harman, the lost revolution

(12): explanation for Stalinism and Nazism lies in the lost German revolution

(14): State machine still run by the Junkers

(15): liberals after 1848 backed the monarchy (only bourgeois opposition was the Catholic party)--the regime became more illiberal as time passed. this didn't prevent it making economic concessions to the lower classes, though.

(16): SDP had its origins in two different movements

1. Marx and revolutionary current
2. Lasalle and reformist current

(16): Erfurt Congress 1891 adopted 'maximum' demand--well on their way to erecting a 'state within a 'state'

(17): however, the minimum demands of Erfurt became the real concern of party activists--revolution had shifted to indefinite future

(18): the Erfurt synthesis--working-class in pariah status, but also extracting concessions from vigorously expanding capitalism.

(19-21): key--Rosa Luxemburg saw the problems with the SDP, but refused to break for fear of isolating herself. this failure to be independently organized is at the heart of Harman's argument re: early failures of the revolution.

(24): Liebknecht didn't break party discipline over war vote until November

(25): effect of the war on popular mood was to wear off very quickly, as Luxemburg noted in early 1915.

(26): gov't had calculated for a 9-month war. so economic crisis soon began: "forty years of slow improvement gave way to a nightmare deterioration" [this bears on the nature of crisis that makes people revolutionary]

(27): women enter workforce

(27): backbone of SDP had been skilled workers--now they were under threat from new forms of industrial discipline, etc.

(28): in sum--short-term effect of war was to destabilize the organizations of the working class, the long-term effect was to create a uniformity of conditions that was propitious for revolutionary organizing.

(30): the class question was opening up in the Army, too, as officers enjoyed better conditions, and whatnot

(32): strike against the war in Jan 1918

(33): treachery of the SDP--Ebert joins the strike committee to help bring it to an end

(35-36): the founding of the USP in early 1917--the centrist current within the SDP (Kautsky, Bernstein)

(37-38): a weak Left, split into three groupings (Spartakus leaders, 'left radicals', working-classmilitants within the Berlin MWU)

(38-39): a failed offensive in the summer of 1918 leads to the collspe of the gov't--a new liberal coalition gov't formed under Prince Baden in September 1918 (aim was to preserve the monarchy)

(41): German Revolution starts in Kiel

(44): treachery of the SDP--Ebert says to the Kaiser that he hates revolution like sin. Therefore he must abdicate.

(46): twin declarations of the republic--Schiedemann and Liebknecht (former just in time, in other words, despite advice of Ebert)

(48-51, 56-57): key--you see a situation of "dual power" being handed away, in effect, precisely because of the weakness of the Left. the SDP can compel the delegates to the Congress of workers' and soldiers' to vote away their power to the Reichstag. ("the masses do not overnight abandon their prejudices"). Ebert retains General Groener, the Imperial High Command, who phones him to express his support--maintains the old Army apparatus intact (USP goes along with this)

(55): in the aftermath of the Revolution, the Councils still ruled Germany, with varying degrees of alleigance to the Ebert gov't ("dual power")

(62): treachery of the SDP--Ebert agrees to led Maercher organize the Frei Korps in order to maintain order

(63, 65, 95): key--there is radicalization and ferment in these months without there being an organized Left hold on the German proletariat. this will prove fatal in January. (attempt to organize themselves as the KPD in December 1918, but they are very weak)

(68-72): key--Luxemburg understood their weakness and the need for long-term work amongst the working-class, but others were leaning too Left and were too immature--this was seen as regards the question of participation in elections for the National Assembly, as regards union work ("out of the unions," said Frolich)

(75-79, 84, 88): key--"Spartakist Days"--in Berlin, January 1919. They were much weaker than they knew. A call for uprising which Liebknecht follows, against wishes of the leadership of the KDP. Nonetheless, they have to go through, with tragic consequences. Failed, in sum, b/c poorly organized.

