothesis not only admissible but unavoidable.<br />
<br />
Inside the conference committee, where a fierce struggle was going on, Volodarsky, who refused to admit that the counter-revolution had won a decisive victory in July, gathered a majority. The resolution that had now emerged from the committee was no longer defended before the conference by Stalin but by Volodarsky. Stalin made no demand for a minority report and took no part in the debate. There was confusion among the delegates. Volodarsky's resolution was finally supported by 28 delegates against 3, with 28 not voting. The group of Vyborg delegates excused their abstention from voting by the fact that "Lenin's theses had not been made public and the resolution was not defended by the reporter." The hint at the improper hiding of the theses was plain enough. Stalin said nothing. He had sustained a double defeat, since he had evoked satisfaction with his concealment of the theses and could not secure a majority for them.<br />
<br />
As for Volodarsky, he continued to defend in substance the Bolshevik schema for the Revolution of 1905: first, the democratic dictatorship; then the inevitable break with the peasantry; and, in the event of the victory of the proletariat in the West, the struggle for the socialist dictatorship. Stalin, supported by Molotov and several others, defended Lenin's new conception: the dictatorship of the proletariat, resting on the poorest peasants, can alone assure th solution to the tasks of the democratic revolution and at the same time open the era of socialist transformations. Stalin was right as against Volodarsky, but he did not know how to prove it. On the other hand, in refusing to recognize that the bourgeois counter-revolution had won a decisive victory, Volodarsky was proved right against both Lenin and Stalin. That debate was to come up again at the Party Congress several days later. The conference ended with passing an appeal written by Stalin, "To All the Toilers," which read in part: ". . .The corrupt hirelings and cowardly calumniators dare openly to accuse the leaders of our Party of 'treason'. . . Never before have the names of our leaders been as dear and as close to the working class as now whn the impudent bourgeois rabble is throwing mad at them!" Besides Lenin, the chief victims of persecution and calumny were Zinoviev, Kamenev and myself. These names are especially dear to Stalin "when the bourgeois rabble" threw mud at them.<br />
<br />
The Petrograd Conference was in the nature of a rehearsal for the Party Congress that convened on the twenty-sixth of July. By that time nearly all the district Soviets of Petrograd were in the hands of the Bolsheviks. At the headquarters of the trade unions, as well as in factory and shop committees, the influence of the Bolsheviks had become dominant. The organizational preparation for the Congress was concentrated in Sverdlov's hands. The political preparation was guided by Lenin from underground. In letters to the Central Committee and in the Bolshevik press, which began to come out again, he shed light on the political situation from various angles. He it was who wrote the drafts of all the basic resolutions for the Congress, carefully weighting all the arguments at clandestine meetings with the various reporters.<br />
<br />
The Congress was called "Unifying", because in it was to take place the fusion into the Party of the Petrograd Inter-district [Mezhrayonnaya] organization to which belonged Joffe, Uritsky, Lunarcharsky, Pokrovsky, Manuilsky, Yurenev, Karakhan and I, as well as other revolutionists who in one way or another entered into the history of the Soviet Revolution. "During the years of the War," states a footnote to Lenin's Works, "the Inter-districters [Mezhrayontsy] were close to the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee." At the time of the Congress the organization numbered about 4,000 workers.<br />
<br />
News of the Congress, which met semi-legally in two different working class districts, got into the newspapers. In government circles there was talk of breaking it up. But when it came to a showdown, Kerensky decided that it would be more sensible not to butt into the Vyborg District. As far as the general public was concerned, the people in charge of the Congress were unknown. Among the Bolsheviks at the Congress who subsequently became famous were Sverdlov, Bukharin, Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Ordzhinikidze, Yurenev, Manuilsky . . . The praesidium consisted of Sverdlov, Olminsky, Lomov, Yurenev and Stalin. Even here, with the most prominent figures of Bolshevism absent, Stalin's name is listed in the last place. The Congress resolved to send greetings to "Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Lunarcharsky, Kamenev, Kollontai and all the other arrested and persecuted comrades." These were elected to the honorary praesidium. The 1938 edition records only Lenin's election.<br />
<br />
Sverdlov reported on the organizational work of the Central Committee. Since the April Conference the Party had grown from 80,000 to 240,000 members, i.e., had tripled in size. The growth, under the blows of July, was a healthy one. Astonishing because of its insignificance was the total circulation of the entire Bolshevik press - a mere three hundred and twenty thousand copies for such a gigantic country! But the revolutionary set-up is electric: Bolshevik ideas made their way into the consciousness of millions.<br />
<br />
Stalin repeated two of his reports - on the political activity of the Central Committee and on the state of the country. Referring to the municipal elections, at which the Bolsheviks won about twenty per cent of the vote in the capital, Stalin reported: "The Central Committee . . . did its utmost to fight not only the Kadets, the basic force of the counter-revolution, butlikewise the Mensheviks and Essars, who willy-nilly followed the Kadets." Much water had gone under the bridge since the days of the March Conference, when Stalin had considered the Mensheviks and the Essars party of the "revolutionary democracy" and had relied on the Kadets to "fortify" the conquests of the Revolution.<br />
<br />
Contrary to custom, questions of war, social patriotism, the collapse of the Second International and the groupings inside of world socialism, were excerpted from the political report and assigned to Bukharin, since Stalin could not make head or tail of international matters. Bukharin argued that the campaign for peace by way of "pressure" on the Provisional Government and the other governments of the Entente had suffered complete collapse and that only the overthrow of the Provisional Government could bring an early approach to a democratic liquidation of the war. Following Bukharin, Stalin made his report on the tasks of the Party.The debates were carried on jointly on both reports, although it soon became apparent that the two reporters were not in agreement.<br />
<br />
"Some comrades have argued," Stalin reported, "that, because capitalism is poorly developed in our country, it is utopian to pose the question of the socialist revolution. They would have been right, had there been no war, no collapse, had not the very foundations of national economy gone to pieces. But today these questions of intervention in the economic sphere are posed in all countries as imperative questions . . ." Moreover, "nowhere did the proletariat have such broad organizations as the Soviets . . . All this precludes the possibility that the laboring masses should refrain from intervening in economic life. Therein is the realistic foundation for posing the question of the socialist revolution in Russia."<br />
<br />
Amazing is the obvious incongruity of his main argument: if the weak development of capitalism makes the program of socialist revolution utopian, then the demolition of the productive forces through war should not bring the era of socialism any closer but on the contrary make it more remote than ever. As a matter of fact, the tendency to transform the democratic revolution into the socialist one is not grounded in the demolition of the productive forces through war, but in the social structure of Russian capitalism. That tendency could have been perceived - as indeed it was - before the war and independently of it. True, the war accelerated the revolutionary process in the masses to an immeasurably more rapid tempo, but it did not in the least change the social content of the revolution. However, it should be added that Stalin cribbed his argument from some isolated and undeveloped remarks of Lenin, whose purpose was to get the old cadres used to the need of rearming.<br />
<br />
During the debates, Bukharin tried partly to defend the old Bolshevik schema: in the first revolution the Russian proletariat marches shoulder to shoulder with the peasantry, in the name of democracy; in the second revolution - shoulder to shoulder with the European proletariat, in the name of socialism. "What is the sense of Bukharin's perspective?" Stalin retorted. "According to him, we are working for a peasant revolution during the first stage. But that cannot . . . fail to coincide with the workers' revolution. It is impossible that the working class, which is the vanguard of the revolution, should at the same time fail to fight for its own demands. Therefore, I consider Bukharin's schema light-minded." This was absolutely right. The peasant revolution could not win otherwise than by placing the proletariat in power. The proletariat could not assume power, without beginning the socialist revolution. Stalin employed against Bukharin the very same reflections which, expounded for the irst time in the beginning of 1905, were branded "utopian" until April, 1917. But in a few years Stalin was to forget these arguments which he voiced at the Sixth Congress; instead, jointly with Bukharin he was to revive the "democratic dictatorship" formula, which would have an important place in the program of the Comintern and play a fatal role in the revolutionary movement of China and other countries.<br />
<br />
The basic task of the Congress was to change the key-note from peaceful transition to power to the Soviets to preparedness for armed insurrection. To do that, it was first of all necessary to understand the shift in the correlation of forces that had taken place. Its general direction was obvious - from the people to the bourgeoisie. It was far more difficult to determine the extent of the change: only another open clash between the classes could measure the new correlation of forces. This test came toward the end of August with General Kornilov's revolt, which made it immediately clear that the bourgeoisie continued to have no support either among the people or the army. The July shift was consequently superficial and episodic in character; nevertheless it was real enough. Henceforth, it was unthinkable to suggest peaceful transition of power to the Soviets. Formulating the new course, Lenin was above all concerned with making the Party face the changed correlation of forces as resolutely as possible. In a certain sense he resorted to deliberate exaggeration: it is more dangerous to underestimate the enemy's forces than to overestimate them. But an overdrawn appraisal would have made the Congress balk, just as it had done at the Petrograd Conference - especially, because of Stalin's eversimplified expression of Lenin's ideas.<br />
<br />
"The situation is clear," Stalin was saying. "No one talks any more about dual authority. The Soviets, which were once a real force, are now merely powerless organs for rallying the masses." Certain of the delegates were absolutely right in protesting that the triumph of the reaction in July was temporary, that the counter-revolution had not won and that dual authority had not yet been abolished to the advantage of the bourgeoisie. Stalin replied in these arguments as he had done at the Conference, with the stock phrase: "Reaction does not occur during revolution." As a matter of fact, the orbit of every revolution is made up of exceptional curves of ascent and descent. Counter-jolts by the enemy, or resulting from the very backwardness of the masses themselves, which render the regime more acceptable to the needs of the counter-revolutionary class, bring forth reactgion, without yet displacing those in power. But the victory of the counter-revolution is quite another matter: that is inconceivable without the passing of power into the hands of another class. No such decisive transition took place in July.<br />
<br />
To this very day, Soviet historians and commentators continue to copy Stalin's formula from book to book, without asking themselves this question: if the power had passed into the hands of the bourgeoisie in July, why did the bourgeoisie have to resort to an uprising in August? Until the July events, under the regime of dual authority the Provisional Government was a mere phantom while real power reposed in the Soviet. After the July events, part of the real power reposed in the Soviet. After the July events, part of the real power passed from the Soviet to the bourgeoisie, but only a part: dual authority did not disappear. That was the very thing that subsequently determined the character of the October Revolution.<br />
<br />
"Should the counter-revolutionaries manage to last a month or two," Stalin said further, "it would be only because the principle of coalition has not been abolished. As the forces of the revolution develop, explosions will occur, and the moment will come when the workers will arouse and rally around themselves the strata of the poor peasantry, raise the banner of the workers' revolution and start the era of socialist revolution in the West." Let us note: the mission of the Russian proletariat is to start "the era of socialist revolution in the West." That was the Party formula for the ensuing years. In all essentials Stalin's report gives the correct appraisal of the situation and correct prognosis - Lenin's appraisal and prognosis. But as usual his report lacks elaboration of thought. The orator asserts and proclaims; he never proves or argues. His appraisals are made by rule of thumb or taken ready-made; they do not pass through the laboratory of analytic thinking and there is no indication of that organic connection between them which in itself generates the necessary arguments, analogies and illustrations. Stalin, as a polemicist, is given to reiterating propositions already expressed, at times in the form of aphorisms, which assume as already proved the very things that need proving. Often the arguments are spiced with churlishness, especially in the peroration, when there is no need to fear an opponent's rebuttals.<br />
<br />
In the 1938 publication concerning the Sixth Congress, we read: "Lenin, Stalin, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky and other were elected members of the Central Committee." Only three dead men are named side by side with Stalin. Yet the protocols of the Congress inform us that 21 members and 10 alternates were elected to the Central Committee. In view of the Party's semi-legality the names of persons elected by secret ballot were not announced at the Congress, with the exception of the four who had received the largest number of votes. Lenin - 133 out of a possible 134, Zinoviev - 132, Kamenev - 131, Trotsky - 131. Besides them the following were elected: Nogin, Kollontai, Stalin, Sverdlov, Rykov, Bubov, Artem, Uritsky, Milutin, Berzin, Dzerzhinsky, Krestinsky, Muranov, Smilga, Sokolnikov, Sha'umyan [Bukharin's name is missing from this list. ed]. The names are arranged in the order of the number of votes received. The names of the eight alternates have been definitely established: Lomov, Joffe, Stassova, Yakovleva, Dzhaparidze, Kisselev, Preobrazhensky, Skrypnik.<br />
<br />
The Congress ended on the third of August. The next day Kamenev was liberated from prison. From then on he not only spoke regularly in Soviet institutions but exerted and unmistakable influence on the Party's general policy and on Stalin personally. Although in varying degrees both of them had adapted themselves to the new line, it was not so easy for them to rid themselves of their own mental habits. Wherever possible, Kamenev rounded out the sharp angles of Lenin's policy. Stalin did not object to that; he merely kept out of harm's way. An open conflict flared up on the issue of the Socialist converence in Stockholm,the initiative for which had come from the German Social-Democrats. The Russian patriots and compromisers, inclined to grasp at any straw, saw in the conference an imporant means of "fighting for peace." But Lenin, who had been accused of connections with the German General Staff, came out resolutely against participation in this enterprise, which was obviously sponsored by the German Goverment. At the sesion of the Central Executive Committee of August sixth Kamenev openly came out for participation in the conference. It did not even occur to Stalin to come to the defense of the Party position in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Proletarian</span> (which was then Pravda's name). Instead, Stalin held back from publication Lenin's sharp article against Kamenev, which appeared only after a delay of ten days and only because of its author's persistent demands, reinforced by his appeal to other members of the Central Committee. Nevertheless, even then, Stalin did not come out openly in support of Kamenev.<br />
<br />
Immediately after Kamenev's liberation a rumor was launched in the press by the democratic Ministry of Justice to the effect that he had had some connections with the Tsarist secret police. Kamenev demanded an investigation. TheCentral Committee commissioned Stalin "to discuss with Gotz [one of the Essar leaders] a commission in the case of Kamenev." He had been given similar assignments in the past: "to discuss" with the Menshevik Bogdanov the case of the Kronstadtites, "to discuss" with the Menshevik Anissimov guarantees for Lenin. Remaining behind the scenes, Stalin was more suitable than others for all sorts of delicate assignments. Besides, the Central Committee was always sure that in discussions with opponents Stalin would not let anyone pull the wool over his eyes.<br />
<br />
"The reptilian hissing of the counter-revolution," wrote Stalin on August thirteenth about the calumny against Kamenev, "is again becoming louder. The disgusting serpent of reaction thrusts its poisonous fangs from round the corner. It will sting and slink back into its dark lair. . . ." and so forth in the typical style of his Tiflis "chameleons." But the article is interesting not only stylistically. "The infamous baiting, the bacchanal of lies and calumnies, the shameless deception, the low-grade forgery and falsification," the author continued, "assume proportions hitherto unknown in history . . . At first they tried to smear the tested revolutionary fighters as German spies, and that having failed, they want to make them out Tsarist spies. Thus they are trying to brand those who have devoted their entire conscious life to the cause of the revolutionary struggle against the Tsarist regime as . . . Tsarists varlets . . . The political meaning of this is self-evident: the masters of the counter-revolution are intent at all cost to render Kamenev harmless and to extirpate him as one of the recognized leaders of the revolutionary proletariat." It is a pity that this article did not figure in Prosecutor Vyshinsky's material during Kamenev's trial in 1936.<br />
<br />
On August 30, Stalin published without a word of reservation an unsigned article by Zinoviev, "What Not to Do," which was obviously directed against preparations for the insurrection. "It is necessary to face the truth: in Petrograd there are now many circumstances favorable to the emergence of an insurrection typified by the Paris Commune of 1871." Without mentioning Zinoviev, Lenin wrote on September third: "The reference to the Commune is very superficial and even foolish . . . The Commune could not at once offer to the people all that the Bolsheviks can offer them when they become the government: namely, land to the peasants, immediate peace proposals." The blow at Zinoviev rebounded at the editor of the newspaper. But Stalin kept silent. Anonymously, he was ready to support any Right Wing polemic against Lenin. But he was careful not to involve himself in it. At the first sign of danger he stepped aside.<br />
<br />
There is practically nothing to say about Stalin's newspaper work during that period. He was the editor of the central organ, not because he was a writer by nature, but because he was not an orator and simply did not fit into any public activity. He did not write a single notable article; did not pose a single new question for discussion; did not introduce a single slogan into general circulation. His comments on events were impersonal, and strictly within the framework of current Party views. He was a Party functionary assigned to a newspaper, not a revolutionary publicist.<br />
<br />
The revival of the mass movement and the return to activity of the Central Committee members who had been temporarily severed from it, naturally threw Stalin out of the position of prominence he held during the July congress. From then on, his activities were carried on in obscurity, unknown to the masses, unoticed by the enemy. In 1924 the Commission on Party History published a copious chronicle of the revolution in several volumes. The 422 pages of the fourth volume, dealing with August and September, record all the happenings, occurences, brawls, resolutions, speeches, articles in any way deserving of notice. Sverdlov, then practically unknown, was mentioned three times in that volume; Kemenev, 46 times; I, who spent August and the beginning of September in prison, 31 times; Lenin, who was in the underground, 16 times; Zinoviev, who shared Lenin's fate, 6 times; Stalin was not mentioned even once. In other words, throughout those months the press did not take cognizance of anything he did or of a single speech he spoke and not one of the more or less prominent participats in the events of those days mentioned his nam even once.<br />
<br />
Fortunately, it is possible to trace Stalin's role in the life of the Party, or rather of its headquarters staff, more or less closely through the protocols of the Central Committee for seven months (August, 1917 to February, 1918), which have been preserved but which, true enough, are incomplete. During the absence of the political leaders, Milutin, Smilga, Glebov, figures of little influence but better fit for public appearances than Stalin, were delegated to various conferences and congresses. Stalin's name seldom occurs in Party decisions. Uritsky, Sokolnikov and Stalin were delegated to organize a committee for elections to the Constituent Assembly. The same three were delegated to negotiate with a printshop about re-establishing the central organ. He was on still another committee for drafting a resolution, and the like. After the July congress Stalin's motion to organize the work of the Central Committee on the principle of "strict allocation of functions" was passed. However, that motion was easier to write than to execute: the course of events was to continue for some time to confound functions and upset decisions. On the sixth of September - after my liberation from prison - Stalin and Ryazanov were replaced on the editorial board of the theoretical journal by Kamenev and me. But that decision, too, remained only in the protocol. As a matter of fact, both journals published only one issue each, and the actual editorial board was quite different from the one designated.<br />
<br />
On the fifth of October the Central Committee appointed a committee to prepare the Draft Party Program for the forthcoming convention. That committee was made up of Lenin, Bukharin, myself, Kamenev, Sokolnikov and Kollontai. Stalin was not included in it, not because there was any opposition to his candidature, but simply because his name never occurred to anyone when it was a matter of drafting a theoretical Party document of prime importance. But the program committee never met - not even once. Quite different tasks were on the order of the day. The Party won the insurrection and came to power without having a finished program. Even in purely Party matters, events did not always dispose of people in correspondence with the foresight and plans of the Party hierarchy. The Central Committee designated editorial boards, committees, groups of three, of five, of seven, which, before they could meet, were upset by new events, and everybody forgot yesterday's decision. Besides, for reasons of conspiracy, the protocols were securely hidden away, and no one ever referred to them.<br />
<br />
Rather strange was Stalin's comparatively frequent absence. He was absent six times from 24 sessions of the Central Committee for August, September and the first week of October. The list of participants for the other six sessions is not available. This lack of punctuality is all the more inexcusable in Stalin's case, because he took no part in the work of the Soviet and its Central Executive Committee and never spoke at public meetings. He himself evidently did not attach the importance to his own participation in the sessions of the Central Committee which is ascribed to him nowadays. In a number of cases his absence was undoubtedly explained by hurt feelings and irritation: whenever he cannot carry his point he is inclined to sulk in hiding and dream of revenge. Noteworthy is the order in which the presence of Central Committee members at its sessions was recorded in the protocol: September 13th; Trotsky, Kamenev, Stalin, Sverdlov, and others; September 15th; Trotsky, Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin, Stalin, Sverdlov, and others; September 20th; Trotsky, Uritisky, Bubnov, Bukharin, and others (Stalin and Kamenev absent); September 21st; Trotsky, Kamenev, Stalin, Sokolnikov, and others; September 23rd; Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and so forth (Stalin absent). The order of the names was not of course regulated and was sometimes violated. Yet it was not accidental, especially when we condier that in the preceding period, when Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were absent, Stalin's name was occasionally listed in first place. These are of course trifling matters. But there is nothing bigger to be found with reference to Stalin; besides, these trifles mirror impartially the Party's life from day to day and Stalin's place in it.<br />
<br />
The greater the sweep of the movement, the smaller is Stalin's place in it and the harder it is for him to stand out among the ordinary members of the Central Committee. In October, the decisive month of the decisive year, Stalin was less noticeable than ever. The truncated Central Committee, his only substantial base, was itself devoid of innate self-confidence during those months. Its decisions were too often nullified through outside initiative. On the whole, the Party machine never felt itself firmly ground in the revolutionary turmoil. The broader and deeper the influence of Bolshevism's slogans, the harder it was for the committeemen to grasp the movement. The more that Soviets fell under the influence of the Party, the less of a place did the machine find for itself. Such is one of the paradoxes of revolution.<br />
<br />
Transferring to 1917 conditions that crystallized considerably later, when the waters of the floodtide had receded inside the banks, many historians, even quite conscientious ones, tell th story as if the Central Committee had directly guided the policy of the Petrograd Soviet, which became Bolshevik about the beginning of September. As a matter of fact, that was not the case. The protocols undoubtedly show that, with the exception of several plenary sessions [of the Petrograd Soviet] in which Lenin, Zinoviev and I participated, the Central Committee did not play a political role. It did not assume the initiative in a single important issue. Many of the Central Committee decisions for that period remained hanging in the air, having clashed with the decisions of the Soviet. The most important resolutions of the Soviet were transformed into action before the Central Committee ha the time to consider them. Only after the conquest of power, the end of the civil war, and the establishment of a stable regime, would the Central Committee little by little begin to concentrate the leadership of Soviet activity in its hands. Then would come Stalin's turn.<br />
<br />
On the eighth of August the Central Committee launched a vigorous campaign against the Government Conference convoked by Kerensky in Moscow, which was crudely manipulated in the interests of the bourgeoisie. The conference opned on the twelfth of August under the stress of the general strike of protest by the Moscow workers. Not admitted to the conference, the Bolsheviks found a more effective expression for their power. The bourgeoisie was frightened and furious. Having surrendered Riga to the Germans on the twenty-first, Commander-in-Chief Kornilov started his march on Petrograd on the twenty-fifth, intent on a personal dictatorship. Kerensky, who had been deceived in his calculations about Kornilov, declared that Commander-in-Chief "as traitor to the fatherland."<br />
<br />
Even at that crucial moment, on the twenty-seventh of August, Stalin did not show up at the Soviet Central Executive Committee. Sokolnikov appeared there in the name of the Bolsheviks. He proclaimed the readiness o the Bolsheviks to come to terms about military measures with the organs of the Soviet majority. The Mensheviks and the Essars accepted the offer with thanks and with gritting of teeth, or the soldiers and workers were now following the Bolsheviks.<br />
<br />
The rapid and bloodless liquidation of the Kornilov mutiny completely restored the power the Soviets had partly lost in July. The Bolsheviks revived the slogan, "All Power to the Soviets!" In the press Lenin proposed a compromise to the Compromisers: let the Soviets take power and guarantee complete freedom of propaganda, and the Bolsheviks would take their stand entirely on the ground of Soviet legality. The Compromisers bellicosely rejected a compromise with the Bolsheviks. They continued to seek their allies on the Right.<br />
<br />
The high-handed refusal of the Compromisers only strengthened the Bolsheviks. As in 1905, the preponderance which the first wave of revolution brought to the Mensheviks soon melting in the atmosphere of the sharpening class struggle. But unlike its tendency in the First Revolution, the growth of Bolshevism now corresponded to the rise rather than the decline of the mass movement. The same essential process assumed a different form in the villages: a Left Wing split off from the Essar Party, which was dominant among the peasantry, and tried to march in step with the Bolsheviks. The garrisons of the large cities were almost entirely with the workingmen. "Indeed, the Bolsheviks worked hard and tirelessly, "testified Sukhanov, a Let Wing Menshevik. "They were among the masses at the lathe, daily, constantly . . .The masses lived and breathed with the Bolsheviks. It was in the hands of the Party of Lenin and Trotsky." It was in the hands of the Party, but not in the hands of the Party's machine.<br />
<br />
On the thirty-first of August the Petrograd Soviet for the first time passed a political resolution of the Bolsheviks. Trying hard not to yield, the Compromisers decided on a new test of strength. None days later the question was put point-blank in the Soviet. The old praesidium and the coalition policy received 414 votes with 519 opposed and 67 not voting. The Mensheviks and Essars reaped the harvest of their policy of compromise with the bourgeoisie. The Soviets greeted the new coalition government they organized with a resolution which I, as its new president, introduced. "The new government . . .will enter the history of the revolution as the government of civil war . . .The All-Russian Congress of Soviets will organize a genuinely revolutionary government." That was an outright declaration of war against the Compromisers who had rejected our "compromise".<br />
<br />
The so-called Democratic Conference, convoked by the Soviet Central Executive Committee, ostensibly to offset the Government Conference but actually to sanction the same old thoroughly rotten coalition, opened in Petrograd on the fourteenth of September. The Compromisers were getting frantic. A few days earlier Krupskaya had gone on a secret trip to Lenin in Finland. In a railroad coach full of soldiers the talk was not about coalition but about insurrection. "When I told Ilyich about this talk of the soldiers, his face became thoughtful ; later, no matter what was under discussion, that thoughtfulness did not leave his face. It was clear that he was saying one thing and thinking about something else - the insurrection and how best to prepare for it."<br />
<br />
On the day the Democratic Conference opened - (the silliest of all the pseudo-parliaments of democracy) - Lenin wrote to the Party Central Committee his famous letter, "The Bolsheviks Must Take Power" and "Marxism and the Insurrection." This time he demanded immediate action: the rousing of regiments and factories, the arrest of the government and the Democratic Conference, the seizure of power. Obviously the plan could not be carried out that very day; but it did direct the thnking and activity of the Central Committee into new channels. Kamenev insisted on a categorical rejection of Lenin's proposal - as disastrous! Fearing that these letters might circulate through the Party as well as the Central Committee, Kamenev gathered six votes in favor of destroying all copies except the one intended for the archives. Stalin proposed "to send the letters to the most important organizations and to suggest their discussion." The latest [official] commentary declares that the purpose of Stalin's proposal was "to organize the influence of local Party Committees on the Central Committe and to urge it to carry out Lenin's directives."<br />
<br />
Had such been the case, Stalin would have come right out in defence of Lenin's proposals and would have countered Kamenev's resolution with - his own! But that was far from his thought. Most of the committeemen in the provinces were more Rightist than the Central Committee. To send them Lenin's letters without the Central Committee's endorsement was tantamount to expressing disapproval of them. Stalin's proposal was made to gain time and in the event of a conflict to secure the possibility of pleading that the local Committees were balking. The Central Committee was paralyzed by vacillation. It was decided to defer the question of Lenin's letters to the next session. Lenin was awaiting the answer in frenzied impatience. But Stalin did not even put in an appearance at the next session, which met no sooner than five days later, and the question of the letters was not even included in the order of the day. The hotter the atmosphere, the colder are Stalin's maneuverings.<br />
<br />
The Democratic Conference resolved to organize in agreement with the bourgeoisie some semblance of a representative institution, to which Kerensky promised to grant consultative rights. What should be the Bolshevik attitude towards this Council of the Republic or Pre-Parliament, became at once a crucial issue of tactics among the Bolsheviks: should they participate in it, or should they ignore it on their way to the insurrection? As reporter of the Central Committee at the forthcoming Party Fraction of the Democratic Conference, I proposed the idea of a boycott. The Central Committee, which divided almost in half on this debatable question (nine for the boycott and eight against), referred to question to the Fraction. To expound the contradictory points of view "two reports were proposed: Trotsky's and Rykov's". "As a matter of fact," Stalin insisted in 1925, "there were four reporters: two for the boycott of the Pre-Parliament (Trotsky and Stalin) and two for the participation (Kamenev and Nogin)." Thisis almost right: when the Fraction decided to terminate the debates, it decided to allow one more representative to speak for each side: Stalin on behalf of the boycottists and Kamenev (no Nogin) for those favoring participation. Rykov and Kamenev received 77 votes; Stalin and I - 50. The defeat of the tactic of the boycott was delivered by teh provincials, whose separation from the Mensheviks was quite recent in many parts of the country.<br />
<br />
Superficially it might seem that the differences were of minor importance. As a matter of fact, the underlying issue was whether the Party was to prepare to play the part of the Opposition in the bourgeois republic or whether it was to set itself the task of taking power by storm. Stalin later recalled his role as a reporter because of the importance this episode had assumed in the official historiography. The obliging editor added of his own accord that I had come out for a "middle of the road position." In subsequent editing my name has been entirely deleted. The new history proclaims: "Stalin came out resolutely against participation in the Pre-Parliament." But in addition to the testimony of the protocols, there is also Lenin's testimony. "We must boycott the Pre-Parliament," he wrote on the twenty-third of September. "We must go . . . to the masses. We must give them a clear and correct slogan: kick out the Bonapartist Kerensky gang and his fake Pre-Parliament." Then a footnote: "Trotsky was for the boycott. Bravo, Comrade Trotsky!" But, of course, the Kremlin has officially prescribed the elimination of all such sins from the new edition of Lenin's Works.<br />
<br />
On the seventh of October the Bolshevik Fraction demonstratively walked out of the Pre-Parliament. "We appeal to the people. All Power to the Soviets!" This was tantamount to calling for insurrection. That very day at the Central Committee session it was decreed to organize an Information Bureau on Fighting the Counter-Revolution. The deliberately foggy name covered a concrete task: reconnaissance and preparation for the insurrection. Sverdlov, Bubnov and I were delegated to organize that Bureau. In view of the laconic nature of the protocol and the absence of other documents, the author is compelled to resort to his own memory at this point. Stalin declined to participate in the Bureau, suggesting Bubnov, a man of little authority, in place of himself. His attitude was one of reserve, if not of skepticism, toward the idea itself. He was in favor of an insurrection. But he did not believe that the workers and soldiers were ready for action. He lived isolated not only from the masses, but even from their Soviet representation, and was content with the refracted impressions of the Party machine.<br />
<br />
So far as the masses were concerned, the July experiences had not passed without a trace. Actually blind pressure had disappeared; cautiousness had replaced it. On the other hand, confidence in the Bolsheviks was already colored with misgivings: will they be able to do what they promised? The Bolshevik agitators were complaining at times that they were being somewhat cold-shouldered by the masses. As a matter of fact, the masses were getting tired of waiting, of indecisiveness, of mere words. But in the machine this tiredness was frequently described as "absence of fighting mood." Hence the tarnish of skepticism on many committeemen. Besides, even the bravest of men is bound to fel a little chill in the pit of the stomach just before an insurrection. This is not always acknowledged, but it is so. Stalin himself was in an equivocal frame of mind. He never forgot April, when his wisdom of a "practico" was so cruelly disgraced. On the other hand, Stalin trusted the machine far more than the masses. On all the most important occasions he insured himself by voting with Lenin. But he showed no initiative in support of the resolutions passed, refrained from directly tackling any decisive action, protected the bridges of retreat, influenced others as a dempener, and in the end missed the October Revolution because he was off on a tangent.<br />
<br />
True, nothing came of the Bureau on Fighting the Counter-Revolution, but it was not the fault of the masses. On the ninth, Smolny got into a new sharp conflict with the Government, which had decreed the transfer of the revolutionary troops from the capital to the front. The garrison rallied more closely than ever around its protector, the Soviet. At once the preparation of the insurrection acquired a concrete basis. Yesterday's initiator of the Bureau transferred his attention to the creation of a miltary staff in the Soviet itself. The first step was taken that very day, on the ninth of October. "For counter-action against the attempts of the General Staff to lead the revolutionary troops out of Petrograd", the Executive Committee decided to launch the Military Revolutionary Committee. Thus, by the logic of things, without any discussion in the Central Committee, almost unexpectedly, the insurrection was started in the Soviet arena and began to recruit its Soviet general staff, which was far more effective that the Bureau of the Seventh of October.<br />
<br />
The next session of the Central Committee, with the participation of Lenin in a wig, took place on the tenth of October. It achieved historical significance. The crux of the discussion was Lenin's motion, which proposed armed insurrection as the pressing practical task. The difficulty, even for the most convinced support of insurrection, was the question of time. As far back as the days of the Democratic Committee the compromisist Central Executive Committee, under the pressure of the Bolsheviks, had set the twentieth of October as the date for the Congress of Soviets. Now there was complete assurance of a Bolshevik majority at that congress. At least in Petrograd, the insurrection had to take place before the twentieth; otherwise, the Congress would not be in the position to seize the reins of government and would risk being dispersed. It was decided at the Central Committee session, without recording it on paper, to begin the insurrection in Petrograd about the fifteenth. There was, therefore, something like five days left for preparations. Everybody felt that this was not enough. But the Party was the prisoner of the date it had itself imposed upon the compromisers on a different occasion. My announcement that the Executive Committee had decided to organize a military staff of its own did not produce a great impression, because it was more a matter of plan than of fact. Everybody's attention was concentrated on polemics with Zinoviev and Kamenev, who resolutely argued against the insurrection. It seems that Stalin either did not speak at all at this session, or limited himself to a brief remark; at any rate, in the protocols there is no trace of anything he might have said. The motion was passed by ten votes against two. But misgivings about the date remained with all who took part.<br />
<br />
Toward the very end of that session, which lasted until way past midnight, on the rather fortuitous initiative of Dzershinsky, it was decreed "to organise for the political guidance of the insurrection a bureau consisting of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamanev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov." This important decision however, led nowhere: Lenin and Zinoviev continued in hiding, Zinoviev and Kamenev became irreconcilably opposed to the decision of October tenth. "The Bureau for the Political Guidance of the Insurrection" did not meet even once. Only its name has been preserved in a pen and ink postscript to the desultory protocol written in pencil. Under the abbreviated name of "the seven" this phantom bureau entered into the official science of history.<br />
<br />
The job of organizing the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet went on apace. Of course, the lumbering machinery of Soviet democracy precluded any decided spurt. Yet very little time was left before the Congress. Not without reason did Lenin fear delay. At his request another session of the Central Committee was convoked on the sixteenth of October, with the most important Petrograd organisers present. Zinoviev and Kamenev persisted in their opposition. Formally their position had becom stronger than ever: six days had passed and the insurrection had not begun. Zinoviev demanded that the decision be postponed until the Congress of the Soviets met, in order "to confer" with the delegates from the provinces: deep in his heart he was hoping for their support. Passions ran high during the debate. For the first time Stalin took part in this discussion. "Expediency must decide the day of the insurrection," he said, "That alone is the sense of the resolution . . . What Kamenev and Zinoviev propose leads objectively to opportunity for the counter-revolution to organize itself; if we continue to retreat without end, we shall lose the revolution. Why not ourselves name the day and the circumstances, so as not to give the counter-revolution an opportunity to organize itself?"<br />
