In a few months, the tenth anniversary of the stormy and glorious days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 will be celebrated. The victory of the Russian industrial proletarians and poor peasants over their oppressors, the capitalists and large landowners, made the hearts of all class-conscious workers in the entire capitalist world beat with joy and enthusiasm. It became a great moral source of light and strength for the world proletariat, which had just been afflicted by the treacherous betrayal of the Second International. The October victory of the Russian workers threatened to become the spark of the proletarian world revolution, instilling paralyzing fear, terror, horror, and impotent rage in the capitalists of all countries.
The situation in the tenth year after the Russian October is different, entirely different. The international bourgeoisie has long since breathed a sigh of relief; it increasingly presents fewer horror stories to the public about “the land of Bolshevik terror” – for the heroic era of the Russian Revolution is over! And the proletarians? The majority still believe that Russia remains an outpost of the world revolution. They believe this because it is still the Bolshevik Party, with its revolutionary credibility, that holds the helm of the Russian government. But this belief, however deeply rooted it may still be in the minds of the working masses, lacks a material basis. It is being shaken to its foundations by the real social forces, by the class relations that determine Russia’s domestic policy.
Russia’s Domestic Policy
What are these Russian class relations like? According to Stalin’s figures, as of October 1, 1925, there were approximately 7 million wage workers, of which 1.2 million were agricultural workers and 715,000 were unemployed (according to Trud on December 12, 1926, there are already 1.023 million unemployed!). The remaining part, the vast majority of Russia’s roughly 130 million population, consists of peasants, urban bourgeoisie, and the private and state-capitalist elements that have developed with the introduction of the “New Economic Policy” (NEP). The peasants are the overwhelming majority – roughly estimated at 80 percent of the total population – and are divided (according to Zinoviev) into 45 percent poor peasants, 50 percent middle peasants, and 5 percent kulaks (large-scale farmers). The Bolsheviks recognized in 1917 that this social composition – with peasants outnumbering proletarians by at least eight to one – was decisive for Russian state policy. Only with the slogan “Land to the Peasants” could they secure their victory over Kerensky and muster the necessary armies to repel the White Guard assaults. However, none of the Russian Bolsheviks saw earlier than Lenin that the Russian peasant masses, by breaking their tsarist-feudal chains, were simultaneously propelled into development as a socially independent class. As early as 1919, Lenin warned the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia: “Do not command the peasants!” With this, Lenin reminded his triumphant comrades of the Marxist truism: the class relations of a country determine the direction of its state policy, and thus the Bolsheviks could only maintain power as the governing party by respecting the will of the Russian peasants, whose core forces had been placed on the social stage as a conscious actor through the October Revolution.
“Do not command the peasants” is the historical warning for the Russian Bolsheviks. Not because a proletarian minority could not exercise a revolutionary dictatorship over a propertyless peasant majority, but because the Russian class relations are merely the concrete expression of specific production relations. And what are these in Russia’s vast agricultural regions? They are characterized by the fact that the former Russian feudal estates were not transformed into proletarian communal property but merely divided into countless fragments. From this economic situation, enormous social difficulties were bound to arise sooner or later for the Russian October Revolution, despite all the political triumphs the Bolsheviks achieved during the period of War Communism over the White bands.