(80, 82): Revolutionary Committee fails miserably (USP participation)--masses come, wait in fog for the whole day, and go home (hadn't made any preparations, didn't know how to lead--masses were prepared to strike, but not prepared to fight, Harman's arguing) [were they not just waiting for the word?]

(82, 182): the unique difficulties of the "masses" as an army -- will only fight if they're sure of victory.

(84-86): treachery of the SDP--Vorwarts celebrates murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg

(93-94): important--comparison of July 1917 and January 1919 -- the main difference was that the Sparatkists were much, much weaker than the Bolsheviks had been.

(97): even after the January days, a weak sort of "dual power" still prevailed (SDP still had to talk a radical talk)

(99, 118): in short--Frei Korps would be sent on a march around Germany to clean up a still radical, though uncoordinated Left

(99-103): "Red Bremen"--invaded by Frei Korps in late January

(103-107): The Ruhr--strikes in Februrary

(107-110): Central Germany--strikes in February

(110-116): Berlin again--strikes in late February/March (some 1,500 killed!)

(116-118): The Ruhr again--strikes in late March/April

(118-119): treachery of the SDP, in sum--alas, the Old Order was returned, no small thanks to the SDP. power of the councils was replaced by the old state structure (bureaucrats, judges, police, officers). SDP was necessary to put a lid on the massive upheavals.

(123): in Hamburg, too (factory owner tossed into river!)--but here, too, the Frei Korps arrive by June and run a military occupation until December.

(123): contrast between Hamburg and Chemnitz, where in the latter the revolutionary Left was able to organize independently (and this stood it in good stead for the Spring of 1920)

(126): the war 'shook' the whole social structure in Bavaria, which had always been conservative/reactionary (though separatist)

(128): Max Weber makes an appearance

(131, 138, 141): key--things erupt in Bavaria in April 1919--first Soviet republic, and then a second Soviet republic. didn't understand, Harman's arguing, the limitations placed by (1) objective material conditions (that Bavaria was rural hinterland, in effect) and by (2)the rollback of revolution in the rest of the country (on decline by mid-April). Frei Korps destroy the republic in short time.

(146): stability by the summer of 1919--SDP support shoots up (though here we see the beginnings of the middle-class-ization of its backing). certainly by June 1920, the USP is the majority party.

(147-150): central and key--excellent critique of Barrington Moore, that 'revolutionary consciousness' cannot be adduced on the basis of fixed expectation. it's contradictory ('ideological turmoil'), and therefore in flux. Germany in 1918-1919 is testimony to this fact.

(154): Versailles not French obstinacy, but expected outcome of capitalist competition (the war by other means)

(159-160, 170, 171): important--Kapp Putsch triggers general strikes (analogy made to Franco's military uprising in 1936)--"in three parts of Germany--Ruhr, Central Germany, and the northern region--the armed working class effectively took power into its own hands." Kapp is forced to back out.

(165): lack, though, of centralized coordination

(172): key--treachery of the SDP (Ebert and Noske), once more. they had an opportunity to smash the apparatus of the Right, which had been wholly discredited. Instead they proceeded to bail out most of the figures involved. (here Harman gives the figure of 20,000 as the number of those that the Frei Korps had killed in the past 14 months).

(175-179): the leadership of the Left, though, dithers in the aftermath, Harman is arguing. didn't agree to 'compromise' until it was too late (it seems like a 'united front' argument is being advanced, here)

(184-185): key--why did the Kapp putsch not have the same effect that the Kornilov coup had in Russia? for Harman, the critical difference is the level of organizatoin and leadership that could have measured up to the consciousness engendered by the putsch. (p. 187--in Berlin it had actually intially opposed a general strike called by the SDP, explaining that the w-class was too weak)

(189): the failure, then, was in overcompensating for past errors. it lies in the 'ultra-leftism' and immaturity of the leadership, which allowed them to abstain from the struggle.

(191): thus, a 'might have been'/'missed opportunity'

(192): important--now the history of the German Revolution becomes a history of the KPD, rather than a history of spontaneous struggles that the Left was too weak to intervene in.

