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Foreword
This text is a translation of two articles entitled
'Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy', written by Rosa
Luxemburg in 1904. The translation was made by the United Workers'
Party in America and first published in Britain in Pamphlet form in 1935
by the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation.
It was later republished by the Independent Labour
Party in the 1960s and went under the title of Leninism or Marxism
This text was scanned from the ILP
pamphlet. In the 1935 edition, several of the paragraphs were
transposed. This version follows the 1935 edition, except for a few
grammatical amendments.
It remains interesting because, even in 1904, Luxemburg
was able to identify those aspects of Lenin's politics which were to lead
to the defeat of the Russian Revolution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. |
LENINISM or MARXISM
ORGANISATIONAL QUESTIONS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
In Social Democracy, organisation is also a different thing from that of the
earlier, Utopian attempts at Socialism. It is not an artificial product of
propaganda but an historical product of the class struggle, into which Social
Democracy simply brings the political consciousness. Under normal conditions,
i.e. where the class rule of the bourgeoisie precedes the social-democratic
movement, the first political welding together of the workers has in large
measure been the work of the bourgeoisie itself. "On this plane," says
the Communist Manifesto, "the drawing
together of workers in mass is not yet the consequence of their own union, but
the consequence of the union of the bourgeoisie." In Russia there has
fallen to Social Democracy the task of consciously stepping in and taking over a
part of the historical process and of leading the proletariat as a fighting
class which is conscious of its goal from political authoritarianism, which
forms the foundation of the absolutist regime, immediately to the highest form
of organisation. Thus the organisational question is particularly difficult to
Russian Social Democracy not merely because its work must be done without any
previous experience of bourgeois democracy, but because it has to create in a
sense, like the good Lord himself "out of nothing", without the
political raw material which has elsewhere already been prepared by bourgeois
society.
The problem on which Russian Social Democracy has been working during the
last few years is, to be precise, the transition from the dispersed, quite
independent circles and local organisations, which corresponded to the
preparatory and primarily propagandistic phase of the movement, to a form of
organisation such as is required for a unified political action of the masses
throughout the whole nation.
Since, however, the most prominent trait of the old form of organisation, now
grown unbearable and politically outmoded, was dispersion and complete autonomy,
or the self-sufficiency of the local organisations, it was
quite natural that the watchword of the new phase, of the preparatory work for
the great organisation, should become centralism. The emphasis on this
thought was the leitmotif of Iskra in its brilliant three-year
campaign for preparing the last and really constituent party congress, and the
same thought dominated the entire young guard of the party. However, it
was soon to appear at the Congress, and still more so after the Congress,
that centralism is a slogan which is far from exhausting the historical content,
the peculiarity of the social-democratic type of organisation; it
has been shown once more that the Marxist conception of Socialism is not
susceptible of being fixed in formulae.
The present book of Comrade Lenin, ( One Step
Forward, Two Steps Backward [Geneva. 1904].)
one of the prominent leaders and debaters of Iskra in its campaign prior
to the Russian Party Congress, is the systematic exposition of the views of the
ultra-centralist wing of the party. The conception which has here found
expression in penetrating and exhaustive form is that of a thorough-going
centralism of which the vital principle is, on the one hand, the sharp
separation of the organised bodies of outspoken and active revolutionists from
the unorganised though revolutionary active masses surrounding them, and on the
other hand, strict discipline and direct, decisive and determining intervention
of the central authorities in all expressions of life in the party's local
organisations. It suffices to note, for example, that the central committee,
according to this conception, is authorised to organise all sub-committees of
the party, hence also has power to determine the personal composition of every
single local organisation, from Geneva and Liege to Tomsk and Irkutsk, to give it
a set of self-made local statutes, to completely dissolve it
by a decree and create it anew, and finally in
this manner to influence the composition of the highest party authority, the
Party Congress. According to this. the central committee appears as the real
active nucleus of the party, and all other organisations are merely its
executive organs.
In the union of such a strict centralism in organisation with the
social-democratic mass movement, Lenin perceives a specific
Marxist-revolutionary principle, and has succeeded in bringing into the field a
large number of facts to support his conception. Let us, however, look into the
matter a bit more closely.