<br />
He was defending the Party's abstract right to choose its moment for the blow - when the problem was to set a definite date. Had the Bolshevik Congress of Soviets proved incapable of seizing the reins of government there and then, it would have merely compromised the slogan, "All Power to the Soviets!" by turning it into a hollow phrase. Zinoviev insisted: "We must tell ourselves frankly that we will not attempt an insurrection during the next five days." Kamanev was driving at the same point. Stalin did not meet this issue directly; instead, he would up with the startling words: "The Petrograd Soviet has already taken the road to insurrection by refusing to sanction the removal of troops." He was simply reiterating the formula, which had nothing to do with his own abstract speech, that had been recently advocated by the leaders of the Military Revolutionary Committee. But what was the meaning of "being already on the road to insurrection"? Was it a matter of <span style="font-style: italic;">days </span>or of <span style="font-style: italic;">weeks</span>? Stalin cautiously refrained from making that specific. He was not clear in his own mind about the situation.<br />
<br />
The resolution of October tenth was endorsed by a majority of twenty otes to two, with three abstaining. However, nobody had answered the crucial question of whether the decision that the insurrection in Petrograd had to take place prior to the twentieth of October was still valid. It was hard to find that answer. Politically the resolve to have the insurrection before the Congress was absolutely right. But too little time was let for carrying it out. The session of October sixteenth never did manage to reconcile that contradiction. But at this point the compromisers came to the rescue: the very next day, for reasons of their own, they decided to postpone the opening of the Congress, which they hadn't wanted anyway, to the twenty-fifth of October. The Bolsheviks received this unexpected postponement with an open protest but with secret gratitude. Five additional days completely solved the difficulties of the Military Revolutionary Committee.<br />
<br />
The Central Committee protocol and the issues of <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda</span> for the last few weeks prior to the insurrection trace Stalin's political career against the background of the insurrection fully enough. Just as before the war he had formally sided with Lenin while at the same time seeking the support of the conciliators against the emigre "crawling on the wall", so now too he aligned himself with the official majority of the Central Committee while simultaneously supporting the Right opposition. As always, he acted cautiously; however, the sweep of events and the acuteness of the conflicts compelled him from time to time to venture farther than he would have liked.<br />
<br />
On the eleventh of October, Zinoviev and Kamenev published in Maxim Gorky's newspaper a letter against the insurrection. At once the situation among the leaders of the Party became exceedingly acute. Lenin stormed and fumed in the underground. In order to be free to spread his views about the insurrection, Kamenev resigned from the Central Committee. The question was discussed at the session of October twentieth. Sverdlov made public Lenin's letter which castigated Zinoviev and Kamenev as strikebreakers and demanded their expulsion from the Party. The crisis was unexpectedly complicated by the fact that on that very morning <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda </span>published a declaration by the editorial board in defense of Zinoviev and Kamenev: "The sharpness of the tone of Comrade Lenin's article does not alter the fact that in the main we continue to share his opinion." The central organ deemed it proper to find fault with "the sharpness" of Lenin's protest rather than with the public stand of two Central Committee members against the Party decision on the insurrection and moreover expressed its solidarity with Zinoviev and Kamenev "on fundamentals". As if at that moment there was anything more fundamental than the question of the uprising! The Central Committee members rubbed their eyes with amazement.<br />
<br />
Stalin's only associate on the editorial board was Sokolnikov, the future Soviet diplomat and subsequently a victim of the "purge". However, Sokolnikov declared that he had nothing to do with writing the editorial rebuke of Lenin and considered it erroneous. Thus Stalin alone - in opposition to the Central Committee and his own editorial calleague - supported Kamenev and Zinoviev as late as four days before the insurrection. The Central Committee restrained its indignation only because it was apprehensive about extending the crisis.<br />
<br />
Continuing to maneuver between the protagonists and opponents of insurrection, Stalin went on record against accepting Kamenev's resignation, arguing that "our entire situation is inconsistent." By five votes, against Stalin's and two others, Kamenev's resignation was accepted. By six votes, again against Stalin's, a resolution was passed, forbidding Kamenev and Zinoviev to wage their fight against the Central Committee. The protocol states: "Stalin declared that he was leaving the editorial board." In his case it meant abandoning the only post he was capable of filling in the circumstances of the revolution. But the Central Committee refused to accept Stalin's resignation, thus precluding the development of another rift.<br />
<br />
Stalin's behavior might seem inexplicable in the light of the legend that has been created around him; but as a matter of fact, it is quite in line with his inner make-up. Distrust of the masses and suspecious cautiousness force him, in moments of historical decisions to retreat into the shadows, bide his time and, if possible, insure himself coming and going. His defense of Zinoviev and Kamenev was certainly not motivated by sentimental considerations. In April Stalin had changed his official position but nhot his mental make-up. Although he voted with Lenin, he was far closer in his feelings to Kamenev. Moreover, dissatisfaction with his own role naturally inclined him to align himself with others who were dissatisfied, even if politically he was not in complete accord with them.<br />
<br />
All of the last week preceding the insurrection Stalin maneuvered between Lenin, Sverdlov and me on the one hand, and Kamenev and Zinoviev, on the other. At the Central Committee session of October twenty-first he restored the recently upset balance by proposing that Lenin be appointed to prepare the theses for the forthcoming Congress of Soviets and that I be appointed to prepare the political report. Both of these motions passed unanimously. Had there been then any disagreements at all between me and the Central Committee - a canard invented several years later - would the Central Committee upon Stalin's initiative have entrusted me with the most important report at the most crucial moment? Having thus insured himself on the Left, Stalin again retreated into the shadows and bided his time.<br />
<br />
The biographer, no matter how willing, can have nothing to say about Stalin's participation in the October Revolution. Nowhere does one find mention of his noem - either in documents nor the numerous memoirs. In order somehow to fill this yawning gap, the official historiographer implies his participation in the insurrection by connecting the insurrection with some mysterious party "center" that had presumably prepared it. However, no one tells us anything about the activity of that "center", the place and time of its sessions, the means it employed in directing the insurrection. And no wonder: there never was any such "center". But the story of this legend is noteworthy.<br />
<br />
At the October sixteenth conference of the Central Committee with some of the leading Petrograd Party organizers it was decided to organize "a military revolutionary center" of five Central Committee members. "This center," states the resolution hastily written by Lenin in a corner of the hall, "will become a part of the Revolutionary Soviet Committee." Thus, in the direct sense of the decision, "the center" was not designed for independent leadership of the insurrection but to complement the Soviet staff. However, like many of the improvisations of those feverish days this idea was fated never to be realized. During the very hours when, in my absence, the Central Committee was organizing a new "center" on a piece of paper, the Petrograd Soviet, under my chairmanship definitely launched the Military Revolutionary Committee, which from the moment of its origin was in complete charge of all the preparations for the insurrection. Sverdlov, whose name appeared first (and not Stalin's name, as is falsely recorded in recent Soviet publications) on the list of "center" members, worked before and after the resolution of October sixteenth in close contact with the Chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Three other members of the "center", Uritsky, Dzerzhinsky and Bubnov, were drawn into work for the Military Revolutionary Committee, each of them individually, as late as October twenty-fourth, as if the resolution of October sixteenth had never been passed. As for Stalin, in line with his entire policy of behavior at that period, he stubbornly kept from joining either the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet or the Military Revolutionary Committee, and did not appear at any of its sessions. All of these circumstances are easily established on the basis of officially published protocols.<br />
<br />
At the Central Committee session of October twentieth the "center" created four days before was supposed to make a report about its work or at least mention that it had begun working: only five days remained before the Congress of Soviets, and the insurrection was supposed to precede the opening of the Congress. Stalin was too busy for that. Defending Zinoviev and Kamenev, he submitted his resignation from the editorial board of <span style="font-style: italic;">Pravda</span> at that very session. But not one of the other members of the "center" present at the session - Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Uritsky - bothered to drop even a hint about it. The protocol record of the October sixteeth session had evidently been carefully put away, in order to hide all traces of Lenin's "illegal" participation in it, and during the ensuing our dramatic days the "center" was all the easier forgotten because the very need for such a supplementary institution was absolutely excluded by the intense activity of the Military Revolutionary Committee.<br />
<br />
At the very next session, on October twenty-first, with Stalin, Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky present, there was again no report about the "center"and not even any mention of it. The Central Committee carried on as if there had never been any resolution whatever passed about a "center". Incidentally, it was at this session that it was decided to put ten more prominent Bolsheviks, among them Stalin, onto the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet for the purpose of improving its activity. But that was just another resolution that remained on paper.<br />
<br />
Preparations for the insurrection proceeded apace, but along an entirely different channel. The actual master of the capital's garrison, the Military Revolutionary Committee, was seeking an excuse for openly breaking with the Government. That pretext was provided on October twenty-second by the officer commanding the troops of the district when he refused to let the Committee's commissars control his staff. We had to strike while the iron was hot. The Bureau of the Military Revolutionary Committee, Sverdlov and I participating, decided to recognize the break with the garrison staff as an accomplished fact and to take the offensive. Stalin was not at this conference. It never occurred to anyone to call him. Whenever the burning of all bridges was at stake, no one mentioned the existence of the so-called "center".<br />
<br />
The Central Committee session that directly launched the insurrection was held at Smolny, now transformed into a fortress, on the morning of October twenty-fourth. At the very outset a motion of Kamenev's [now reinstated] was passed: "No member of the Central Committee may absent himself from the Smolny today without special dispensation." The report of the Military Revolutionary Committee was on the agenda. At the very moment when the insurrection began there was no mention of the so-called "center". The protocol states: "Trotsky proposed that two members of the Central Committee be placed at the disposal of the Military Revolutionary Committee for maintaining contact with the post and telegraph operations and the railway men; a third member to keep an eye on the Provisional Government." Dzerzhinsky was assigned to the post and telegraph operators, Bubnov to the railwaymen. Sverdlov was delegated to keep a watchful eye over the Provisional Government. Further: "Trotsky proposed that establishment of a reserve staff in the Peter and Paul Fortress and the assigment of one member of the Central Committee there for that purpose. Resolved: 'Sverdlov delegated to maintain constant contact with the Fortress'." Thus three members of the "center" were for the first time placed at the direct disposal of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Naturally, that would not have been necessary had the "center" existed and been occupied with preparing the insurrection. The protocol records that a fourth member of the "center", Uritsky, made some practical suggestions. But where was the fifth member, Stalin?<br />
<br />
Most amazing of all is the fact that Stalin was not even present at this decisive session. Central Committee members obligated themselves not to leave Smolny. But Stalin did not even show up in the first place. This is irrefutably attested to by the protocols published in 1929. Stalin never explained his absence, either orally or in writing. No one made any issue of it, probably in order not to provoke unnecessary trouble. All the most important decisions on conducting the insurrection were made without Stalin, without even the slightest indirect participation by him. When the parts were being assigned to the various actors in that drama, no one mentioned Stalin or proposed any sort of appointment for him. He simply dropped out of the game. Did he perhaps run his "center" from some secret hiding place? But all the other members of the "center" stayed continually at the Smolny.<br />
<br />
During the hours when the open insurrection had already begun, Lenin, who was aflame with impatience in his isolation, appealed to the district leaders: "Comrades! I am writing these lines on the evening of the twenty-fourth . . . I assure you with all my strength that now everything hangs by a thread, that we are confronted with issues which cannot be decided by conferences or by congresses (not even by Soviet Congresses), but exclusively by the struggle of the armed masses . . ." It is perfectly clear from this letter that until the very evening of October twenty-fourth Lenin knew nothing about the launching of the offensive by the Military Revolutionary Committee. Contact with Lenin was chiefly maintained through Stalin, because he was one o those in whom the police showed not the slightest interest. Unavoidable is the inference that having failed to come to the Central Committee session in the morning and having stayed away from Smolny throughout the rest of the day, Stalin did not find out that the insurrection had already begun and was in full swing rather late that evening. Not that he was a coward. There is no basis for accusing Stalin of cowardice. He was simply politically non-committal. The cautious schemer preferred to stay on the fence at the crucial moment. He was waiting to see how the insurrection turned out before committing himself to a position. In the event of failure he could tell Lenin, and me and our adherents: "It's all your fault!" One must clearly recapture the red-hot temper of those days in order to appreciate according to its deserts the man's cool grit or, if you like, his insidiousness.<br />
<br />
No, Stalin did not lead the insurrection - either personally or by means of some "center". In the protocols, reminiscences, countless documents, works of reference, history textbooks published while Lenin was alive, and even later, the so-called "center" was never mentioned and Stalin's name either as its leader or as a prominent participant in the insurrection in some other capacity was not mentioned by anyone. The Party's memory passed him by. It was only in 1924 that the Committee on Party History, in the course of collecting all sorts of data, dug up the minutes of the session of October sisteenth with the text of the resolution to organize a practical "center". The fight against the Left Opposition and against me personally which was then raging called for a new version of Party history and the history of the Revolution. I remember that Serebryakov, who had friends and contacts everywhere, told me once that there was a great rejoicing in Stalin's secretariat over the discovery of the "center". <br />
"Of what significance could that possibly be?" I asked in astonishment.<br />
"They are going to wind something around that bobbin," the shrewd Serebryakov replied.<br />
<br />
That did not preclude it from being turned into the nucleus of a new version of the October Revolution. In 1925 Stalin was already arguing, "It is strange that Comrade Trotsky, the 'inspirer', 'chief figure', and 'sole leader' of the insurrection was not a member of the practical center which was called upon to lead the insurrection. How is it possible to reconcile that with the current opinion about Comrade Trotsky's special role?" The argument is patently illogical: according to the precise sense of the resolution, the "center" was to have become a part of the very same Military Revolutionary Committee of which I was the Chairman. Stalin fully exposed his intention of "winding" a new history of the insurrection around that protocol. What he failed to explain was the source of "the current opinion about Trotsky's special role." Yet that might be worth considering.<br />
<br />
The following is contained under my name in the notes to the first edition of Lenin's Works: "After the Petersburg Soviet passed into the hands of the Bolsheviks [Trotsky] was elected its President and as such organized and led the insurrection of 25th October." The "legend" thus found a place for itself in Lenin's Works during their author's lifetime. It never occurred to anyone to challenge it until 1925. Moreover, Stalin himself at one time paid his tribute to this "current opinion". In the first anniversary article, in 1918, he wrote: "All the work of practical organization of the insurrection was conducted under the direct leadership of the President of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It may be said with certainty that the swift passing of the garrison to the side of teh Soviet, and the bold execution of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Party owes principally and above all to Comrade Trotsky. Comrades Antonov and Podvoisky were Comrade Trotsky's chief assistants." Today these words sould like a panegyric. As a matter of fact, what the author had in the back of his mind was to remind the Party that during the days of the insurrection, in addition to Trotsky, there existed also the Central Committee, of which Stalin was a member. But forced to invest his article with att least a semblance of objectivity, Stalin could not have avoided saying in 1918 what he did say. Anyway, on the first anniversary of the Soviet Government he ascribed "the practical organization of the insurrection" to Trotsky. What then was the mysterious role of the "center"? Stalin did not even mention it; it was then still six years before the discovery of the protocol of October sixteenth.<br />
<br />
In 1920, no longer mentioning Trotsky, Stalin advanced Lenin against the Central Committee as the author of the erroneous plan for insurrection. He repeated this in 1922, but substituted for Lenin, "one part of the comrades", an cautiously intimated that he (Stalin) had something to do with saving the insurrection from the erroneous plan. Another two years passed, and it seems that Trotsky was the one who had maliciously invented the canard about Lenin's erroneous plan; indeed, Trotsky himself proposed the erroneous plan, which was fortunately rejected by the Central Committee. Finally, the "History" of the Party, published in 1938, represented Trotsky as a rabid opponent of the October Revolution, which had really been conducted by Stalin. Parallel to all this occurred the mobilization of all the arts: poetry, painting, the theater, the cinema, suddenly discovered the urge to invest the mythical "center" with the breath of life, although the most assiduous historians were unable to find any trace of it with a magnifying glass. Today, Stalin figures as the leader of the October Revolution on the screens of the world, not to mention the publications of the Comintern.<br />
<br />
The facts of history were revised in the same way, although perhaps not quite so flagrantly, with regard to all the Old Bolsheviks, time and time again, depending on changing political combinations. In 1917 Stain defended Zinoviev and Kamenev, in an attempt to use them against Lenin and me and in preparation for his future "triumvirate". In 1924, when the "triumvirate" already controlled the political machine, Stalin argued in the press that the differences of opinion with Zinoviev and Kamenev prior to October were of a fleeting and secondary character. "The differences lasted only a few days because, and only because, in the person of Kamenev and Zinoviev we had Leninists, Bolsheviks." After the "triumvirate" fell apart, Zinoviev's and Kamenev's behavior in 1917 figured for a number of years as the chief reason for denouncing them as "agents of the bourgeoisie", until finally it was included in the fatal indictment which brought both of them to the firing squad.<br />
<br />
One is forced to pause in sheer amazement before the cold, patient and at the same time cruel persistence directed toward one invariably personal goal. Just as at one time in Batum the youthful Koba had persistently undermined the members of Tiflis Committee who were his superiors; just as in prison and in exile he had incited simpletons against his rivals, so now in Petrograd he tirelessly schemed with people and circumstances, in order to push aside, derogate, blacken, belittle anyone who in one way or another eclipsed him or interfered with his ambition.<br />
<br />
Naturally the October Revolution, as the source of the new regime, has assumed the central postion in the ideology of the new ruling circles. How did it all happen? Who led at the center and in the branches? Stalin had to have practically twenty years to impose upon the country a historical panarama, in which he replaced the actual organizers of the insurrection and ascribed to them roles as the Revolution's betrayers. It would be incorrect to think that he started out with a finished plan of action for personal aggrandizement. Extraordinary historical circumstances invested his ambition with a sweep startling even to himself. In one way he remained invariably consistent: regardless of all other considerations, he used each concrete situation to entrench his own position at the expense of his comrades - step by step, stone by stone, patiently, without passion, but also without mercy! It is in the uninterrupted weaving of intrigues, in the cautious doling out of truth and falsehood, in the organic rhythm of his falsifications that Stalin is best reflected as a human personality and as a leader of the new privileged stratum, which, by and large, has to concoct fresh biographies for itself.<br />
<br />
Having made a bad beginning in March, which was not improved in April, Stalin stayed behind the scenes throughout the year of the Revolution. He never knew direct association with the masses and never felt responsible for the fate of the Revolution. At certain moments he was chief of staff, never the commander-in-chief. Preferring to keep his peace, he waited for others to take the initiative, took note of their weaknesses and mistakes, and himself lagged behind developments. He had to have a certain stability of relations and a lot of time at his disposal in order to succeed. The Revolution deprived him of both.<br />
<br />
Never forced to analyze the problems of revolution under that mental pressure which is generated only by the feeling of immediate responsibility, Stalin never acquired an intimate understanding of the October Revolution's inherent logic. That is why his recollections of it are so empirical, scattered and inco-ordinate, his latter-day judgments on the strategy of the insurrection so contradictory, his mistakes in a number in a number of latter-day revolutions (Germany, China, Spain) so monstrous. Truly, revolution is not the element of this former "professional revolutionist".<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, 1917 was a most important stage in the growth of the future dictator. He himself said later that at Tiflis he was a schoolboy, at Baku he turned an apprentice, in Petrograd he became a craftsman. After four years of political and intellectual hibernation in Siberia, where he descended to the level of the Left Mensheviks, the year of the Revolution, during which he was under the direct leadership of Lenin, in the circle of highly qualified comrades, had immeasurable significance in his political development. For the first time he had the opportunity to learn much that hitherto had been beyond the range of his experience. He listened and observed with malevolence, but sharply and vigilantly. At the core of political life was the problem of power. The Provisional Government, supported by the Mensheviks and Populists, yesterday's comrades of the underground, prison and exile, enabled him to look more closely into that mysterious laboratory where, as everyone knows, it is not gods that glaze the pots. The unspannable distance, which in epoch of Tsarism separated the underground revolutionists from the government, shrank into nothing. The government became something close, a familiar concept. Koba threw off much of his provincialism, if not in habits and customs, at least in the measure of his political thinking. He sensed - keenly, resentfully - what he lacked as an individual, but at the same time he tested the power of a closely knit collection of gifted and experienced revolutionists ready to fight to the bitter end. He became a recognized member of the general staff of the party the masses were bearing to power. He stopped being Koba. He definitely became Stalin.<br />
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ENDDave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1108334945989890262005-02-13T14:47:00.000-08:002006-03-01T18:33:50.886-08:00Aijaz Ahmad on Marx on India<strong><span style="font-size:130%;">MARX ON INDIA: A Clarification.<br />by Aijaz Ahmad<br /></span></strong><br /><strong>Chapter Five of: In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.<br />1992 Verso London and New York.<br /></strong><br />There is a large and now fairly old tradition of cultural criticism which addresses the issues of empire as well as the uses of literature and the knowledge industry that generates imperialist ideologies both for domestic consumption within the metropolitan countries and for export to the imperialized formations, not to speak of the complicity of particular writers, scholars and scholarly disciplines. In other words, the body of work on cultural imperialism is very copious. Until about the mid 1970s, most of the scholarship had been produced by people who were either Marxists themselves or were quite prepared to accept their affinities with Marxist positions on issues of colony and empire; much useful work of that kind continues to be done even today. Within mainstream scholarship, the usual way of marginalizing that work was either to ignore it altogether or to declare it simple-minded and propagandistic. Dismissal by the post-structuralist critic is as a rule equally strident, though the vocabulary has of course changed. Instead of using words like ‘simple-minded’ or ‘propagandistic’, one now declares that work of that kind was too positivistic, too deeply contaminated with empiricism, historicism, the problematics of realism and representability, the metaphysical belief in origin, agency, truth.<br /><br />It has been Edward Said’s achievement to have brought this question of cultural imperialism to the very centre of the ongoing literary debates in the metropolitan university by posing it in terms that were acceptable to that university. Sections of the Right could still attack him, as they loudly did, but the liberal mainstream had to concede both that he knew his Spitzer and his Auerbach as well as they did, and that he certainly was not ‘propagandistic’ in the way the 1960s radicals usually were. One of Said’s notable contributions to the American Left, in fact, is that he, perhaps more than anyone else, has taught this Left how to build bridges between the liberal mainstream and avant-garde theory. The range of erudition has been a considerable asset, though not everyone who wrote from the Marxist position was necessarily less erudite. And there certainly is an eloquence, a style. But the notable feature, underlying all the ambivalences, is the anti-Marxism and the construction of a whole critical apparatus for defining a postmodern kind of anti-colonialism. In this Said was certainly among the first, and a setter of trends. The Marxist tradition had been notably anti-imperialist; the Nietzschean tradition had no such credentials. Now it transpires that that is precisely what had been wrong – not with the Nietzschean intellectuals but with anti-imperialism itself. It should have been Nietzschean and now needed to do some theoretical growing up.<br /><br />For buttressing the proposition that Marxism is not much more than a ‘modes-of-production narrative’ and that its opposition to colonialism is submerged in a positivistic ‘myth of progress’, it is always very convenient to quote one or two journalistic flourishes from those two dispatches on India, the first and third, which Marx wrote for the New York Tribune in 1853 and which are the most anthologized on this topic: ‘The British Rule in India’ and ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’. That Said would quote the most-quoted passage, the famous one on ‘the unconscious tool’,<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[i]</a> is predictable, and there is no evidence in Orientalism that he has come to regard this as a representative passage after some considerable engagement with Marx’s many and highly complex writings on colonialism as such and on the encounter between non-capitalist and capitalist societies. This is certainly in keeping with Said’s characteristically cavalier way with authors and quotations, but here it gains added authority from the fact that it is by now a fairly familiar procedure in dealing with Marx’s writings on colonialism. The dismissive hauteur is then combined in very curious ways with indifference to – possibly ignorance of – how the complex issues raised by Marx’s cryptic writings on India have actually been seen in the research of key Indian historians themselves, before the advent, let us say, of Ranajit Guha. What this hauteur seems to suggest is that neither Marx’s writing on India nor what Indian scholarship has had to say about that writing is really worth knowing in any detail; the issue of Indian scholarship is in fact never raised – not even by remote suggestion. This, too, is curious. One would have thought that if some ‘Orientalist’ view of Indian history were in question, one obvious place to start looking for a discussion of that ‘Orientalism’ might well be the writings of precisely those anti-imperialist Indian historians who have been most concerned about the structure of pre-colonial Indian society and its contrasts with Europe at that stage – superb historians, I might add, by any reckoning.<br /><br />It is not my purpose in this chapter to address the whole issue of Marx’s writing on India, or to review the many Indian debates which have a bearing on that subject; that would be quite beyond the scope of the present argument. Rather, I would like to examine Said’s summary way of dealing with this complex and highly contentious matter, to summarize some minimal background for putting Marx’s journalism in perspective, and then to cite some representative opinions from the main currents of anti-colonial historiography in India, in order to illustrate the curious fact that Said’s understanding of quite the opposite of what Indian historians have usually had to say about this question. This clarification is necessary because Said’s position on this matter is both authoritative and influential, while the procedure in his treatment of Marx is a familiar one, as we saw in the case of Aeschylus and Dante in the previous chapter: he detaches a certain passage from its context, inserts it into the Orientalist archive and moves in different, even contradictory, directions.<br /><br />The larger section of the book in which Said’s comments on Marx are enclosed actually deals with English and French literary travellers in the Near East – Edward Lane, Nerval, Flaubert, Lamartine, Burton, and others. The appearance of Marx in this company is surprising, since he was not ‘literary’ in that sense, nor did he ever travel anywhere south of France. The distinction is important because the theme of the section is testimony and witness brought back in the form of travelogue, fiction, lyric, linguistic knowledge, to say ‘I was there, therefore I know’. Marx clearly made no such claims. Said none the less goes on to quote the overly famous passage:<br /><br />Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization and the their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it an unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies…<br /><br />England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was actuated only be the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.<br /><br />Now, it is obviously true that colonialism did not bring us a revolution.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[ii]</a> What it brought us was, precisely, a non-revolutionary and retrograde resolution to a crisis of our own society which had come to express itself, by the eighteenth century, in a real stagnation of technologies and productivities, as well as regional and dynastic wars so constant and ruinous as to make impossible a viable coalition against the encroaching colonial power. Likewise, it is doubtless true the image of Asia as an unchanging, ‘vegetative’ place was part of the inherited world-view in nineteenth-century Europe, and had been hallowed by such figures of the Enlightenment as Hobbes and Montesquieu; it is also true –though Said does not say so –that the image of the so-called self-sufficient Indian village community that we find in Marx was lifted, almost verbatim, out of Hegel. All this had been reiterated for the Left, yet again, by Perry Anderson in his Lineages of the Absolutist State (1975), which had circulated widely while Orientalism was being drafted. Said’s contribution was not that he pointed towards these facts (he emphasised instead, in literary-critical fashion, Goethe and the Romantics) but that he fashioned a rhetoric of dismissal, as we shall see presently.<br /><br />In that rhetoric, moreover, there really was no room for other complexities of Marx’s thought. For it is equally true that Marx’s denunciation of pre-colonial society in India is no more strident than his denunciations of Europe’s own feudal past, or of the Absolute monarchies, or of the German burghers; his essays on Germany are every bit as nasty.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn3" name="_ednref3">[iii]</a> His direct comments about the power of the caste system in the Indian village –‘restrain[ing] the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies’ – are, on the one hand, a virtual paraphrase of his comments on the European peasantry as being mired in ‘the idiocy of rural life’ and remind one, on the other hand, of the whole range of reformist politics and writings in India, spanning a great many centuries but made all the sharper in the twentieth century, which have always regarded the caste system as an altogether inhuman one – a ‘diabolical contrivance to suppress and enslave humanity’, as Ambedkar put it in the preface to The Untouchables – that degrades and saps the energies of the Indian peasantry, not to speak of the ‘untouchable’ menial castes. Conversely, the question Marx raises towards the end of that passage –‘can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?’ – may be objectionable to the postmodern mind because of its explicit belief, inherited from the more decent traditions of the Enlightenment, in the unity, universality and actual possibility of human liberation, but it is surely not generated by the kind of racism Said ascribes to Marx, as we shall soon see. It is also worth recalling that those particular questions – Is human liberation possible without the liberation of Asia? What transformation will have to take place within Asian societies in order to make that liberation possible? – have been posed again and again in our own century: most doggedly in China, Korea, the Indochinese countries, but also in those revolutionary enterprises which were defeated so many years ago that barely a memory now remains – in Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines, India.<br /><br />I shall return to the issue of accuracy, or lack of it, in Marx’s judgement presently. (Now, after the experience of the history that Britain in fact made, who could possibly want an ‘unconscious tool’ of that sort?) The first issue, again in the Foucaldian terms that Orientalism popularised, is the methodological one: what mode of thought, what discursive practice authorizes Marx’s statement? Said, of course, locates it in ‘Orientalism’. In my view, the intemperate shrillness of those denunciations belongs to an altogether different problematic – or ‘discourse’, as Said uses the term. The idea of a certain progressive role of colonialism was linked, in Marx’s mind, with the idea of a progressive role of capitalism as such, in comparison with what had gone before, within Europe as much as outside it. In context, any attempt to portray Marx as an enthusiast of colonialism would logically have to portray him as an admirer of capitalism as well, which is what he wanted Germany to achieve, as quickly as possible. This idea of a colonial society giving rise to brisk capitalist development was also connected, in Marx’s mind, with the North American experience. At the time when he was writing those much-too-well-known journalistic pieces on India, in the 1850s, the full colonization of Africa was still some years away, and although the process in Asia generally – and especially in India – was much further advanced, there was no past experience of fully fledged colonization in these two continents that was available for summation; the long-term consequences of full colonization in our part of the world were still a matter of speculation. Rammohun himself, indulging in the worst kind of speculation, had recommended the settling of British farmers and the insertion of British capital into the Indian economy, in order to buttress the ‘constructive mission’ of British colonialism, some thirty years before Marx offered his generalities. In other words, from the historical point of view, the status of Marx’s writings on the possible consequences of British colonialism in India is not theoretical but conjunctural and speculative.<br /><br />What gave these speculations there particular, progressivist slant, apart from a positivist faith in the always-progressive role of science and technology, was the prior experience of the United States, where a powerful capitalist society was then emerging out of a brutal colonizing dynamic – more brutal, in fact, then that in India – and was even then, during the 1850s, in the process of completing its bourgeois revolution, in the shape of the impending Civil War. Marx was wondering, even as the conflict in India waxed and waned, whether India might not, in the long run, go the way of the United States. The idea of ‘the transplantation of European society’ grew out of that analogy, which now appears to us altogether fantastic, but it is worth recalling that the gap in material prosperity between India and England was narrower in 1835 than it was to become by 1947, on the eve of decolonization. Marx was particularly concerned with the anachronisms of our pre-capitalist societies, the dead weight of our caste rigidities, the acute fragmentation of our politics, the primacy of military encampment over manufacture in our mode of urbanization, the exhaustion of the urban artisanate – due as much to levels of direct appropriations as to the inability to find markets in the countryside – and other such distortions of development in nineteenth-century India, because these distortions were seen as impediments in the path towards a true bourgeois revolution. We need to keep the whole range of these complexities in mind while reading those journalistic pieces, even though Marx’s understanding of Indian society was on some crucial points factually quite incorrect; indeed, the hope of brisk industrialization under colonialism turned out to be so misplaced that Marx himself seems to have abandoned it in later years. Here, in any event, is Said’s main comment on Marx’s passage:<br /><br />That Marx is still able to sense some fellow felling, to identify even a little with poor little Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over…only to give it up when he confronted a more formidable censor in the very vocabulary he found himself forced to employ. What that censor did was to stop and then chase away the sympathy, and this was accompanied by a lapidary definition: Those people, it said, don’t suffer – they are Orientals and hence have to be treated in other ways…The vocabulary of emotion dissipated and submitted to the lexicographical police action of Orientalist science and even Orientalist art.<br /><br />Several things in Marx’s passage are –to me at least – disagreeable, including its positivist belief in the march of history, and I shall return to some of my own reservations about Marx’s writings on India. But having read it countless times over some twenty years I still cannot find in that passage even a hint of the racist ‘lapidary definition’ which Said claims to find there: ‘These people don’t suffer –they are Orientals and hence have to be treated in other ways.’ There is a different kind of blindness in that passage, but racism –and racism of that order – there is not. What is also striking about Said’s comment is its reckless psychologizing impulse – not that Marx held certain views about historical development which led inevitably to this passage, but that something happened to him emotionally, psychologically. I should rather think that Marx’s passage needs to be placed, if one wishes to grasp its correlates, alongside any number of passages from a wide variety of his writings, especially Capital, where the destruction of the European peasantry in the course of the primitive accumulation of capital is described in analogous tones, which I read as an enraged language of tragedy, - a sense of colossal and irretrievable loss, a moral dilemma wherein neither the old nor the new can be wholly affirmed, the recognition that the sufferer was at once decent and flawed, the recognition also that history of victories and losses is really a history of material productions, and the glimmer of hope, in the end, that something good might come of this merciless history. One has to be fairly secure in one’s own nationalism to be able to think through the dialectic of this tragic formulation. Amilcar Cabral emphasized as much in his famous essay ‘The Weapon of Theory’, which he first delivered as a talk in Havana at a time when he was leading Southern Africa’s most highly developed struggle against Portuguese colonialism.