(197): Zinoviev's big moment--wins over the left of the USP to form the new VKPD in Dec 1920

(201-210): key--Party completely misjudged what was happening in March 1921. Lost about 200,000 members. Why? Party being urged, by Kun, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, to take action to prevent a drift to the Right (under Levi's 'conservative' influence). the "Theory of the Offensive." forgot that it wasn't revolutionaries who make the revolution, but the masses.

(214-216): Lenin sides with Levi and Zetkin against Thalheimer and Bela Kun (despite this, Levi remains expelled). Trotsky also. They take this to the Third Congress in June 1921 (this is where the 'United Front' is hammered out)

(220, 258): key--here, again, we have an explanation that focuses on the lack of a shared history of struggle within the Party (a 'weakness of organization' explanation, once more). had there been a party with months of common struggle, the German leaders wouldn't have caved as they did to Bela's advice. and they wouldn't, he's saying, have then felt the need to overcompensate (which led to the grave errors of 1923).

(223-224): grave inflation, pushed by industrialists [where is finance? why doesn't it care?]

(231-234): rise of the Far Right (Bavaria in particular--with an extremely right-wing gov't)

(234): 1922 had seen the working-class grow, once more. its traditional representatives were satisifed (merger of right USP with SDP in the autumn)

(235-237, 239, 254-256): success of the United Front in these months

(247, 248-249): by early summer 1923, with hyperinflation, the SPD was collapsing; a "massive movement of alleigance"

(256-257, 258): key--by April and May of 1923, a revolutionary will was appearing (and the party, trapped in the UF, was slow to recognize this fact). Party was taken by surprise by the strike wave in May and June. Why? The experience of the March Action still haunted them.

(260-263): key--the events of the Anti-Fasicst Day (late July 1923)--Brandler opposed by his right and his Left, no coherent advice forthcoming from Russia (Radek said no, Stalin said no, Trotsky didn't know, Zinoviev/Bukharin said yes).

(266): Communist leaders belatedly start to understand the scale of what's unfolding. Begin to agitate for the overthrow of the gov't.

(270): new gov't formed in August 1923.

(272): key--the counterfactual, re: 1923--should have moved to the offensive before the strike broke, should not have retreated, should have raised a clearer slogan. if it had done all this--maybe? [but this feels a tad weak?]

(289-290): Brandler, finding himself in gov't, expecting the Left SD's to rise with him. completely mistaken. decision, then, to abandon rather than push through [and so we're saying, had he pushed through, history might have been different]

(291): rising succeeded, for 24 hours, in Hamburg

(294-300): four possible explanations for the failures of 1923--Harman sides with Trotksy, who attributes it to a failure of the KPD to test the waters (can't address this in hindsight--can't look at this after the event and say the workers wouldn't have risen) [but this might be a bit weak, too?]

(302): in sum--a lack of organization in November 1918 (a kind of tragic path-dependency)

-----

(1): all else aside, what is the nature of a crisis that is propitious for revolution? it is precisely what you see here -- the vigorous expansion of capitalism, which allows the construction of large working-class organization, culminating in a sharp crisis. added to this are the the points about de-skilling and uniformity of conditions. (p. 26; p. 28)

(2): the serious failures of the early years had to do with the lack of a independently-organized Left--contrast Luxemburg with Lenin (the Spartakus Rising--p.88, p. 95; p. 302 for summary argument). There is a larger question here, though, about whether we're willing to admit any objective antecedents to 'organization'--i.e., is there anything in the nature of German captialim that we would allow to 'explain' the weakness of the independent Left (or, what is the same thing, the strength of the SDP--something about relationship between vigorous captialism, the concessions it can given, and the corresponding strength of reformist politics). Because the reason that Luxemburg didn't feel compelled to have an independent organization was precisely this--she didn't want to abandon the workers' movement.

in other words, we might not have any problem with Harman's argument as a set of political claims. but we're entitled to ask some analytical questions.