There can be no doubt that a strong capitalistic streak is native to Social
Democracy. Having sprung from the economic soil of capitalism, which is
centralistic in its tendencies, and confined in its struggle to the political
framework of a centralised great power under the dominance of the bourgeoisie,
Social Democracy is fundamentally opposed to any particularism or national
federalism. Called upon to represent the total interests of the proletariat as a
class within the framework of a given State in opposition to all partial and
group interests, it reveals everywhere a natural striving
to weld together all national, religious and professional groups of the working
class into one unified party.
In this respect, there has been and is for Russian Social Democracy also no question but that it must form, not a federative
conglomerate made up of a great number of special organisations on a national
and provincial scale, but a unified, compact labour party of the Russian Empire.
There is, however, a quite different question also to be considered: namely, the
greater or lesser degree of centralisation and the detailed structure within a
united and unified party.
From the standpoint of the formal tasks of Social Democracy as a fighting
party, centralism in its organisation appears a priori as an indispensable
condition, the fulfilment of which is directly related to the fighting qualities
of the party. More important here, however, than the consideration of the formal
demands of any fighting organisation are the specific historical conditions of
the proletarian struggle.
The social-democratic movement is the first in the history of class societies
which, in all its factors and throughout its course, is calculated upon the
organisation and the initiative of the masses. In this respect, Social Democracy
creates a quite different type of organisation than did
the earlier socialist movements; for example, those of the
Jacobin and Blanquist type.
Lenin appears to underrate this fact when he states in his book that the
revolutionary Social Democrat is, after all, simply "the Jacobin
inseparably linked with the organisation of the class-conscious
proletariat". In the organisation and class consciousness of the
proletariat, Lenin perceives the only factors which differentiate Social
Democracy from Blanquism. He forgets that this difference involves also a
complete transvaluation of organisational concepts, a quite new content of the
many-sided relation between organisation and struggle.
Up to this point we have regarded the question of centralism from the
standpoint of the general bases of Social Democracy and also in part from that
of the present-day relations in Russia. But the night-watchman spirit of the
ultra-centralism championed by Lenin and his friends is by no means, as concerns
him personally, an accidental product of errors but is bound up with a
thorough-going opposition to opportunism.
"The question is," says Lenin, "by means of the rules of
organisation, to forge a weapon against opportunism. The deeper the sources of
opportunism lie, the sharper must be this weapon."
Lenin perceives then in the absolute power of the central committee and in
the strict hedging off of the party by statute, the one effective dyke against
the opportunistic current, the specific earmarks of which he denotes as the
inborn academic predilection for autonomism, for disorganisation, and the
wincing at strict party discipline and at any bureaucratism in the party life.
In Lenin's opinion, only the socialist Literati, thanks to his innate
instability and individualism, can oppose such unlimited powers of the central
committee; a genuine proletarian, on the other hand, must, even as a result of
his revolutionary class instinct, experience a sort of rapture at all the
stiffness, strictness and smartness of his highest party officials, and so
subjects himself to all the rude operation of party discipline with joyously
closed eyes. Bureaucratism as against democratism," says Lenin, "that
is precisely the organisational principle of Social Democracy as opposed to the
organisational principle of the opportunists." He appeals insistently to
the fact that the same opposition between the centralistic and the autonomistic
conception in Social Democracy is becoming noticeable in all countries where the
revolutionary and the reformist or revisionist tendency stand facing each other.
Firstly, it must be noted that the strong emphasis laid on the inborn
capacities of the proletarians for social-democratic organisation and the
contempt heaped upon the academic elements of the social-democratic movement,
is not in itself to be appraised as anything Marxist-revolutionary. All that
sort of thing can equally well be regarded as bearing a relationship to
opportunistic views.
To be sure, there can be observed in what has hitherto been the practice of
Social Democracy of Western Europe an undeniable connection between opportunism
and the academic element, and also between opportunism and decentralist
tendencies in questions of organisation. But when these phenomena, which arose
upon a concrete historical soil, are released from this connection, and
converted into abstract patterns with general and absolute validity such a
procedure is the greatest sin against the Holy Ghost of Marxism, namely,
against his historic-dialectical method of thought.
Taken in the abstract, only this may be definitely stated: that the
intellectual, as an element stemming from the bourgeoisie and hence by nature
foreign to the proletariat, can arrive at socialism not in accordance with his
own class feeling, but only through overcoming that feeling and by way of the
socialist ideology, and is accordingly more predisposed to opportunistic
strayings than is the enlightened proletarian, who, in so far as he has not lost
the connection with his social origin, the proletarian mass, is provided with a
sure revolutionary handhold in virtue of his immediate class instinct. As to the
concrete form, however, in which this academic tendency to opportunism appears,
particularly in matters of organisation that depends in each case on the
concrete social milieu in question.