<br /><br />Said’s treatment of Marx is too impressionistic ever to come down to any real chronology, but if I understand him correctly he seems to be asserting that Marx started with ‘some fellow felling’ for ‘poor Asia’ but then gave in to a ‘censor’ (Orientalism) which served to ‘chase away the sympathy’ and replaced it with that ‘lapidary definition’. Marx, it seems, started in one place and arrived at another: what is rehearsed here for us appears to be a chronology of submission, or at least blockage. May one, then, quote from a letter he wrote to Danielson in 1881:<br /><br />In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in store for the British government. What the British take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless for the Hindoos, pensions for the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc., etc. – what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India – speaking only of the value of the commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England – it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60 million of agricultural and industrial laborers of India. This is a bleeding process with a vengeance.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn4" name="_ednref4">[iv]</a> (original emphasis)<br /><br />This letter was written towards the very end of Marx’s life, and the ‘lapidary definition’ which Said puts into the mouth of Orientalism (‘Those people don’t suffer – they are Orientals’) does not seem to have prevented Marx from describing colonialism as a ‘bleeding process with a vengeance’, the ‘lexicographical police action’ notwithstanding. Between the dispatch of 1853 from which Said quotes and the letter of 1881 cited above, there had also been –in terms of chronology – the great Rebellion of 1857. This is not the place to review the complexities of Marx’s analyses of that event, but it is worth recalling that he declared it a ‘national revolt’ and welcomed it as part of what he took to be a great Asian upheaval, indicated to him first by the Taiping Rebellion, against Europe – which was certainly more that what was said by the whole of the emergent modern intelligentsia of Bengal, which remained doggedly pro-British.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn5" name="_ednref5">[v]</a><br /><br />Nor was Marx alone in this, either in the earlier or the latter part of his life. Engels, who had virtually forced Marx to take up that journalism in the first place, had this to say about what we today call ‘national liberation’:<br /><br />There is evidently a different spirit among the Chinese now…The mass of people take an active, nay, a fanatical part in the struggle against the foreigners. They poison the bread of the European community at Hongkong by wholesale, and with the coolest meditation…The very coolies emigrating to foreign countries rise in mutiny, and as if by concert, on board every emigrant ship, fight for its possession…Civilization mongers who throw hot shell on a defenseless city and add rape to murder, may call the system cowardly, barbarous, atrocious; but what matter it to the Chinese if it be successful?…We had better recognize that this is a war pro aris et focis, a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn6" name="_ednref6">[vi]</a><br /><br />That is a wonderfully contemptuous word for the colonizers: ‘civilization-mongers’! What one wishes to emphasize here is that the writings of Marx and Engels are indeed contaminated in several places with the usual banalities of nineteenth-century Eurocentrism, and the general prognosis they offered about the social stagnation of our societies was often based on unexamined staples of conventional European histories. Despite such inaccuracies, however, neither of them portrayed resistance to colonialism as misdirected; the resistance of the ‘Chinese coolie’ was celebrated in the same lyrical cadences as they would deploy in celebrating the Parisian communard. On the whole, then, we find the same emphases there as Cabral was to spell out a century later: colonialism did have, in some limited sense and in some situations, a ‘progressive’ side, but ‘maintenance’ of ‘nationality’ is the inalienable right of the colonized. For Indian historiography, meanwhile, this issue of the partially progressive role of colonialism has been summarized by Bipan Chandra, our foremost historian of anti-colonial thought of the Indian bourgeois intelligentsia, who is himself sometimes accused of being too nationalistic:<br /><br />…most of the anti-imperialist writers would agree with Marx. They all, without exception, accept that the English introduced some structural changes and nearly all of them welcome these changes…Their criticism was never merely or even mainly that the traditional social order was disintegrated by British rule but that the structuring and construction of the new was delayed, frustrated, and obstructed. From R.C. Dutt, Dadabhai Naoroji and Ranade down to Jawaharlal Nehru and R.P. Dutt, the anti-imperialist writers have not…really condemned the destruction of the pre-British economic structure, except nostalgically and out of the sort of sympathy that any decent man would have, that, for example, Marx showed for the ‘poor Hindu’s’ loss of the old world.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn7" name="_ednref7">[vii]</a><br /><br />I shall have more to say about some other Indian historians and political leaders in a moment, but let me return to the passage from Marx which Said quotes, and to the methodological problem of how we read particular statements in relation to discursive practices, in terms to which Said would appear to subscribe. It seems fairly clear to me that what authorizes that particular statement – to the effect that the replacement of village society by industrial society is historically necessary and therefore objectively progressive – is by no means the discourse of ‘Orientalism’ (Britain, Marx says, is pursuing the ‘vilest interests’) but what Foucault would designate as the discourse of political economy. In other words, Marx’s statement follows not anecdotally from Goethe or German Romanticism, nor discursively from an overarching ‘Orientalism’, but logically and necessarily from positions Marx held on issues of class and mode of production, on the comparative structuration of the different pre-capitalist modes, and on the kind and degree of violence which would inevitably issue from a project that sets out to dissolve such a mode on so wide a scale. One may or may not agree with Marx, either in the generality of his theoretical construction or with his interpretation of particular events, but the question about Said’s method remains in any case, as much here as in the case of Dante: if particular representations and discursive statements – if in fact they are discursive statements – can float so easily in and out of various discourses, then in what sense can we designate any one of them a discourse in which the whole history of Western enunciations is so irretrievably trapped?<br /><br />The Foucauldian objection, in any case, is not the only possible one – to my mind, not even the more important one – against Said’s procedure here. At the one point in Orientalism where he registers a considerable difference with Foucault, Said emphasizes his own belief in ‘the determining imprint of individual writers’ (p.23). Yet when he sets out to debunk Dante or Marx or a host of others, what he offers us are decontextualized quotations, with little sense of what status the quoted passage has in the work of the ‘individual writer’ or what sort of ‘imprint’ he might have left –what responses the writing might have evoked – among scholars and thinkers outside ‘the West’. These are complicated histories and this is not the place to examine all of them, but to the extent that Said’s summary dismissal if fairly characteristic of some current radical understandings in the Ango-American milieu – in its dismissal and is summary brevity – a few facts may be usefully cited.<br /><br />Marx sent, in all, thirty-three dispatches on Indian affairs to the New York Tribune (‘this wretched paper’, as he unjustly called it in a letter to Engels in 1858) and thought of the whole enterprise as a ‘great interruption’ to the economic studies he was then undertaking, having put the defeats of 1848-49 behind him after writing The Eighteenth Brumaire. The likelihood is that the journalism might not have come if he had not needed the money so very desperately. Twelve of those dispatches were written in 1853, fifteen in 1857, six in 1858. The first thing to be said for this overly famous series, which got going with the dispatch of June 1853, is that there is no evidence that Marx was taking any regular interest in India before the beginning of that year; it was the presentation of the Company Charter to Parliament for renewal that gave him the idea of attending to this matter in the first place. That he read much of the Parliamentary Papers and the Travels of Bernier, the seventeenth-century French writer and medicine-man, very carefully before writing the first dispatch is clear enough, and his acuteness of mind is equally obvious from the great insights which are scattered through the series. But the overall status of that journalism cannot be separated from its immediate purpose, the general state of knowledge about India prevailing in England at the time (which was far more considerable than Said would grant, but still patchy and frequently misleading), the web of prejudice which enveloped that knowledge (but the prejudice was not the only and not even an isolable fact), the relative novelty of the subject matter for Marx himself, and the stage in his own development at which these pieces begin; the drafting even of the Grundrisse, let alone Capital, was still some years away.<br /><br />No careful reader of Orientalism need be surprised by the fact that Said hangs the whole matter on a quotation from the first, most widely anthologized of those dispatches, without any effort to contextualize the writing.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn8" name="_ednref8">[viii]</a> How little Marx knew about India when he started writing those pieces is indicated by the fact that he thought the title for all agricultural land was held by the sovereign;<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn9" name="_ednref9">[ix]</a> he had picked up this idea from Bernier and others, and the British authorities had done much to propagate it, since they were now the new rulers. Only four years later, when he came to write the second series of his dispatches on India, he had realized that this had been at best a legal fiction, but he still did not even begin quite to grasp the complex land tenure system in pre-British India and began having some sense of the intricacies only much later, after he had read Kovalevsky’s Communal Landholdings (1879), when his main interest had shifted to the Russian mir and India figured in his studies only as a comparative case.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn10" name="_ednref10">[x]</a><br /><br />The point is neither to suggest that those dispatches should be simply ignored as mere juvenilia, nor to argue in favour of an onward march in Marx’s thoughts on India, from precocious insight to final clarities. The point, rather, is to emphasize far greater complexity than Said’s summary procedures admit, and even to register a certain affinity with Harbans Mukhia when he remarks, in the course of what is clearly one of the definitive summations of how one is now to view Marx’s writings on India in the light of more modern researches:<br /><br />The notion of significant changes in pre-colonial India’s economy and society is a recent entrant in Indian historiography; and no hard effort is called for to explain Marx’s ignorance of it…Yet the significant difference implied by Marx in the pace and nature of changes in pre-colonial Indian society vis-à-vis premodern Europe remains an important pointer to the different paths of development that those societies have followed for entering into the modern world.<br />Europe’s stages of historical development – slavery, feudalism and capitalism – are clearly enough marked…Changes in India are long-drawn and gradual; they have the effect of modifying the existing production techniques and social organization of production; but they rarely overthrow an existing social and economic structure and replace it by a new one, by a new mode of production. This is especially true since the seventh century A.D. (emphasis added)<br /><br />Then, after summarizing some of the social conflicts which beset India over the next millennium, from the seventh to the seventeenth century, Mukhia goes on to say:<br /><br />As a consequence of these conflicts, the means of production were never redistributed until after the onset of colonialism; what was distributed and redistributed was the peasant’s surplus produce. It was thus that even when crises created by such momentous events, as the collapse of the Mughal empire, occurred during the early eighteenth century, the empire was succeeded by the resurgence of a class of zamindars everywhere; the crisis, in other words, led to the resurgence of an old property form rather than the emergence of a new one.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn11" name="_ednref11">[xi]</a><br /><br />We might add that Mukhia’s is a very cautious and authoritative evaluation, by no means simply adulatory; he carefully documents how Marx was at least partially wrong on every count. He disagrees with Irfan Habib in matters both of detail and of emphasis in the latter’s interpretation both of medieval India and of Marx’s writings on the subject, but he, like Habib, rejects the idea of the so-called Asiatic mode of production as well as the alternative notion that pre-colonial India was somehow ‘feudal’; these agreements and disagreements aside, he and Habib are entirely in accord on what Mukhia has to say in the above passage.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn12" name="_ednref12">[xii]</a> These two are, of course, among contemporary India’s most distinguished historians for the pre-colonial period and both doubtless write, even as they periodically disagree with each other on some key issues, from recognizably strict Marxist positions. Ravinder Kumar, an equally distinguished historian of both the colonial and the post-colonial periods who writes from within that other tradition also descended from strands in classical Marxism, the traditions of Left-liberal social democracy, basically confirms the same substantive prognosis:<br /><br />…substantially self-regulating village communities, scattered over the face of the subcontinent, and characterized by relatively weak economic and cultural interaction with one another, constituted the distinctive feature of rural society over the centuries. Hence the vision of a timeless and static world which surfaces again and again in the historical literature on Indian civilization. The classic formulation of this vision is to be found in the memoranda penned by British civilians of the nineteenth century, who, while they overstated the case for changelessness, nevertheless grasped an essential truth about the structure and configuration of rural society in India.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn13" name="_ednref13">[xiii]</a><br /><br />Marx’s famous view of colonialism’s ‘double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating’, which Said takes to be the epitome of ‘the Romantic Orientalist vision’ in which Mar’s ‘human sympathy’ is ‘dissolved’, is thus one that has been debated very, very extensively, in explicit as well as implicit ways, by India’s own most notable political thinkers (from Gandhi to Namboodripad) as well as Indian historians. It is unfortunate that Said is unaware of these complex intellectual and political traditions. There are innumerable things to be learned from then, but as regards the positions that have been give such credence by Edward Said and the subsequent Colonial Discourse Analysis groups, at least two general principles which govern the principal historiographic traditions in India – essentially humanist, rationalist and universalist principles – may be emphasized. One is that the right to criticize is a universal right, which must be conceded to everyone, European and Asian alike; what is objectionable is not the European’s right to criticize Asians, past or present, but those particular exercises of this right which are manifest and arbitrary exercises of colonial or racial or any other kind of prejudice. In other words, criticism itself must be evaluated from some objective criterion of validity and evidence. The accompanying principle, necessarily conjoined to the first, is that the archive which we have inherited from our colonial past is, like any substantial historical archive, a vast mixture of fantastic constructs, time-bound errors and invaluable empirical information. This, too, must be subjected to the same kind of discrimination that we require for any other kind of historical investigation, whether the writer in question is European or non-European.<br /><br />Before we go on to offer some comments on the politically contrasting traditions, from Gandhi to Namboodripad, it may be useful here, without attempting a full resume, to specify that Marx’s position was in fact the exact opposite of what can accurately be called the Orientalist position in India, and that Marx self-consciously dissociates himself from that position when he declares earlier, in that very first dispatch: ‘I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindustan.’<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn14" name="_ednref14">[xiv]</a> The idea of a golden age in the remote past which India now needed to reconstitute –one that sections of Orientalist scholarship had inherited from strands of High Brahminism – was to bequeath itself to a great many tendencies in Indian nationalism, as we shall soon see. But when Marx moves quickly to dissociate himself also from the opposite position – most famously enunciated by the anti-Orientalist Macaulay – which saw British colonialism as a benign civilizing mission. Against that Marx is equally unequivocal, in the very next paragraph: ‘the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before.’ In short, the idea of ‘the double mission’ was designed to carve out a position independent both of the Orientalist-Romantic and the colonial-modernist.<br /><br />The dispatch from which Said quotes was drafted on 10 June 1853, and Said has the liberty to believe that Marx’ s ‘human sympathy’ had, by the end of that piece, been ‘dissolved’. The other piece by Marx, ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, which has become equally famous, was drafted a few weeks later, on 22 July. Here, too, Marx says some very rude things, and he certainly has no ‘sympathy’, either for India –<br /><br />…the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history…of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. (p. 29)<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn15" name="_ednref15">[xv]</a><br /><br />–or for Britain:<br /><br />The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked. (p. 34)<br /><br />In between, he also speaks frankly of ‘the hereditary division of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power’,<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn16" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn16" name="_ednref16">[xvi]</a>but then comes to a final judgement on the ‘double mission’:<br /><br />All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social conditions of the masses of the people…<br />The Indian will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. (p. 33)<br /><br />Three things need to be said about this judgement. First, no influential nineteenth-century Indian reformer, from Rammohun to Syed Ahmed Khan to the founders of the Indian National Congress, was to take so clear-cut a position on the issue of Indian Independence; indeed, Gandhi himself was to spend the years during World War 1 recruiting soldiers for the British Army. Second, every shade of Indian nationalist opinion as it developed after 1919 – from the Gandhian to the communist, and excluding only the most obscurantist – would accept the truth of that statement, including the idea that colonial capitalism did contribute ‘new elements of society’ in India, some of which have a very great need to be preserved. Finally, it should be of some interest to us here that Marx speaks of the ‘proletariat’ in the English context but the ‘Hindus’ (by which he simply means the inhabitants of the country) in the context of India. In other words, only five years after his hopes for a European revolution had been dashed, Marx is hoping for three things in the short run: a socialist revolution in Britain, a nationalist revolution in India, and the break-up of the caste system. Those, he thought, would be the preconditions for ‘the masses of people’ even to start reaping any sort of ‘benefit from the new elements in society’. Now, much later, India has of course become independent, but those two other issues – of class in Britain and caste in India (‘the hereditary division of labour’, as Marx put it) –are yet to be resolved; and the resolution of the class question in India doubtless passes, even today, through the caste question.<br /><br />This is hardly a ‘Romantic, Orientalist vision’. But if we do want to have some sense of what a particularly Tolstoyan version of a Romantic, Orientalist statement in the Indian situation may have been like, we need go no further then the following from Hind Savaraj, by Gandhi, the admirer of Emerson and Tolstoy and Ruskin:<br /><br />The more we indulge in our emotions the more unbridled they become…Millions will always remain poor. Observing all this, our ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures. We have managed with the same kind of plough as existed thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind of cottages that we had in former times, and our indigenous education remains the same…It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre. They, therefore, after due deliberation, decided that we should do what we could with our hands and feet…They further reasoned that large cities were a snare and a useless encumbrance and people would not be happy in them, that there would be gangs of thieves and robbers, prostitution and vice flourishing in them, and that poor men would be robbed by rich men. They were therefore satisfied with small villages.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn17" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn17" name="_ednref17">[xvii]</a><br /><br />Said has recently included Gandhi in the category of ‘prophets and priests’. I am not sure whether the above is to be read as prophecy or priestcraft, but Gandhi did write it, originally in Gujarati, in 1909. What is remarkable about this passage is that whether or not Gandhi knew it, he seems to be refuting Marx on every count. If Marx raved against the slow (‘vegetative’) pace of change in India, Gandhi admires precisely that kind of statis, while his sense of India’s eternal changelessness is much more radical than Marx could ever muster: that the Indian peasant has used the same kind of plough for ‘thousands of years’, while the education system has also remained the same, is said to be a good thing. The reason India did not have an industrial revolution (and was therefore particularly vulnerable to colonial capital, Marx might have added) is not that the antiquated systems of production and governance did not allow it, but that ‘our forefathers’, in their superior wisdom, had decided that it should be so; and we should of course follow in the footsteps of ‘our forefathers’. If Marx had debunked the mode of medieval India’s urbanization for being based upon royal courts and military encampments and conspicuous waste of the agrarian surplus, Gandhi simply denies the existence of cities in our history altogether: no cities, no thieves, robbers, prostitutes, or divisions between rich and poor; only the idyllic village community, based on ‘moral fibre’.<br /><br />Gandhi, like Marx, was an extremely complex thinker, and I have no wish to reduce him to this quotation. I should clarify, therefore, that what I am illustrating here is not Gandhism as such but a certain way of idealizing the past by eliminating all its material co-ordinates –that is to say, a certain strand of obscurantist indigenism which unfortunately surfaced in Gandhi’s thought much too frequently; which was radically opposed to the way Marx thought of these matters; and which still lives today, in many forms, under the insignia, always, of cultural nationalism and opposed, always, to strands of thought derived from Marxism.<br /><br />As a counterpoint to that kind of indigenism, it might be useful briefly to recapitulate the views of an eminent intellectual of the political Left – E.M.S. Namboodripad, who recently retired from his post as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) –and who has written precisely on these same themes. In the course of a brief intervention in a seminar on Indology, Namboodripad speaks first of ‘the kernel of truth concerning Indian society revealed by Marx’, and then goes on to say, unwittingly shedding some light on the same paragraph which Said, unknown to Namboodripad, interprets in his own way:<br /><br />Indian society had, for several centuries, remained in a stage of stagnation and decay; its destruction had come as the order of the day. Since, however, there was no internal force which could destroy the stagnant and decaying old society, the external force that appeared on the scene, the European trading bourgeoisie who came to India in the 15th and 16th centuries, particularly the most modern and powerful of them, the British trading-cum-industrial bourgeoisie, were the ‘unconscious tools of history’. Marx the revolutionary therefore did not shed a single tear at this destruction, although with his deep humanism and love for the people, he had nothing but sympathy for the Indian people who were undergoing – and hatred for the British who were inflicting – immense suffering on them.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn18" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_edn18" name="_ednref18">[xviii]</a><br /><br />Later in the same essay, having pointed out the progressive role Bhakti had played in the rise of the post-Sanskritic modern languages, Namboodripad goes on to reflect upon the overall impact of colonialism on language and literature in India:<br /><br />The efforts of the early European trading companies to popularize the Christian faith and the subsequent measures adopted by the British rulers to establish educational institutions in order to create a stratum of educated employees of the company, led to the development of a language and literature which was as popular in style as the earlier Bhakti works, but free from the limitations of the latter which was, by and large, confined to Hindu society and culture…<br /><br />The development of the world market and the slow but sure integration of the Indian village into that world market broke the self-sufficient character of India’s village society which has now become part of the growing world capitalist society…<br /><br />This naturally reflected itself in the field of literature. Eminent writers in all the languages of the rapidly-growing world capitalist system were translated into, and exercised their influence over, the new generation of Indian writers. In other words, the world of Indian literature could free itself from the shackles of the caste-ridden Hindu society and its culture only when its economic basis – the self-sufficient village with its natural economy –was shattered by the assault of foreign capitalism. (pp.42-3).<br /><br />This ‘assault’, then, contributed to the widening of cultural horizons: a ‘progressive’ role, clearly, even though one has considerable reservations about some simplification here. But Namboodripad then specifies yet another dialectic specific to colonialism: the growth, on the one hand, of a dependent, comprador intelligentsia –‘the foreign and foreign-trained intellectual elite’ who emerged as ‘the dominant force moving the new bourgeois literature and culture of India’ and were ‘interested in decrying all that was Indian…as “barbarian” and “uncivilized” –and, on the other, a ‘false nationalism’ which defended everything Indian, old and new, and relied for its arguments, ironically, upon that other body of imperialist scholarship which had taken to idealizing ‘ancient Hindu society’. The praxis of the socialist revolution is then seen, in the closing paragraphs of Namboodripad’s brief text, as the negation of the whole of that colonial dynamic, and as the precondition for ‘that final defeat of the stagnating and decadent society and culture, inherited by the Indian people fro0m their several-centuries-old development since the pre-historic tribal societies were disintegrated and class society was formed under the garb of caste society’. This formulation, too, is notable for three different emphases. Some fundamental aspects of decadence and stagnation are acknowledged to be much older than colonialism itself; these aspects are not dissolved into the comforting category of the ‘colonial legacy’. Meanwhile, colonialism itself is recognized as having come and gone without destroying ‘the stagnating and decadent society’; colonialism’s potential for constructive destruction was, after all, very limited. Finally, Namboodripad emphasizes that same tie between class and caste in India which we have noted above in the case of Marx and Ambedkar.<br /><br />What Namboodripad specifies at the end is a particular contradiction in the cultural logic of colonial capitalism: a certain democratization of language, some secularization of ideological parameters, some denting of insularity; but also, decisively, the creation of a dominant intelligentsia which merely oscillates between ideological dependence on the fabrications and sophistries of advanced capitalism on the one hand, and indigenist, frequently obscurantist nostalgia on the other. The issue he finally raises is that of agency. To what extent can even the patriotic section of the bourgeois intelligentsia, divided as it is between metropolitan theorizations and idealized indigenisms, fulfil the tasks of the very anti-imperialism it so stridently preaches? Through what location, affiliation, praxis?<br /><br />That Marx picked up some phrases from the Romantic lexicon is in fact a minor matter, and whatever injury is done to one’s national pride can easily be overcome by recalling the colourful epithets he uses for the European bourgeoisie. Two other kinds of problem are in fact much more central to what went wrong in Marx’s writings on India. The first is the issue of evidence. Modern research shows that each of the props of Marx’s general view of India –the self-sufficient village community; the hydraulic state; the unchanging nature of the agrarian economy; absence of property in land –was at least partially fanciful. Research in all these areas is still far from adequate, but the available evidence suggests that the village economy was often much more integrated in larger networks of exchange and appropriation than was hitherto realized; that the small dam, the shallow seasonal well and the local pond built with individual, family or co-operative labour were at least as important in irrigation as the centrally planned waterworks; that property in land and stratification among the peasantry was far more common than was previously assumed; and that agrarian technology was, over the centuries, not nearly as stagnant. The fact that Marx did not have this more modern research at his disposal explains the origin of his errors, but the fact that he accepted the available evidence as conclusive enough to base certain catagorical assertions on it was undoubtedly and error of judgement as well.<br /><br />But the error of judgement was also a theoretical error and a violation of the very materialist method which he did more than anyone else to establish in the sciences of the social as such. The danger in the practice of any materialism is that whereas it begins by opposing all those speculative systems of thought which make universal and categorical claims without the necessary physical evidence for the grounding of such claims, its own sustained oppositional practice tends to push it in a direction where it is impelled to assert universal laws of its own, different from those it opposes, but without sufficient evidence of its own; a materialism which does not sufficiently resist such pressure, and does not recognize the gap between the validity of a universalist aspiration and the paucity of both evidence and method that might in fact give us a universal history of all humankind, becomes speculative in its own way. The period of Marx’s work in which those journalistic pieces were drafted is riven with contrary pulls towards the most concrete engagements, as in The Eighteenth Brumaire, and brilliant but flawed speculations about a systematic, universal history of all modes of production, as in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. The drafting of Grundrisse – which Marx started after writing his 1853 articles on India, and which ranges from broad summations of transcontinental systems to the most minute movements of commodities – was in a way the transitional text. By the time he came to write Capital, the aspiration to formulate the premisses of a universal history remained, as it should have remained, but the realization grew that the only mode of production he could adequately theorize was that of capitalism, for which there was very considerable evidence as well as a largely adequate method, which he himself had taken such pains to formulate. It is from the theoretical standpoint of Capital, as much as from the empirical ground of more modern research in past history, that one can now see the brilliance, but also the error, in many a formulation about India.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[i]</a> See Orientalism, pp. 153-7, for the quotation and Said’s treatment of it.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[ii]</a> Some awareness of this fact in sections of even the British-educated intelligentsia in India is virtually as old as colonialism itself, and thus predates Marx. Criticisms of the British land settlement and revenue system are already there in Rammohun Roy and his colleagues. See for example, Rammohun’s ‘Questions and Answers on the Revenue System of India’, composed in 1832, in English Works of Rammohun Roy, vol. 3 (Calcutta 1947).Bipan Chandra’s The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (New Delhi 1966) is a convenient summary of the criticisms of the British obstruction of Indian industry and finance among the intellectuals and entrepreneurs who grew up under the shadow of 1857. Enormous evidence, too vast for convenient citation, of what I have called colonialism’s non-revolutionary resolution of the Indian crisis has accumulated since that early phase. Among the ongoing researches, see in particular A.K. Bagchi’s distinguished work on the nature of private investments, de-industrialization and structural distortions in the colonial economy in, among other writings, Private Investments in India 1900-1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) and such of his essays as ‘De-Industrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some Theoretical Implications’, Journal of Peasant Studies, January 1976 and ‘Colonialism and the Nature of ‘Capitalist’ Enterprise in India’, in Ghanshyam Shah, ed., Capitalist Development: Critical Essays (Bombay: Popular Parkashan, 1990).<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref3" name="_edn3">[iii]</a> This particular point –that Marx had equal contempt for European and non-European pre-capitalist structures – was initially made in response to Said by the Syrian intellectual Sadek el-Azm in his essay ‘Orientalism and Orientalism-in-Reverse’, Khamsin, no 8 (London: Ithaca Press, 1982)<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref4" name="_edn4">[iv]</a> Marx and Engels, On Colonialism: Articles from the ‘New York Tribune’ and other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 339<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref5" name="_edn5">[v]</a> This loyalism at the time of battle was to give rise to a fully fledged sense of guilt among that first generation of Bengali nationalists which grew up in the shadow of 1857. For a preliminary statement of the facts, see Benoy Ghosh, ‘The Bengal Intelligentsia and the Revolt’, in P.C. Joshi, ed., Rebellion 1857 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House 1957).<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref6" name="_edn6">[vi]</a> Frederick Engels, Persia and China (1857) pp. 123-4.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref7" name="_edn7">[vii]</a> Bipan Chandra, ‘Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, March 1968; reprinted in his Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman 1979). Quotation from the 1981 paperback edition, p. 43.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref8" name="_edn8">[viii]</a> It should be said, in all fairness, that the practice of speaking of ‘Marx’ on the basis of these two well-anthologized journalistic pieces is by no means peculiar to Said; it is in fact the norm. Bill Warren, whose argument is the exact opposite of Said’s, does the same thing in Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1980). For a discussion of Warren, see my ‘Imperialism and Progress’ in Ronald Chilcote and Dale Johnson, eds, Theories of Development: Mode of Production or Dependency? (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983).<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref9" name="_edn9">[ix]</a> So cursory was Marx’s knowledge of the facts and so offhand his attitude towards the journalism, that he simply lifted entire formulations from Engel’s letter of 6 June 1853, and inserted them into his own dispatch on 10 June. As luck would have it, some of those epistolary/journalistic amalgams became overly famous.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref10" name="_edn10">[x]</a> By the time Marx came to write the letter of 1881 from which we have quoted above (about ‘railways useless for Hindoos’, etc.), he had developed a great interest in the communal form of landholdings in the less industrialized countries as a possible basis for socialist transition, perhaps because it had become obvious by then that West European capital was not going to ‘transplant’ industrial society in the dependent countries like Russia and India. See, for an illuminating exploration, Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘The Peripheries of Capitalism’ (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref11" name="_edn11">[xi]</a> Harbans Mukhia, ‘Marx on Pre-Colonial India: An Evaluation’, in Diprendra Banerjee, ed., Marxian Theory and the Third World (New Delhi: Sage, 1985) pp 181-2.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref12" name="_edn12">[xii]</a> See Irfan Habib’s two fundamental essays, ‘Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis in India’, Enquiry, Monsoon 1969, pp 52-67; and ‘Potentialities of Capitalist Development in the Economy of Mughal India’, Enquiry, Winter 1971, pp. 1-56. The classic triangular debate on pre-colonial Indian formation between Mukhia, Habib and R.S. Sharma –with some contributions by others – which was triggered initially by Mukhia’s famous essay ‘Was their Feudalism in Indian History?’, is available in T.J. Byers and Harbans Mukhia, eds., Feudalism and Non-European Societies (London: Frank Cass, 1985). Marx figures only peripherally in that debate, but the clarifications which the debate provides are germane to evaluating Marx’s ideas about India.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref13" name="_edn13">[xiii]</a> See Ravinder Kumar, ‘The Secular Culture of India’, in Rasheeduddin Khan, ed., Composite Culture of India and National Integration (Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1987), pp. 353-4. The passage quoted above is immediately followed by an approving quotation from the Minute by Sir Charles Metcalfe dated 17 November 1930. Now, there is no reference to Metcalfe in Marx’s articles or letters on the subject, but it was a famous Minute and Marx very probably knew of it; what Metcalfe says is, in any case, almost identical. Ravinder Kumar is too erudite a historian not to be fully aware of this overlap, and the choice of Metcalfe appears deliberate, so that he can avoid an unnecessary controversy about Marx but make the same point.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref14" name="_edn14">[xiv]</a> Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The First Indian War of Independence: 1857-1859 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 14. Marx and Engels, in fact, composed no such book. Editors in Moscow simply put together some –not all, only some –of Marx’s journalistic pieces, personal notes and private letters, and gave the collection an inordinately imposing title.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref15" name="_edn15">[xv]</a> We should emphasize that these dispatches belong to the same period of Marx’s thought which had been inaugurated with the magisterial pronouncement in The Communist Manifesto: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ When the Manifesto was to be reprinted in 188t6, after Marx’s death, the only revision Engels proposed (but then dropped) was to add the word ‘written’ before ‘history’, so that the phrase would then be ‘the written history of all hitherto existing society’. Marx’s outrageous statement that ‘India has no history at all, at least no know history’ gets a very peculiar twist from the fact that the history of class struggles in pre-colonial India was in fact not ‘known’ at this time.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn16" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref16" name="_edn16">[xvi]</a> It is as well to recall that Ambedkar, whose portrait now hangs prominently in the hall of the Indian Parliament, was to make a much harsher judgement a century later. The Indian caste system was worse than slavery, he said, because it was ‘a system of exploitation without obligation’.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn17" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref17" name="_edn17">[xvii]</a> From Hind Savaraj in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol 10, p. 37.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn18" href="file:///D:/profiles/dbed003/Desktop/Marx%20on%20India.htm#_ednref18" name="_edn18">[xviii]</a> E.M.S. Namboodripad, ‘Evolution of Society, Language and Literature’, in Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Marxism and Indology (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1981) pp.35-44.Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1104972316203032752005-01-05T16:25:00.000-08:002005-01-05T16:52:48.820-08:00Mike Davis on the Third World<strong>Origins of the Third World
<br /></strong>
<br />By Mike Davis
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<br />
<br /><em>From Late Victorian Holocausts,</em> Chapter Nine
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<br />Verso 2001
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<br />Emaciated people, disease, ribs showing, shriveled bellies, corpses, children with fly-encircled eyes, with swollen stomachs, children dying in the streets, rivers choked with bodies, people; living, sleeping, lying, dying on the streets in misery, beggary, squalor, wretchedness, a mass of aboriginal humanity… -Harold Isaacs. <em>Scratches on our Minds: American Images of China and India.</em> New York 1958, p.273
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<br />What historians, then, have so often dismissed as “climatic accidents” turn out to be not so accidental after all. [1] Although its syncopations are complex and quasi-periodic, ENSO has a coherent spatial and temporal logic. And, contrary to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s famous (Eurocentric?) conclusion in the Times of Feast, Times of Famine that climate change is a “slight, perhaps negligible” shaper of human affairs, ENSO [El Nino/Southern Oscillation] is an episodically potent force in the history of tropical humanity.[2] If, as Raymond Williams once observed, “Nature contains, though often unnoticed an extraordinary amount of human history,” we are now learning that the inverse is equally true: there is an extraordinary amount of hitherto unnoticed environmental instability in modern history.[3] The power of ENSO events indeed seems so overwhelming in some instances that it is tempting to assert that great famines, like those of the 1870s and 1890s (or, more recently, the Sahelian disaster of the 1970s) were “caused” by El Nino, or by El Nino acting upon traditional agrarian misery. This interoperation, of course, inadvertently echoes the official line of the British in Victorian India as recapitulated in every famine commission report and viceregal allocution: millions were killed by extreme weather, not imperialism.[4] Was this true?