(3): the 'shaking' of the social structure--how to make sense of this, sociologically? (so you have Bavaria oscillating wildly (p. 126--but also p. 138), it seems; and students also, maybe, in flux (p. 155--maybe he wouldn't want to make too much of this point, but important nonetheless--p. 180)

(4): similar to the point above, Harman makes an excellent point about the nature of revolutionary consciounsess in the critique of Barrington Moore (pp. 147-149)

luxemburg, socialism and the churches (1905)

It is true that we do meet churchmen of another kind. There exist some who are full of goodness and pity and who do not seek gain; these are always ready to help the poor. But we must admit these are indeed uncommon and that they can be regarded in the same way as white blackbirds. The majority of priests, with beaming faces, bow and scrape to the rich and powerful, silently pardoning them for every depravity, every iniquity. With the workers the clergy behave quite otherwise: they think only of squeezing them pity; in harsh sermons they condemn the “covetess” of the workers when these latter do no more than defend themselves against the wrongs of capitalism.
(...) The Social-Democrats want to bring about the state of “communism”; that is chiefly what the clergy have against them. First of all, it is striking to notice that the priests of today who fight against “Communism” condemn in reality first Christian Apostles. For these latter were nothing else than ardent communists.
(...) Further, to make the people forget their hardships it offered them free circus shows. Unlike the proletariat of our time, which maintains the whole of society by its labours, the enormous proletariat of Rome existed on charity.
(...) In this crumbling society, where there existed no way out of their tragic situation for the people, no hope of a better life, the wretched turned to Heaven to seek salvation there. The Christian religion appeared to these unhappy beings as a life-belt, a consolation and an encouragement, and became, right from the beginning, the religion of the Roman proletarians. In conformity with the material position of the men belonging to this class, the first Christians put forward the demand for property in common - communism. What could be more natural?
(...) [institutionalization] In the beginning, when the number of Christians was small, the clergy did not exist in the proper sense of the word. The faithful, who formed an independent religious community, united together in each city. They elected a member responsible for conducting the service of God and carrying out the religious rites. Every Christian could become the bishop or prelate. These functions were elective, subject to recall, honorary and carried no power other than that which the community gave of its own free will.^[9] In proportion as the number of the faithful increased and the communities became more numerous and richer, to run the business of the community and to hold office became an occupation which demanded a great deal of time and full concentration. As the office-bearers could not carry out these tasks at the same time as following their private employment, the custom grew up of electing from among the members of the community, an ecclesiastic who was exclusively entrusted with these functions. Therefore, these employees of the community had to be paid for their exclusive devotion to its affairs. Thus there formed within the Church a new order of employees of the Church, which separated itself from the main body of the faithful, the clergy. Parallel with the inequality between rich and poor, there arose another inequality, that between the clergy and the people. The ecclesiastics, at first elected among equals with a view to performing a temporary function raised themselves to form a caste which ruled over the people... . From the 4th Century, the ecclesiastics of the communities met together in Councils. The first council took place at Nicaea in 325. In this way there was formed the clergy, an order apart and separated from the people. The bishops of the stronger and richer communities took the lead at the Councils. That is why the Bishop of Rome soon placed himself at the head of the whole of Christianity and became the Pope. Thus an abyss separated the clergy, divided up in the hierarchy, from the people. At the same time, the economic relations between the people and the clergy underwent a great change. the clergy and running the Church. Before the formation of this order, all that the rich members of the Church offered to the common property belonged to the poor people. Afterwards, a great part of the funds was spent on paying