The phenomena in the life of the German as well as of the French and Italian
Social Democracy, to which Lenin refers, were the outgrowth of a quite
determinate social basis, namely, bourgeois parliamentarianism. Just as this
latter is in general the specific soil of the present opportunistic current in
the socialist movement of Western Europe, so also have sprung from it
the special tendencies of opportunism towards disorganisation.
Parliamentarianism supports not only all the illusions of present-day
opportunism, as we have come to know them in France, Italy and Germany, but also
the over-estimation of reform work, of the co-operation of classes and parties,
of peaceful development, etc. It forms, at the same time, the soil on which
these illusions can be confirmed in practice, in that the intellectuals, who as
parliamentarians even in Social Democracy are still separated from the
proletarian mass, are thus in the sense elevated over that mass. Finally, with
the growth of the labour movement, the same parliamentarianism makes of this
movement a springboard for political upstarts, and accordingly easily converts it
into a refuge for ambitious and bankrupt bourgeois existences.
From all these factors, arises also the definite inclination of the
opportunistic intellectual of Western European Social Democracy to
disorganisation and lack of discipline.
The second definite basis of the present-day opportunistic current is, of
course, the presence of an already high stage of development of the
social-democratic movement, and therefore of an influential social-democratic
party organisation. The latter appears, then, as the bulwark of the
revolutionary movement against bourgeois-parliamentarian tendencies a bulwark
which has to be worn down and pulled apart so as to dissolve the compact and
active kernel of the proletariat back into the amorphous mass of electors. In
this way, arise the historically well-founded and determinate political aims of
modern opportunism with its admirably adapted automatic and decentralistic
tendencies; tendencies which, therefore, are not to he traced back to the inborn
slovenliness and looseness of the intellectual, as Lenin assumes, but to the
needs of the bourgeois parliamentarian not to the psychology of the academic
element, but to the politics of the opportunist.
But all these relations have a considerably different aspect in absolutist
Russia, where the opportunism in the labour movement is by no means a product of
the vigorous .growth of the Social Democracy, of the decomposition of bourgeois
society, but inversely a product of its political backwardness.
The Russian intelligentsia, from which the socialist
intellectual is recruited, has naturally a much more indeterminate class
character, is much more declasse in the exact sense of the word, than the
intelligentsia of Western Europe. From this there results in combination, of
course, with the youthfulness of the proletarian movement in Russia
a much wider field for theoretical instability and opportunistic
meanderings, which, at one time, take the form of a complete negation of the
political side of the labour movement, and at another time, turn toward the
opposite belief in the exclusive blessedness of terrorism, and finally rest up
in the philosophic swamps of liberalism or of Kantian idealism.
But for the tendency towards disorganisation to be effective, the
social-democratic intellectual of Russia lacks, in our opinion, not only the
positive hold in bourgeois parliamentarism but also the corresponding
sauce-psychological milieu. The modern writer of Western Europe who devotes
himself to the cult of his alleged ego and drags this master morality even
into the socialist world of struggle and thought, is not typical of bourgeois
existence; he is in fact the product of a decadent, corrupted bourgeoisie
already hidebound in the worst circle of its class rule. On the other hand, the
Utopian and opportunistic vagaries of the socialist intellectual of Russia tend,
as is understandable, rather to assume the inverted theoretical form of
self-mortification, or self-flagellation. In fact, that erstwhile "going to
the people, that is, the obligatory masquerade of the Populist intellectual as
a peasant, was nothing other than a despairing invention of the same
intellectual, just as is nowadays the clumsy cult of the horny hand on the
part of the pure Economists.
The same reflection also makes clear that centralism in the social-democratic
sense is not at all an absolute concept which can be carried out equally well at
any stage of the labour movement, but that it must rather
be regarded as a tendency, the realisation of which proceeds in step with the
enlightenment and political schooling of the working class in the course of its
struggle.