The crisis – whose driving forces lie primarily in Russia’s insufficiently developed material conditions – could only have been prevented if the Russian Revolution, with its socialist tasks, had been rapidly placed on an international basis. This attempt failed due to the revolutionary weakness of the international, and particularly the German, proletariat, and the crisis became inevitable. When it became clear in the summer of 1921 that the snail’s pace of the world revolution could not be mechanically transformed into high-speed progress, the Russian Bolsheviks faced an unavoidable alternative: either to perish honorably in the revolutionary struggle against the overwhelming capitalist encirclement and the unfavorable historical situation in their own country, or to lead a shameful, deceptive existence at the mercy of capitalist powers; either to save the honor of international socialism at the eleventh hour, or to incur the disgrace of moral collapse by fleeing into an opportunistic policy alien to proletarian class interests! In this historical dilemma, the Bolsheviks, to formally remain in power, opted for a shameful compromise, thereby sacrificing the class content of the Russian proletarian uprising. For the liquidation of the War Communism system through the introduction of the NEP meant nothing less than a principled abandonment of the methods and goals of proletarian class policy. Unlike his Stalinist successors, Lenin was fully aware of the anti-proletarian character of the NEP. He stated at the time: “The political situation in the spring of 1921 shows us that it is inevitable to retreat, in a number of economic questions, to the positions of state capitalism.” (See Inprekorr No. 3, p. 28). Elsewhere in the same article, Lenin is even clearer: “The task of transitioning to the NEP consists precisely in the fact that, after attempts at immediate socialist construction under the most difficult conditions, we are faced with the clear situation: no immediate socialist construction, but a retreat in a whole series of economic fields to state capitalism.” “What is that?” Lenin asks further and answers unequivocally: “A consolidation of small-scale production, capital consolidates small-scale production, capital arises from small-scale production. One must not close one’s eyes to this. Of course, freedom of trade means the growth of capitalism. If small-scale economy exists, if freedom of exchange exists, then capitalism emerges.” And in the last speech Lenin was able to deliver before his death at a Russian party congress, he warned once again against a fundamental error: “…we do not yet have a socialist foundation. Those communists who imagine otherwise are making a great mistake.” (See Inprekorr 1926, No. 13, p. 156).
The fact that millions of Russian peasants (i.e., the 50 percent middle peasants) are landowners and thus private property owners has increasingly imposed a social stamp on Bolshevik state policy, as the economic power of the possessing peasant class also has political effects. While during the period of War Communism the specific weight of the middle peasantry was still so small that the Bolsheviks could suffice with the slogan “neutralization of the middle peasants,” the middle peasant has become so economically strengthened through the NEP that he now represents the “central figure.” “The middle peasantry is the basic mass, the fundamental layer of the rural population. Middle farms form the basic mass of peasant farms. The middle peasant constitutes the majority of the rural population and is therefore the central figure,” Bukharin stated at the 14th Congress of the Communist Party. And because the middle peasants are now the economically most powerful class in Russia, they increasingly dictate the course of domestic policy. Therefore, the Bolsheviks had to issue the slogan “alliance of workers with the middle peasants.” Year by year, it becomes clearer that the Bolsheviks, through the NEP, have fallen into an insoluble dilemma where they must represent the interests of a class alien to the Russian working class. Certainly, it would be foolish to deny the possibility of an alliance between industrial workers and peasants altogether. But from a Marxist standpoint, it is a fatal self-deception to believe that the most basic conditions for such an alliance already exist in today’s Russia. For the Russian peasant masses (i.e., their decisive middle strata, alongside the kulaks) have become landowners, private property owners, through the overthrow of feudalism! And as such, their social interests are diametrically opposed to the proletarian class interests. In other words: private ownership of land inevitably leads to agriculture on a capitalist basis, production for a solvent market, i.e., a commodity economy – while the class goal of the proletariat (also in Russia!) can only be a needs-based economy, communism, the abolition of bourgeois property. The NEP itself is the most striking proof that the Bolsheviks, as the governing party, can no longer pursue a proletarian class policy, as the state policy of any country is determined by its real economic forces. All the well-known concessions of recent years – the reintroduction of free trade, the legal recognition of land leasing and the expansion of wage slavery in agriculture, the lifting of restrictions on wage labor in cottage industries, the state promotion of private capital accumulation in the countryside, etc. – only confirm how the Bolsheviks are forced by the social weight of the landowning peasant strata to gradually abandon the interests of the Russian working class.