(...) From the 6th century, the clergy imposed a special tax, the tithe (tenth part of the crops), which had to be paid to the Church.
(...) Ecclesiastical positions therefore offered the best opportunities to obtain large revenue. Each ecclesiastic disposed of the property of the Church as if it were his own and largely endowed from it his relatives, sons and grandsons. By this means the goods of the Church were pillaged and disappeared into the hands of the families of the clergy. For that reason, the Popes declared themselves to be the sovereign proprietors of the fortunes of the Church and ordained the celibacy of the clergy, in order to keep it intact and to prevent their patrimony from being dispersed. Celibacy was decreed in the 11th Century, but it was not put into practice until the 13th Century, in view of the opposition of the clergy.
(...) When the country and town proletariat rose up against oppression and serfdom, it found in the clergy a ferocious opponent. It is also true even within the Church itself there existed two classes: the higher clergy who engulfed all the wealth and the great mass of the country parsons whose modest livings brought in no more than 500 francs to 2,000 francs a year. Therefore this unprivileged class revolted against the superior clergy and in 1789, during the Great Revolution, it joined up with the people to fight against the power of the lay and ecclesiastical nobility.
(...) In fact the cloisters profited considerably from this benevolence; having the reputation of opening their doors to the poor, they received large gifts and legacies from the rich and powerful. With the appearance of capitalism and production for exchange, every object acquired a price and became exchangeable. At this moment the convents, the houses of the lords, and the ecclesiastics ceased their benefactions. The people found no refuge anywhere. Here is one reason, among others, why at the beginning of capitalism, in the 18th Century, when the workers were not yet organised to defend their interests, there appeared poverty so appalling that humanity seemed to have gone back to the days of the decades of the Roman Empire. But while the Catholic Church in former times undertook to bring help to the Roman proletariat by the preaching of communism, equality and fraternity, in the capitalist period it acted in a wholly different fashion. It sought above all to profit from the poverty of the people; to put cheap labour to work. The convents became literally hells of capitalist exploitation, all the worse because they took in the labour of women and children. The law case against the Convent of the Good Shepherd in France in 1903 gave a resounding example of these abuses. Little girls, 12, 10 and 9 years old were compelled to work in abominable conditions, without rest, ruining their eyes and their health, and were badly nourished and subjected to prison discipline.
(...) To sum up, it is the labour of millions of exploited people, which assures the existence of the Church, the government, and the capitalist class. The statistics concerning the revenue of the Church in Austria give an idea of the considerable wealth of the Church, which was formerly the refuge of the poor. Five years ago (that is, in 1900) its annual revenues amounted to 60 million crowns, and its expenditure did not exceed 35 million. Thus, in the course of a single year, it “put aside” 25 million – at the cost of the sweat and blood shed by the workers.
(...) Your cruelties and your calumnies in former times could not prevent the victory of the Christian idea, the idea which you have sacrificed to the Golden Calf; today your efforts will raise no obstacle to the coming of Socialism. Today it is you, in your lies and your teachings, who are pagans, and it is we who bring to the poor, to the exploited the tidings of fraternity and equality. It is we who are marching to the conquest of the world as he did formerly who proclaimed that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
(...)[the key in understanding this entire text, though, is that the 'priest' represents a very specific representative of institutionalized christianity, and not religion writ large] And here is the answer to all the attacks of the clergy: the Social-Democracy in no way fights against religious beliefs. On the contrary, it demands complete freedom of conscience for every individual and the widest possible toleration for every faith and every opinion. But, from the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working classes, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery, he is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or in the uniform of the police.