The insufficiency of the most important presuppositions for the full
realisation of centralism in the Russian movement at the present time may, to be
sure, have a very baneful effect. Nevertheless it is
false, in our opinion, to believe that the majority rule of the enlightened
workers within their party organisation although as yet unattainable,
may be replaced temporarily by a transferred sole-mastery on the part of the
central authority of the party, and that the as yet undeveloped public control
on the part of the working masses over the acts and omissions of the party
organs would be just as well replaced by the inverted control of a central
committee over the activity of the revolutionary workers.
The history of the Russian movement itself furnishes many proofs for the
dubious value of centralism in this latter sense. The central committee with its
almost unlimited authority of interference and control according to Lenin's idea
would evidently be an absurdity if it should limit its
power to the purely technical side of the social-democratic activity, to the
outer means and accessories of agitation say, to the supplying of party
literature and suitable distribution of agitational and financial forces. It
would have a comprehensible political purpose only in case it were
to employ its power in the creation of a unified fighting tactic for Russia and
in arousing a great political action. What do we see, however, in the phases
through which the Russian movement has already passed Its most important and
most fruitful tactica1 turns of the last decade were not by any means 'invented'
by determinate leaders of the movement, and much less by leading organisations ,
but were in each case the spontaneous product of the unfettered movement itself.
So was the first stage of the genuine proletarian movement in Russia, which
began with the elemental outbreak of the great St. Petersburg strike in the year
1896 and which for the first time had inaugurated the
economic mass action of the Russian proletariat. Likewise, the second phase that
of the political street demonstrations was opened quite spontaneously as a
result of the student unrests in St. Petersburg in March 1901. The further
significant turning point, by which new horizons were opened to tactics, was the
mass strike which broke out all of itself in Rostov-on-Don, with its ad hoc
improvised street agitation, the popular meetings under the open sky, the public
addresses things of which the boldest blusterer among the Social Democrats
would not have ventured to think a few years earlier. Of all these cases, we may
say that, in the beginning was the deed. The initiative and conscious
leadership of the social-democratic organisations played an exceedingly small
role. This was not, however, so much the fault of defective preparation of these
special organisations for their role even though this factor may have been a
considerable contributing cause and certainly not of the lack at that time, in
the Russian Social Democracy, of an all-powerful central committee in accordance
with Lenin's plan. On the contrary, such a committee would in all probability
only have had the effect of making the indecision of the various party
committees still greater, and brought about a division between the storming
masses and the procrastinating Social Democracy.
The same phenomenon the small part played by the conscious initiative of the
party leadership in the shaping of tactics is still more observable in Germany
and elsewhere. The fighting tactics of Social Democracy, at least, as regards
its main features, are definitely not invented, but are the result of a
progressive series of great creative acts in the course of the class struggle
which is often e1emental and always experimenting. Here also the unconscious
precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process goes
before the subjective logic of its spokesmen. So that the role of
social-democratic leadership becomes one of an essentially conservative
character, in that it leads to working out empirically to its ultimate
conclusions the new experience acquired in the struggle and soon to converting it
into a further innovation in the grand style. The present
tactic of German Social Democracy, for example, is generally admired for its
remarkable manifoldness, flexibility, and at the same time, certainty. Such
qualities simply mean, however, that our party has adapted itself wonderfully to
its daily struggle on the present parliamentary basis, down to the last detail,
that it knows how to exploit the whole field of battle
offered by parliamentarism and to master it in accordance with given principles.
At the same time, however, this specific formulation of tactics already serves
too much to conceal the further horizons in that one notes a strong inclination
to eternalize that tactic and to regard the parliamentary tactic as the
social-democratic tactic for all time. As illustrative of this mood, we may
mention the vain efforts which Parvus has been making for years now to bring
about a debate in the party press regarding an eventual reformulation of tactics
in case of the abrogation of universal suffrage, in spite of the fact that such
an eventuality is viewed by the party leaders in full and bitter seriousness.
This inertia is, however, largely explained by the difficulty of giving contour
and palpable forms to a political struggle which, whatever its weight in the
emptiness of abstract speculation, is still non-existent and imaginary. To.
Social Democracy also, the important thing each time is not the premonition and
formulation of a ready -made recipe for the future tactic, but the preservation
within the party of the correct historical appraisal for
the prevailing forms of struggle, a sensitivity to the relativity of the given
phase and for the necessary intensification of the revolutionary
factors from the standpoint of the final goal of the proletarian movement.
