The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (5/18)
Following the 1917 February Revolution, most of the leading Bolsheviks were outside Russia, having had to flee from persecution and potential arrest by the Tsarist police state. The revolution brought them back by various means from a range of countries across the globe. In Russia, the task of guiding the party fell to Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin, the most senior Bolsheviks there at the time. They continued to apply the principle behind the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry. On the basis of it, they gave critical support to the Provisional government. Lenin, however, fumed at this position, constantly sending messages and telegrams insisting that such support be withdrawn, and venting his anger. Trotsky notes,
"On March 6 he telegraphed through Stockholm to Petrograd: “Our tactic; absolute lack of confidence; no support to the new government; suspect Kerensky especially; arming of proletariat the sole guarantee; immediate elections to the Petrograd Duma; no rapprochement with other parties. In this directive, only the suggestion about elections to the Duma instead of the Soviet, had an episodic character and soon dropped out of sight...
On the 17th of March, through friends in Stockholm, he wrote a letter filled with alarm. “Our party would disgrace itself forever, kill itself politically, if it took part in such deceit ... I would choose an immediate split with no matter whom in our party rather than surrender to social patriotism ...” After this apparently impersonal threat – having definite people in mind however – Lenin adjures: “Kamenev must understand that a world historic responsibility rests upon him.” Kamenev is named here because it is a question of political principle. If Lenin had had a practical militant problem in mind, he would have been more likely to mention Stalin. But in just those hours Lenin was striving to communicate the intensity of his will to Petrograd across smoking Europe, Kamenev with the co-operation of Stalin was turning sharply toward social patriotism."
(Trotsky - History of The Russian Revolution, Chapter 15)
The immediate cause for alarm was the fact that the Provisional Government had resumed the Tsarist position in relation to the war. The outbreak of the February Revolution had been heralded by the fact that Russian troops at the German front had begun to desert their positions in large numbers and return home. The Bolsheviks held a position common to all the revolutionary socialists across Europe of “revolutionary defeatism”. That is they argued that the main enemy of the working-class was at home, in the shape of its own ruling class. Revolutionary defeatism does not mean actively seeking the defeat of your own country, on the contrary, many of the revolutionaries were themselves fighting on the front lines, seeking to conduct revolutionary propaganda amongst their troops along these lines. Trotsky put forward a similar position at the start of WWII, pouring scorn on the role of the pacifists, conscientious objectors and draft dodgers. Rather, what revolutionary defeatism means is that the primary goal of the working-class remains to wage the class struggle against your own ruling-class, and seek to overthrow it, even if the consequence of that is defeat at the hands of the enemy. It is only justified to argue for defence, in the event that the workers actually do secure victory, and establish a workers' state, then the workers have something they can truly defend.
But, as Lenin notes in his April Thesis, that formulation, of the Democratic Dictatorship, was one they adopted in relation to some future state of affairs. The reality was that the February Revolution had brought about that state of affairs. The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry now existed. The question was what then the position of socialists to it should be. Marx in the Address referred to previously notes, that in the period when the petty-bourgeoisie secures power, the socialists must
“oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organised. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organise themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organise themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.”
The significance of this position can perhaps be best seen currently in the US, in relation to the continued murder of black citizens by racist cops, and whilst this has led to demands for the police to be disbanded and defunded, the same bourgeois, and petty-bourgeois forces again try to neuter such demands, by attempting to translate the demands as merely calls for the police to be reconstituted and reformed. Its only necessary to look back to the Miners' Strike of 1984-5, to see the importance of building such a position in preparation for such large class battles.
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