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<br /><strong>‘Bad Climate’ versus ‘Bad Systems’
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<br />At this point it would be immensely useful to have some strategy for sorting out what the Chinese pithily contrast as “bad climate” versus “bad system.” Y. Kueh, as we have seen, has attempted to parameterize the respective influences of drought and policy upon agricultural output during the Great Leap Forward famine of 1958-61. The derivation of his “weather index,” however, involved fifteen years of arduous research and the resolution of “a series of complicated methodological and technical problems” including a necessary comparative regression to the 1930s. Although his work is methodologically rich, his crucial indices depend upon comprehensive meteorological and econometric data that are simply not available for the nineteenth century. A direct statistical assault on the tangled causal web of the 1876-77 and 1896-1902 famines thus seems precluded.[5]
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<br />An alternative is to construct a “natural experiment”. As Jared Diamond has advocated in a recent sermon to historians, such an experiment should compare systems “differing in the presence or absence (or in the strong or weak effect) of some putative causal factor.”[6] We ideally need, in other words, an analogue for the late Victorian famines in which the natural parameters are constant but the social variables significantly differ. An excellent candidate for which we possess unusually detailed documentation is the El Nino event of 1743-44 (described as “exceptional” by Whetton and Rutherfurd) in its impact on the north China plain.[7] Although not as geographically far-reaching as the great ENSO droughts of 1876-78 or 1899-1900, it otherwise prefigured their intensities. The spring monsoon failed two years in a row, devastating winter wheat in Hebgei (Zhili) and northern Shandong. Scorching winds withered crops and farmers dropped dead in their fields from sunstroke. Provincial grain supplies were utterly inadequate to the scale of need. Yet unlike the late nineteenth century, there was no mass mortality from either starvation or disease. Why not?
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<br />Pierre-Etienne Will has carefully reconstructed the fascinating history of the 1743-44 relief campaign from contemporary records. Under the skilled Confucian administration of Fang Guancheng, the agricultural and hydraulic expert who directed relief operations in Zhili, the renowned “ever-normal granaries” in each county immediately began to issue rations (without any labor test) to peasants in the officially designated disaster counties.[8] (Local gentry had already organized soup kitchens to ensure the survival of the poorest residents until state distributions began.) When local supplies proved insufficient, Guancheng shifted millet and rice from the great store of tribute grain at Tongcang at the terminus of the Grand Canal, then used the Canal to move vast quantities of rice from the south. Two million peasants were maintained for eight months, until the return of the monsoon made agriculture again possible. Ultimately 85 percent of the relief grain was borrowed from tribute depots or granaries outside the radius of the drought.[9]
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<br />As Will emphasizes, this was famine defense in depth, the “last word in technology at the time.” No contemporary European society guaranteed subsistence as a human right to its peasantry (ming-sheng is the Chinese term), nor, as the Physiocrats later marveled, could any emulate “the perfect timing of [Guancheng’s] operations: the action taken always kept up with developments and even anticipated them.”[10] Indeed while the Qing were honoring their social contract with the peasantry, contemporary Europeans were dying in the millions from famine and hunger-related diseases following arctic winters and summer droughts in 1740-43. “The mortality peak of the early 1740s,” emphasizes an authority, “is an outstanding fact of European demographic history.”[11] In Europe’s Age of Reason, in other words, the “starving masses” were French, Irish and Calabrian, not Chinese.
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<br />Moreover, “the intervention carried out in Zhili in 1743 and 1744 was not the only one of its kind in the eighteenth century, nor even the most extensive.” [12] Indeed as Table 9.1 indicates, the Yellow River flooding of the previous year (1742-43) involved much larger expenditures over a much broader region. (In addition to the ENSO-correlated droughts and floods shown in the Table, Will has also documented seven other flood disasters that involved massive relief mobilization.) Although comparable figures are unavailable, Beijing also acted aggressively to aid Shandong officials in preventing famine during the series of El Nino droughts that affected that province (and much of the tropics) between 1778 and 1787).[13]
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<br /><strong>Table 9.1
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<br />ENSO Disasters Relieved by the Qing
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<br /></strong><em> Quinn Intensity Provinces Amount of Relief
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<br /></em>1720/21 Very Strong Shaanxi Unknown
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<br />1742/43 (Flooding) J iangsu/Anhui 17 m taels; 2.3 m shi
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<br />1743/44 Moderate+ Hebei .87 m taels; 1 m shi
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<br />1778 Strong Henan 1.6 m taels; .3 m shi
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<br />1779/80 La Nina Henan same
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<br />1785 ? Henan 2.8 m taels
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<br />Source: Constructed from Table V11, Whetton and Rutherfurd, p. 244; Table 20 Will, Bureaucracy7 and Famine, pp. 298-9.
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<br />The contrast with the chaotic late-Qing relief efforts in 1877 and 1899 (or, for that matter, Mao’s monstrous mishandling of the 1958-61 drought) could not be more striking. State capacity in eighteenth-century China, as Will an d his collaborators emphasize, was deeply impressive: a cadre of skilled administrators and trouble-shooters, a unique national system of grain price stabilization, large crop surpluses, well-managed granaries storing more than a million bushels of grain in each of twelve provinces, and incomparable hydraulic infrastructures.[14]
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<br />The capstone of Golden Age food security was the invigilation of grain prices and supply trends by the emperor himself. Although ever-normal granaries were an ancient tradition, price monitoring was a chief innovation of the Qing. “Great care was exercised by the eighteenth-century Emperors in looking over the memorials and price lists in search of inconsistencies.” On the fifth of every month hsien magistrates forwarded detailed price reports to the prefectures, who summarized them for the provincial governors who, in turn, reported their content in memorials to the central government.[15] Carefully studied and annotated by the emperors, these “vermilion rescripts” testify to an extraordinary engagement with the administration of food security and rural well-being. “In the 1720s and 1730s,” R. Bin Wong writes, “the Yongsheng emperor personally scrutinized granary operations, as he did all other bureaucratic behaviour; his intense interest in official efforts and his readiness to berate officials for what he considered failures partially explain the development of granary operations beyond the levels achieved in the late Kangxi period.” [16] Yongzheng also severely sanctioned speculation by the “rich households [who] in their quest for profit habitually remove grain by the full thousand or full myriad bushels.”[17]
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<br />His successor, Qianlong, ordered the prefects to send the county-level price reports directly to the Bureau of Revenue in Beijing so he could study them firsthand. The emperor’s intense personal involvement ensured a high standard of accuracy in price reporting and, as Endymion Wilkinson demonstrates, frequently led to significant reform.[18] This was another differentia specifica of Qing absolutism. It is hard to imagine a Louis XVI spending his evenings scrupulously poring over the minutiae of grain prices from Limoges or the Auvergne, although the effort might have ultimately saved his head from the guillotine.
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<br />Nor can we easily picture a European monarch intimately involved in the esoteria of public works to the same degree as the Qing routinely immersed themselves in the details of the Grand Canal grain transport system. “The Manchu emperors,” Jane Leonard points out, “had since the early reigns involved themselves deeply in Canal management, not just in broad questions of policy, but in the control and supervision of lower-level administrative tasks.” When, for example, flooding in 1824 destroyed sections of the Grand Canal at the critical Huai-Yellow River junction, the Tao-Kuang emperor personally assumed command of reconstruction efforts.[19]
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<br />In contrast, moreover, to later Western stereotypes of a passive Chinese state, government during the high Qing era was proactively involved in famine prevention through a broad program of investment in agricultural improvement, irrigation and waterborne transportation. As in other things, Joseph Needham points out, the eighteenth century was a golden age for theoretical and historical work on flood control and canal construction. Civil engineers were canonized and had temples erected in their honor.[20] Confucian activists like Guancheng, with a deep commitment to agricultural intensification, “tended to give top priority to investments in infrastructure and to consider the organization of food relief merely a makeshift.” Guangcheng also9 wrote a famous manual (the source of much of Will’s account) that codified historically tested principles of disaster planning and relief management: something else that has little precedent in backward European tradition.[21]
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<br />Finally, there is plentiful evidence that the northern China peasantry during the high Qing was more nutritionally self-reliant and less vulnerable to climate stress than their descendants a century later. In the eighteenth century, after the Kangxi emperor permanently froze land revenue at the 1712 level, China experienced “the mildest agrarian taxation it had ever known in the whole of his history.”[22] Dwight Perkins estimates that the formal land tax was a mere 5 to 6 percent of the harvest and that a large portion was expended locally by hsien and provincial governments.[23] Likewise, the exchange ratio between silver and copper coinage, which turned so disastrously against the poor peasantry in the nineteenth century, was stabilized by the booming output of the Yunnan copper mines (replacing Japanese imports) and the great inflow of Mexican bullion earned by China’s huge trade surplus.[24] Unlike their contemporary French counterparts, the farmers of the Yellow River plain (the vast majority of whom owned their land) were neither crushed by exorbitant taxes nor ground down by feudal rents. North China, in particular, was unprecedentedly prosperous by historical standards, and Will estimates that the percentage of the rural population ordinarily living near the edge of starvation –depending, for example, on husks and wild vegetables for a substantial part of their diet – was less than 2 percent.[25] As a result, epidemic disease, unlike in Europe, was held in check for most of the “Golden Age”.”[26]
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<br />Still, could even Fang Guancheng have coped with drought disasters engulfing the larger part of north China on the scale of 1876 or even 1899? It is important to weight this question carefully, since drought-famines were more localized in the eighteenth century, and because the 1876 drought, as we have seen, may have been a 200-year or even 500-year frequency event. Moreover, the late Victorian droughts reached particular intensity in the loess highlands of Shanxi and Shaanxi, where transport costs were highest and bottlenecks unavoidable. It is reasonable, therefore to concede that a drought of 1876 magnitude in 1743 would inevitably have involved tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of deaths in more remote villages.
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<br />Such a drought, however, would have been unlikely, as in the late nineteenth century, to grow into a veritable holocaust that consumed the greater part of the populations of whole prefectures and counties. In contrast to the situation in 1876-77, when granaries were depleted or looted and prices soared out of control, eighteenth-century administrators could count on a large imperial budget surplus and well-stocked local granaries backed up by a huge surplus of rice in the south. Large stockpiles of tribute grain at strategic transportation nodes in Henan and along the Shanxi-Shaanxi border were specially designated for the relief of the loess provinces, and an abundance of water sources guaranteed the Grand Canal’s navigability year-round.[27] Whereas in 1976 the Chinese state –enfeebled and demoralized after the failure of the Tongzhe Restoration’s domestic reforms – was reduced to desultory cash relief augmented by private donations and humiliating foreign charity, in the eighteenth century it had both the technology and political will to shift grain massively between regions and, thus, relieve hunger or a larger scale than any previous polity in world history.[28]
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<br /><strong>‘Laws of Leather’ versus ‘Laws of Iron’
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<br />What about famine in pre-British India? Again, there is little evidence that rural India had ever experienced subsistence crises on the scale of the Bengal catastrophe of 1770 under East India Company rule or the long siege by disease and hunger between 1875 and 1920 that slowed population growth almost to a standstill. The Moguls, to be sure, did not dispose of anything like the resources of the centralized Qing state at its eighteenth century zenith, nor was their administrative history as well documented. As Sanjay Sharma has pointed out, “The problems of intervening in the complex network of caste-based local markets and transport bottlenecks rendered an effective state intervention quite difficult."[29]
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<br />On the other hand, benefiting perhaps from a milder ENSO cycle, Mogul India was generally free of famine until the 1779s. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that in pre-British India before the creation of a railroad-girded national market in grain, village-level food reserves were larger, patrimonial welfare more widespread, and grain prices in surplus areas better insulated against speculation.[30] (As we have seen, the perverse consequence of a unitary market was to export famine, via price inflation, to the rural poor in grain-surplus districts.) The British, of course, had a vested interest in claiming that they had liberated the populace from a dark age of Mogul despotism: "One of the foundations of Crown Rule was the belief that…India’s past was full of depravity.”[31] But as Bose and Jalal point out, “The picture of an emaciated and oppressed peasantry, mercilessly exploited by the emperor and his nobility, is being seriously altered in the light of new interpretations of the evidence.”[32] Recent research by Ashok Desai indicates that “the mean standard of food consumption in Akbar’s empire was appreciably higher than in India of the early 1960s.”[33]
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<br />The Mogul State, moreover, “regarded the protection of the peasant as an essential obligation,” and there are numerous examples of humane if sporadic relief operations.[34] Like their Chinese contemporaries, the Mogul rulers Akbar, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb relied on a quartet of fundamental polices – embargoes on food exports, antispeculative price regulation, tax relief and distribution of free food without a forced-labor counterpart – that were an anathema to later British Utilitarians.[35] They also zealously policed the grain trade in the public interest. As one horrified British writer discovered, these “oriental despots” punished traders who shortchanged peasants during famines by amputating an equivalent weight of merchant flesh. [36]
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<br />In contrast to the Raj’s punitive taxation of irrigation and its neglect of traditional wells and reservoirs, the Moguls used tax subsidies to promote water conservation. As David Hardiman explains in the case of Gujarat: “Local officials had considerable discretion over tax assessment, and it seems to have been their practice to encourage well-construction be granting tax concessions. In the Ahmedabad region, for example, it was common to waive the tax on a ‘rabi’ crop raised through irrigation from a recently constructed well. The concession continued until the tax exemptions were held to have equaled the cost of construction.” [37]
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<br />Occasionally, the British paid appropriate tribute to the policies of their “despotic” predecessors. The first Famine Commission Report in 1880, for example, cited Aurangzeb’s extraordinary relief campaign during the (El Nino?) drought-famine of 1661: “The Emperor opened his treasury and granted money without stint. He gave every encouragement to the importation of corn and either sold it at reduced prices, or distributed it gratuitously amongst those who were too poor to pay. He also promptly acknowledged the necessity of remitting the rents of the cultivators and relieved them for the time being of other taxes. The vernacular chronicles of the period attribute the salvation of millions of lives and the preservation of many provinces to his strenuous exertions.”[38]
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<br />Food security was also probably better in the Deccan during the period of Maratha rule. As Mountstuart Elphinstone admitted retrospectively after the British conquest, “The Mahratta country flourished, and the people seem to have been exempt from some of the evils which exist under our more perfect Government.”[39] His contemporary, Sir John Malcolm, claimed that between 1770 and 1820 there had been only three very bad seasons in the Maratha lands and, though some years had been ‘indifferent,’ none had been as bad as to occasion any particular distress,”[40]D.E.U. Baker cites a later British administrative report from the Central Provinces that contrasted the desultory relief efforts of the East India Company during the droughts of the 1820s and 1830s (“a few thousand rupees”) with the earlier and highly effective Maratha policy of forcing local elites to feed the poor (“enforced charity of hundreds of rich men”).[41] Indeed, the resilient Maratha social order was founded on a militarized free peasantry and “very few landless labourers existed.” In contrast to the British-imposed raiyatwari system, occupancy rights in the Maratha Deccan were not tied to revenue payment, taxes varied according to the actual harvest, common lands and resources were accessible to the poor, and the rulers subsidized local irrigation improvements with cheap taqavi (or tagai) loans.[42] In addition Elphinstone observed, the “sober, frugal, industrious” Maratha farmers lived in generally tolerant coexistence with the Bhils and other tribal peoples. Ecological and economic synergies balanced the diverse claims of plains agriculture, pastoralism and foothill swidden.[43]
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<br />In contrast to the rigidity and dogmatism of British land-and-revenue settlements, both the Moguls and Marathas flexibly tailored their rule to take account of the crucial ecological relationships and unpredictable climate fluctuations of the subcontinent’s drought-prone regions. The Moguls had “laws of leather,” wrote journalist Vaughan Nash during the famine of 1899, in contrast to the British “laws of iron.”[44] Moreover, traditional Indian elites, like the great Bengali zamindars, seldom shared Utilitarian obsessions with welfare cheating and labor discipline. “Requiring the poor to work for relief, a practice begun in 1866 in Bengal under the influence of the Victorian Poor Law, was in flat contradiction to the Bengali premise that food should be given ungrudgingly, as a father gives food to his children.”[45] Although the British insisted that they had rescued India from “timeless hunger,” more than one official was jolted when Indian nationalists quoted from an 1878 study published in the prestigious Journal of the Statistical Society that contrasted thirty-one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia.[46]
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<br />India and China, in other words, did not enter modern history as the helpless “lands of famine” so universally enshrined in the Western imagination. Certainly the intensity of the ENSO cycle in the late nineteenth century, perhaps only equaled on three or four occasions in the last millennium, must loom large in any explanation of the catastrophes of the 1870s and 1890s. But it is scarcely the only independent variable. Equal causal weight, or more, must be accorded to the growing social vulnerability to climate variability that became so evident in south Asia, north China, northeast Brazil and southern Africa in late Victorian times. As Michael Watts has eloquently argued in his history of the “silent violence” of draught-famine in colonial Nigeria: “Climate risk…is not given by nature but…’negotiated settlement’ since each society has institutional, social, technical means for coping with risk…Famines [thus] are social crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political systems.”[47]
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<br /><strong>Perspectives on Vulnerability
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<br />Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO’s episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disasters after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries – even sometimes Creole elites, as in Brazil – perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism.
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<br />From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. “It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations,” writes Watts, “which binds households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability.” Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, “not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology.”[48] Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian “proto-third world.”
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<br />First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security. Recent scholarship confirms that it was subsistence adversity (high taxes, chronic indebtedness, inadequate acreage, loss of subsidiary employment opportunities, enclosure of common resources, dissolution of patrimonial obligations, and so on), not entrepreneurial opportunity, that typically promoted the turn to cash-crop cultivation. Rural capital, in turn, tended to be parasitic rather than productivist as rich landowners redeployed fortunes that they built during export booms into usury, rack-renting and crop brokerage. “Marginal subsistence producers,” Hans Medick points out, “…did not benefit from the market under these circumstances; they were devoured by it.” [49] Medick, writing about the analogous predicament of marginal smallholders in “proto-industrial” Europe, provides and exemplary description of the dilemma of millions of Indian and Chinese poor peasants in the late nineteenth century:
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<br />For them [even] rising agrarian prices did not necessarily mean increasing incomes. Since their marginal productivity was low and production fluctuated, rising agrarian prices tended to be a source of indebtedness rather than affording them the opportunity to accumulate surpluses. The “anomaly of the agrarian markets” forced the marginal subsistence producers into an unequal exchange relationship through the market…Instead of profiting from exchange, they were forced by the market into the progressive deterioration of their conditions of production, i.e. the loss of their property titles. Especially in years of bad harvests, and high prices, the petty producers were compelled to buy additional grain, and, worse, to go into debt. Then, in good harvest years when cereal prices were low, they found it hard to extricate themselves from the previously accumulated debts; owning to the lo9w productivity of their holdings they could not produce sufficient quantities for sale.[50]
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<br />As a result, the position of small rural producers in the international economic hierarchy equated with downward mobility, or, at best, stagnation. There is consistent evidence from north China as well as India and northeast Brazil of falling household wealth and increased fragmentation or alienation of land. Whether farmers were directly engaged by foreign capital, like the Berari khatedars and Cearan parceiros who fed the mills of Lancashire during the Cotton Famine, or were simply producing for domestic markets subject to international competition like the cotton-spinning peasants of the Boxer hsiens in western Shandong, commercialization went hand in hand with pauperization without any silver lining of technical change or agrarian capitalism.
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<br />Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade. Peasants’ lack of market power vis-à-vis crop merchants and creditors was redoubled by their commodities’ falling international purchasing power. The famous Kondratief downswing of 1873-1897 mad dramatic geographical discriminations. As W. Arthur Lewis suggests, comparative productivity or transport costs alone cannot explain and emergent structure of global unequal exchange that valued the products of tropical agriculture so differently from those of temperate farming. “With the exception of sugar, all the commodities whose price was lower in 1913 than in 1883 were commodities produced almost wholly in the tropics. All the commodities whose prices rise over this thirty-year period were commodities in which the temperate countries produced a substantial part of total supplies. The fall in ocean freight rates affected tropical more than temperate prices, but this should not make a difference of more than five percentage points.”[51]
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<br />Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the Gold Standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses – especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation – that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks. As Curzon once famously complained to the House of Lords, tariffs “were decided in London, not in India; in England’s interests, not in India’s.”[52] Moreover, as we shall see in the next chapter, any grassroots benefit from British railroad and canal construction was largely canceled by official neglect of local irrigation and the brutal enclosures of forest and pasture resources. Export earnings, in other words, not only failed to return to smallholders as increments in household income, but also as usable social capital or state investment.
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<br />In China, the “normalization” of grain prices and the ecological stabilization of agriculture in the Yellow River plain were undermined by interaction of endogenous crises and the loss of sovereignty over foreign trade in the aftermath of the two Opium Wars. As disconnected from world market perturbations as the starving loess provinces might have seemed in 1877, the catastrophic fate of their populations was indirectly determined by Western intervention and the consequent decline in state capacity to ensure traditional welfare. Similarly, the depletion of “ever-normal” granaries may have resulted from a vicious circle of multiple interacting causes over a fifty-year span, but the coup de grace was certainly aggressions against China in the 1850s. As foreign pressure intensified in later decades, the embattled Qing, as Kenneth Pomeranz has shown, were forced to abandon both their traditional mandates: abandoning both hydraulic control and grain stockpiling in the Yellow River provinces in order to concentrate on defending their endangered commercial littoral.[53]
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<br />British control over Brazil’s foreign debt and thus its fiscal capacity likewise helps explain the failure of either the empire or its successor republic to launch any antidrought development effort in the sertao. The zero-sum economic conflicts between Brazil’s rising and declining regions took place in a structural context where London banks, above all the Rothchilds, ultimately owned the money-supply. In common with India and China, the inability to politically regulate interaction with the world market at the very time when mass subsistence increasingly depended upon food entitlements acquired in international trade became a sinister syllogism for famine. Moreover in the three cases of the Deccan, the Yellow River basin and the Nordeste, former “core” regions of eighteenth-century subcontinental power systems were successively transformed into famished peripheries of a London-centered world economy.
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<br />The elaboration of these theses, as always in geo-historical explanation, invites closer analysis at different magnifications. Before considering case-studies of rural immiseration in key regions devastated by the 1870s and 1880s El Nino events or looking at the relationships among imperialism, state capacity and ecological crisis at the village level, it is necessary to briefly discuss how the structural positions of Indians and Chinese (the big battalions of the future Third World) in the world economy changed over the course of the nineteenth century. Understanding how tropical humanity lost so much economic ground to western Europeans after 1850 goes a long way toward explaining why famine was able to reap such hecatombs in El Nino years. As a baseline for understanding the origins of modern global inequality (and that is the key question), the herculean statistical labors of Paul Bairoch and Angus Maddison over the last thirty years have been complemented by recent comparative case-studies of European and Asian standards of living.
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<br /><strong>The Defeat of Asia</strong>
<br />
<br />Bairoch’s famous claim, corroborated by Maddison, is that differences in income and wealth between the great civilizations of the eighteenth century were relatively slight: “It is very likely that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the average standard of living in Europe was a little bit lower than that of the rest of the world.”[54] When the sans culottes stormed the Bastille, the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still in the Yangzi Delta and Bengal, with Lingan (modern Guangdong and Guangxi) and coastal Madras not far behind.[55] India alone produced one-quarter of world manufactures, and while its “pre-capitalist agrarian productivity was probably less than the Japanese-Chinese level, its commercial capital surpassed that of the Chinese.”[56]
<br />
<br />
<br />As Prasannan Parthasarathi has recently shown, the stereotype of the Indian laborer as a half-starved wretch in a loincloth collapses in the face of new data about comparative standards of living. “Indeed, there is compelling evidence that South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the eighteenth century and lived lives of greater financial security.” Because the productivity of land was higher in South India, weavers and other artisans enjoyed better diets than average Europeans. More importantly, their unemployment rates tended to be lower because they possessed superior rights of contract and exercised more economic power. But even outcaste agricultural labourers in Madras earned more in real terms than English farm laborers.[57](By 1900, in contrast, Romesh Chunder Dutt estimated that the average British household income was 21 times higher.)[58]
<br />
<br />
<br />New research by Chinese historians also challenges traditional conceptions of comparative economic growth. Referring to the pathbreaking work of Li Bozhong, Philip Huang notes that “the outstanding representative of this new academic tendency has even argued the overall economic of the Yangzi Delta in the Qing exceeded that of ‘early modern’ England.”[59] Similarly, Bin Wong has recently emphasized that the “specific conditions associated with European proto-industrialization – expansion of seasonal crafts, shrinking farm size, and good marketing systems – may have been even more widespread in China [and India] than in Europe.”[60] “basic functional literacy,” adds F. Mote, “was more widespread than in Western countries at that time, including among women at all social levels.”[61]
<br />
<br />
<br />Moreover, in the recent forum “Re-thinking 18th Century China.” Kenneth Pomeranz points to evidence that ordinary Chinese enjoyed a higher standard of consumption than eighteenth-century Europeans:
<br />
<br />Chinese life expectancy (and thus nutrition) was at roughly English levels (and so above Continental ones) even in the late 1700s. (Chinese fertility was actually lower than Europe’s between 1550 and 1850, while its population grew faster; thus mortality must have been low.) Moreover, my estimates of “non-essential” consumption come out surprisingly high. Sugar consumption works out to between 4.3 and 5.0 pounds per capital ca. 1750 – and much higher in some regions – compared with barely 2 pounds per capital for Europe. China circa 1750 seems to have produced 6-8 lbs. of cotton cloth per capita; its richest area, the Yangzi Delta (population roughly 31 million), probably produced between 12 and 15 lbs. per capita. The UK, even in 1800, produced roughly 13 lbs. of cotton, line and wool cloth combined per resident, and Continental output was probably below China’s.[62]
<br />
<br />
<br /><strong>Table 9.2
<br />
<br />Shares of World GDP
<br /></strong>
<br /><em> 1700 1820 1890 1952
<br /></em>
<br />China 23.1 32.4 13.2 5.2
<br />
<br />India 22.6 15.7 11.0 3.8
<br />
<br />Europe 23.3 26.6 40.3 29.7
<br />
<br />
<br />Source: Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run, Paris 1998, p.40.
<br />
<br />
<br />Pomeranz has also calculated that “the Lower Yangzi appears to have produced roughly as much cotton cloth per capita in 1750 as the UK did cotton, wool, linen and silk cloth combined in 1800 – plus an enormous quantity of silk.”[63] In addition, as Madison demonstrates, the Chinese GDP in absolute terms grew faster than that of Europe throughout the eighteenth century, dramatically enlarging its share of the world income by 1820.
<br />
<br />
<br />The usual stereotype of nineteenth-century economic history is that Asia stood still while the Industrial Revolution propelled Britain, followed by the United States and eventually the rest of Western Europe, down the path of high speed GNP growth. In a superficial sense, of course, this is true, although the data gathered by Bairoch and Maddison show that Asia lost its preeminence in the world economy later than most of us perhaps imagine. The future Third World, dominated by the highly developed commercial and handicraft economies of India and China, surrendered ground very grudgingly until 1850 (when it still generated 65 percent of global GNP), but then declined with increasing rapidity through the rest of the nineteenth century (only 38 percent of world GDP in 1900 and 22 percent in 1960).[64]
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><strong>Table 9.3
<br />
<br />Shares of World Manufacturing Output, 1750-1900 (percent)
<br />
<br /></strong><em> 1750 1800 1830 1860 1880 1900
<br /></em>
<br />Europe 23.1 28.0 34.1 53.6 62.0 63.0
<br />
<br />UK 1.9 4.3 9.5 19.9 22.9 18.5
<br />
<br />Tropics 76.8 71.2 63.3 39.2 23.3 13.4
<br />
<br />China 32.8 33.3 29.8 19.7 12.5 6.2
<br />
<br />India 24.5 19.7 17.6 8.6 2.8 1.7
<br />
<br />
<br />Source: Derived from B.R.Tomlinson, “Economics: The Periphery,” in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford 1990, p. 69 (Table 3.8).
<br />
<br />
<br />The deindustrialization of Asia via the substitution of Lancashire cotton imports for locally manufactured textiles reached its climax only in the decades after the construction of the Crystal Palace. “Until 1831,” Albert Feuerwerker points out, “Britain purchased more ‘nankeens’ (cloth manufactured in Nanking and other places in the lower Yangzi region) each year than she sold British-manufactured cloth to China.”[65] Britain exported 51 million yards of cloth to Asia in 1831; 995 million in 1871; 1413 million in 1879; and 2000 million in 1887.[66]
<br />
<br />
<br />But why did Asia stand in place? The rote answer is because it was weighted down with the chains of tradition and Malthusian demography, although this did not prevent Qing China, whose rate of population increase was about the same as Europe’s, from experiencing extraordinary economic growth throughout the eighteenth century. As Jack Goldstone recently argued, China’s “stasis” is an “anachronistic illusion that come[s] from reading history backwards.”[67] The relevant question is not so much why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in England, Scotland and Belgium, but why other advanced regions of the eighteenth-century world economy failed to adapt their handicraft manufactures to the new conditions of production and competition in the nineteenth century.
<br />
<br />
<br /><strong>Table 9.4
<br />
<br />Standing in Place: China vs. Europe (Dollars per capita GDP/population in millions)
<br /></strong>
<br /><em> Western Europe China
<br /></em>
<br />1400 430 (43) 500 (74)
<br />
<br />1820 1034 (122) 500 (342)
<br />
<br />1950 4902 (412) 454 (547)
<br />
<br />
<br />Source: Lu Aiguo, China and the Global Economy Since 1840, Helsinki 2000, p. 56 (Table 4.1 as derived from Maddison).