Under the pressure of NEP-capitalist development, the Russian Bolsheviks, as political representatives of the middle peasant class, must increasingly dismiss the proletariat with phrases and promises, with assurances that the vital interests of the possessing and therefore alien peasantry are its own class interests. The Russian working class, on the orders of the governing Bolsheviks, is no longer allowed to pursue an independent class policy but is condemned to renounce the struggle for its own interests through an alliance with capitalistically operating middle peasants. The Russian proletarians are forbidden by the “Soviet government” to fight for communism together with the rural poor (whose numbers are constantly growing due to the agrarian concentration process), because such a policy would unleash class struggle in the countryside. Class struggle of the propertyless against the propertied means shaking and undermining the NEP economy, ultimately resulting in a revolutionary upheaval of the existing Russian social relations, a new revolutionary overturn that is not in the class interest of the economically dominant middle peasants – and therefore the Bolsheviks dictate a truce to the Russian proletariat with the capitalistically oriented peasant masses.
This truce, this self-inflicted betrayal of their class interests, is made palatable to the Russian working class with the assurance: “Despite the NEP, a socialist construction is taking place in Russia, for the proletariat holds state industry in its hands.” This is the highest but also the most worthless trump card the Bolsheviks can play. For, quite apart from the fact that under the conditions of today’s highly developed world capitalism, socialism in a single country (and especially in a backward agrarian state) must remain a utopia; and that a socialist industry and NEP-capitalist agricultural production cannot possibly form an economic unity, the hard facts themselves speak a fundamentally different language than the Leninist assertions. How is it possible, for example, that in Russia, despite the greatest hunger for goods, millions of unemployed proletarians simply cannot be provided with work? Well, only because Russian industry does not produce for the needs of the masses but for the solvent market: the proletariat does not control the means of production, otherwise it could use this economic weapon to counter the danger of unemployment from the outset. The Russian workers have no decisive influence on the industrial production process; they are wage slaves who must sell their labor power as a commodity by the piece or by the hour – and this labor power is subject to the laws of capitalist market relations: it is absorbed by industry when demand for goods rises and repelled when goods cannot find sufficient sales due to a lack of purchasing power. The unemployment that the governing Bolsheviks cannot eliminate is clear proof that Russia, even in state industry, has a capitalist production basis, and therefore there can be absolutely no talk of socialist development. – An aggravating factor is that Russia’s capital shortage and other economic difficulties (which impair its competitiveness on the world market) also necessitate the rationalization of the Russian economy, which, as in Germany and all capitalist states, is carried out at the expense of the working class. On this Russian rationalization, called the “economy regime,” Rote Fahne wrote on October 17, 1926, among other things: “The process of simple reconstruction by utilizing the old production apparatus is complete. Any further expansion of industrial production is only possible through the investment of new capital and, to some extent, through better utilization of existing capital. The possibility of the latter lies primarily in the rationalization of the production process.” In plain language, this means that the social effects of rationalization in Russia also have a mass-impoverishing tendency. The proletarians, who as “superfluous eaters” burden the production apparatus, are thrown onto the streets, and working conditions are worsened to better utilize existing capital and invest new capital. It goes without saying that private capital in Russia, the foreign concessionaires, is at the forefront of this rationalization offensive, systematically depressing the proletarian living standard.