But to desire, as Lenin does, to deck out a party leadership with such
absolute powers of a negative character would be only to multiply artificially
and in a most dangerous measure the conservatism which is a necessary outgrowth
of every such leadership. Just as the social-democratic tactic was formed not by
a central committee but by the whole party or, more correctly stated by the
whole movement, so the separate organisations of the party plainly require such
elbow-room as alone enables complete of all means offered by the situation of
the moment, as well as the unfolding of revolutionary initiative. The
ultra-centralism advocated by Lenin, however, appears to us as something which,
in its whole essence, is not informed with the positive and creative spirit, but
with the sterile spirit of the night-watchman. His thought is patterned mainly
upon the control of party activity and not upon its promotion, upon narrowing
and not upon unfolding, upon the hemming and not upon the drawing together of
the movement.
Such an experiment seems doubly dangerous to Russian Social Democracy at the
present time. The party stands on the eve of great revolutionary struggles for
the overthrow of absolutism, before or rather engaged in a period of most
intense creative activity in the field of tactics and thing which is
self-evident in revolutionary epochs of feverish extensions and shiftings of its
sphere of influence. In such times, to insist on fettering the initiative of the
party spirit and raising a barbed-wire fence around its capacity for leap-like
expansion, would be to make Social Democracy unfit in advance for the great
tasks of the moment.
These general considerations on the peculiar content of social democratic
centralism do not, of course, allow us to deduce the actual rules of
organisation for the Russian party. Those depend naturally, in the last
instance, upon the concrete circumstances in which the activity develops in the
given period, and since we are concerned
in Russia with what is, after all, the first attempt at a great proletarian
party organisation can scarcely pretend to infallibility in advance, but must
rather in each case first stand the test of practical life. What can be
inferred, however, from the general conception of the social-democratic type of
organisation are the main outlines, the spirit of the organisation; and
this spirit prescribes, especially in the beginnings of the mass movement,
co-ordination and drawing together rather than regimentation and exclusiveness.
If this spirit of political liberty, combined with a sharp eye to stability of
principles and to the unity of the movement, has secured a foothold in the ranks
of the party, in such a case the defects of any rules of organisation, even of
those which are awkwardly worded, will soon undergo effective revision through
practice itself. It is not the wording of the regulations
but the spirit and meaning incorporated into that wording by the active fighters
which decides the value of a form of organisation.
Blanquism was not based upon the direct class action of the working masses,
and accordingly did not need a mass organisation. On the contrary, since the
great mass of the people was not to appear on the scene of action until the time
for the revolution, while the preliminary action for the preparation of a
revolutionary insurrection was performed by a small minority, a sharp separation
of the persons entrusted with this action from the mass of the people was an
indispensable condition to the successful carrying out of their task. Such a
separation was possible and practicable, since no inner connection existed
between the daily life of the masses and the Blanquist conspiratorial activity.
Likewise, since the tactic and the more immediate objects of activity had no
connection with the elemental class struggle, but were improvised out of the
whole cloth, these were worked out in full detail in advance, fixed and
described as a definite plan. For that reason the active members of the
organisations were naturally transformed into pure executive organs of a
previously determined will existing outside their own field of activity, i.e.
into tools of a central committee. Thus we have also the second characteristic
of conspiratorial centra1ism: the absolute, blind subordination of the different
organs of the party to their central authority, and the extension of the
decisive powers of this latter onto the outermost periphery of the party
organisation.
Fundamentally different are the conditions of social-democratic action. This
action grows historically out of the elemental class struggle. In so doing, it
works and moves in the dialectical contradiction that the proletarian
army is first recruited in the struggle itself, where it also
becomes clear regarding the tasks of the struggle. Organisation, enlightenment
and struggle are not separate, mechanical and also temporarily disconnected
factors, as in the case of a Blanquist movement, but are only different sides of
the same process. On the one hand apart from general principles of the struggle there
is no detailed, ready-made fighting tactic established in advance
and in which the party membership could be drilled by a central committee. On
the other hand, the process of struggle which shapes the organisation leads to a
constant fluctuation of the party's sphere of influence.