<br />
<br />
<br />As Marx like to point out, the Whig view of history deletes a great deal of very bloody business. The looms of India and China were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs. (Already by 1850, imposed Indian opium imports had siphoned 11 percent of China’s money-supply and 13 percent of its silver stock out of the country.)[68] Whatever the internal brakes on rapid economic growth in Asia, Latin America or Africa, it is indisputable that from about 1780 or 1800 onward, every serious attempt by a non-Western society to move over into a fast lane of development or to regulate its terms of trade was met by a military as well as an economic response from London or a competing imperial capital. Japan, prodded by Perry’s black ships, is the exception that proves the rule.
<br />
<br />
<br />The use of force to configure a “liberal” world economy (as Marx and later Rosa Luxemburg argued) is what Pax Britannica was really about. Palmerston paved the way for Cobden. The Victorians, according to Brian Bond’s calculations, resorted to gunboats on at least seventy-five different occasions.[69] The simultaneous British triumphs in the Mutiny and the “Arrow” War in 1858, along with Japan’s yielding to Perry in the same year, were the epochal victories over Asian economic autonomy that made a Cobdenite world of free trade possible in the second half of the nineteenth century. (Thailand had already conceded a 3 percent tariff in 1855).[70] The Taiping Revolution – “more revolutionary in its aims than the Meiji Restoration, insisting on gender equality and democratizing literacy” – was a gigantic attempt to revise that verdict, and was, or course, defeated only thanks to the resources and mercenaries that Britain supplied to the embattled Qing.[71]
<br />
<br />
<br />This is not to claim that the Industrial Revolution necessarily depended upon the colonial conquest or economic subjugation of Asia; on the contrary, the slave trade and the plantations of the New World were much more strategic streams of liquid capital and natural resources in boosting the industrial take-off in Britain, France and the United States. Although Ralph Davis has argued that that spoils of Plessy contributed decisively to the stability of the Georgian order in an age of revolution, the East India Company’s turnover was small change compared to the great trans-Atlantic flow of goods and capital.[72] Only the Netherlands, it would appear, depended crucially upon Asian tribute –the profits of its brutal culturrstelsel – in financing its economic recovery and incipient industrialization between 1830 and 1850.
<br />
<br />
<br />Paradoxically, monsoon Asia’s most important “moment” in the Victorian world economy was not at the beginning of the epoch, but towards its end. “The full value of British rule, the return on political investments first made in the eighteenth century,” write Cain and Hopkins in their influential history of British imperialism, “was not realised until the second half of the nineteenth century, when India became a vital market for Lancashire’s cotton goods and when other specialised interests, such as jute manufacturers in Dundee and steel producers in Sheffield, also greatly increased their stake in the sub-continent.” [73] The coerced levies of wealth from India and China were not essential to the rise of British hegemony, but they were absolutely crucial in postponing its decline.
<br />
<br />
<br /><strong>The Late Victorian World Economy
<br /></strong>
<br />During the protracted period of stop-and-go-growth from 1873 to 1896 (what economic historians misleadingly used to call the “Great Depression”), the rate of capital formation and the growth of productivity of both labor and capital in Britain began a dramatic slowdown.[74] She remained tied to old products and technologies while behind their tariff barriers German and the United States forged leadership in cutting-edge oil, chemical and electrical industries. Since British imports and overseas investment still dynamised local growth from Australia to Denmark, the potential ‘scissors” between UK productivity and consumption threatened the entire structure of world trade. It was in this conjuncture that the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries were wheeled in as unlikely saviors. For a generation they braced the entire system of international settlements, allowing England’s continued financial supremacy to temporarily coexist with its relative industrial decline. As Giovanni Arrighi emphasizes, “The large surplus in the Indian balance of payments became the pivot of the enlarged reproduction of Britain’s world-scale processes of capital accumulation and of the City’s mastery of world finance.”[75]
<br />
<br />
<br />The operation of this c crucial circuit was simple and ingenious. Britain earned huge annual surpluses in her transactions with India and China that allowed here to sustain equally large deficits with the United States, Germany and the white Dominions. True, Britain also enjoyed invisible earnings from shipping, insurance, banking and foreign investment, but without Asia, which generated 73 percent of British trade credit to 1910, Anthony Latham argues, Britain “presumably would have been forced to abandon free trade,” while her trading partners would have been forced to slow their own rates of industrialization. The liberal world economy might otherwise have fragmented into autarkic trading blocs, as it did later during the 1930s:
<br />
<br />
<br />The United States and industrial Europe, in particular Germany, were able to continue their policy of tariff protection only because of Britain’s surplus with Asia. Without that Asian surplus, Britain would no longer have been able to subsidize their growth. So what emerges is that Asia in general, but India and China in particular, far from being peripheral to the evolution of the international economy at this time, were in fact crucial. Without that surpluses which Britain was able to earn there, the whole pattern of international economic development would have been severely constrained.[76]
<br />
<br />
<br />India, of course, was the greatest captive market in world history, rising from third to first place among consumers of British exports in the quarter century after 1870.[77] “British rulers,” writes Marcello de Cecco in his study of the Victorian gold standard system, “deliberately prevented Indians from becoming skilled mechanics, refused contracts to Indian firms which produced materials that could be got from England, and generally hindered the formation of an autonomous industrial structure in India.”[78] Thanks to a “government stores policy that reserved most government purchases to British products and by the monopoly of British agency houses in organizing the import-export trade,” India was forced to absorb Britain’s surplus of increasingly obsolescent and noncompetitive industrial exports.[79] By 1910 this included two-fifths of the UK’s finished cotton goods and three-fifths of its exports of electrical products, railway equipment, books and pharmaceuticals. As a result, observes de Cecco, Britain avoided “having to restructure her industry and was able to invest her capital in the countries where it gave the highest return.” Thanks to India, “British financiers were not compelled to ‘tie’ their loans to British exports because the Imperial outlet was always available for British products.”[80]
<br />
<br />
<br />The subcontinent was equally important to the rentier strata. The climate detonated crisis of English agriculture in the late 1870s and the subsequent decline of farm output produced a sharp fall in agricultural rents in England and Wales from ₤53 million in 1876 to only ₤37 million in 1910.[81] Indian Army and civil service sinecures were accordingly famous for rescuing the fortunes of Britain’s landed aristocracy. But, as Cain and Hopkins have argued in making their case for a hegemonic “gentlemanly capitalism,” even bigger spoils were returned to the middle classes of London and the Home Counties as government-guaranteed interest on railroad debentures and Indian bonds. “This constituency of southern investors, and its institutional representatives in banking and shipping, fell in readily behind the flag of empire and gave full support to policies of free trade and sound money. If British rule in India was helpful to British industry, it was vital to British investment.”[82] As Hobsbawm points out, “not even the free-traders wished to see this goldmine escape from British control.”[83]
<br />
<br />
<br />But how, in an age of famine, could the subcontinent afford to subsidize its conqueror’s suddenly precarious commercial supremacy?[84] In a word, it couldn’t, and India was forced-marched into the world market, as we shall see, by revenue and irrigation policies that compelled farmers to produce for foreign consumption at the price of their own food security. This export drive was the hallmark of the new public finance strategy introduced by James Wilson – founder of The Economist and finance member of the Council of India – in the fist years of direct rule. The opening of the Suez Canal and the growth of steam shipping drastically reduced the transport costs of bulk commodity export from the subcontinent. As a result India’s seaborne foreign trade increased more from than eightfold between 1840 and 1886.[85] In addition to opium cultivation in Bengal, new export mono-cultures of indigo, cotton, wheat and rice supplanted millions of acres of subsistence crops. Part of this production, of course, was designed to assure low grain prices in the metropolis after the debacle of English agriculture in the 1870s. Between 1875 and 1900, years that included the worst famines in Indian history, annual grain exports increased from 3 million to 10 million tons: a quantity that, as Romesh Dutt pointed out, was equivalent to the annual nutrition of 25 million people. By the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain’s wheat consumption as well as allowing London grain merchants to speculate during shortages on the Continent.[86]
<br />
<br />
<br />But Indian agriculture’s even more decisive contribution to the imperial system, from the East India Company’s first illegal shipment of opium to Canton, was the income it earned in the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere. Especially in the 1880s and 1890s, the subcontinent’s permanent trade and current account imbalances with Britain were financed by its trade surpluses in opium, rice and cotton thread vis-à-vis the rest of Asia. Indeed England’s systematic exploitation of India depended in large part upon India’s commercial exploitation of China. This triangular trade between India, China and Britain had a strategic economic importance in the Victorian world system that transcended other far larger flows of commerce. If China generated only a tiny 1.3 percent of the total volume of world trade in the late nineteenth century, it was nonetheless immensely valuable to the British Empire, which monopolized fully 80 percent of China’s foreign trade in the 1860s and 60 percent as late as 1899. (British firms, which controlled two-thirds of coastal shipping, also took an important slice of China’ s domestic commerce.)[87]
<br />
<br />
<br />From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the East India Company had relied on opium exports from Bengal to Canton (which in 1832 earned a net profit “at least fourteen times the prime cost”) to finance the growing deficits generated by its expensive military operations on the subcontinent. By forcibly enlarging the Chinese demand for the narcotic and, thus, the taxes collected on its export, the two Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-58) and the punitive Treaty of Tianjin (1858) revolutionized the revenue base of British India. “Opium,” says John Wong, “serviced the cost of imperial expansion in India.”[88] Opium shipments from India reached a peak of 87,000 chests in 1879, the biggest drug transaction in world history.[89]
<br />
<br />
<br />This extraordinary one-sided trade – in 1868 India supplied over 35 percent of China’s imports but bought less than 1 percent of its exports – also subsidized the imports of US cotton that fueled the industrial revolution in Lancashire.[90] “The sale of Bengal opium to China,” Latham explains, “was a great link in the chain of commerce with which Britain had surrounded the world. The chain worked like this: The United Kingdom ;paid the United States for cotton by bills upon the Bank of England. The Americans took some of those bills to Canton and swapped them for tea. The Chinese exchanged the bills for Indian opium. Some of the bills were remitted to England as profit; others were taken to India to buy additional commodities, as well as to furnish the money remittance of private fortunes in India and the funds for carrying on the Indian government at home.”[91]
<br />
<br />
<br />When, after 1880, the Chinese unofficially resorted to domestic cultivation of opium (an early example of “import-substitution”) to reduce their trade deficit, British India found a lucrative new advantage in the export of factory-spun cotton yarn, which, as we shall see, had a devastating impact on Chinese folk textiles. Moreover, in the later nineteenth century Britain herself started earning a substantial surplus in the China trade for the first time. The Second Opium War – or “Arrow War” – which increased British exports to China tenfold in a single decade was the turning point.[92] Britain’s dominant role in Chinese foreign trade, built by Victorian narcotraficantes with gunboats, thus leveraged the whole free-trade imperium. “China,” summarizes Latham, “directly through Britain and indirectly through India, enable Britain to sustain her deficits with the United States and Europe on which those countries depended for export stimulus and, in the case of the United States, capital inflow to some degree.”[93]
<br />
<br />
<br />Moreover, China was forced at bayonet point to cede control over tariffs to the British inspector-general of the Imperial Customs Administration, a de facto imperial pro-consul who “came to enjoy more influence with the Foreign Office than did the British Minister in Peking.”[94] China’s growing trade deficit became intractable by 1884. “Not a single year [in the rest of the nineteenth century] showed a surplus; the average annual deficit rose to 26.6 million taels – roughly about 10 percent of the yearly total trade, but over 20 percent of the annual imports or just under 30 per cent of the annual exports.”[95] Among its traditional monopolies, tea was undercut in the world market by Indian production while Japanese silk competed with the famous brands of southern China. Unlike India, China was unable to finance any of its “consistent and growing overall deficit” via trade surpluses with a third party, nor could it siphon compensatory incomes, like Britain, from its overseas colonies. As a result, the Qing became increasingly dependent upon foreign exchange remittances from 5 million Chinese emigrants in southeast Asia, Oceania, Peru, the Caribbean and the United States.[96] Although the government publicly expressed its disgust with the coolie trade, it had little alternative but to collaborate in its expansion. The so-called “yellow peril” that English writers would help to popularize was thus a direct consequence of Asia’s increasing subsidization of faltering British hegemony. Emigrant Chinese plantation workers and railroad laborers, like Indian ryots, balanced England’s accounts on their bent backs.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><strong>Militarism and the Gold Standard
<br /></strong>
<br />In addition to being at the losing end of the imperialism of free trade, the Indian and Chinese economies were also throttled by military expenditures and the Gold Standard. In the Victorian era, no other major countries were forced to devote such excessive portions of their national income to war. India, already saddled with a huge public debt that included reimbursing the stockholders of the East India Company and paying the costs of the 1857 revolt, also had to finance British military supremacy in Asia. In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, ordinary Indians also paid for such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the sacking of Beijing (1860), the invasion of Ethiopia (1868), the occupation of Egypt (1882), and the conquest of the Sudan (1896-98). As a result, military expenditures were never less than 25 percent (or 34 percent including police) of India’s annual budget, and viceroys were constantly searching for creative ways to purloin monies for the army from other parts of the budget, even from the Famine Fund. Victorian England, on the other hand, never expended more than 3 percent of its net national product on its army and navy, a serendipitous situation that considerably diminished domestic tensions over imperialism.[97]
<br />
<br />
<br />The Chinese case, of course, was even more extreme. From 1850 to 1873 China was aflame with social and ethnic conflicts an a scale that utterly dwarfed the contemporary US War Between The States. As most historians have recognized, this carnage was largely rooted in the structural recession and increasing insecurity of existence that followed the First Opium War. The fiscal effects of epic civil war, in turn, were enormous.[98] The Taiping revolutionaries and their Triad allies for several years cut off Beijing from the revenues of half a dozen southern provinces. Nian rebels simultaneously disrupted administration in large parts of four northern provinces, while a Muslim revolt in Gansu and Shaanxi grew into a nightmarish and immensely expensive war of ethnic extermination. In the worst years, 75 percent of the imperial budget was expended on the maintenance of vast field armies (without, however, leading to real military modernization.)[99] The staggering costs of their survival forced the Qing, in Pomeranz’s phrase, to “triage” state expenditure between regions. They ultimately chose to favor the coastal cities, where customs revenues were soaring but sovereignty was must under threat, over the vast subsistence economy of inland north China. As we shall see later, their abandonment of imperial mandates for flood control and canal navigation, essential to the ecological security of the Yellow River plain, had predictably catastrophic consequences when the ENSO cycle intensified in the later nineteenth century.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />The two great nations were also victimized by the new international monetary system established in the 1870s. Although Britain adopted the Gold Standard in 1821, the rest of the world clung to either a silver standard or a bimetallic system. Supply and demand for both metals were relatively stable with only minor fluctuations in their exchange ratio. After defeating France in 1871, however, Germany shifted to gold and was soon followed by the United States, the rest of Europe and eventually Japan. Vast quantities of demonetarized silver flooded the world market, depreciating the currency of India and China, the major nations outside the hegemonic gold bloc. (India began to move to the Gold Standard after 1893.)
<br />
<br />
<br />As John McGuire has shown, the London-based Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, which financed much of the Indian trade, had the same kind of quasi-state influence over Indian monetary policy as the Manchester Chamber of Commerce enjoyed over Indian agriculture. Keeping the rupee tied to silver had obvious advantages for Britain, since the value of its exports (denominated in gold) to India increased in value while its imports (denominated in silver) declined in value. “From 1873 to 1895 the value of the rupee fell from an index value in gold of 100 to an index value of 64.”[100] Since India’s “home charges” – the annual payments to London for pensions, border wars, public debt, the secretary of state’s office, and so on – were fixed in gold, the devaluation of the silver rupee cost Indians an additional ₤105 million between 1874 and 1894.[101]
<br />
<br />
<br />Likewise it is estimated that the Gold Standard stole one-quarter of the purchasing power of the silver ornaments that constituted the savings of the common people.[102] While the gold denominated export price of Indian grains remained stable to the benefit of British consumers, their domestic cost in rupees was sharply inflated to the detriment of the Indian poor.[103] As Sir William Wedderburn pointed out: “Indian peasants in general had three safeguards against famine: (a) domestic hoards of grain; (b) family ornaments; and (c) credit with the village moneylender, who was also the grain dealer. But towards the close of the nineteenth century all were lost by the peasants.”[104]
<br />
<br />
<br />Economic historians celebrate the irony of impoverished Indians providing a flow of cheap credit to Britain. While “at every harvest season,” De Cecco writes, “Indian interest rates would shoot up to unbearable levels,” British-owned Presidency banks “received deposits from the government and from other public bodies without paying on them one anna of interest.” In addition, “The reserves on which the Indian monetary system was based provided a large masse de manoeuvre which British monetary authorities could use to supplement their own reserves and to keep London the centre of the international monetary system.”[105] Krishnendu Ray expands this point: “By preventing India from transforming its annual surpluses into gold reserves the India Office contributed towards keeping British interest rates low. English banks were able to borrow from the India Office at 2 percent and reinvest on the London market at 3 percent.”[106] Even more importantly, monetary policy was used, in Dieter Rothermund’s phrase, “to flush out India’s produce.” Until fiscal exigencies forced a partial demonetarization of silver in 1893, inflation greatly abetted the British campaign to recruit peasants to the production of export crops like wheat, indigo, opium and jute that helped balance the Empire’s accounts.
<br />
<br />
<br />At an earlier time the Dutch had adopted a deliberate method of extracting cash crops from Java by circulating a large amount of worthless copper coins. In India the British did not have to do this deliberately because by simply keeping the mints open to the free flow of depreciating silver they got practically the same result. The management of credit facilitated the extraction of cash crops. By advancing money to the peasants who grew cash crops for export the British and their agents preempted the productive capacity of India’s agriculture. The area under cash crops expanding even at times when food grain from home consumption would have fetched a better price. What was grown for export has to be rated as a cash crop in this context. The depreciation of the currency and the preemption of the productive capacity of vast parts of the country combined so as to achieve the miracle that India could export produced at “stable” export prices even at a time when severe famines tormented the country. By absorbing silver and exporting wheat at the lowest price India served as the buffer at the base of the world economy of the late nineteenth century.[107]
<br />
<br />
<br />In China’s case, the shock of the Gold Standard in the late 1870s compounded the monetary chaos inherited from the civil wars of the 1850s and 1860s. Powerless to stop the drain of silver that the British had engineered with the imposition of the opium trade , the Qing had also lost control of their domestic copper supply in the 1860s when Muslim rebels seized the famous Yunnan mines. Accordingly, Beijing had to finance its struggle for survival by issuing worthless paper money and systematically re-mining copper cash into higher denominations. The debasement of cash relative to silver created particular havoc in the Yellow River provinces where an estimated 99 percent of exchanges were in copper (versus on 30 percent in the Yangzi Delta).[108] Since land revenues were still assessed in silver, the continuing high price of the metal –as Mary Wright has emphasized – undercut the subsequent attempt of the Tongzhi restorationists in the late 1860s to reclaim the loyalty of the peasantry through an amelioration of the tax burden.[109]
<br />
<br />
<br />The conversion of world trade to the universal Gold Standard aggravated both China’s external and internal exchange crises. First of all, the international price of silver plummeted: “Within a generation, the tael had lost nearly two-thirds of its exchange value.”[110] Some mercantile elites may have benefited from the advantage that cheaper international prices gave their export, particularly tea and Shanghai cotton good. But “imports from gold-standard countries became more expensive, which was particularly serious for railway development. Foreign investment in China was also discouraged, for fear of repayment in a depreciated standard.”[111]
<br />
<br />
<br />Yet precisely because China’s growing commercial debt was financed by the outflow or “dehoarding” of silver, silver’s internal value actually rose vis-à-vis the copper coinage that circulated in village economies. The country’s shortage of gold in international trade (party compensated, as we have seen, by the reluctant export of coolie labor) was mirrored by the continuing depreciation of cash, especially in the north. There the common people were also outraged that in order to pay their taxes they had to convert their copper to silver at much higher exchange rates then the privileged gentry. A principal grievance of the Taipings in 1851, monetary instability also helped fuel the Boxer Rebellion nearly a half century later.[112]
<br />
<br />
<br /><strong>The Myth of ‘Malthusia’</strong>
<br />
<br />Forcibly imposed trade deficits, export drives that diminished food security, over-taxation and predatory merchant capital, foreign control of key revenues and developmental resources, chronic imperial and civil warfare, a Gold Standard that picked the pockets of Asian peasants: these were key modalities through which the burden of “structural adjustment” in the late Victorian world economy was shifted from Europe and North America to agriculturalists in newly minted “peripheries”. But surely we must also concede that demography –especially in India and China where partible systems of inheritance were the rule – played a major role in undermining food security in the nineteenth century.
<br />
<br />
<br />Malthus is still a potent figure among at least the older generation of economic historians. Princton’s W. Arthur Lewis, one of the leading authorities on the nineteenth-century world economy, assumed as a matter of course in an influential 1978 study that the underlying cause of famine in Victorian India was not the “drain of wealth” to England as alleged by contemporary critics, but “a large population that continued to live at subsistence level on inadequately watered marginal lands, without a profitable cash crop.”[113] Similarly, the historiography of late imperial China has been haunted by the spectre of “agricultural involution” and the so-called “high-level equilibrium trap” – both euphemisms for how the presumed population explosion of the eighteenth century squeezed arable land to the threshold of chronic famine.
<br />
<br />
<br />Recent scholarship offers a more complex picture of the relationship between demography and subsistence in Asia. (Malthus is not an issue in the cases of Brazil and Africa where land/population rations were high and labor shortages chronic until at least the middle of the twentieth century). As Charlesworth points out, “It is indisputable that land was, in absolute terms, hardly under great pressure from population in the Deccan of the early British period.” Through the 1840s, at least, “only about half of the cultivable land in most Deccan districts, according to formal British estimates, was being tilled.”[114] Although population grew rapidly in the 1850s and 1860ws, partly as a result of the cotton boom, the demographic momentum came to an abrupt halt with the catastrophe of 1876. In India as a whole during the half century between 1870 and 1920 there was only a single decade (1880s) of significant population growth. (South Asia’s percentage of world population declined from 1750 to 1900 from 23 percent to 20 percent while Europe was rising from 17 percent to 21 percent.[115]
<br />
<br />
<br />Modern case-studies corroborate the position of nationalist critics of the Raj, like G.V. Josh in 1890, who argued that “the problem of India lies not so much in the fact of an alleged overpopulation as in the admitted and patent evil of under-production.” (Josh estimated that fully half of the net savings of India was confiscated as revenue.)[116] If cultivators in the Deccan and other drought-prone regions were relentlessly pushed onto marginal lands where productivity was low and crop failure were inevitable, the culprit was less likely overpopulation then the “British land revenue system itself.” This is certainly the finding of Bagchi, who, after a careful inquisition of colonial agricultural statistics, argues that the revenue collectors’ inflexible claims on a high “average” harvest “compelled the peasants to cultivate marginal lands, and also forced them to ‘mine’ their land in a situation where most of them had few investible resources left to improve its productivity.”[117]
<br />
<br />
<br />Likewise contemporary scholars are dramatically revising the traditional image of late imperial China as a “demographic profligate”: the hopeless “Malthusia” depicted by generations of economic theorists and demographers.[118] Until recently, most scholars have accepted fragmentary evidence for an eighteenth-century population explosion that doubled or even tripled China’s 1700 population. Demographic reductionists, however, have always had difficulty explaining how population growth that was clearlyl so “Boserupian” in the eighteenth century (promoting a dynamic expansion of productive forces) could abruptly become so grimly Malthusian in the nineteenth (blocking all advances in productivity). (Esther Boserup, of course, inverted Malthus in a famous 1965 study to argue that population increase was really the motor, not the brake, of economic and social progress.)[119] Moreover, there is little evidence for any increase in demographic pressure after the end of the Qing Golden Age. As Maddison points out, China’s population was no higher in 1890 than in 1820 while per capita income was significantly lower.[120]
<br />
<br />
<br />Pomeranz, who has examined this issue in the context of north China, agrees that population pressures alone “do not explain why ecological problems greatly worsened after the mid-nineteenth century.” His study area, Huang-Yun (comprising parts of Shandong, Zhili and Henan around the intersection of the Grand Canal and Yellow River), “after the wars, floods and droughts of the 1850-80 period…did not significantly exceed its 1840s population until after 1949”![121] Moreover, the vast human losses of the Taiping revolution created a demographic vacuum in the middle and lower Yangzi that was refilled after 1864 by millions of immigrants from congested provinces, including Honan and Kiangsu.[122] Thereafter famine and epidemic, followed by war and revolution, kept population growth in north China at a minimum until 1948.
<br />
<br />
<br />Recently some experts on Qing China, led by Princeton’s F. W. Mote and Martin Heijdra, have frontally challenged the orthodox view of a population doubling or even tripling during the eighteenth century. They advance compelling arguments for a late Ming population of 250 to 275 million, rather than 150 million conventionally adopted as a baseline circa 1700 for Qing demography. This implies an annual growth rate of 0.3 percent (the same as India and less than the world average) rather than the 0.6 to 0.9 percent claimed in most histories.[123] Moderate, rather than exponential, population growth during the Golden Age would perforce revise neo-Malthusian explanations of China’s subsequent nineteenth-century crises. As Mote carefully explains:
<br />
<br />
<br />A major implication of the proposed outline of Qing population growth is that it discredits [124]what usually has been taken as the most significant demographic fact about Qing: the idea of a “population explosion” in the eighteenth century. That supposed phenomenon is given high explanatory value in relation to many social and political contexts. It, however, the population did not suddenly increase during that century, but started from a higher plateau and grew moderately, many social issues must then be otherwise explained. For example, calculations using these earlier population figures in conjunction with equally suspect Ming and Qing figures for land in cultivation show a disastrous fall in the ratio of cultivated land to consuming population: the implicit crisis in that ratio of productive land to population must be reexamined. Related views about the “optimum population” of China, perhaps in itself a suspect notion, also must be reconsidered…
<br />
<br />
<br />Rejecting demographic determinism, of course, does not mean that population regimes played no role in China’s nineteenth-century crisis. On the contrary, it is clear that the very success of agricultural intensification in the Golden Age encouraged excessive subdivision of land in many regions as well as ecologically destructive reclamations of previously uncultivated highlands and wetlands. Moreover, population growth often seems to have been concentrated in the poorest and most environmentally vulnerable areas. Local population-resource relationships will thus figure prominently in subsequent discussions of subsistence crisis and disaster vulnerability in north China. But population growth was hardly the self-acting, archimedean lever of history imagined by so many economic historians.
<br />
<br />
<br /><strong>The Irrigation Deficit</strong>
<br />
<br />As Pomeranz points out, Europe faced even more sever demographic and ecological pressures at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but was able to resolve them with the help of New World natural resources, massive colonial emigration and, eventually urban industrialization.[125] The relevant question, in other words, is less population pressure per se than why Western Europe was able to escape its incipient “high-level equilibrium trap” and Qing China wasn’t.
<br />
<br />
<br />In addition to the factors already highlighted, there is another variable that is frequently missing from historical discussions of “underdevelopment”. If (according to Pomeranz) the chief “economic bottleneck” to economic growth in Atlantic Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the inelastic supply of fiber crops and timber, in both India and China it was water. As Patrick O’Brien observes, “up to half of the populations of Asia, Africa, and South America may have subsisted on land where water supply constituted the key constraint upon increasing agricultural output.”[126] This was, or course, common sense to “Oriental despots,” and a major achievement of the Qing Golden Age, as well as of the Mogul zenith, had been high sustained levels of state and village-level investment in flood control and irrigation. As we shall see in detail, however, the nineteenth century was characterized by the near-collapse of hydraulic improvement.
<br />
<br />
<br />“Traditional water-harvesting systems,” writes David Hardiman, “disintegrated and disappeared in large parts of India during the early colonial period [and] high rates of land-tax left no surplus for the effective maintenance of irrigation systems.”[127] Despite the later development of the celebrated canal colonies of the Punjab, irrigation in British India lagged behind expansion of agriculture until Independence. In China, meanwhile, “irrigation, water storage and control, and grain storage facilities were not extended or improved beyond their eighteenth-century levels.” [128] Indeed, irrigated acreage shrank from it Qing high point of 29.4 percent of the arable in 1820 to only 18.5 percent of the arable in 1952. In Brazil’s drought-stricken Nordeste, there was no state support whatsoever for irrigation.[129]
<br />
<br />
<br />The irrigation deficit undergirded the Malthusian illusion of helpless “involution” in China and elsewhere. Whether as a result of population pressure of displacement by export crops, subsistence in all three lands was pushed onto drier, often less productive soils, highly vulnerable to ENSO cycles, without parallel improvements in irrigation, drainage or reforestation to ensure sustainability. Modern irrigation-based revolutions in agricultural productivity in northern India and north China (since 1960), as well as in the Nordeste (since 1980), only dramatize the centrality of water resources and political capacities to ensure their development to any discussion of “carrying capacity” or “demographic ceilings.”
<br />
<br />
<br />More broadly, it is clear that any attempt elucidate the social origins of late Victorian subsistence crises must integrally incorporate the relevant histories of common property resources (watersheds, aquifers, forests and pastures) and social overhead capital (irrigation and flood control systems, granaries, canals and roads}. In the case-study chapters that follow, I argue that ecological poverty –defined as the depletion or loss of entitlement to the natural resource base of traditional agriculture – constituted a causal triangle with increasing household poverty and state decapitation in explaining both the emergence of a “third world” and its vulnerability to extreme climate events.[130]
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
<br />
<br />[1] For a typically cavalier view, see Roland Lardinois, “Famine, Epidemics and Mortality in South India: A Reappraisal of the Demographic Crisis of 1876-1878,” Economic and Political Weekly 20:111 (16 March 11985), p. 454.
<br />
<br />[2] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000. Garden City, N.Y. 1971, p.119.
<br />
<br />[3] Raymond Williams, Problems of Materialism and Culture, London 1980, p.67
<br />
<br />[4] When it served their interests, of course, the British could switch epistemologies. In the case of late-nineteenth-century China, for example, the British and their allies primarily blamed Qing corruption, not drought, for millions of famine deaths.
<br />
<br />[5] Kueh, pp. 4-5.
<br />
<br />[6] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York 1997, pp. 424-5.
<br />
<br />[7] Re 1743-44: “another exceptional period in the eastern hemisphere, which corresponds with QN El Nino of 1744, although conditions were more markedly dry in the east in 1743” Peter Whetton and Ian Rutherford, “Historical ENSO Teleconnections in the Eastern Hemisphere,” Climatic Change 28 (1994) pp.243-6.
<br />
<br />[8] “The first Qing emperor envisioned ever-normal granaries in county seats, charity granaries in major towns, and community granaries in the countryside. Ever-normal granaries were to be managed by members of the magistrate’s staff, who were directed to sell, lend, or give away grain in the spring and make purchases, collect loans, and solicit contributions in the autumn” (Pierre-Etiene Will and R. Bin Wong [with James Lee, Jean Oi and Peter Perdue], Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650-1850, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 1981, p.19).
<br />
<br />[9] P-E Will, Bureaucracy and Famine, Chapters 7 and 8.
<br />
<br />[10] Ibid., pp. 86 and 189.
<br />
<br />[11] John Post, Food Shortage, Climatic Variability, and Epidemic Disease in Preindustrial Europe: The Mortality Peak in the Early 1740s, Ithaca, N.Y. 1985, p. 30.
<br />
<br />[12] Will. P.70
<br />
<br />[13] Jean Oi and Pierre-Etienne Will, “North China: Shandong During the Quianlong Period,” in Will and Wong, pp. 367-70. ENSO correlations based on Quinn chronology.
<br />
<br />[14] “Introduction,” in Will and Wong, p.21. China’s roads, on the other hand, remained miserable, and were a major obstacle to market integration as well as famine relief.
<br />
<br />[15] Endymion Wilkinson, “Studies in Chinese Price History,” Ph.D dissertation, Princeton University, 1970, pp. 122-9.
<br />
<br />[16] R. Bin Wong, “Decline and Its Opposition, 1781-1850,” in Will and Wong, p. 76.
<br />
<br />[17] Helen Dunstan, Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644-1840, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1966, p. 251.
<br />
<br />[18] Wilkinson, pp. 122-9. See also Will, “The Control Structure,” in Will and Wong, pp. 220-1.
<br />
<br />[19] Jane Leonard, “’Controlling from Afar’: Open Communications and the Tao-Kuang Emperor’s Control of Grand Canal-Grain Transport Management, 1824-26,” Modern Asian Studies 22:4 (1988), p. 666.
<br />
<br />[20] Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4. 1971, p. 376
<br />
<br />[21] Will, p. 257.
<br />
<br />[22] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation, 2nd edn., Cambridge 1996, p. 468.
<br />
<br />[23] Dwight Perkins, Agricultural Development in China, 1368-1968. Chicago 1969, p. 176.
<br />
<br />[24] Wilkinson, p. 31.
<br />
<br />[25] Will, p. 32.
<br />
<br />[26] J.G.A. Roberts, A Concise History of China, Cambridge, Mass. 1990, p. 173.
<br />
<br />[27] On the special tribute granaries at Luoyang and Shanzhou organised during the Kangxi reign, see Will and Wong, pp. 32 and 301.