chapters 6- , "lenin: building the party"

The spokesman of Menshevism, Martynov, in his pamphlet Two Dictatorships (1904), spelled out the reasoning behind this attitude in similar terms:

The coming revolution will be a revolution of the bourgeoisie; and that means that ... it will only, to a greater or lesser extent, secure the rule of all or some of the bourgeois classes ... If this is so, it is clear that the coming revolution can on no account assume political forms against the will of the whole of the bourgeoisie, as the latter will be the master of tomorrow. If so, then to follow the path of simply frightening the majority of the bourgeois elements would mean that the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat could lead to only one result – the restoration of absolutism in its original form.

The revolutionary’s goal, therefore, lay in “the more democratic ‘lower’ section of society’s compelling the ‘higher’ section to agree to lead the bourgeois revolution to its logical conclusion.”

(...) In complete contrast, Lenin always relentlessly denounced the Russian liberal bourgeoisie as a counterrevolutionary force. Of Martynov’s campaign tactics for the Zemstvo Assembly, he wrote contemptuously in November 1904:

A fine definition of the tasks of the workers’ party, I must say! At a time when an alliance of the moderate Zemstvoists and the government to fight the revolutionary proletariat is only too clearly possible and probable ... we are to “reduce” our task, not to redoubling our efforts in the struggle against the government, but to drawing up casuistic conditions for agreements with the liberals on mutual support.

(...) He pulled no punches in his outspoken analysis of the reasons why the liberals would prove to be reactionary.

The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie with us is much deeper than it was in 1789, 1848 or 1871; hence, the bourgeoisie will be more fearful of the proletarian revolution and will throw itself more readily into the arms of reaction.

(...) The experience of the 1905 Revolution demonstrated even more clearly the bankruptcy of the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly on the question that was crucial for the overwhelming majority of the Russian population: the agrarian question. The liberals were against expropriating the great landowners. Their party, the Cadets, supported the distribution of the crown and monastery lands among the peasants, but agreed to the compulsory expropriation of the landlords’ estates only on condition that fair prices were paid to the landlords... The experience of the 1905 Revolution demonstrated even more clearly the bankruptcy of the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly on the question that was crucial for the overwhelming majority of the Russian population: the agrarian question. The liberals were against expropriating the great landowners. Their party, the Cadets, supported the distribution of the crown and monastery lands among the peasants, but agreed to the compulsory expropriation of the landlords’ estates only on condition that fair prices were paid to the landlords.

(...) Lenin’s hatred of the liberals had been seared into his very soul by the experience of his youth. Krupskaya relates:

Vladimir Ilyich once told me about the attitude of the liberals towards the arrest of his elder brother. All acquaintances shunned the Ulyanov family. Even an aged teacher, who had formerly come every evening to play chess, left off calling. There was no railway at Simbirsk at that time, and Vladimir Ilyich’s mother had to go on horseback to Syzran in order to go on to St. Petersburg, where her eldest son was imprisoned. Vladimir Ilyich was sent to seek a companion for the journey. But no one wanted to travel with the mother of an arrested man. Vladimir Ilyich told me that this widespread cowardice made a very profound impression upon him at that time. This youthful experience undoubtedly did leave its imprint on Lenin’s attitude towards the liberals. It was early that he learned the value of all liberal chatter.

Nor did Lenin forget how the great revolutionary Chernyshevsky in his time had been disgusted by the liberals. Chernyshevsky spoke of the liberals of the sixties as “windbags, braggarts and fools”. He clearly perceived their dread of revolution, their spinelessness, and their servility in the face of Tsarism.

(...) However, while the police were making plans, the Petersburg Social Democrats were acting. After a slow start, they finally intervened actively in the movement, and achieved a measure of success. They sent speakers to the district meetings of the assembly, and succeeded in introducing resolutions and amendments into the original text of the petition. It was actually the Menshevik Group that displayed this initiative. (We shall deal below with the tactics of the Bolsheviks at the time.) The result was a petition very different from the one originally envisaged by the leaders of the assembly. A whole string of political demands were included under the influence of the Social Democrats: the eight-hour working day, freedom of assembly for the workers, land for the peasants, freedom of speech and the press, the separation of church and state, an end to the Russo-Japanese War and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.

(...) Lenin evaluated the events of 9 January very differently. Three days after Bloody Sunday, he writes:

The working class has received a momentous lesson in civil war; the revolutionary education of the proletariat made more progress in one day than it could have made in months and years of drab, humdrum, wretched existence.

Immediate overthrow of the government – this was the slogan with which even the St. Petersburg workers who had believed in the Tsar answered the massacre of 9 January; they answered through their leader, the priest Georgi Gapon, who declared after that bloody day: “We no longer have a Tsar. A river of blood divides the Tsar from the people. Long live the fight for freedom!”