It follows that social-democratic centralisation cannot be based on blind
obedience, on mechanical subordination of the party fighters to their central
authority; and, furthermore, that no absolute partition can be erected between
the nucleus of the class conscious proletariat already organised into fixed
party cadres and the surrounding element engaged in the class struggle but still
in process of class enlightenment. The setting up of the central organisation on
these two principle son the blind subordination of all party organisations and
their activity, down to the least detail, to a central authority which alone
thinks, acts and decides for all, and on a sharp separation of the organised
nucleus of the party from the surrounding revolutionary milieu, as championed by
Lenin appears to us for that reason as a mechanical carrying over of the
organisational principles of the Blanquist movement of conspiratorial circles
onto the social-democratic movement of the working masses. And Lenin himself has
perhaps characterised his standpoint more keenly than any of his opponents could
do, in that he defines his "revolutionary Social Democrat" as the
"Jacobin indissolubly linked with the organisation of the class-conscious
workers". As a matter of fact, however, Social Democracy is not linked with
the organisation of the movement of the
working class, but is the movement of the working class itself.
Social-democratic centralism must therefore be of an essentially different
construction from the Blanquist. It can be nothing other than the imperious
co-ordination of the will of the enlightened and fighting vanguard of the
workers as contrasted with its different groups and individuals; this is, so to
speak, a self-centralism of the leading element of the proletariat, the
majority rule of that element within its own party organisation.
Simply from looking into this true content of social-democratic centralism, it
becomes clear that the necessary conditions for it are not yet fully
realised in Russia. These conditions are, in the main, the presence of a
considerable element of proletarians already schooled in the political struggle
and the possibility of giving expression to their maturity through the direct
exercise of influence (at public party congresses, in the party press, etc.).
It is clear that this latter condition can only be created with the advent of
political freedom in Russia. The former condition, however the forming of a
class-conscious, competent vanguard of the proletariat is only in course of
achievement and must be regarded as the primary purpose of the next agitational
and organisational work.
All the more surprising is the effect produced by the opposite assurance of
Lenin, according to which all the preconditions for the carrying out of a large
and highly centralised labour party are already present in Russia. And he
betrays once more a much too mechanical conception of social-democratic
organisation in optimistically proclaiming that even now it is "not the
proletariat but a great number of intellectuals in the Russian Social Democracy
who lack self-training in the spirit of organisation and discipline". The
discipline which Lenin has in mind is impressed upon the proletariat not
merely by way of the factory, but also through the whole mechanism of the
centralised bourgeois State. And it is nothing short of an improper use of
slogans to denote equally as discipline two such opposed concepts as the lack
of will and thought of a four-legged and many-armed mass of flesh which performs
mechanical movements to the accompaniment of the baton and the voluntary
co-ordination of conscious political actions on the part of a certain social
element; the lifeless obedience of a governed class and the organised
rebellion of a class struggling for its liberation. It is not by adding to the
discipline impressed upon it by the capitalist State with
the mere transfer of the baton from the hand of the bourgeoisie into that of a
social-democratic central committee but by the breaking up and uprooting of this
slavish spirit of discipline, that the proletariat can be prepared for the new
discipline, the voluntary self-discipline of Social Democracy.
If we seek to solve the question of forms of organisation, not by way of the
mechanical transfer to Russia of inert patterns from Western Europe but through
the investigation of the given concrete relations in Russia itself, we arrive at
a quite different conclusion. To say of opportunism, as Lenin implicitly does,
that it goes in for any one certain form of organisations
for decentralization is at any rate to mistake its inner
nature. Being opportunistic as it is, the only principle
of opportunism, even in questions of organisation, is lack of principles. It
always selects its means according to circumstances, with reference to the
degree to which those means promote its ends. But if, like Lenin, we define
opportunism as the endeavour to paralyse the independent revolutionary movement
of the proletariat in order to make it serviceable to the
lust for ruling on the part of the bourgeois intelligentsia, one can only say
that this purpose can be most readily attained, in the initial stages of the
labour movement, not through decentralisation but precisely by way of strict
centralism, by which the proletarian movement, still unclear in its aims and
methods, is turned over, bound hand and foot, to a handful of academic leaders. Even from the standpoint of the fears entertained by
Lenin-i.e....., the
dangerous influence of the intellectuals upon the proletarian movement his own
conception of organisation constitutes the greatest danger for Russian Social
Democracy.