<br />
<br />[28] Food security in the mid eighteenth century may have consumed 10 percent of annual Qing revenue. As Wong emphasizes, “For a state to spend such sums for this purpose on a regular basis for well over a century is likely unique the early modern world” (“Qing Granaries and Late Imperial History,” in Will and Wong, p. 477).
<br />
<br />[29] Sanjay Sharma, “The 1837-38 Famine in U.P.: Some Dimensions of Popular Action,” Indian Economic and Social History Review [IESHR] 30:3 (1993), p. 359.
<br />
<br />[30] B. Bhatia, Famines in India, 1850-1945, Bombay 1963, p. 9.
<br />
<br />[31] Darren Zook, “Developing India: The History of an Idea in the Southern Countryside, 1860-1990,” Ph.D Diss., University of California, Berkeley 1998, p. 158. The Raj was built upon mythology and hallucination. As Zook points out, the British universally attributed the ruins scattered through the India countryside to the decadence of native civilisations, when, in fact, many were direct memorials to the violence of British conquest (p. 157).
<br />
<br />[32] Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jala, Modern South Asia, Delhi 1999, p. 43.
<br />
<br />[33] Ashok Desai, “Population and Standards of Living in Akbar’s Time,” IESHR 9:1 (1972). P. 61
<br />
<br />[34] Chetan Singh, “Forests, Pastoralists and Agrarian Society in Mughal India,” in David Arnold and Raachandra Guha (eds.), Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, Delhi 1996, P. 22.
<br />
<br />[35] Habibul Kondker, “Famine Policies in Pre-British India and the Question of Moral Economy,” South Asia 9:1 (June 1986), pp. 25-40; and Kuldeep Mahtur and Niraja Jayal, Drought, Policy and Politics, New Delhi 1993, p. 27. Unfortunately, contemporary discussion of famine history before 1763 has been contaminated by Hindu-versus-Muslim bickering. See for example, the apparent anti-Muslim bias in Mushtag Kaw, “Famines in Kashmir, 1586-1819: The Policy of the Mughal and Afghan Rulers,” IESHR 33:1 (1996), pp. 59-70.
<br />
<br />[36] C Blair, Indian Famines, London 1874, pp. 8-10
<br />
<br />[37] David Hardiman, “Well irrigation in Gujarat: System of Use, Hierarchies of Control,” Economic and Political Weekly, 20 June 1998, p. 1537.
<br />
<br />[38] Commission quoted in W.R. Aykroyd, The Conquest of Famine, London 1974, p. 51; See also John Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, 1:5) Cambridge 1993, p. 163.
<br />
<br />[39] Bagchi, pp. 11-12 and 27.
<br />
<br />[40] J. Malcolm, A Memoir of Central Asia, vol. 1. London 1931, p. 7, quoted in D.E.U. Baker, Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland: The Central Provinces, 1820-1920, Delhi 1993, p. 28.
<br />
<br />[41] Baker, p. 52
<br />
<br />[42] J. Richards and Michelle McAlpin, “Cotton Cultivating and Land Clearing in the Bombay Deccan and Karnatak: 1818-1920,” in Richard Tucker and J. Richards (eds.) Global Deforestation and Nineteenth-Century World Economy, Durham 1983, pp. 71 and 74.
<br />
<br />[43] ibid
<br />
<br />[44] Vaughan Nash, The Great Famine and Its Causes, London 1900, p. 92.
<br />
<br />[45] Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, p. 59.
<br />
<br />[46] C.Walford, “The Famines of the World: Past and Present,” Journal of the Statistical Society 41:13 (1878), pp. 434-42. I cite Walford elsewhere from the expanded 1879 book version of this article.
<br />
<br />[47] Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria, Berkeley 1983, pp. 462-3. This “negotiation,” or course, is two-sided and must include climate shock as an independent variable.
<br />
<br />[48] Watts, pp. 267 and 464.
<br />
<br />[49] Hans Medick, “The Proto-Industrial Family Economy and the Structures and Function of Population Development under the Proto-Industrial System,” in P. Kriedte et al. (eds.), Industrialisation Before Industrialisation, Cambridge 1981, p. 45.
<br />
<br />[50] Ibid., pp. 44-5
<br />
<br />[51] W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, p. 189
<br />
<br />[52] Cited in Clive Dewey, “The End of the Imperialism of Free Trade,” p. 35.
<br />
<br />[53] Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937, Berkeley 1993.
<br />
<br />[54] Paul Bairoch, “The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities Since the Industrial Revolution,” in Paul Bairoch and Maurice Levy-Leboyer (eds.) Disparities in Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution, London 1981, p.7.
<br />
<br />[55] Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750-1980,” in Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982), p. 107.
<br />
<br />[56] Fritjof Tichelman, The Social Evolution of Indonesia, The Hague 1980, p. 30
<br />
<br />[57] Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in Eighteenth-Century Britain and South India,” Past and Present 158 (Feb. 1998), pp. 82-7 and 105-6.
<br />
<br />[58] Dutt, cited in Eddy, p. 21
<br />
<br />[59] Philip Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988, Stanford, Calif. 1990.
<br />
<br />[60] R. Bin Wong, p. 38.
<br />
<br />[61] F.W. Mote, Imperial China, 900-1800, Cambridge, Mass. 1999, p. 941.
<br />
<br />[62] Kenneth Pomeranz, “A High Standard of Living and Its Implications,” contribution to “E.H.R. Forum: Re-Thinking 18th century China,” Internet, 19 Nov. 1997.
<br />
<br />[63] Pomeranz, “Two Worlds of Trade, Two Worlds of Empire: European State-Making and Industrialization in a Chinese Mirror,” in David Smith et al., States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy, London 1999, p. 78.
<br />
<br />[64] See S. Patel, “The Economic Distance Between Nations: Its Origin, Measurement and Outlook, Economic Journal, March 1964. (There is some discrepancy between his figures for the aggregate non-European world and the later estimates of Bairoch and Maddison.)
<br />
<br />[65] Albert Feuerwerker, The Chinese Economy, 1870-1949, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1995, pp. 32-3.
<br />
<br />[66] Paul Bairoch, “Geographical Structure and Trade Balance of European Foreign Trade, from 1800-1970.” Journal of European Economic History 3:3 (Winter 1978), p 565. Ch’en cites 1866 as the beginning of the serious penetration of imported textiles into China (p. 64).
<br />
<br />[67] Jack Goldstone, “Review of David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” Journal of World History 2:1 (Spring 2000), p. 109.
<br />
<br />[68] Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy, London 1999, p. 98
<br />
<br />[69] Brian Bond, Victorian Military Campaigns, London 1967, pp. 309-11.
<br />
<br />[70] See O’Rourke and Williamson, pp. 53-4
<br />
<br />[71] Historians traditionally contrast the Meiji and Tanzhand restorations, but as Goldstone suggests, the more significant comparison is between the Taipings and Japan. “What if China’s old imperial regime, like Japan’s, had collapsed in the mid nineteenth century, and not fifty years later, what then? What if the equivalent of Chiang Kai-shek’s new model army had begun formation in the 1860s and not the 1920s? Would Japan still have been able to colonize Korea and Taiwan? What would have been the Asian superpower?” (Goldstone, ibid).
<br />
<br />[72] “Indian wealth supplied the funds that bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others, first temporarily in the interval of peace between 1763 and 1774, and finally after 1783, leaving Britain nearly free from overseas indebtedness when it came to face the great French wars from 1793” (Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade, Leicester 1979, pp. 55-6.
<br />
<br />[73] P. Cain and A. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-11914, London 1994, p. 263.
<br />
<br />[74] For a recent review, see Young Goo-Park, “Depression and Capital Formation: The UK and Germany, 1873-96,” Journal of European Economic History 26:3 (Winter 1997), especially pp. 511 and 516.
<br />
<br />[75] Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, London 1994, p. 263.
<br />
<br />[76] A. Latham, The International Economy and the Underdeveloped World, 1865-1914, London 1978, p. 70. Latham it should be noted, is notoriously apologistic for British colonialism in India, arguing that the subcontinent’s “relatively low growth overall is due largely to climatic factors, not to any deleterious effect of British colonial policy.” (See A. Latham, “Asian Stagnation: Real or Relative?”, in Derek Alcroft and Ross Catterall (eds.), Rich Nations-Poor Nations: The Long-Run Perspective, Cheltenham 1996, p. 109).
<br />
<br />[77] Robin Moore, “Imperial India, 1853-1914,” in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford 1999, p. 441.
<br />
<br />[78] Marcello de Cecco, The International Gold Standard: Money and Empire, New York 1984, p. 30.
<br />
<br />[79] Ravi Palat, et al., “Incorporation of South Asia,” p. 185. According to these authors, the apparent exceptions to Indian deindustrialization in fact proved the rule: cotton spinning was integral to the production of an export surplus from the China trade while jute manufacture was an “island of British capital…initiated, organized, and controlled by British civil servants and merchants” (p. 186).
<br />
<br />[80] Ibid., pp. 37-8.
<br />
<br />[81] J. Stamp, British Incomes and Property, London 1916, p. 36.
<br />
<br />[82] Cain and Hopkins, pp. 338-9.
<br />
<br />[83] Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain sine 1750, London 1968, p. 123.
<br />
<br />[84] The same question, of course, could be asked of Indonesia, which in the late nineteenth century generated almost 9 percent of the Dutch national domestic product. See Angus Maddison, “Dutch Income in and from Indonesia, 1700-1838,” Modern Asian Studies 23:4 (1989), p. 647.
<br />
<br />[85] Eric Stokes, “The First Century of British Colonial Rule in India: Social Revolution or Social Stagnation?” Past and Present 58 (Feb. 1873), p. 151.
<br />
<br />[86] Dietmar Rothermund, An Economic History of India, New York 1988, p. 36; Dutt, Open Letters, p. 48.
<br />
<br />[87] Lu Aiguo, China and the Global Economy Since 1840, Helsinki 2000, pp. 34, 37, 39 (Table 2.4).
<br />
<br />[88] J. W. Wong Deadly Dreams: Opium and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China, Cambridge 1998, pp. 390 and 396. The British tea imports from China, which opium also financed, were the source of the lucrative tea duty that by mid-century almost compensated for the cost of the Royal Navy (pp. 350-355).
<br />
<br />[89] Lu Aiguo, p. 36.
<br />
<br />[90] Latham, The International Economy, p. 90. India (including Burma) also earned important income from rice exports to the Dutch East Indies.
<br />
<br />[91] Ibid., pp. 409-10. See also M. Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, Cambridge 1951, p. 15.
<br />
<br />[92] Latham, pp. 453-4.
<br />
<br />[93] Ibid., pp. 81-90. After Japan’s victory in 1895, however, its textile exports began to crowd India and Britain out of the Chinese market (p. 90).
<br />
<br />[94] Cain and Hopkins, p. 425.
<br />
<br />[95] Jerome Ch’en, State Economic Policies of the Ch’ing Government, 1840-1895, New York 1980, p. 116.
<br />
<br />[96] Latham, ibid.
<br />
<br />[97] John Hobson, “The Military-Extraction Gap and the Wary Titan: The Fiscal Sociology of British Defense Policy, 1970-1913,” Journal of European Economic History 22:3 (Winter 1993), p. 480.
<br />
<br />[98] Historians have yet to address Chi-ming Hou’s complaint in 1963 that “no serious studies have ever been made of the effects of such wars on the Chinese economy” (Some Reflections on the Economic History of Modern China, 1840-1949,” Journal of Economic History 23:4 [Dec. 1963], p. 603.
<br />
<br />[99] Bohr, p. 24.
<br />
<br />[100] Michelle McAlpin, “Price Movements and Fluctuations in Economic Activity,” in Dumar (ed.), Cambridge Economic History of India, p. 890.
<br />
<br />[101] John McGuire, “The World Economy, the Colonial State, and the Establishment of the Indian National Congress,” in I. Shepperson and Colin Simons (eds.), The Indian National Congress and the Political Economy of India, 1885-1985, Avebury 1988, p. 51.
<br />
<br />[102] Nash, p. 88
<br />
<br />[103] McAlpin, “Price Movements,” ibid.
<br />
<br />[104] Bandyopadhyay, Indian Famine, p. 130.
<br />
<br />[105] De Cecco, pp. 62 and 74. “[Indians] considered fiscal pressure to be unduly high, in view of the fact that the Indian government’s budget was every year in surplus and the country had a trade surplus year after year; in addition to which the government had a substantial credit balance.” (p. 74).
<br />
<br />[106] Krishnendu Ray, “Crises, Crashes and Speculation,” Economic and Political Weekly (30 July 1994), pp. 92-3. By 1913 the Government of India’s account in London was ₤136 million (ibid.).
<br />
<br />[107] Deiter Rothermund, “The Monetary Policy of British Imperialism, “IESHR 7 (1970), pp. 98-9.
<br />
<br />[108] Wilkinson, pp. 34, 41-3, 52.
<br />
<br />[109] Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism, p. 166.
<br />
<br />[110] Ch’en, p. 120.
<br />
<br />[111] Aiguo, p. 48.
<br />
<br />[112] Wilkinson, pp. 34, 41-3, 52.
<br />
<br />[113] Lewis, p. 216.
<br />
<br />[114] Charlesworth, pp. 13 and 22.
<br />
<br />[115] Tomlinson, “Economics: The Periphery,” p. 68 (Table 3.7).
<br />
<br />[116] Quoted in Bipan Chandra, “Colonial India: British versus Indian Views of Development,” Review 14:1 (Winter 1991), p. 102.
<br />
<br />[117] Bagchi, p. 27.
<br />
<br />[118] William Lavely and R. Bin Wong, “Revising the Malthusian Narrative: The Comparative Study of Population Dynamics in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 57:3 (Aug. 1998), pp.714-48.
<br />
<br />[119] Esther Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure, Chicago 1967.
<br />
<br />[120] Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run, Paris 1998, p. 39. See also Zhang Kaimin, “The Evolution of Modern Chinese Society from the Perspective of Population Changes, 1840-1949,” in Frederic Wakeman and Wang Xi (eds.) China’s Quest for Modernisation: A Historical Perspective, Berkeley 1997.
<br />
<br />[121] Pomeranz, p. 121.
<br />
<br />[122] Gernet, p. 560.
<br />
<br />[123] Martin Heijdra, “The Socio-Economic Development of Ming Rural China (1368-1644),” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University 1884, pp. 50-56; and Mote, pp. 903-6.
<br />
<br />[124] Mote, p. 906.
<br />
<br />[125] Pomeranz, “Two Worlds of Trade,” pp. 81-3.
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<br />[126] Patrick O’Brien, “Intercontinental Trade and Third World Development,” Journal of World History (Spring 1997), p. 91.
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<br />[127] Hardiman, “Well Irrigation in Gujarat,” p. 1533. He is characterizing the conclusions of Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems Delhi 1997).
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<br />[128] Feuerwerker, p. 21
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<br />[129] Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance, p. 30.
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<br />[130] As the geographer Joshua Muldavin has emphasized, economic and ecological poverty are not equivalent: Households with identical levels of economic poverty can have extremely different levels of vulnerability to climatic instability or disaster (“Village Strategies for Maintaining Socio-Ecological Security in the post-Mao Era,” unpublished paper, UCLA Department of Geography, 1998).
<br />Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1103094921951553582004-12-14T23:14:00.000-08:002004-12-14T23:15:21.950-08:00Lenin on ReligionLenin on Religion
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<br />Socialism and Religion
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<br />Written: approx. December 3, 1905
<br />First Published: Nozvaya Zhizn (No. 28), December 3, 1905
<br />Source: Collected Works Volume 10, p. 83-87
<br />Transcription\Markup: Brian Basgen
<br />Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
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<br /> Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the "free" workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are "entitled" only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.
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<br />The economic oppression of the workers inevitably calls forth and engenders every kind of political oppression and social humiliation, the coarsening and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses. The workers may secure a greater or lesser degree of political liberty to fight for their economic emancipation, but no amount of liberty will rid them of poverty, unemployment, and oppression until the power of capital is overthrown. Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.
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<br />But a slave who has become conscious of his slavery and has risen to struggle for his emancipation has already half ceased to be a slave. The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.
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<br />Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen's religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies. These should become absolutely free associations of like minded citizens, associations independent of the state. Only the complete fulfillment of these demands can put an end to the shameful and accursed past when the church lived in feudal dependence on the state, and Russian citizens lived in feudal dependence on the established church, when medieval, inquisitorial laws (to this day remaining in our criminal codes and on our statute-books) were in existence and were applied, persecuting men for their belief or disbelief, violating men's consciences, and linking cosy government jobs and government-derived incomes with the dispensation of this or that dope by the established church. Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church.
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<br />The Russian revolution must put this demand into effect as a necessary component of political freedom. In this respect, the Russian revolution is in a particularly favorable position, since the revolting officialism of the police-ridden feudal autocracy has called forth discontent, unrest and indignation even among the clergy. However abject, however ignorant Russian Orthodox clergymen may have been, even they have now been awakened by the thunder of the downfall of the old, medieval order in Russia. Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the "servants of God". We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition, in which case you evidently still cling to your cosy government jobs and government-derived incomes, in which case you evidently do not believe in the spiritual power of your weapon and continue to take bribes from the state. And in that case the class-conscious workers of all Russia declare merciless war on you.
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<br />So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.
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<br />If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party?
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<br />The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats.
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<br />Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.["Fluchtlings-Literatur", Volksstaat (No. 73) June 22, 1874)]
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<br />But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an "intellectual" question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.
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<br />That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various "Christians". But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow the forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development.
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<br />Everywhere the reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now beginning to concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious strife ? in order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the really important and fundamental economic and political problems, now being solved in practice by the all-Russian proletariat uniting in revolutionary struggle. This reactionary policy of splitting up the proletarian forces, which today manifests itself mainly in Black-Hundred pogroms, may tomorrow conceive some more subtle forms. We, at any rate, shall oppose it by calmly, consistently and patiently preaching proletarian solidarity and the scientific world-outlook ? a preaching alien to any stirring up of secondary differences.
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<br />The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.
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<br />Collected Works Volume 10 <../../cw/volume10.htm>
<br />Collected Works Table of Contents <../../cw/index.htm>
<br />Lenin Works Archive <../../index.htm>
<br />Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9588906.post-1103019971711755702004-12-14T02:23:00.000-08:002004-12-14T02:26:11.710-08:00Leon Trotsky on General KornilovTrotsky reporting on Kornilov's insurrection and its defeat by the soviets.
<br />Chapters 9 and 10 of History of the Russian Revolution.
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<br />CHAPTER IX
<br />KORNILOV’S INSURRECTION
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<br />"As early as the beginning of August, Kornilov had ordered the transfer of the Savage Division and the 3rd Cavalry Corps from the South-Western front to the sector of the railroad triangle, Nevel-Novosokolniki-Velikie Luie, the most advantageous base for the an attack on Petrograd - this under the guise of reserves for the defence of Riga. At the same time the commander-in-chief had concentrated one Cossack division in the region between Vyborg and Byeloostrov. This first thrust into the very face of the capital –from Byeloostrov to Petrograd is only thirty kilometres! –was given out as a preparation of reserves for possible operations in Finland. Thus even before the Moscow Conference four cavalry divisions had been moved into position for the attack on Petrograd, and these were the divisions considered most useful against Bolsheviks. Of the Caucasian division it was customary in Kornilov's circle to remark: "Those mountaineers don't care whom they slaughter." The strategic plan was simple. The three divisions coming from the south were to be transported by railroad to Tsarskoe Selo, Gatchina, and Krasnoe Selo, in order from those points "upon receiving information of disorders beginning in Petrograd, and not later than the morning of September 1" to advance on foot for the occupation of the southern part of the capital on the left bank of the Neva. The division quartered in Finland was at the same time to occupy the northern part of the capital.
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<br />Through the mediation of the League of Officers Kornilov had got in touch with Petrograd patriotic societies who had at their disposal, according to their own words, 2,000 men excellently armed but requiring experienced officers to lead them. Kornilov promised to supply commanders from the front under the pretext of leave-of-absence. In order to keep watch of the mood of the Petrograd workers and soldiers and the activity of revolutionists, a secret intelligence service was formed, at the head of which stood a colonel of the Savage Division, Heiman. The affair was conducted within the framework of military regulations. The conspiracy made use of the headquarters' apparatus.
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<br />The Moscow Conference merely fortified Kornilov in his plans. Miliukov, to be sure, according to his own story, recommended a delay on the ground that Kerensky still enjoyed a certain popularity in the provinces. But this kind of advice could have no influence upon the impatient general. The question after all was not about Kerensky, but about the soviets. Moreover, Muliukov was not a man of action, but a civilian, and still worse a professor. Bankers, industrialists, Cossack generals were urging him on. The metropolitans had given him their blessing. Orderly Zavoiko offered to guarantee his success. Telegrams of greeting were coming from all sides. The Allied embassies took an active part in the mobilisation of the counter-revolutionary force. Sir G. Buchanan held in his hands many of the threads of the plot. The military attaches of the Allies at headquarters assured him of their most cordial sympathies. "The British attache in particular," testifies Denikin, "did this in a touching form." Behind the embassies stood their governments. In a telegram of August 23, a commissar of the Provisional Government abroad, Svatikov, reported from Paris that in a farewell reception the Foreign Minister Ribot had "inquired with extraordinary eagerness who among those around Kerensky was a man of force and energy." And President Poincare had "asked many questions...about Kornilov." All this was known at headquarters. Kornilov saw no reason to postpone and wait. On or about the 20th, two cavalry divisions were advanced further in the direction of Petrograd. On the day Riga fell, four officers from each regiment of the army were summoned to headquarters, about 4,000 in all, "for the study of English bomb-throwing." To the most reliable of these officers it was immediately explained that the matter in view was to put down "Bolshevik Petrograd" once and for all. On the same day an order was given from headquarters to supply two of the cavalry division with several boxes of hand grenades: they would be the most useful in street fighting. "It was agreed," writes the chief-of-staff, Lukomsky, "that everything should be ready by the 26th of August."
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<br />As the troops of Kornilov approached Petrograd an inside organisation "was to come out of Petrograd, occupy Smolny Institute and try to arrest the Bolshevik chiefs." To be sure in Smolny Institute the Bolshevik chiefs appeared only at meetings, wheras continually present there was the Executive Committee which had appointed the ministers, and continued to number Kerensky among its vice-presidents. But in a great cause it is not possible or necessary to observe the fine point of things. Kornilov at least did not bother about them. "It is time," he said to Lukomsky, "to hang the German agents and spies, Lenin first of all, and disperse the Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies - yes, and disperse it so it will never get together again."
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<br />Kornilov firmly intended to give the command of the operations to Krymov, who in his own circles enjoyed the reputation of a bold and resolute general. "Krymov was at that time happy and full of the joy of life," says Denikin, "and looked with confidence on the future." At headquarters they looked with confidence upon Krymov. "I am convinced," said Kornilov, "that he will not hesitate, if need arises, to hand the whole membership of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies." The choice of this general, so happy and full of the joy of life, was consequently most appropriate.
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<br />At the height of these labours, which drew attention from the German front, Savinkov arrived at headquarters in order to dot the i's of an old agreement, and introduce some secondary changes into it. Savinkov named the same date for the blow against the common enemy as that which Kornilov had long ago designated for his action against Kerensky: the semi-anniversary of the revolution. In spite of the fact that the conspiracy had split into two halves, both sides were trying to operate with the common elements of the plan -Kornilov for the purpose of camouflage, Kerensky in order to support his own illusions. The proposal of Savinkov played perfectly in the hands of headquarters: the government had presented its head, and Savinkov was ready to slip the noose. The generals at headquarters rubbed their hands: "He's biting!" they exclaimed like happy fishermen. Kornilov was quite ready to make the proposed concessions, which cost him nothing. What difference will the non-subordination of the Petrograd garrison to headquarters make, once the Kornilov troops have entered the capital? Having agreed to the other two conditions, Kornilov immediately violated them: the Savage Division was placed in the vanguard and Krymov at the head of the whole operation. Kornilov did not consider it necessary to choke on the gnats.
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<br />The Bolsheviks debated the fundamental problems of their policy openly: a mass party cannot do otherwise. The government and headquarters could not but know that the Bolsheviks were restraining the masses, and not summoning them to action. But as the wish is father to the thought, so political needs become the basis for a prognosis. All the ruling classes were talking about an impending insurrection because they were in desperate need of one. The date of the insurrection would approach or recede a few days from time to time. In the War Ministry - that is, in the office of Savinkov - according to the press, the impending insurrection was regarded "very seriously." Rech stated that the Bolshevik faction of the Petrograd Soviet was assuming the responsibility for the attack. Miliukov was to such an extent involved in this matter of the pretended insurrection of the Bolsheviks in his character of politician, that he has considered it a matter of honour to support the tale in his character of historian. "In subsequently published documents of the Intelligence Service," he writes, "new assignments of German money for Trotsky's enterprise relate to exactly this period." The learned historian, together with the Russian Intelligence Service, forgets that Trotsky - whom the German staff for the convenience of Russian patriots was kind enough to mention by name - was "exactly at this period," from 23rd July to the 4th September, locked up in prison. The fact that the earth's axis is merely an imaginary line does not of course prevent the earth from rotating on its axis. In like manner the Kornilov operations rotated round an imaginary insurrection of the Bolsheviks as round its own axis. That was amply sufficient for the period of preparation. But for the denouement something a little more substantial was needed.
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<br />One of the leading military conspirators, the officer Vinberg, revealing in his interesting notes what was going on behind the scenes in this business, wholly confirms the assertion of the Bolsheviks that a vast work of military provocation was in progress. Even Muliukov is obliged, under the whip of facts and documents, to admit that "the suspicions of the extreme left circles were correct: agitation in the factories was undoubtedly one of the tasks which the officers' organisations were supposed to fulfil." But even this did not help: "The Bolsheviks," complains the same historian, decided "not to be put upon," and the masses did not intend to go out without the Bolsheviks. However, even this obstacle had been taken into consideration in the plan, and paralysed as it were in advance. The "republican centre," as the leading body of the conspirators in Petrograd was called, decided simply to replace the Bolsheviks. The business of imitating a revolutionary insurrection was assigned to the Cossack colonel, Dutov. In January 1918, Dutov, to a question from his political friends: "What was to have happened on the 28th of August, 1917?" answered as follows (the quotation is verbatim): "Between the 28th of August and the 2nd of September I was to take action in the form of a Bolshevik insurrection." Everything had been foreseen. This plan had not been laboured over by the officers of the general staff for nothing.
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<br />Kerensky, on his side, after the return of Savinkov from Moghiliev, was inclined to think that all misunderstandings had been removed, and that headquarters was entirely drawn into his plan. "There were times," writes Stankevich, "when all those active not only believed they were all acting in the same direction, but that they had a like conception of the very methods of action." Those happy moments did not last long. An accident occurred, which like all historic accidents opened the sluice-gates of necessity. To Kerensky came the Octobrist, Lvov, a member of the first Provisional Government - that same Lvov who as the expansive Procuror of the Holy Synod had reported that this institution was filled with "idiots and scoundrels." Fate had allotted to Lvov the task of discovering that under the appearance of a single plan there were in reality two plans, one of which was directed in a hostile manner against the other.
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<br />In his character as an unemployed but word-loving politician, Lvov had taken part in endless conversations about the transformation of the government and the salvation of the country - now at headquarters, now in the Winter Palace. This time he appeared with a proposal that he be permitted to mediate in the transformation of the cabinet along national lines, incidentally frightening Kerensky in a friendly manner with the thunders and lightenings of a discontented headquarters. The disturbed Minister-President decided to make use of Lvov in order to test the loyalty of the staff - and at the same time, apparently, that of his accomplice, Savinkov. Kerensky expressed his sympathy for the plan of a dictatorship - in which he was not hypo-critical - and encouraged Lvov to undertake further mediations - in which there was military trickery.
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<br />When Lvov again arrived at headquarters, weighed down now with the credentials of Kerensky, the generals looked upon his mission as a proof that the government was ripe for capitulation. Only yesterday Kerensky through Savinkov had promised to carry out the programme of Kornilov if defended by a corps of Cossacks; today Kerensky was already proposing to the staff a co-operative transformation of the government. “It is time to put a knee in his stomach.” The generals justly decided. Kornilov accordingly explained to Lvov that since the forthcoming insurrection of the Bolsheviks has as its aim “the overthrow of the Provisional Government, peace with Germany, and the surrender to her by the Bolsheviks of the Baltic fleet,” there remains no other way out but “the immediate transfer of power by the Provisional Government into the hands of the supreme commander-in-chief.” To this Kornilov added: “…no matter who he may be”–but he had no idea of surrendering his place to anybody. His position had been fortified in advance by the oath of the Cavaliers of St. George, the League of Officers and the Council of the Cossack army. In order to make sure of the “safety” of Kerensky and Savinkov from the hands of the Bolsheviks, Kornilov urgently requested them to come to headquarters and place themselves under his personal protection. The orderly, Zavoiko, gave Lvov an unequivocal hint as to just what this protection would consist of.
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<br />Returning to Moscow, Lvov fervently urged Kerensky, as a “friend,” to agree to the proposal of Kornilov “in order to save the lives of the members of the Provisional Government, and above all his own life.” Kerensky could not but understand at last that his political playing with the idea of dictatorship was taking a serious turn, and might end most unfortunately for him. Having decided to act, he first of all summoned Kornilov to the wire in order to verify the facts: Had Lvov correctly conveyed his message? Kerensky put his questions, not only in his name, but in the name of Lvov, although the latter was not present during the conversations. “Such and action,” remarks Martynov, “appropriate for a detective, was of course improper for the head of a government.” Kerensky spoke of his arrival at headquarters the next day as a thing already decided upon. This whole dialogue on the direct wire seems incredible. The democratic head of the government and the “republican” general converse about yielding the power the one to the other, as though they were discussing a berth in a sleeping car!
<br />
<br />Miliukov is entirely right when he sees in the demand of Kornilov that the power be transferred to him, merely “ a continuation of all those conversations openly begun long ago about a dictatorship, a reorganisation of the government, etc.” But Miliukov goes too far when he tries upon this basis to present the thing as though there had been in essence no conspiracy at headquarters. It is indubitable that Kornilov could not have presented his demand through Lvov, if he had not formerly been in a conspiracy with Kerensky. But this does not alter the fact that with one conspiracy –the common one –Kornilov was covering up another –his own private one. At the same time that Kerensky and Savinkov were intending to clean up the Bolsheviks, and in part the soviets, Kornilov was intending also to clean up the Provisional Government. It was just this that Kerensky did not want.
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<br />For several hours on the evening of the 26th, headquarters was actually in a position to believe that the government was going to capitulate without a struggle. But that does not mean that there was no conspiracy; it merely means that the conspiracy seemed about to succeed. A victorious conspiracy always finds ways of legalising itself. “I saw General Kornilov after this conversation,” says Trubetskoy, a diplomat who represented the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at headquarters. “A sigh of relief lifted his breast, and to my question, ‘This means that the government is coming to meet you all along the line?’ he answered: ‘Yes’” Kornilov was mistaken. It was at that very moment that the government, in the person of Kerensky, had stopped coming to meet him.
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<br />Then headquarters has its own plans? Then it is not a question of dictatorship in general, but of a Kornilov dictatorship? To him, to Kerensky, they are offering as if in mockery that post of Minister of Justice? Kornilov has actually been so imprudent as to make this suggestion through Lvov. Confusing himself with the revolution, Kerensky shouted out to the Minister of Finance, Nekrassov: “I won’t hand over the revolution to them!” And the disinterested friend, Lvov, was immediately arrested and spent a sleepless night in the Winter Palace with two sentries at his feet, listening through the wall with a grinding of his teeth to “the triumphant Kerensky in the next room, the room of Alexander 111, happy at the successful progress of his affairs and endlessly singing a roulade from an opera.” During those hours Kerensky experienced an extraordinary afflux of energy.
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<br />Petrograd in those days was living in a two-fold state of alarm. The political tension, purposely exaggerated by the press, contained the material of an explosion. The fall of Riga had brought the front nearer. The question of evacuating the capital, raised by the events of the war long before the fall of the monarchy, now came up with new force. Well-to-do people were leaving town. The flight of the bourgeoisie was caused far more by fear of a new insurrection than by the advance of the enemy. On August 26th the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks repeated its warning: “A provocational agitation is being carried on by unknown persons supposedly in the name of our party.” The leading organs of the Petrograd soviet, the trade unions, and the shop and factory committees, announced on the same day that not one workers’ organisation, and not one political party, was calling for any kind of demonstration. Nevertheless rumours of an overthrow of the government to occur on the following day did not cease for one minute. “In government circles,” stated the press, “they are talking of a unanimously adopted decision that all attempted manifestations shall be put down.” And measures had been taken to call out the manifestation before putting it down.
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<br />In the morning papers of the 27th there was not only no news of the insurrectionary intentions of headquarters, but, on the contrary, an interview with Savinkov declared that “General Kornilov enjoys the absolute confidence of the Provisional Government.” On the whole the semi-anniversary began in unusual tranquillity. The workers and soldiers avoided anything which might look like a demonstration; the bourgeoisie, fearing disorders, stayed at home; the streets stood empty; the tomb of the February martyrs on the Mars Field seemed abandoned.