The further Russia’s NEP-capitalist development progresses, the sharper the social contradictions between the proletariat and the possessing strata must become. The social perspective of the NEP is already clearly recognizable in the Marxist mirror today and presents the following picture: on one hand, an increase in agricultural production and growing peasant wealth; on the other, rising rural poverty through the increase of small peasants dispossessed by kulaks; here, growing industrial competitiveness through advancing rationalization; there, the formation of an army of permanently unemployed and worsening of the proletarian class situation; here, the luxurious life of the NEP bourgeoisie; there, the unheard-of misery of proletarian children; here, the systematic growth of the influence of capitalist strata in state administration; there, the equally steady decline of proletarian influence; here, neo-capitalist progress at every corner of Russian society; there, the unstoppable retreat of the working class on all fronts. Thus, the Bolshevik Party of Russia – and with it the Comintern, spiritually inspired by it – has been unmistakably in a permanent crisis since the introduction of the NEP: it has gone from being a pioneer of the proletarian world revolution to a bearer of capitalist development! The Russian Bolsheviks have fulfilled the Marxist thesis that Friedrich Engels formulated in his German Peasants’ War as follows:
“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be forced to take over the government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the rule of the class he represents and for the implementation of the measures that the rule of this class requires. What he can do depends not on his will but on the level to which the antagonism of the various classes has been driven and on the degree of development of the material conditions of existence, the relations of production and exchange, on which the respective degree of development of class antagonisms rests. What he ought to do, what his own party demands of him, again depends not on him, nor on the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions; he is bound to his previous doctrines and demands, which again do not arise from the momentary position of the social classes relative to each other or from the more or less accidental state of the relations of production and exchange, but from his greater or lesser insight into the general results of the social and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds himself in an insoluble dilemma: what he can do contradicts his entire previous conduct, his principles, and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be carried out. In a word, he is forced to represent not his party, his class, but the class for whose rule the movement is just ripe. In the interest of the movement itself, he must carry out the interests of a class alien to him and dismiss his own class with phrases and promises, with the assurance that the interests of that alien class are its own interests. Whoever falls into this false position is irretrievably lost.”
Russia’s Foreign Policy
“And now the Bolsheviks face the most terrible end to their thorny path: like a sinister specter, an alliance of the Bolsheviks with Germany approaches! This would indeed be the final link in the fateful chain that the World War has wrapped around the neck of the Russian Revolution: first retreat, then capitulation, and finally an alliance with German imperialism. The Russian Revolution would thus have been hurled by the World War, which it sought to escape at all costs, to the opposite pole – from the side of the Entente under the Tsar to the side of Germany under the Bolsheviks… An alliance of the Bolsheviks with German imperialism would be the most devastating moral blow that could still be dealt to international socialism. Russia was the last bastion where revolutionary socialism, purity of principles, and ideal values still held sway, where the gazes of all honest socialist elements in Germany and throughout Europe turned to recover from the disgust evoked by the practice of the Western European labor movement, to arm themselves with courage to persevere and faith in ideal causes and sacred words. With the grotesque ‘pairing’ of Lenin and Hindenburg, the moral light source in the East would be extinguished…
A socialist revolution riding on German bayonets, a proletarian dictatorship under the patronage of German imperialism – that would be the most monstrous thing we could still witness. And on top of that, it would be – pure utopia…
Then, all the previous sacrifices, the great sacrifice of the Brest Peace, would have been made in vain: for their ultimate price would be – moral bankruptcy. Any political downfall of the Bolsheviks in honest struggle against the overwhelming power and adversity of the historical situation would be preferable to this moral downfall.”
(Rosa Luxemburg, September 1918. See Spartakusbriefe, pp. 183–185, Berlin 1920.)
“There is no principled difference here between a loan and a military alliance. And I assert that we have grown strong enough to be able to conclude a military alliance with another bourgeoisie in order to crush another bourgeoisie by means of this bourgeois state. What will happen later, under certain power relations, you can easily imagine; this is a question of purely strategic-tactical expediency. This is how it should be formulated in the program.
In this form of homeland defense, of military alliance with bourgeois states, it is the duty of the comrades in such a country to help this bloc achieve victory.”
(Bukharin at the 4th World Congress of the Comintern, November 1922; see Protocol p. 420, Comintern Publishing.)