As a matter of fact, there is nothing which so easily and so surely hands
over a still youthful labour movement to the private ambitions of the
intellectuals as forcing the movement into the straight-jacket of a bureaucratic
centralism, ( In England the
Fabians are the most zealous supporters of bureaucratic centralism and enemies
of democratic forms of organisation, particularly the Webbs the Editor (Die
Nine Zeit).) which debases the fighting workers into a pliable tool
in the hands of a committee. And inversely, nothing so surely preserves the
labour movement from all opportunistic abuses on the part of an ambitious
intelligentsia as the revolutionary self-activation of the working masses, the
intensification of their feeling of political responsibility.
And, in fact, the very thing which Lenin sees as a spectre today, may easily
turn tomorrow into a palpable reality.
Let us not forget that the revolution which we see in the offing in Russia is
not a proletarian but a bourgeois revolution, which will greatly change the
entire background of the social-democratic struggle. Thereupon the Russian
intelligentsia will also quickly absorb a strongly pronounced bourgeois content.
Whereas today Social Democracy is the only leader of the Russian working masses,
on the morning after the revolution the bourgeoisie, and in the first instance,
its intelligentsia, will seek to convert these masses into a pedestal for its
parliamentary rule. Thus, the less scope there is given in the present period of
the struggle to the self-activation, to the free initiative, to the political
sense of the awakened element of the working class, and the more that element is
politically bell-weathered and drilled by a social-democratic central committee,
the easier will be the game of the bourgeoisie demagogues in the renovated
Russia and the more will the results of the current efforts of the Social
Democracy turn to the advantage of the bourgeoisie.
On the other hand, it is a thoroughly unhistorical illusion to think that the
social-democratic tactic in the revolutionary sense can be established in
advance once for all time, that the labour movement can be preserved
once-for-all from opportunistic side-leaps. To be sure, the Marxian doctrine
provides effective weapons against all basic types of opportunistic thought.
Since, however, the social-democratic movement is in fact a mass movement and
the dangers by which it is menaced do not spring from human heads but from the
social conditions, opportunistic strayings cannot be guarded against in advance;
they must be overcome through the movement itself of course, with the aid of the
weapons supplied by Marxism after they have assumed a definite shape in the
course of experience. Regarded from this point of view, opportunism too appears
as a product of the labour movement itself, as an unavoidable factor of its
historical development. Precisely in Russia, where Social Democracy is still
young, and the political conditions of the labour movement are so abnormal,
opportunism might very well at present spring largely from this source, from the
unavoidable groping and experimenting in matters of tactics, from the necessity
of bringing the present struggle into harmony with socialist principles in quite
peculiar and unexampled relations.
But if that is so, one must marvel all the more at the idea that the rise of
opportunistic tendencies can be forbidden in the very beginnings of a labour
movement by means of this or that form of rules of organisation. The attempt to
ward off opportunism by such scraps of paper can, as a matter of fact, do no
harm to opportunism but only to Social Democracy itself. By restraining within
the party the pulsing of healthy blood, such an attempt weakens its power of
resistance not only against opportunistic currents, but also a thing which,
after all, might be of some importance against the existing social order. The
means turns against the end.
In this frightened effort of a part of Russian Social Democracy to preserve
from false steps the aspiring labour movement of Russia through the guardianship
of an omniscient and omnipresent central committee, we seem to see also the same
subjectivism by which socialist thought in Russia has frequently been imposed
upon in the past. Amusing, in truth, are the somersaults which the revered human
subject of history loves to perform at times in his own historical process.
The ego which has been beaten down by Russian absolutism takes revenge by
setting itself on the throne in its revolutionary thought-world and declaring
itself omnipotent as a conspiratorial committee in the name of a non-existent
popular will. The object shows itself stronger, however: the knout soon
triumphs, in that it proves itself to be the legitimate expression of the
given stage of the historical process. Finally, there appears on the scene, as a
more legitimate child of the historical process, the Russian labour movement,
which makes a splendid beginning to form, for the first time in Russian history,
a real popular will. Now, however, the ego of the Russian revolutionary
quickly stands on its head and declares itself once more to be an almighty ruler
of history this time, in the directing of the social-democratic working masses.
In so doing, the bold acrobat overlooks the fact that the only subject to which
this role has now fallen is the mass-ego of the working class, which everywhere
insists on venturing to make its own mistakes and learning historical dialectic
for itself. And by way of conclusion, let us say openly, mistakes made by a
really revolutionary working-class movement are infinitely, in historical
perspective, more fruitful and valuable than the infallibility of the most
excellent central committee.
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