The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (4/18)
Having set out his basic programme around the demands to be pursued by such a “Left government”, Paul says,
“If you want a framework to understand the difference between such a left government and socialism, the “workers government” concept promoted by the Comintern at its Fourth Congress in 1922 is a good place to start.”
But, that is to completely misunderstand the concept of the Workers', or, as Lenin formulated it, Workers' and Peasants' Government, which is a formulation that arises in a condition of dual power, i.e. in a revolutionary situation. That most certainly is not the conditions we face today, or are likely to face in the foreseeable future. Paul's understanding of the Workers' Government is not that of the Communist International in 1922, but that of the Stalinists in later years, used to justify its support for the Popular Front.
In 1917, the February Revolution led to the establishment of the Provisional government of Kerensky. It was a Popular Front government, comprising representatives of the workers (Mensheviks), peasants and petty-bourgeoisie (Social-Revolutionaries/Popular Socialists) and the bourgeoisie (Kadets/Octobrists). The Bolsheviks had believed, like all Marxists, that the socialist revolution would occur first in the already developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. The basis of this, as Lenin set out in his writings against the Narodniks in the 1890's, was that it is only where such developed industrial capital exists that the contradictions of capitalism become fully mature. It is there where the industrial worker is most clearly divorced from all private ownership of the means of production and, so, freed of all the ideological influences that such ownership continues to have upon them. It is why, in Russia itself, he argues that it is only the industrial workers in the big towns and cities that can provide the vanguard of the proletarian struggle, as against the arguments of the Narodniks (who in the 20th century morphed into the SR's and Popular Socialists) that the nature of the peasant and of the village commune created the material basis for socialist construction. On the contrary, Lenin says, it is the very fact that the peasant and petty-bourgeois handicraft worker still has a foot in the past, with their connection to the private ownership of means of production that means they cannot break away from the petty-bourgeois ideas that go with them, and those petty-bourgeois ideas amount only to a watered down, backward, and so reactionary, version of bourgeois ideas themselves. The peasant and petty-bourgeoisie could be drawn in behind the revolution, or at least neutralised in their social impact, only by the industrial proletariat providing the lead to developing a socialist alternative to capitalism.
Paul believes that these conditions no longer exist, because the days of the big industrial workplaces are behind us, that many workers are employed in small workplaces, precarious employment and self-employment etc., and the types of exploitation are no longer based purely on the extraction of surplus value. In fact, this is based upon a misconception. The same misconception was held by the Narodniks, like Mikhailovsky, and used to present the same argument in relation to Russia in the late 19th century. Paul's argument is really just a modern day version of the same argument put forward by the Narodniks 130 years ago. In fact, as Lenin points out, in response, if this argument were correct, then there would have been no basis for Marx's argument in Britain in the 19th century either, because the factory workers comprised only a small minority of the total workforce, with more being employed as domestic servants than industrial workers. I will come back to this in relation to Paul's argument in that respect later. I have also dealt with this argument in my critique of his Postcapitalism.
The Russian Marxists saw the historical process being one in which the industrial proletariat in Western Europe undertook socialist revolutions, and began creating socialism. In the wake of those revolutions, the industrial proletariat, in Russia, would act as the vanguard, uniting the peasants and petty-bourgeoisie behind it, in overthrowing Tsarism. Given the undeveloped state of Russian capitalism, and small size of the industrial proletariat, this revolution would lead not to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as envisaged for Western Europe, but the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, and this would create a transitional period during which both agriculture and industry was developed towards socialism, with the support of the socialist economies of Western Europe.
Trotsky had argued in Results and Prospects, following the 1905 Russian Revolution, that, in fact, revolutions might occur in non-advanced economies, like Russia, or in countries undertaking anti-colonial revolutions. The basis of his argument was the concept of “Permanent Revolution”, first mentioned by Marx and Engels in 1850, in addresses to the Communist League. Following the defeats of the Revolutions of 1848, when the bourgeoisie, and the petty-bourgeoisie, organised within the liberal and social-democratic parties, betrayed the proletariat, Marx and Engels had set out the need for the workers to retain their political and organisational independence from these bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties.
Marx says,
“While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.”
Years later, Engels was to admit that their hopes in this direction had been Utopian for the simple reason that the only country in Europe where the working-class even formed a sizeable proportion of society, in 1848, was Britain. Even when Marx comes to write the Critique of the Gotha Programme, in 1875, he is led to point out,
“In the first place, the majority of the "toiling people" in Germany consists of peasants, not proletarians.”
I will come back to the position of Marx and Engels in this relation later.
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