Introduction
The war between Russia and Ukraine has, again, shown the confusion that exists on the “Left”, in relation to the Marxist attitude to imperialism, national liberation struggles and war. That's not surprising. The socialist movement split, in 1914, over the question of war and national defence. In 1917, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were split, following the February Revolution, over the question of national defence, with Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev arguing a bourgeois-defencist position that left Lenin fuming and, threatening to split the party, if it adopted this social-patriotic line.
In the 1920's, as Trotsky describes, in his analysis of the Chinese Revolution, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev returned to their February 1917 position whose manifestation is the Popular Front, an alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, for the purpose of carrying through the bourgeois-democratic national revolution, which Lenin also equated with the national independence struggle of colonies and annexed nations. To understand that, its necessary to also look back to the lessons of the Russian Revolution, and the role of the theory of Permanent Revolution.
As a result of the revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels concluded that the era of “popular revolutions” had passed. Lenin makes the same conclusion, which he sets out in his polemics against the Narodniks. Lenin says that it was valid to speak of popular revolutions, or “the people” in that period prior to the differentiation of the peasantry and small commodity producers into a bourgeoisie and proletariat, because “the people”, at that time, constituted an undifferentiated mass, but that was no longer the case.
Bourgeois-democratic revolutions would occur, and would involve an alliance of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat, but the proletariat itself, now, constituted a revolutionary class, also in opposition to the bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry. Its antagonistic interests to those of the bourgeoisie, and these other classes, would inevitably mean that, having been mobilised, it would also pursue those class interests of its own, whilst the bourgeoisie and democratic petty-bourgeoisie, would try to curtail the revolution at that point, where its interests had been met, and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie had been established. In conditions where the peasants still constituted a large mass of society, they also had an incentive to utilise their numbers, as voters, in bourgeois parliaments. The interests of peasants and proletarians may be aligned to a point, but they are different classes, with different class interests.
In his 1850 Address to the Executive of the Communist League, Marx says,
“As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this; but it does lie within their power to make it as difficult as possible for the petty bourgeoisie to use its power against the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier...
Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself...
they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.”
It was necessary, he says, therefore, for the proletariat to guard against this by ensuring their political and organisational independence from the bourgeoisie.
No comments:
Post a Comment