As I have written in the past, an analysis can enable predictions of the future, based upon a scientific understanding of material reality, and the laws that govern its movement. In fact, these are not “predictions”, as such, but simply a description of what already exists, and is in process of becoming. These predictions can be made more certainly than predictions of what may happen tomorrow, or next week. All such predictions are conditional, but the conditions play a more significant role in the short term. The scientist must always set out this conditionality.
“In general, it is impossible to establish a prognosis with which the leaders of the proletariat would, in the future, no longer have need of analysing the situation. A prognosis has not the significance of command but rather of an orientation. One can and one must make reservations on the point up to which it is conditional. In certain situations, one can furnish a number of variants of the future, delimiting them with reflection. One can, finally, in a turbulent atmosphere, completely abandon prognosis for the time being and confine oneself to giving the advice: Wait and see! But all this must be done clearly, openly, honestly.” (p 191)
That was not the method of the Stalinists. Their prognoses were always written in this manner that allowed them, at a later date, to basically say, “We were right”. Moreover, they were written in such a way as to constitute traps for national leaders, and lower strata of the bureaucracy. Every bureaucracy works in this way, utilising the lower echelons to act as scapegoats for the errors of the top bureaucrats.
“The principal aim of the “prognoses” is: to inspire veneration towards the wisdom of the leadership, and in case of defeat, to save its “prestige”, that supreme fetish of weak people. It is a method of oracular announcement and not of Marxian investigation. It presupposes the existence on the scene of action of “scapegoats”. It is a demoralizing system. The ultra-leftist mistake committed by the German leadership in 1923 flowed precisely from this same perfidious, double-meaning manner of formulating the question on the subject of the “two waves of revolutionary progress”. The resolution of the Sixth Congress can cause just as many misfortunes.” (p 191-2)
Within a revolutionary period, there are waves of ebb and flow. That was seen, for example, in the period from around 1968-85. Short of an actual revolution, the intensity of the revolutionary struggle cannot be maintained permanently at a high or rising level. Some of those involved become worn out and must recuperate, whilst other, new forces enter the fray. But, in a counter-revolutionary period, the struggle is defensive, with the ebb heavily outweighing the flow, and this flow, often assumes a sporadic, adventurist, putschistic or terroristic nature.
The ECCI resolution noted, the necessity of utilising “all discontentment against the landed proprietors, the bourgeoisie, the generals, the foreign imperialists ...” (p 192) In a revolutionary period, that has different implications than during a counter-revolutionary period. Every increase in discontent and rebellion, in a revolutionary period, can signify the end of an ebb, and start of a new wave of upsurge. In those conditions, revolutionary and transitional demands take centre stage, as the basis of a program of action. It becomes necessary to begin to develop revolutionary organs of workers' power, from factory and peasant committees to soviets and from defence squads to militia. This is a necessary condition of utilising a revolutionary situation, and preparing the ground for an effective insurrection, as the Bolsheviks had done prior to October 1917.
But, in conditions of a counter-revolutionary period, such actions become adventurist and putschistic. Such was the case, in Germany, and in Canton. The extension of it is seen in terrorism and urban and rural guerrilla warfare.
“But the Sixth Congress does not possess this “bagatelle”, a correct historical perspective, on any question. The Fifth Congress was a failure because of this deficiency. It is on this score that the whole Communist International can also break its neck.” (p 192)
And, the correct historical perspective is required, when considering the opposite of this adventurism and putschism, i.e. opportunism. The ECCI resolution, also, criticised the raising of the demand for a National Assembly, as such opportunism, but, as set out earlier, in conditions where a majority of the masses still have illusions in that formal democracy, it is ultra-Left sectarianism, as described by Lenin, to refuse to participate in it, or refuse to support the masses in their struggle for it. After all, as Marx described, we do not share workers illusions in their ability to resolve their situation, by strikes, to raise their wages, and so on, but that does not mean we refuse to support their strikes, which, rather, we use to demonstrate their actual futility. As seen in 1917, that is true even in a revolutionary situation. It is even more true in a counter-revolutionary situation.
That does not make Marxists proponents or supporters of that formal democracy, only realists, who recognise the need to break the masses from it, by standing alongside them in that struggle. We are not supporters of the bourgeois ideology and politics of the Labour Party, or other such social-democratic parties either, but, that does not prevent us working alongside the workers who retain illusion in such parties, either directly via an entryist tactic (undeclared United front), or via an openly declared United Front, where we are strong enough to propose it.
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