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<br />On the morning of that long-expected day which was to bring the salvation of the country, the supreme commander-in-chief received a telegraphic command from the Minister-President: to turn over his duties to the chief-of-staff, and come immediately to Petrograd. This was a totally unexpected turn of affairs. The general understood –to quote his own words –that “here a double game was being played.” He might have said with more truth that his own double game had been discovered. Kornilov decided not to surrender. Savinkov’s urgings over the directed wire made no difference. “Finding myself compelled to act openly” –with this manifesto the commander-in-chief appealed to the people –“I, General Kornilov, declare that the Provisional Government, under pressure from the Bolshevik majority of the soviets, is acting in full accord with the plans of the German general staff, and simultaneously with the impending descent of hostile forces upon the Riga coastline is murdering the army and unsettling the country from within.” Not wishing to surrender the power to the enemy, he, Kornilov “prefers to die upon the field of honour and battle.” Of the author of this manifesto Miliukov subsequently wrote, with a tinge of admiration: “resolute, scornful of juridical refinements, and accustomed to go directly toward the goal which he has once decided is right.” A commander-in-chief who withdraws troops from the enemy front in order to overthrow his own government certainly cannot be accused of a partiality for “juridical refinements.”
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<br />Kerensky removed Kornilov upon his sole personal authority. The Provisional Government had by that time ceased to exist. On the evening of the 26th the ministers had resigned –and act which, by a happy conjuncture of events, corresponded to the desires of all sides. Several days before the break between headquarters and the government, General Lukomsky had already suggested to Lvov through Alladin, that “it would not be a bad idea to warn the Kadets that they should withdraw from the government before the 27th of August, so as to place the government in a difficult situation and themselves avoid any unpleasantness.” The Kadets did not fail to take congnisance of this suggestion. On the other side, Kerensky himself announced to the government that he considered it possible to struggle with the revolt of Kornilov “only on condition that the whole power be conferred upon him personally.” The rest of the ministers, it seemed, were only waiting for some such happy occasion to take their turn at resigning. Thus the Coalition received one more test. “The ministers from the Kadet Party,” writes Miliukov, “announced that they would resign for the given moment, without prejudicing the question of their future participation in the Provisional Government.” True to their traditions, the Kadets wanted to stay on the side-lines until the struggle was over, so that their decision might be guided by its outcome. They had no doubt that the Compromisers would keep their seats inviolable for them. Having thus relieved themselves of responsibility, the Kadets, along with all the other retired ministers, took part thereafter in a series of conferences of the government, conferences of a “private character.” The two camps who were preparing for a civil war grouped themselves, in a “private” manner, around the head of the government, who was endowed with all possible authorisations but no real power.
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<br />Upon a telegram from Kerensky received at headquarters reading, “Hold up all echelons moving towards Petrograd and its districts, and return them to their last stopping-point,” Kornilov wrote: “Do not carry out this order. Move the troops towards Petrograd.” The military insurrection was thus firmly set in motion. This must be understood literally: three cavalry divisions, in railroad echelons, were advancing on the capital. Kerensky’s order to the soldiers of Petrograd read: “General Kornilov, having announced his patriotism and loyalty to the people…has withdrawn regiments from the front…and…sent them against Petrograd.” Kerensky wisely omitted to remark that the regiments were withdrawn from the front, not only with his knowledge, but at his direct command, in order to clean up that same garrison before whom he was now disclosing the treachery of Kornilov. The rebellious commander of course was not slow with his answer. “The traitors are not among us,” his telegram reads, “but there in Petrograd, where for German money, with the criminal connivance of the government, they have been selling Russia.” Thus the slander set in motion against the Bolsheviks found ever new roads.
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<br />That exalted nocturnal mood in which the President of the Council of Retired Ministers was singing arias from the opera, very quickly passed. The struggle with Kornilov, whatever turn it took, threatened dire consequences. “On the first night of the revolt of headquarters,” writes Kerensky, “in the soldier and worker circles of Petrograd a persistent rumour went round associating Savinkov with the movement of General Kornilov.” The rumour named Kerensky in the next breath after Savinkov, and the rumour was not wrong. Extremely dangerous revelations were to be feared in the future.
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<br />“Late at night on the 26th of August,” relates Kerensky, “the general administrator of the War Ministry entered my office in a great state of excitement. ‘Mr. Minister,’ Savinkov addressed me, standing at attention, ‘I ask you to arrest me immediately as an accomplice of General Kornilov. If, however, you trust me, I ask you to give me the opportunity to demonstrate to the people in action that I have nothing in common with the revoltees…’” “In answer to this announcement,” continued Kerensky, “I immediately appointed Savinkov temporary governor-general of Petersburg, endowing him with ample authority for the defence of Petersburg from the troops of General Kornilov.” Not content with that, at the request of Savinkov, Kerensky appointed Filonenko his assistant. The business of revolting and the business of putting down the revolt were thus concentrated within the narrow circle of the “directory.”
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<br />This so hasty naming of Savinkov governor-general was dictated to Kerensky by his struggle for political self-preservation. If Kerensky had betrayed Savinkov to the Soviets, Savinkov would have immediately betrayed Kerensky. On the other hand, having received from Kerensky –not without blackmail –the possibility of legalising himself by an overt participation in the actions against Kornilov, Savinkov was bound to do his best to exonerate Kerensky. The “governor-general” was needed not so much for the struggle against counter-revolution, as for covering up the tracks of the conspiracy. The friendly labours of the accomplices in this direction began immediately.
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<br />“At four o’clock on the morning of August 28th,” testifies Savinkov, “I returned to the Winter Palace, summoned by Kerensky, and their found General Alexeiev and Tereshchenko. We all four agreed that the ultimatum of Lvov had been nothing more than a misunderstanding.” The role of mediator in this early-morning conference belonged to the new governor-general. Miliukov was directing it all from behind the scenes. During the course of the day he will come out openly upon the stage. Alexeiev, although he had called Kornilov a sheep’s brain, belonged to the same camp with him. The conspirators and their seconds made a last attempt to declare the whole business a “misunderstanding” –that is, to join hands in deceiving public opinion, in order to save what they could of the common plan. The Savage Division, General Krymov, the Cossack echelons, the refusal of Kornilov to retire, the march on the capital – all these things were the mere details of a “misunderstanding”! Frightened by the ominous tangle of circumstances, Kerensky was no longer shouting: “I will not hand over the revolution to them!” Immediately after the conference with Alexeiev he went to the journalists’ room in the Winter Palace and demanded that they withdraw from the papers his manifesto declaring Kornilov a traitor. When in answer the journalists had made it clear that this was a physical impossibility, Kerensky exclaimed: “That’s too bad.” This miserable episode, described in the newspapers of the following day, illumines with marvelous clarity the figure of the now hopelessly entangled super-arbiter of the nation. Kerensky had so perfectly embodied in himself both the democracy and the bourgeoisie, that he had now turned out to be at the same time the supreme incarnation of governmental power and a criminal conspirator against it.
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<br />By the morning of the 28th, the split between the government and the commander-in-chief had become an accomplished fact before the eyes of the whole country. The stock exchange immediately took a hand in the matter. Wheras it had reacted to the Moscow speech of Kornilov threatening the surrender of Riga with a fall in value of Russian stocks, it reacted to the news of an open insurrection of the general with a rise of all values. With this annihilating appraisal of the February regime, the stock exchange gave unerring expression to the moods and hopes of the possessing classes who had no doubt of Kornilov’s victory.
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<br />The chief-of-staff, Lukomsky, whom Kerensky the day before had ordered to take upon himself the temporary command, answered: “I do not consider it possible to take the command from General Kornilov, for that will be followed by an explosion in the army which will ruin Russia.” With the exception of the commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, who after some delay declared his loyalty to the Provisional Government, the rest of the commanders in various tones of voice supported the demands of Kornilov. Inspired by the Kadets, the head committee of the League of Officers sent out a telegram to all the staffs of the army and fleet: “The Provisional Government, which has already more than once demonstrated to us its political incapacity, has now dishonored its name with acts of provocation and can no longer remain at the head of Russia…” That same Lukomsky was the respected president of the League of Officers. At headquarters they said to General Krasnov, appointed to command the 3rd Cavalry Corps: “Nobody will defend Kerensky. This is only a promenade. Everything is ready.”
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<br />A fair idea of the optimistic calculations of the leaders and backers of the plot is conveyed by the code telegram of the aforementioned Prince Trubetskoy to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “ Soberly estimating the situation,” he writes, “it must be acknowledged that the whole commanding staff, an overwhelming majority of the officers, and the best of the rank-and-file elements of the army, are for Kornilov. On his side at the rear stand all the Cossacks, a majority of the military schools, and also the best fighting units. To these physical forces it is necessary to add…the moral sympathy of all the non-socialist layers of the population, and in the lower orders…an indifference which will submit to the least blow of the whip. There is no doubt that an enormous number of the March socialists will come quickly over to the side” of Kornilov in case of his victory. Trubetskoy here expressed not only the hopes of headquarters, but also the attitude of the Allied missions. In the Kornilov detachments advancing to the conquest of Petrograd, there were English armoured cars with English operatives –and these we may assume constituted the most reliable units. The head of the English military mission in Russia, General Knox, reproached the American Colonel Robbins, for not supporting Kornilov: “I am not interested in the government of Kerensky,” said the British General, “it is too weak. What is wanted is a strong dictatorship. What is wanted is the Cossacks. This people needs the whip! A dictatorship –that is just what it needs.” All these voices from different quarters arrived at the Winter Palace, and had an alarming effect upon its inhabitants. The success of Kornilov seemed inevitable. Minister Nekrassov informed his friends that the game was competely up, and it remained only to die an honourable death. “Several eminent members of the Soviet,” affirms Miliukov, “foreseeing their fate in case of Kornilov’s victory, had already made haste to supply themselves with foreign passports.”
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<br />From hour to hour came the messages, one more threatening than the other, of the approach of Kornilov’s troops. The bourgeois press seized them hungrily, expanded them, piled them up, creating an atmosphere of panic. At 12.30 noon on August 28th: “The troops sent by General Kornilov have concentrated themselves in the vicinity of Luga.” At 2.30 in the afternoon: “Nine new trains containing the troops of Kornilov have passed through the station Oredezh. In the forward train is a railroad engineering battalion.” At 3 pm: ‘The Luga garrison has surrendered to the troops of General Kornilov and turned over all its weapons. The station and all the government buildings of Luga are occupied by the troops of Kornilov.” At 6 in the evening: “Two echelons of Kornilov’s army have broken through from Narva and are within half a verst of Gatchina. Two more echelons are on the road to Gatchina.” At two o’clock in the morning of the 29th: “A battle has begun at the Antropshino Station (33 kilometres from Petrograd) between government troops and the troops of Kornilov. Killed and wounded on both sides.” By nightfall comes the news that Kaledin has threatened to cut off Petrograd and Moscow from the grain-growing south of Russia. “Headquarters,” “commanders-in-chief at the front,” “British mission,” “officers,” “echelons,” “railroad battalions,” “Cossacks,” “Kaledin” –all these words sounded in the Malachite Hall of the Winter Palace like the trumpets of the Last Judgement.
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<br />Kerensky himself acknowledged this in a somewhat softened form: “August 28th was the day of the greatest wavering,” he writes, “the greatest doubt as to the strength of the enemy, Kornilov, the greatest nervousness among the democracy.” It is not difficult to imagine what lies behind those words. The head of the government was torn by speculations, not only as to which of the two camps was stronger, but as to which was personally the less dangerous to him. “We are neither with you on the Right, nor with you on the Left” –those words seemed effective on the stage of the Moscow theatre. Translated into the language of a civil war on the point of explosion, they meant that the Kerensky group might appear superfluous to both Right and Left. “We were all as though numb with despair,” writes Stankevich, “seeing this drama unfold to the destruction of everything. The degree of our numbness may be judged by the fact that even after the split between headquarters and the government was before the eyes of the whole people, attempts were made to find some sort of reconciliation…”
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<br />“A thought of mediation…was in these circumstances spontaneously born,” say Miliukov, who himself preferred to function in the capacity of mediator. On the evening of the 28th he appeared at the Winter Palace “to advise Kerensky to renounce the strictly formal viewpoint of the violation of the law.” The liberal leader, who understood that it is necessary to distinguish the kernel of a nut from the shell, was at that moment a most suitable person for the task of loyal intermediary. On the 13th of August, Miliukov had learned directly from Kornilov that he had set the 27th as the date for the revolt. On the following day, the 14th, Miliukov had demanded in his speech at the Conference that “the immediate adoption of the measures designated by the supreme commander-in-chief should not serve as a pretext for suspicions, verbal threats, or even removals from office.” Up to the 27th Kornilov was to remain above suspicion! At the same time Miliukov promised Kerensky his support –“voluntarily and without any argument.” Kerensky upon his side acknowledges that Miliukov, appearing with his proposal of mediation, “chose a very comfortable moment to demonstrate to me that the real power was on the side of Kornilov.” The conversation ended so successfully that in conclusion Miliukov called the attention of his political friends to General Alexeiev as a successor to Kerensky against whom Kornilov would offer no objection. Alexeiev magnanimously gave his consent.
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<br />And after Miliukov came a greater than he. Late in the evening the British Ambassador Buchanan handed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs a declaration in which the representatives of the Allied Powers unanimously offered their good services “in the interests of humanity and the desire to avoid irrevocable misfortune.” This official mediation between the government and the general in revolt was nothing less than support and insurance to the revolt. In reply, Tershchenko expressed, in the name of the Provisional Government, “extreme astonishment” at the revolt of Kornilov, a greater part of whose programme has been adopted by the government. In a state of loneliness and prostration, Kerensky could think of nothing better to do than to call one more of those everlasting conferences with his retired ministers. In the midst of this wholly disinterested business of killing time, some especially alarming news arrived as to the approach of the enemy’s echelons. Nekrassov voiced an apprehension that “in a few hours Kornilov’s troops will probably be in Petrograd.” The former ministers began to guess “how in those circumstances the governmental power would have to be formed.” The thought of a directory against swam to the surface. The idea of including General Alexeiev in the staff of the “directory” found sympathy both Right and Left. The Kadet Kokoshkin thought that Alexeiev ought to be placed at the head of the government. According to some accounts, the proposal to tender the power to some other was made by Kerensky himself, with a direct reference to his conversation with Miliukov. Nobody objected. The candidacy of Alexeiev reconciled them all. Miliukov’s plan seemed very, very near to realisation. But just here – as is proper at the moment of highest tension –resounds a dramatic knock on the door. In the next room a deputation is waiting from the “Committee of Struggle against the Counter-Revolution.” It was a most timely arrival. One of the most dangerous nests of counter-revolution was this pitiful, cowardly and treacherous conference of Kornilovists, intermediaries, and capitulators in the hall of the Winter Palace.
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<br />This new Soviet body –The Committee of Struggle against Counter-Revolution –had been created at a joint session of both Executive Committees, the worker-soldiers’ and peasants’. It was created on the evening of the 27th, and consisted of specially delegated representatives of the three Soviet Parties from both executive committee, from the trade union centre, and from the Petrograd Soviet. This creation ad hoc of a fighting committee was in essence a recognition of the fact that the governing Soviet bodies were themselves conscious of their decrepid condition, and their need of a transfusion of fresh blood for the purposes of revolutionary action.
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<br />Finding themselves compelled to seek the support of the masses against the rebellious general, the Compromisers hastened to push their left shoulder forward. They immediately forgot all their speeches about how all questions of principle should be postponed to the Constituent Assembly. The Mensheviks announced that they would press the government for an immediate declaration of a democratic republic, a dissolution of the State Duma, and the introduction of agrarian reform. It was for this reason that the word “republic” first appeared in the announcement of the government about the treason of the commander-in-chief.
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<br />On the question of power, the Executive Committees considered it necessary for the time being to leave the government in its former shape – replacing the retired Kadets with democratic elements – and for a final solution of the problem to summon in the near future a congress of all those organisations which had united in Moscow on the platform of Cheidze. After midnight negotiations it became known, however, that Kerensky resolutely rejected the idea of a democratic control of the government. Feeling that the ground was slipping under him both to the left and right, he was holding out with all his might for the idea of a “directory,” in which there was still room for his not yet dead dreams of a strong power. After renewed fruitless and wearisome debates in Smolny, it was decided to appeal again to the irreplaceable and one and only Kerensky, with the request that he agree to the preliminary project of the Executive Committees. At seven-thirty in the morning Tseretelli returned with the information that Kerensky would make no concession, that he demanded “unconditional” support, but that he agreed to employ “all the power of the state” in the struggle against the counter-revolution. Wearied out with their night’s vigil, the Executive Committees surrendered at last to that idea of a “directory” which was as empty as a knot-hole.
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<br />Kerensky’s solemn promise to throw “all the power of the state” into the struggle with Kornilov did not, as we already know, prevent him from carrying on those negotiations with Miliukov, Alexeiev, and the retired ministers, about a peaceful surrender to headquarters –negotiations which were interrupted by a midnight knock on the door. Several days later the Menshevik, Bogdanov, one of the members of the Committee of Defence, made a report to the Petrograd Soviet in cautious but unequivocal words about the treachery of Kerensky. “When the Provisional Government was wavering, and it was not clear how the Kornilov adventure would end, intermediaries appeared, such as Miliukov and General Alexeiev…” But the committee of defence interfered and “with all energy” demanded an open struggle. “Under our influence,” continued Bogdanov, “the government stopped all negotiations and refused to entertain any proposition from Kornilov…”
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<br />After the head of the government, yesterday’s conspirator against the Left camp, had become to-day its political captive, the Kadet ministers who had resigned on the 26the only in a preliminary and hesitating fashion, announced that they would conclusively withdraw from the government, since they did not wish to share the responsibility for Kerensky’s action in putting down so patriotic, so loyal, and so nation-saving a rebellion. The retired ministers, the counsellors, the friends –one after another they all left the Winter Palace. It was, according to Kerensky himself, “a mass abandonment of a place known to be condemned to destruction.” There was one night, August 28-9, when Kerensky was actually walking about almost in “complete solitude” in the Winter Palace. The opera bravuras were no longer running in his head. “A responsibility lay upon me in those anguishingly long days and nights that was really super-human.” This was in the main a responsibility for the fate of Kerensky himself: everything else had already been accomplished over his head and without any attention being paid to him.
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<br />
<br />CHAPTER X
<br />THE BOURGEOISIE MEASURES STRENGTH WITH THE DEMOCRACY
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<br />On the 28th of August, while fright was shaking the Winter Palace like a fever, the commander of the Savage Division, Prince Bagration, informed Kornilov by telegraph that “the natives would fulfil their duty to the fatherland and at the command of their supreme hero…would shed the last drop of their blood.” Only a few hours later the division came to a halt; and on the 31st of August a special deputation, with the same Bagration at the head, assured Kerensky that the division would submit absolutely to the Provisional Government. All this happened not only without a battle, but without the firing of a single shot. To say nothing of its last, the division did not shed even its first drop of blood. The soldiers of Kornilov never even made the attempt to employ weapons to force their way to Petrograd. The officers did not dare give them the command. The government troops were nowhere obliged to resort to force in stopping the onslaught of the Kornilov army. The conspiracy disintegrated, crumbled, evaporated in the air.
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<br />In order to understand this, it is only necessary to look closely at the powers which had come into conflict. First of all we must notice –and this will not be an unexpected discovery –that the staff of the conspiracy was the same old czarist staff, composed of clerical people without brains, incapable of thinking out in advance two or three moves in the vast game they had undertaken. Notwithstanding the fact that Kornilov had set the day of the insurrection several weeks in advance, nothing whatever had been foreseen or properly reckoned upon. The purely military preparation of the uprising was carried out in an inept, slovenly and light-headed manner. Complicated changes in the organisation and commanding staff were undertaken on the eve of the action – just on the run. The Savage Division, which was to deal the first blow at the revolution, consisted all told of 1,350 fighters, and they were short 600 rifles, 1,000 lances and 500 sabres. Five days before the beginning of active fighting, Kornilov gave an order for the transformation of the division into a corps. This measure, which any schoolbook would condemn, was obviously considered necessary in order to attract the officers with higher pay. “A telegram stating that the lacking weapons would be supplied at Pskov,” writes Martynov, “was received by Bagration only on August 31st after the complete collapse of the whole enterprise.” The sending of instructors from the front to Petrograd was also taken up at headquarters only at the very last moment. The officers accepting the commission were liberally supplied with money and private cars, but the patriotic heroes were in no great hurry, it seems, to save the fatherland. Two day later railroad communications between headquarters and the capital were cut off, and the majority of the heroes had not yet arrived at the place of their proposed deeds.
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<br />The capital, however, had its own organisation of Kornilovists numbering about 2,000. The conspirators here were divided into groups according to the special tasks allotted to them; seizure of armoured automobiles; arrest and murder of the more eminent members of the Soviet; arrest of the Provisional Government; capture of the more important public institutions. Vinberg, the president of the League of Military Duty, known to us above, says: “By the time Krymov’s troops arrived, the principal forces of the revolution were supposed to have already been broken, annihilated, or rendered harmless, so that Krymov’s task would be merely to restore order in the town.” At Moghiliev, to be sure, they considered this programme exaggerated, and relied upon Krymov for most of the work, but headquarters did also expect very serious help from detachments of the republican centres. As it turned out, however, the Petrograd conspirators never showed themselves for an instant, never lifted a voice, never moved a finger; it was quite as though they did not exist in the world. Vinberg explains this mystery rather simply. It seems that the superintendent of the Intelligence Service, Colonel Heiman, spent the decisive hours in a roadhouse somewhere outside of town, while Colonel Sidorin, whose duty it was, under the immediate command of Kornilov, to co-ordinate the activities of all the patriotic societies of the capital, and Colonel Ducemetiere, the head of the military department, “had disappeared without a trace and could not be found anywhere.” The Cossack colonel Dutov, who was supposed to take action “in the guise of” Bolsheviks, subsequently complained: “I ran…and called people to come into the streets, but nobody followed me.” The sums of money set aside for organisation were, according to Vinberg, appropriated by the principal participants and squandered on dinner parties. Colonel Sidorin, according to Denikin’s assertion, : “fled to Finland, taking with him the last remnants of the treasury of the organisation, something around a hundred or hundred and fifty thousand roubles.” Lvov, whom we last saw under arrest in the Winter Palace, subsequently told about one of the secret contributors who was to deliver do some officers a considerable sum of money, but upon arriving at the designated place found the conspirators in such a state of inebriation that he could not deliver the goods. Vinberg himself thinks that if it had not been for these truly vexatious “accidents”, the plan might have been crowned with complete success. But the question remains: Why was a patriotic enterprise entered into and surrounded, for the most part, by drunkards, spendthrifts, and traitors? Is it not because every historic task mobilises the cadres that are adequate to it?
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<br />As regards personnel the conspiracy was in a bad case, beginning from the very top. “General Kornilov,” according to the right Kadet, Izgoyev, “was the most popular general…among the peaceful population, but not among the soldiers, at least not among those in the rear whom I had an opportunity to observe.” By peaceful population, Isgoyev means the people of the Nevsky Prospect. To the popular masses, both front and rear, Kornilov was alien, hostile, hateful.
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<br />The general appointed to command the 3rd Cavalry Corps, Krasnov, a monarchist who soon after tried to become a vassal of Wilhelm II, expressed his surprise that “Kornilov conceived such a great undertaking, but himself remained at Moghiliev in a palace surrounded by Turkomen and shock troops, as though he did not believe in his own success.” To a question from the French journalist, Claude Anet, why Kornilov himself did not go to Petrograd at the decisive moment, the chief of the conspiracy answered: “I was sick. I had a serious attack of malaria, and was not in possession of my usual energy.”
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<br />There were too many of these unfortunate accidents: it is always so when a thing is condemned to failure in advance. The moods of the conspirators oscillated between drunken toploftiness, when the ocean only came up to the knees, and complete prostration before the first real obstacle. The difficulty was not Kornilov’s malaria, but a far deeper, more fatal, and incurable disease paralysing the will of the possessing classes.
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<br />The Kadets have seriously denied any counter-revolutionary intentions upon the part of Kornilov, understanding by that the restoration of the Romanov monarchy. As though that were the matter in question! The “republicanism” of Kornilov did not in a the least prevent the monarchist Lukomsky from going hand in hand with him, nor did it prevent the president of the Union of Russian People, the Black Hundreds, Rimsky-Korsakov, from Telegraphing Kornilov on the day of the uprising: “I heartily pray God to help you save Russia. I put myself absolutely at your disposal.” The Black Hundred partisans of czarism would not stop for a cheap little thing like a republican flag. They understood that Kornilov’s programme was to be found in himself, in his past, in the Cossack stripes on his trousers, in his connections and sources of financial support, and above all in his unlimited readiness to cut the throat of the revolution.
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<br />Designating himself in his manifestoes as “the son of a peasant” Kornilov based the plan of his uprising wholly upon the Cossacks and the mountaineers. There was not a single infantry detachment among the troops deployed against Petrograd. The general had no access to the muzhik and did not even try to discover any. There was at headquarters, to be sure, an agrarian reformer, some sort of “professor,” who was ready to promise every soldier a fantastic number of dissiatins of land, but the manifesto prepared upon this theme was not even issued. The generals were restrained from agrarian demagogism by a well-justified dread of frightening and repelling the landlords.
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<br />A Moghiliev peasant Tadeush, who closely observed the environs of the staff in those days, testifies that among the soldiers and in the villages nobody believed in the manifestoes of the general, “He wants the power,” they said, “and not a word about the land and not a word about ending the war.” On life-and-death questions, the masses had somehow or other learned to find their way during the six months of revolution. Kornilov was offering the people war and a defence of the privileges of generals and the property of landlords. He could give them nothing more, and they expected nothing else from him. In his inability to rely upon the peasant infantry –evident in advance to the conspirators themselves – to say nothing of relying upon the workers, is expressed the socially outcast position of Kornilov’s clique.
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<br />The picture of political forces traced by the headquarters’ diplomat, Prince Trubetskoy, was correct in many things, but mistaken in one. Of that indifference of the people which made them ready “to submit to the least blow of the whip,” there was not a trace. On the contrary, the masses were as if only awaiting a blow of the whip in order to show what sources of energy and self-sacrifice were to be found in their depths. This mistake in estimating the mood of the masses brought all their other calculations to the dust.
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<br />The conspiracy was conducted by those circles who were not accustomed to know how to do anything without the lower ranks, without labour forces, without cannon-fodder, without orderlies, servants, clerks, chauffeurs, messengers, cooks, laundresses, switchmen, telegraphers, stablemen, cab drivers. But all these little human bolts and links, unnoticeable, innumerable, necessary, were for the Soviet and against Kornilov. The revolution was omnipresent. It penetrated everywhere, coiling itself around the conspiracy. It had everywhere its eye, its ear, its hand.
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<br />The ideal of military education is that the soldier should act when unseen by the officer exactly as before his eyes. But the Russian soldiers and sailors of 1917, without carrying out official orders even before the eyes of the commanders, would eagerly catch on the fly the commands of the revolution, or still oftener fulfil them on their own initiative before they arrived. The innumerable servants of the revolution, its agents, its intelligence men, its fighters, had no need either of spurs or of supervision.
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<br />Formally the liquidation of the conspiracy was in the hands of the government, and the Executive Committee co-operated. In reality the struggle was carried on within totally different channels. While Kerensky, bending under the weight of a “more than human responsibility,” was measuring the floors of the Winter Palace in solitude, the Committee of Defence, also called the Military Revolutionary Committee, was taking action on a vast scale. Early in the morning instructions were sent by telegram to the railroad workers, and postal and telegraph clerks, and soldiers. “All movements of troops” –so Dan reported on the dame day –“are to be carried out at the direction of the Provisional Government when countersigned by the Committee of People’s Defence.” Qualifications aside, this meant: The Committee of Defence deploys the troops under the firm name of the Provisional Government. At the same time steps were taken for the destruction of Kornilovist nest in Petrograd itself. Searches and arrests were carried out in the military schools and officers’ organisations. The hand of the Committee was felt everywhere. There was little or no interest in the governor-general.
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<br />The lower soviet organisations in their turn did not await any summons from above. The principal effort was concentrated in the workers’ districts. During the hours of greatest vacillation in the government, and of wearisome negotiations between the Executive Committee and Kerensky, the district soviets were drawing more closely together and passing resolutions: to declare the inter-district conferences continuous; to place their representatives in the staff organised by the Executive Committee; to form a workers’ militia; to establish the control of the district soviets over the government commissars; to organise flying brigades for the detention of counter-revolutionary agitators. In the total, these resolutions meant an appropriation not only of very considerable governmental functions, but also of the functions of the Petrograd Soviet. The logic of the situation compelled the soviet institutions do draw in their skirts and make room for the lower ranks. The entrance of the Petrograd districts into the arena of the struggle instantly changed both its scope and its direction. Again the inexhaustible vitality of the soviet form of organisation was revealed. Although paralysed above by the leadership of the Compromisers, the soviets were reborn again from below at the critical moment under pressure from the masses.
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<br />To the Bolshevik leaders of the districts, Kornilov’s uprising had not been in the least unexpected. They had foreseen and forewarned, and they were the first to appear at their posts. At the joint session of the Executive Committees, on August 27, Sokolnikov announced that the Bolshevik Party had taken all measures available to it in order to inform the people of the danger and prepare for defence; the Bolsheviks announced their readiness to co-ordinate their military work with the organs of the Executive Committee. At a night session of the Military Organisation of the Bolsheviks, participated in by delegates of numerous military detachments, it was decided to demand the arrest of all conspirators, to arm the workers, to supply them with soldier instructors, to guarantee the defence of the capital from below, and at the same time to prepare for the creation of a revolutionary government of workers and soldiers. The Military Organisations held meetings throughout the garrison; the soldiers were urged to remain under arms in order to come out at the first alarm.
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<br />“Notwithstanding the fact that they were in a minority,” writes Sukhanov, “it was quite clear that in the Military Revolutionary Committee the leadership belonged to the Bolsheviks.” He explains this as follows: “If the committee wanted to act seriously, it was compelled to act in a revolutionary manner,” and for revolutionary action “only the Bolsheviks had genuine resources,” for the masses were with them. Intensity in the struggle has everywhere and always brought forth the more active and bolder elements. This automatic selection inevitably elevated the Bolsheviks, strengthened their influence, concentrated the initiative in their hands, giving them de facto leadership even in those organisations where they were in a minority. The nearer you came to the district, to the factory, to the barrack, the more complete and indubitable was the leadership of the Bolsheviks. All the nuclei of the party were on their toes. The big factories organised a system of guard duty by Bolsheviks. In the district committees of the party representatives of small plants were put on duty. A tie was formed from below, from the shop, leading through the districts, to the Central Committee of the party.
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<br />Under the direct pressure from the Bolsheviks and the organisations led by them, the Committee of Defence recognised the desirability of arming individual groups of workers for the defence of the workers’ quarters, the shops and factories. It was only this sanction that the masses lacked. In the districts, according to the workers’ press, there immediately appeared “whole queues of people eager to join the ranks of the Red Guard.” Drilling began in marksmanship and the handling of weapons. Experienced soldiers were brought in as teachers. By the 29th, Guards had been formed in almost all the districts. The Red Guard announced its readiness to put in the field a force of 40,000 rifles. The unarmed workers formed companies for trench-digging, sheet-metal fortification, barbed-wire fencing. The new governor-general Palchinsky who replaced Savinkov –Kerensky could not keep his accomplice longer then three days – was compelled to recognise in a special announcement that when the need arose for the work of sappers in the defence of the capital “thousands of workers…by their irreplaceable, personal labour achieved in the course of a few hours a colossal task which without their help would have required several days.” This did not prevent Palchinsky, following the example of Savinkov, from suppressing the Bolshevik paper, the sole paper which the workers considered their own.
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<br />The giant Putilov factory became the centre of resistance in the Peterhoff district. Here fighting companies were hastily formed; the work of the factory continued day and night; there was a sorting out of new cannon for the formation of proletarian artillery divisions. The worker, Minichev, says, “In those days we worked sixteen hours a day…We got together about 100 cannon.”
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<br />The newly formed Vikzhel received a prompt baptism of war. The railroad workers had a special reason to dread the victory of Kornilov, who had incorporated in his programme the inauguration of martial law on the railroads. And here, too, the lower ranks far outdistanced their leaders. The railroad workers tore up and barricaded the tracks in order to hold back Kornilov’s army. War experiences came in handy. Measures were also taken to isolate the centre of the conspiracy, Moghiliev, preventing movements both towards and away from headquarters. The postal and telegraph clerks began to hold up and send to the Committee telegrams and orders from headquarters, or copies of them. The generals had been accustomed during the years of war to think of transport and communications as technical questions. They found out now that these were political questions.