The NEP, i.e., the capitalistically oriented domestic policy, must inevitably correspond to Russia’s foreign policy. For the fatal situation that imperatively required an economic policy change in 1921 simultaneously necessitated the establishment of a new and fundamentally different relationship between Russia and its capitalist environment. This was all the more urgent because Russia, stuck in a bourgeois revolution, is a wavering colossus on clay feet in global political isolation. Faced with the task of consolidating social relations, the possessing Russian peasant masses cannot solve this vital task on their own but only in alliance with the international bourgeoisie. What, then, is the essence of this foreign policy corresponding to the NEP? For NEP Russia to build its economy, it must be reintegrated into the capitalist world economic system. It needs machines to improve its industry and agriculture, markets for its agricultural products, trade relations, and loans. NEP Russia needs peace with the capitalist world; it also needs political alliances with bourgeois states – not a proletarian world revolution, not communist revolutions in capitalist countries. Material assistance from foreign capital groups in building the NEP economy – this is the historical guideline of Russian foreign policy, which springs from the class interests of the possessing social strata.
But the foreign policy of NEP Russia would be incomplete if it were limited to purely political and economic relations. The logic of NEP-capitalist development inevitably dictates that Russia also seeks military alliances to strengthen its power-political position in the capitalist world. Russia can only achieve this more favorable position by attempting to form an alliance with countries in a similar economic condition (industrially not yet highly developed, e.g., China) and with states that, due to their military inferiority in the World War, have fallen into a dependent relationship with imperialist powers (e.g., Germany, Turkey, etc.). Given its weak economic and global political position, the foreign policy of the Russian peasant state, if it is to have real value for the NEP, must aim to paralyze the imperialist dominance of the Geneva League of Nations, led by France and England, by creating an eastern League of Nations. To achieve this goal, Russia (and with it the Comintern) actively supports the Canton government (Kuomintang) of Chinese landowners and capitalists in their war for national independence. For the same reason, the Moscow government supplied arms to Turkey’s national capitalists during the Greco-Turkish War. On the same line of struggle against capitalist rivals were the Russian government’s expressions of solidarity with the English miners’ strike, as well as the temporary “good relations” between “Soviet” Russia and Mussolini’s Italy. And for the same reason, Russia also supported the German bourgeoisie’s Ruhr War through a military alliance that was still in effect as late as 1926! The brotherhood-in-arms with bourgeois states is merely the crowning achievement of Russian foreign policy, for NEP Russia can simply see no principled difference between a loan and a military alliance.
Military alliances with bourgeois states for the purpose of defeating another (i.e., “Western-oriented”) bourgeoisie are indeed a vital necessity for today’s Russia. But this alliance policy simultaneously tears the last revolutionary veil from the face of the Russian Bolsheviks, mercilessly completing the Russian tragedy. – When Russia maintains a military alliance with a bourgeois state, according to Bukharin, the Comintern section (i.e., the proletarians) of that country is obliged, in case of war, to “help this bloc achieve victory,” for it is a matter of a “national liberation struggle,” a “progressive” war. However, this Leninist explanation, which forms the ideological cornerstone of Russian foreign policy, has no viable material basis in harsh reality. It is sheer nonsense to speak of “progressive” wars by bourgeois states in the monopolistic phase of world capitalism. Revolutionary Marxism determines the character of wars and its attitude toward them from the standpoint of the interests of social development, and thus from the standpoint of the interests of the proletariat. Marxism does not divide wars into progressive and reactionary based on whether they are defensive or offensive, i.e., imperialist wars, or whether they are for national independence or not – for it, wars are progressive or reactionary depending on whether they contribute to the overthrow of an old social order that has become an obstacle to development and thus pave the way for a new order. This means: the only possible progressive war in the current era of highly developed capitalism is the war against capitalism itself! From this Marxist standpoint, Turkey’s war was not progressive, as it was only about national independence. The same character applies to the struggle of the young Chinese bourgeoisie, which merely seeks greater independence from capitalist world powers. The clearest example, however, is the Ruhr War of 1923, supported by Russia. This “national liberation struggle” of the German bourgeoisie was equally non-progressive, as its goal was not to change the social order but merely to restore German police and military authority.
From the stance of the Russian Leninist leaders on wars in the current highly capitalist era, important political consequences arise: In the Ruhr War of 1923, Russia supported the German capitalist class through a military alliance (i.e., through ammunition supplies); the KPD was thus obliged to “help this bloc achieve victory” and therefore had to lead the proletariat into a truce with the bourgeoisie! A few years earlier, during the World War, according to Lenin’s own statements, the German working class had the task of waging civil war: “Revolutionary actions during the war,” Lenin writes in Against the Current (p. 105), “against one’s own government certainly and undoubtedly mean not only the desire for its defeat but also the actual promotion of such a defeat.” Leninism thus moves in the following contradictory cycle: During an imperialist war, the proletariat must be for the defeat of its own country – but if that country is defeated, it must then support “its” bourgeoisie in its struggle for national independence – and when the “oppressed” bourgeoisie, through this proletarian support, becomes the representative of an equal nation again, the working class must again reject homeland defense – only to support it again when its bourgeoisie faces defeat once more, and so on!! In effect, this means: Leninism calls on the proletariat to renounce civil war against the bourgeoisie in so-called “progressive national liberation struggles” and thus to abandon the only truly progressive war today – the war against capitalism! Against these social-patriotic implications of Leninist slogans, revolutionary Marxism calls out to the workers of highly capitalist countries: You can only exploit national movements for social progress if you ruthlessly strike at the roots of capitalism, which has become an obstacle to social development! Not a truce, but civil war, proletarian mass actions with a communist aim, is the revolutionary slogan placed on the agenda by history!
The most monstrous thing has happened: the moral light source of the world proletariat in Eastern Europe has been extinguished; the Russian Bolsheviks have morally collapsed… In the tenth year after the Russian October, class-conscious workers of all countries – however many cherished illusions may be shattered – must recognize the iron fact: The path of NEP Russia, i.e., the path of Leninism, leads to the defense of capitalist fatherlands by proletarians who possess no fatherland, and thus to the social-democratic crime of August 4, 1914; it leads to supplying the German Reichswehr with “Soviet” ammunition. – The path of Leninism leads from revolution to counterrevolution!
Leninism for the Defense of Capitalist Fatherlands
On January 8, 1927, Bukharin stated at the Moscow Provincial Conference of the Bolsheviks, according to Inprekorr No. 11 of January 25, 1927 (p. 203):
“You all know perfectly well that Germany at the time (i.e., 1919–23, ed.) embodied the most peaceful tendency toward us, with the circumstance playing an enormous role that Germany was temporarily subjected to national oppression, humiliation, and direct plunder by the imperialist states. I mention in passing that our party, as well as all other communist parties, precisely in view of this special situation of Germany, rightly considered it possible to defend even a bourgeois Germany against the violations by the imperialist states.
… If currently some politicians of bourgeois Germany, their social-democratic mouthpieces, and ultra-left renegades (?) of communism try to portray our stance on this issue as a kind of sin and vice on our part, we can declare to them from this platform once again that the Communist Party of our country and the Soviet state led by the Communist Party will always and everywhere stand on the side of all oppressed, all subjugated, and even national-bourgeois states in those cases where they are attacked on all sides by imperialist robbers. This is our line, this line we have pursued and will continue to pursue as long as such cases arise in the future.”
Russia Arms the Bourgeoisie
At a district` district party congress of the KPD, Wasserkante, Arthur Ewert, a member of the Central Committee of the KPD, made the following confession, according to the report of the Hamburger Volkszeitung of March 1, 1927:
“Now a word about the Soviet grenades. Comrades, take, for example, the Turkish government. It waged a war against Greece. And the Turkish government was also supplied with arms material by Soviet Russia (as was Germany, ed.). This is an established and undisputed fact. The same Turkish government, however, simultaneously persecuted the communists in Turkey most severely; this, too, is an undisputed fact. Our party in Turkey worked under the harshest conditions; nevertheless, the struggle against the vanguard of Western imperialism by this national Turkish government was supported by Soviet Russia. This must be made clear to the workers.”