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<br />The trade unions, least of all inclined toward political neutrality, did not await any special invitation before occupying military positions. The railroad workers’ union armed its members, and sent them along the lines for inspection, and for tearing up railroads, guarding bridges, etc. The workers in their enthusiasm and resolution pushed ahead of the more bureaucratic and moderate Vikzhel. The metal workers’ union put its innumerable office workers at the disposal of the Committee of Defence, and also a large sum of money for expenses. The chauffeurs’ union put in charge of the committee its technical and transportation facilities. The printers’ union arranged in a few hours for the issue of Monday’s papers, so as to keep the population in touch with events, and at the same time availed themselves of the most effective of all possible means of controlling the press. The rebel general had stamped his foot, and the legions rose up from the ground –but they were the legions of the enemy.
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<br />All around Petrograd, in the neighbouring garrisons, in the great railroad stations, in the fleet, work was going on night and day. They were inspecting their own ranks, arming the workers, sending out detachments as patrols along the tracks, establishing communications with neighbouring points, and with Smolny. The task of the Committee of Defence was not so much to keep watch over and summon the workers, as merely to register and direct them. Its plans were always anticipated. The defence against the rebellion of the generals turned into a popular round-up of the conspirators.
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<br />In Helsingfors a general congress of all the Soviet organisations created a revolutionary committee which sent its commissars to the offices of the governor-general, the commandant, the Intelligence Service, and other important institutions.
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<br />Thenceforth no order was valid without its signature. The telegraphs and telephones were taken under control. The official representatives of a Cossack regiment quartered in Helsingfors, chiefly officers, tried to declare themselves neutral: they were secret Kornilovists. On the second day, a rank-and-file Cossack appeared before the Committee with the announcement that the whole regiment was against Kornilov. Cossack representatives were for the first time introduced into the Soviet. In this case as in others a sharp conflict of classes was pushing the officers to the right and the rank-and-file to the left.
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<br />The Kronstadt Soviet, which had completely recovered from the July wounds, sent a telegraphic declaration: “The Kronstadt garrison is ready as one man at the first word from the Executive Committee to come to the defence of the revolution.” The Kronstadters did not know in those days to what extent the defence of the revolution meant the defence of themselves against annihilation: at that time they could still only guess this.
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<br />Soon after the July Days it had been decided by the Provisional Government to vacate the Kronstadt fortress as a nest of Bolshevism. This measure, adopted in agreement with Kornilov, was officially explained as due to “strategic motives.” Sensing some dirty work, the sailors had resisted. “The legend of treachery at headquarters” –wrote Kerensky after he himself had accused Kornilov of treachery – “was so deeply rooted in Kronstadt that every attempt to remove the artillery evoked actual ferocity from the crowd there.” The task of devising a way to liquidate Kronstadt was laid by the government upon Kornilov. Kornilov devised a way: immediately after the conquest of the city Krymov was to dispatch a brigade with artillery to Oranienbaum and, under threat of bombardment from the shores, demand that the Kronstadt garrison disarm the fortress and transfer themselves to the mainland, where the sailors were to undergo mass executions. But while Krymov was entering upon his task of saving the government, the government found itself obliged to ask the Kronstadters to save it from Krymov.
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<br />The Executive Committee sent telephonograms to Kronstadt and Vyborg asking for the dispatch of considerable detachments of troops to Petrograd. On the morning of the 29th, the troops began to arrive. These were chiefly Bolshevik units. In order that the summons of the Executive Committee should become operative, it had to be confirmed by the central committee of the Bolsheviks. A little earlier, at midday of the 28th, upon an order from Kerensky which sounded very much like a humble request, sailors from the cruiser Aurora has undertaken the defence of the Winter Palace. A part of the same crew were still imprisoned in Kresty for participation in the July demonstration. During their hours off duty the sailors came to the prison for a visit with the imprisoned Kronstadters, and with Trotsky, Raskolnikov and others. “Isn’t it time to arrest the government?” asked the visitors. “No, not yet,” was the answer. “Use Kerensky as a gun-rest to shoot Kornilov. Afterward we will settle with Kerensky.” In June and July these sailors had not been inclined to pay much attention to revolutionary strategy, but they had learned much in a short two months. They raised this question of the arrest of the government rather to test themselves and clear their own consciences. They themselves were beginning to grasp the inexorable consecutiveness of events. In the first half of July, beaten, condemned, slandered; at the end of August, the trusted defenders of the Winter Palace against Kornilovists; at the end of October, they will be shooting at the Winter Palace with the guns of the Aurora.
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<br />But although the sailors were willing to postpone for a certain time a general settlement with the February regime, they did not want to endure for one unnecessary day the Kornilovist officers hanging over their heads. The commanding staff which had been imposed upon them by the government since the July Days was almost solidly on the side of the conspirators. The Kronstadt Soviet immediately removed the government commander of the fortress and installed their own. The Compromisers had now ceased to shout about the secession of the Kronstadt republic. However the thing did not everywhere stop at mere removals from office: it came to bloody encounters in several places.
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<br />“It began in Vyborg,” says Sukhanov, “with the beating to death of generals and officers by a sailor-soldier crowd infuriated and panic-stricken.” No, these crowds were not infuriated, and it would not be possible to speak in this instance of panic. On the morning of the 29th, Centroflot sent a telegram to the commandant at Vyborg, General Oranovsky, for communication to the garrison, informing them of the mutiny at headquarters. The commandant held up the telegram for a whole day, and to questions about what was happening, answered that he had received no information. In the course of a search instituted by the sailors the telegram was found. Thus caught in the act, the general declared himself a partisan of Kornilov. The sailors shot the commandant and along with him two other officers who had declared themselves of the same party. From the officers of the Baltic fleet the sailors required a signed declaration of loyalty to the revolution, and when four officers of the ship-of-the-line Petropavlovsk refused to sign, declaring themselves Kornilovists, they were by resolution of the crew immediately shot.
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<br />A mortal danger was hanging over the soldiers and sailors; a bloody purgation not only of Petrograd and Kronstadt, but of all the garrisons of the country, was impending. From the conduct of their suddenly emboldened officers, –from their tones, their side glances –the soldiers and sailors could plainly foresee their own fate in case of a victory of headquarters. In those localities where the atmosphere was especially hot, they hastened to cut off the road of the enemy, forestalling the purgation intended by the officers with their own sailors’ and soldiers’ purgation. Civil war, as is well known, has its laws, and they have never been considered identical with the laws of humane conduct.
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<br />Cheidze immediately sent a telegram to Vyborg and Helsingfors condemning lynch law as “a mortal blow against the revolution.” Kerensky on his part telegraphed to Helsingfors: “I demand an immediate end of disgusting acts of violence.” If you seek the political responsibility for these individual cases of lynch law –not forgetting that revolution as a whole is taking of the law into one’s own hands – in the given case the responsibility rests wholly on the government and the Compromisers, who at a moment of danger would run for help to the revolutionary masses, in order afterward to turn them over again to the counter-revolutionary officers.
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<br /> As during the State Conference in Moscow, when he was expecting an uprising from moment to moment, so now after the break with headquarters, Kerensky turned to the Bolsheviks with a request “to influence the soldiers to come to the defence of the revolution.” In summoning the Bolshevik sailors to the defence of the Winter Palace, however, Kerensky did not set free their comrades, the July prisoners. Sukhanov writes on this theme: “The situation with Alexeiev whispering to Kerensky and Trotsky in prison was absolutely intolerable.” It is not hard to imagine the excitement which prevailed in the crowded prisons. “We were boiling with indignation,” relates Midshipman Raskolnikov, “against the Provisional Government which in such days of alarm…continued to let revolutionists like Trotsky rot in Kresty… ‘What cowards, what cowards they are,’ said Trotsky as some of us were circling around together on our walk. ‘They ought immediately to declare Kornilov an outlaw, so that any soldier devoted to the revolution might feel that he had a right to put an end to him.’”
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<br />The entrance of Kornilov’s troops into Petrograd would have meant first of all the extermination of the arrested Bolsheviks. In his order to General Bagration, who was to enter the capital with the vanguard, Krymov did not forget this special command: “Place a guard in prisons and houses of detention, in no case let out the people now under restraint.” This was a concerted programme, inspired by Miliukov ever since the April Days: “In no case let them out.” There was not a single meeting in Petrograd in those days which did not pass resolutions demanding the release of the July prisoners. Delegation after delegation came to the Executive Committee, which in turn sent its leaders for negotiations to the Winter Palace. In vain! The stubbornness of Kerensky on this question is the more remarkable since during the first day and a half or two days he considered the position of the government hopeless, and was therefore condemning himself to the role of the old-time jailkeeper –holding the Bolsheviks so that the generals could hang them.
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<br />It is no wonder that the masses led by the Bolsheviks in fighting against Kornilov did not place a moment of trust in Kerensky. For them it was not a case of defending the government, but of defending the revolution. So much the more resolute and devoted was their struggle. The resistance to the rebels grew out of the very road beds, out of the stones, out of the air. The railroad workers of the Luga station, where Krymov arrived, stubbornly refused to move the troop trains, alluding to a lack of locomotives. The Cossack echelons also found themselves immediately surrounded by armed soldiers from the Luga garrison, 20,000 strong. There was no military encounter, but there was something far more dangerous: contact, social exchange, interpenetration. The Luga Soviet had had time to print the government announcement retiring Kornilov, and this document was now widely distributed among the echelons. The officers tried to persuade the Cossacks not to believe the agitators, but this very necessity of persuasion was a bad sign.
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<br />On receiving Kornilov’s order to advance, Krymov demanded under threat of bayonets that the locomotives be ready in half an hour. The threat seemed effective: the locomotives, although with some delays, were supplied; but even so, it was impossible to move, since the road out was damaged and so crowded with cars that it would take a good twenty-four hours to clear it. To get free of demoralising propaganda, Krymov on the evening of the 28th, removed his troops several versts from Luga. But the agitators immediately turned up on the villages. These were soldiers, workers, railroad men –there was no refuge from them. They went everywhere. The Cossacks began even to hold meetings. Thus stormed with propaganda and cursing his impotence, Krymov waited in vain for Bagration. The railroad workers were holding up the echelon of the Savage Division, which also in the coming hours was to undergo a most alarming moral attack.
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<br />No matter how spineless and even cowardly the compromisist democracy was in itself, those mass forces upon which it again partly relied in its struggle against Kornilov, opened before it inexhaustible resources for action. The Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks did not see it as their task to conquer the forces of Kornilov in open struggle, but to bring the forces over to their own side. That was right. Against “compromises” along that line, it goes without saying, the Bolsheviks had no objection. On the contrary that was their own fundamental method. The Bolsheviks only demanded that behind the agitators and parliamentarians, armed workers and soldiers should stand ready. For this moral mode of action upon the Kornilov regiments, an unlimited choice of ways and means was suddenly discovered. Thus a Mussulman delegation was sent to meet the Savage Division on the staff of which were included native potentates who had immediately made themselves known, beginning with the grandson of the famous Shamil who heroically defended the Caucasus against czarism. The mountaineers would not permit their officers to arrest the delegation: that was a violation of the ancient customs of hospitality. Negotiations were opened and soon became the beginning to the end. The Kornilov commanders, in order to explain the whole campaign, had kept referring to a rebellion of German agents supposed to have begun in Petrograd. The delegates, arriving directly from the capital, not only disproved the fact of a rebellion, but also demonstrated with documents in their hands that Krymov was a rebel and was leading his troops against the government. What could the officers of Kornilov reply to that?
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<br />On the staff car of the Savage Division the soldiers stuck up a red flag with the inscription: “Land and freedom.” The staff commander ordered them to take down the flags –“merely to avoid confusing it with a railroad signal,” as the lieutenant-colonel politely explained. The staff officers were not satisfied with this cowardly explanation, and arrested the lieutenant-colonel. Were they not mistaken at headquarters when they said that the Caucasian mountaineers did not care who they slaughtered?
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<br />The next morning a colonel arrived at Krymov’s headquarters from Kornilov with an order to concentrate his corpse, advance swiftly on Petrograd, and “unexpectedly” occupy it. At headquarters they were obviously still trying to shut their eyes to the facts. Krymov replied that the different units of the corps were scattered on various railroads and in some places were de-training; that he had at his disposition only eight Cossack squadrons; that the railroads were damaged, overloaded, barricaded, and that it was possible to move farther only on foot; and that finally there would be no talk of an unexpected occupation of Petrograd, now that the workers and soldiers had been placed under arms in the capital and its environs. The affair was still further complicated by the fact that the possibility was hopelessly past of carrying out the operation “unexpectedly” even to the troops of Krymov himself. Sensing something unpropitious, they had demanded explanations. It had become necessary to inform them of the conflict between Kornilov and Kerensky –that is, to place the soldiers’ meetings officially on the order of the day.
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<br />An order issued by Krymov at just that moment read: “This evening I received from the headquarters of the commander-in-chief and from Petrograd information that rebellions have begun in Petrograd…” This deceit was designed to justify an already quite open campaign against the government. An order of Kornilov himself on the 29the of August, had read: “The intelligence service from Holland reports: (a) In a few days a simultaneous attack upon the whole front is to begin, with the aim of routing and putting to flight our disintegrating army; (b) An insurrection is under preparation in Finland; (c) Explosions are to be expected of bridges on the Dnieper and the Volga; (d) An insurrection of Bolsheviks is being organised in Petrograd.” This was the same “information” to which Savinkov had already referred on the 23rd. Holland is mentioned here merely to distract attention. According to all evidence the document was fabricated in the French war mission or with its participation.
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<br />Kerensky on the same day telegraphed Krymov: “There is complete tranquillity in Petrograd. No demonstrations are expected. Your corps is not needed.” The demonstrations were to have been evoked by the military edicts of Kerensky himself. Since it had been necessary to postpone this governmental act of provocation, Kerensky was entirely justified in concluding that “no demonstrations are expected.”
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<br />Seeing no way out, Krymov, made an awkward attempt to advance upon Petrograd with this eight Cossack squadrons. This was little but a gesture to clear his own conscience, and nothing of course came of it. Meeting a force on patrol duty a few versts from Luga, Krymov turned back without even trying to give battle. On the theme of this single and completely fictitious “operation,” Krasnov, the commander of the Third Cavalry Corps, wrote later: “We should have struck Petrograd with a force of eighty-six cavalry and Cossack squadrons, and we struck with one brigade and eight weak squadrons, half of them without officers. Instead of striking with our fist, we struck with our little finger. It pained the finger, and those we struck at were insensible to the blow.” In the essence of the matter there was no blow even from a finger. Nobody felt any pain at all.
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<br />The railroad workers in those days did their duty. In a mysterious way echelons would find themselves moving on the wrong roads. Regiments would arrive in the wrong division, artillery would be sent up a blind alley, staffs would get out of communication with their units. All the big stations had their own soviets, their railroad workers’ and the military committees. The telegraphers kept them informed of all events, all movements, all changes. The telegraphers also held up the orders of Kornilov. Information unfavourable to the Kornilovists was immediately multiplied, distributed, pasted up, passed from mouth to mouth. The machinists, the switchmen, the boilers, became agitators. It was in this atmosphere that the Kornilov echelons advanced –or what was worse, stood still. The commanding staff, soon sensing the hopelessness of the situation, obviously did not hasten to move forward, and with their passivity promoted the work of the counter-conspirators of the transport system. Parts of the army of Krymov were in this way scattered about in the stations, sidings, and branch lines, of eight different railroads. If you follow on the map the fate of the Kornilov echelons, you get the impression that the conspirators were playing at blind-man’s-buff on the railroad lines.
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<br />“Almost everywhere,” says General Krasnov, writing his observations made on the night of August 30, “we saw one and the same picture. On the tracks or in the cars, or in the saddles of their black or bay horses, who would turn from time to time to gaze at them, dragoons would be sitting or standing, and in the midst of them some lively personality in a soldier’s long coat.” The name of this “lively personality” soon became legion. From the direction of Petrograd innumerable delegations continued to arrive from regiments sent out to oppose the Kornilovists. Before fighting they wanted to talk things over. The revolutionary troops were confidently hopeful that the thing could be settled without fighting. This hope was confirmed: the Cossacks readily came to meet them. The communication squad of the corps would seize locomotives, and send the delegates along all railroad lines. The situation would be explained to every echelon. Meetings were continuous and at them all the cry was being raised: “They have deceived us!”
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<br />“Not only the chiefs of divisions,” says Krasnov, “but even the commanders of regiments did not know exactly where their squadrons and companies were. The absence of food and forage naturally irritated everybody still more. The men …seeing all this meaningless confusion which had been created around them, began to arrest their chiefs and officers.” A delegation from the Soviet which had organised its own headquarters reported: “Fraternisation is going on rapidly…We are fully confident that the conflict may be considered liquidated. Delegations are coming from all sides…” Committees took the place of the officers in directing the units. A soviet of deputies of the corps was very soon created, and from its staff a delegation of forty men was appointed to go to the Provisional Government. The Cossacks began to announce out loud that they were only waiting an order from Petrograd to arrest Krymov and the other officers.
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<br />Stankevich paints a picture of what he found on the road when he set out on the 30th with Voitinsky in the direction of Pskov. In Petrograd, he says, they had thought Tsarskoe was occupied by Kornilovists; there was nobody there at all. “In Gatchina, nobody…On the road to Luga, nobody. In Luga, peace and quiet…We arrived at the village where the staff of the corps was supposed to be located…empty…We learned that early in the morning the Cossacks had left their positions and gone away in the direction opposite to Petrograd.” The insurrection had rolled back, crumbled to pieces, been sucked up by the earth.
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<br />But in the Winter Palace they were still dreading the enemy. Kerensky had an attempt to enter into conversation with the commanding staff of the rebels. That course seemed to him more hopeful than the “anarchist” initiative of the lower ranks. He sent delegates to Krkymov, and “in the name of the salvation of Russia,” invited him to come to Petrograd, guaranteeing him safety on his word of honour. Pressed upon all sides, and having completely lost his head, the general hastened, or course, to accept the invitation. On his heels came a deputation from the Cossacks.
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<br />The fronts did not support headquarters. Only the South-western made a somewhat serious attempt. Denikin’s staff had adopted preparatory measures in good season. The unreliable guards at the staff were replaced by Cossacks. The printing presses were seized on the night of the 27th. The staff tried to play the role of self-confident master of the situation, and even forbade the committee of the front to use the telegraph. But the illusion did not last more than a few hours. Delegates from various units began to come to the committee with offers of support. Armoured cars appeared, machine-guns, field artillery. The committee immediately asserted its control of the activity of the staff, leaving it the initiative only in operations against the enemy. By three o’clock on the 28th the power on the South-western front was wholly in the hands of the committees. “Never again,” wept Denikin, “did the future of the country seem so dark, our impotence so grievous and humiliating.”
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<br />On the other fronts the thing passed off less dramatically: the commander-in-chief had only to look around in order to sense a torrent of friendly feeling going out to the commissars of the Provisional Government. By the morning of the 29th, telegrams had arrived at the Winter Palace with expressions of loyalty from General Sherbachev, on the Roumanian front, Valuyev on the Western, and Przevalsky on the Caucasian. On the Northern front, where the commander-in-chief was an open Kornilovist, Klembovsky, Stankevich named a certain Savitsky as his deputy. “Savitsky, little known to anybody until then, and appointed by telegram at the moment of conflict,” writes Stankevich himself, “could appeal with confidence to any bunch of soldiers –infantry, Cossacks, orderlies and even junkets –with any order whatever, even if were a question of arresting the commander-in-chief, and that order would be promptly carried out.” Klembovsky was replaced, without further difficulties, by General Bonch-Bruevich, who through the mediation of his brother, a well-known Bolshevik, became afterward one of the first to enter the service of the Bolshevik government.
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<br />Things went a little better with the southern pillar of the military party, the ataman of the Don Cossacks, Kaledin. They were saying in Petrograd that Kaledin was mobilising the Cossack army and that echelons from the front were marching to join him on the Don. Meanwhile the ataman, according to one of his biographers, “was riding from village to village, far from the railroad…peacefully conversing with villagers.” Kaledin actually did conduct himself more cautiously than was imagined in revolutionary circles. He chose the moment of open revolt, the date of which had been made known to him in advance, for making a “peaceful” round of the villages, in order that during the critical days he might be beyond control by telegraph or otherwise, and at the same time might be feeling out the mood of the Cossacks. On the 27th he telegraphed his deputy, Bogayevsky: “It is necessary to support Kornilov with all means and forces.” However, his conversations with the villagers were demonstrating at just that moment that properly speaking there were no means or forces: those Cossack wheat-growers would not think of rising in defence of Kornilov. When the collapse of the uprising became evident, the so-called “troop ring” [the Cossacks’ name for their elective assembly] of the Don decided to refrain from expressing its opinion “until the real correlation of forces has become clear.” Thanks to these manoeuvres, the chiefs of the Don Cossacks succeeded in making a timely jump to the sidelines.
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<br />In Petrograd, in Moscow, on the Don, at the front, along the course followed by the echelons, here, there and everywhere, Kornilov had had his sympathisers, partisans, friends. Their number seemed enormous to judge by telegrams, speeches of greeting, newspaper articles. But strange to say, now when the hour had come to reveal themselves, they had disappeared. In many cases the cause did not lie in personal cowardice. There were plenty of brave men among the Kornilov officers. But their bravery could find no point of application. From the moment the masses got into motion the solitary individual had no access to events. Not only the weighty industrialists, bankers, professors, engineers, but also students and even fighting officers, found themselves pushed away, thrown aside, elbowed out. They watched the events developing before them as though from a balcony. Along with General Denikin they had nothing left to do but curse their humiliating and appalling impotence.
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<br />On the 30th August, the Executive Committee sent to all soviets the joyous news that “there is complete demoralisation in the troops of Kornilov.” They forgot for the moment that Kornilov had chosen for his undertaking the most patriotic units, those with the best fighting morale, those most protected from the influence of the Bolsheviks. The process of demoralisation consisted in the fact that the soldiers had decisively ceased to trust their officers, discovering them to be enemies. The struggle for the revolution against Kornilov meant a deepening of the demoralisation of the army. That is exactly the thing of which they were accusing the Bolsheviks.
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<br />The generals had finally got an opportunity to verify the force of resistance possessed by that revolution which had seemed to them so crumbly and helpless, so accidentally victorious over the old regime. Ever since the February days, on every possible occasion, the gallant formula of soldier braggadocio had been repeated: “Give me one strong detachment and I will show them.” The experience of General Khabolov and General Ivanov at the end of February had taught nothing to these warriors of loud mouth. The same song was frequently sung too by civilian strategists. The Octobrist Shidlovsky asserted that if in February there had appeared in the capital “a military detachment, not especially large but united by discipline and fighting spirit, the February revolution would have been put down in a few days.” The notorious railway magnate, Bublikov, wrote: “One disciplined division from the front would have been enough to crush the insurrection to the bottom.” Several officers who participated in the events assured Denikin that “one firm battalion under a commander who know what he wanted could have changed the whole situation from top to bottom.” During the days of Guchkov’s war ministry, General Krymov came to him from the front and offered to clean up Petrograd with one division –of course not without bloodshed.” The thing was not put through merely because “Guchkov did not consent.” And finally Savinkov, preparing in the interests of a future directory his own particular “August 27th” asserted that two regiments would be amply sufficient to make dust and ashes of the Bolsheviks. Now fate had offered all these gentlemen, in the person of the “happy” general “full of the joy of life”, an ample opportunity to verify the truth of these heroic calculations. Without having struck a single blow, with bowed head, shamed and humiliated, Krymov arrived at the Winter Palace. Kerensky did not let pass the opportunity to play out a melodramatic scene with him –a scene in which his chief effects were guaranteed their success in advance. Returning from the Prime Minister to the war office, Krymov ended his life with a revolver shot. Thus turned out his attempt to put down the revolution “not without bloodshed.”
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<br />In the Winter Palace they breathed more freely, having concluded that a matter so pregnant with difficulties was ending favourably. And they decided to return as soon as possible to the order of the day –that is to a continuation of the business which had been interrupted. Kerensky appointed himself commander-in-chief. From the standpoint of preserving his political ties with the old generals, he could hardly have found a more suitable figure. As chief of the headquarters staff he selected Alexeiev, who two days ago had barely missed landing in the position of Prime Minister. After hesitating and conferring with his friends, the general, not without a contemptuous grimace, accepted the appointment – with the aim, as he explained to his own people, of liquidating the conflict in a peaceful manner. The former chief-of-staff of the supreme commander-in-chief, Nicholas Romanov, thus arrived at the same position under Kerensky. That was something to wonder at! “Only Alexeiev, thanks to his closeness to headquarters and his enormous influence in high military circles “ –so Kerensky subsequently tried to explain his wonderful appointment –“could successfully carry out the task of peacefully transferring the command from the hands of Kornilov to new hands.” Exactly the opposite was true. The appointment of Alexeiev –that is, one of their own men –could only inspire the conspirators to further resistance, had there remained the slightest possibility of it. In reality Alexeiev was brought forward by Kerensky after the failure of the insurrection for the same reason that Savinkov had been summoned at the beginning of it: it was necessary at any cost to keep open a bridge to the right. The new commander-in-chief considered a restoration of friendship with the generals now especially needful. After the disturbance if will be necessary to inaugurate a firm order, and accordingly a doubly strong power is needed.
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<br />At headquarters nothing was now left of that optimism which had reigned two days before. The conspirators were looking for a way to retreat. A telegram sent to Kerensky stated that Kornilov “in view of the strategic situation” was disposed to surrender the command peacefully, provided he was assured that “a strong government will be formed.” This large ultimatum the capitulator followed up with a small one: he, Kornilov, considered it “upon the whole impermissible to arrest the generals and other persons most indispensable to the army.” The delighted Kerensky immediately took a step to meet his enemy, announcing by radio that the order of General Kornilov in the sphere of military operations were obligatory upon all. Kornilov himself wrote to Krymov on the same day:” An episode has occurred –the only one of its kind in the history of the world: a commander-in-chief accused of treason and betrayal of the fatherland, and arraigned for this crime before the courts, has received an order to continue commanding the armies…” This new manifestation of the good-for-nothingness of Kerensky immediately raised the hopes of the conspirators, who still dreaded to sell themselves too cheap. In spite of the telegram sent a few hours earlier about the impermissibility of inner conflict “at this terrible moment,” Kornilov, half-way restored to his rights, sent two men to Kaledin with a request “to bring pressure to bear” and at the same time suggested to Krymov: “If the circumstances permit, act independently in the spirit of my instructions to you.” The spirit of those instructions was: Overthrow the government and hang the members of the Soviet.
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<br />General Alexeiev, the new chief-of-staff, departed for the seizure of headquarters. At the Winter Palace they still took this operation seriously. In reality Kornilov had had at his immediate disposition: a battalion of St. George, the “Kornilovist” infantry regiment, and a Tekinsky cavalry regiment. The St. George battalion had gone over to the government at the very beginning, the Kornilovist and Tekinsky regiments were still counted loyal, but part of them has split off. Headquarters had no artillery at all. In these circumstances there could be no talk of resistance. Alexeiev began his mission by paying ceremonial visits to Kornilov and Lukomsky –visits during which we can only imagine both sides unanimously squandering the soldierly vocabulary on the subject of Kerensky, the new commander-in-chief. It was clear to Kornilov, as also to Alexeiev, that the salvation of the country must in any case be postponed for a certain period of time.
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<br />But while at headquarters peace without victors or vanquished was being so happily concluded, the atmosphere in Petrograd was getting extraordinarily hot, and in the Winter Palace they were impatiently awaiting some reassuring news from Moghiliev which might be offered to the people. They kept nudging Alexeiev with inquiries. Colonel Baranovsky, one of Kerensky’s trusted men, complained over the direct wire: “The soviets are raging, the atmosphere can be discharged only by a demonstration of power, and the arrest of Kornilov and others…” This did not at all correspond to the intentions of Alexeiev. “I remark with deep regret,” answers the general, “that my fear lest at present we have fallen completely into the tenacious paws of the Soviet has become an indubitable fact.” By the familiar pronoun “we” is implied the group of Kerensky, in which Alexeiev, in order to soften the sting, conditionally includes himself. Colonel Baranovsky replies in the same tone: “God grant that we shall get out of the tenacious paws of the Soviet into which we have fallen.” Hardly had the masses saved Kerensky from the paws of Kornilov, when the leader of the democracy hastened to get into agreement with Alexeiev against the masses: “We shall get out of the tenacious paws of the Soviet.” Alexeiev was nevertheless compelled to submit to necessity, and carry out the ritual of arresting the principal conspirators. Kornilov offered no objection to sitting quietly under house arrest four days after he had announced to the people: “I prefer death to my removal from the post of commander-in-chief.” The Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, when it arrived at Moghiliev, also arrested the Vice-Minister of Communications, several officers of the general staff, the unarrived diplomat Alladin, and also the whole personnel of the head committee of the League of Officers.
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<br />During the first hours after the victory the Compromisers gesticulated ferociously. Even Avksentiev gave out flashes of lightning. For three whole days the rebels had left the front without any command! “Death to the traitors!” cried the members of the Executive Committee. Avksentiev welcomed these voices: Yes, the death penalty was introduced at the demand of Kornilov and his followers –“so much the more decisively will it be applied to them.” Stormy and prolonged applause.
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<br />The Moscow Church Council which had two weeks ago bowed its head before Kornilov as the restorer of the death penalty, now beseeched the government by telegraph in the name of God and the Christlike love of the neighbour to preserve the life of the erring general.” Other levers also were brought into operation. But the government had no idea at all of making a bloody settlement. When delegation from the Savage Division came to Kerensky in the Winter Palace, and one of the soldiers in answer to some general phrases of the new commander, said that “the traitor commanders ought to be ruthlessly punished,” Kerensky interrupted him with the words “Your business now is to obey your commander and we ourselves will do all that is necessary.” Apparently this man thought that the masses ought to appear on the scene when he stamped his left foot, and disappear again when he stamped with his right.
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<br />“We ourselves will do all that is necessary.” But all that they did seemed to the masses unnecessary, if not indeed suspicious and disastrous. The masses were not wrong. The upper circles were most of all occupied with restoring that very situation out of which the Kornilov campaign had arisen. “After the first few questions put by the members of the Inquiry Commission,” relates Lukomsky, “it became clear that they were all in the highest degree friendly toward us.” They were in essence accomplices and accessories. The military prosecutor Shablovsky gave the accused a consultation on the question of how to evade justice. The organisations of the front sent protests. “The generals and their accomplices are not being held as criminals before the state and the people…The rebels have complete freedom of communication with the outside world.” Lukomsky confirms this: “The staff of the commander-in-chief kept us informed about all matters of interest to us.” The indignant soldiers more than once felt an impulse to try the generals in their own courts, and the arrestees were saved from summary execution only by a counter-revolutionary Polish division sent to Bykhov where they were detained.
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<br />On the 12th of September, General Alexeiev wrote to Miliukov from headquarters a letter which reflected the legitimate indignation of the conspirators at the conduct of the big bourgeoisie, which had first pushed them on, but after the defeat left them to their fate. “You are to a certain degree aware” –wrote the general, not without poison on his pen- “that certain circles of our society not only knew about it all, not only sympathised intellectually, but even, to the extent that they were able, helped Kornilov…” In the name of the League of Officers Alexeiev demanded of Vyshnegradsky, Putilov and other big capitalists, who had turned their backs to the vanquished, that they should collect 300,000 roubles for the benefit of “the hungry families of those with whom they had been united by common ideals and preparations…” The letter ended in an open threat: “If the honest press does not immediately begin an energetic explanation of the situation…General Kornilov will be compelled to make a broad exposure before the court of all the preparatory activities, all conversations with persons and circles, the parts they played, etc.” As to the practical results of this tearful ultimatum, Denikin reports: “Only towards the end of October did they bring to Kornilov from Moscow about 40,000 roubles.” Miliukov during this period was in a general way absent from the political arena. According to the official Kadet version he had “gone to the Crimea for a rest.” After all these violent agitations the liberal leader was, to be sure, in need of rest.
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<br />The comedy of the Inquiry Commission dragged along until the Bolshevik insurrection, after which Kornilov and his accomplices were not only set free, but supplied Kerensky’s headquarters with all necessary documents. These escaped generals laid the foundations of the civil war. In the name of the sacred aims which had united Kornilov with the liberal Miliukov and the Black Hundredist, Rimsky-Korsakov, hundreds of thousands of people were buried, the south and east of Russia were pillaged and laid waste, the industry of the country was almost completely destroyed, and the Red Terror imposed upon the revolution. Kornilov, after successfully emerging from Kerensky’s courts of justice, soon fell on the civil war front from a Bolshevik shell. Kaladin’s fate was not very different. The “troop ring” of the Don demanded, not only a revocation of the order for Kaledin’s arrest, but also his restoration to the position of ataman. And here too Kerensky did not miss the opportunity to go back on himself. Skobelev was sent to Novocherkassk to apologise to the troop ring. The democratic minister was subjected to refined mockeries conducted by Kaledin himself. The triumph of the Cossack general was not, however, long-lasting. Pressed from all sides by the Bolshevik revolution breaking out on the Don, Kaledin in a few months ended his own life. The banner of Kornilov then passed into the hands of General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak, with whose names the principle period of the civil war is associated. But all that has to do with 1918 and the years that followed.
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<br />Dave Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.com1