Writing on 8 February he reiterated: “9 January 1905, fully revealed the vast reserve of revolutionary energy possessed by the proletariat.” But then he added in sorrow that it revealed “as well ... the utter inadequacy of Social Democratic organisation.”

(...) [goodness!] Finally, however, the Petersburg Committee decided that the party members should take part in the 9 January procession.

To carry out the measures planned by the Petersburg Committee, the committee of the City sector chose as the gathering point for January 9 the corner of Sadovaia and Chernyshev Alley, where the sub-sector organisers were to come in the morning with their organised circles.

The attendance was pitiful; “only a small group, some 15 workers, no more, appeared at the rendezvous.”

(...) Even more crucial than this fight against the sectarian attitude of some Bolshevik leaders toward the trade unions was the battle Lenin waged against practically the whole St. Petersburg Committee on the issue of the newly established soviet. The Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was the offspring of the general strike of October 1905. This had been sparked off in Moscow by a small strike of printers, who demanded a few kopeks more per thousand letters set and pay for punctuation marks. The strike spread spontaneously throughout the country. The initiative in establishing the Petersburg Soviet was taken by the Mensheviks, who, however, had no conception of the effect their creation would have in the long run. The Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks, for their part, showed extreme hostility toward the soviet... One reason for the Petersburg Bolsheviks’ negative attitude to the Soviet in October 1905 was the fact that the Mensheviks’ attitude to it was a positive one. “Denouncing the inconsistency and lack of principles of the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks intended to boycott the Soviet.”

(...) It needed Lenin’s intervention to call the Bolshevik leadership in Petersburg to order – to pull them back from the abyss of a completely sectarian attitude toward the soviet. He remained abroad for almost a month after its establishment. On his way to Petersburg, where he arrived on November 8, he spent about a week in Stockholm, where he wrote an article, Our tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. A letter to the editor, intended for the Bolshevik journal Novaya Zhizn. In it he says of the issue:

The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies or the party? I think that it is wrong to put the question in this way and that the decision must certainly be: both the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and the party. The only question – and a highly important one – is how to divide, and how to combine, the tasks of the Soviet and those of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

(...) A year after writing the important article quoted above, and after the experience of the December 1905 uprising in Moscow, Lenin developed further the concept of the interrelation between the soviet and the revolutionary government. In the article quoted above, he argued that the soviet was the form of revolutionary government of the future. A year later, he argued that the soviet could not exist independently of the immediate revolutionary situation, but also that it was not able by itself to organise the armed insurrection.

The experience of October–December has provided very instructive guidance ... Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are organs of direct mass struggle. They originated as organs of the strike struggle. By force of circumstances they very quickly became the organs of the general revolutionary struggle against the government. The course of events and the transition from a strike to an uprising irresistibly transformed them into organs of an uprising. That this was precisely the role that quite a number of “Soviets” and “committees” played in December is an absolutely indisputable fact. Events have proved in the most striking and convincing manner that the strength and importance of such organs in time of militant action depend entirely upon the strength and success of the uprising.

It was not some theory, not appeals on the part of someone, tactics invented by someone, not party doctrine, but the force of circumstances that led these non-party mass organs to realise the need for an uprising and transformed them into organs of an uprising ...

If that is so – and undoubtedly it is – the conclusion to be drawn is also clear: “Soviets” and similar mass institutions are in themselves insufficient for organising an uprising. They are necessary for welding the masses together, for creating unity in the struggle, for handing on the party slogans (or slogans advanced by agreement between parties) of political leadership, for awakening the interests of the masses, for rousing and attracting them. But they are not sufficient for organising the immediate fighting force, for organising an uprising in the narrowest sense of the word.

(...) It is useful to compare Lenin’s clear formulation with an analysis of the lessons of 1905 by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Rosa Luxemburg, participant in the 1905 Revolution, in her magnificent book The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, does not mention the soviet at all. Not until 1918 did she appreciate its role as a form of workers’ government.

part I:

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the pride of the international socialist movement before the First World War. It was founded in 1875 in Gotha as a fusion between the Marxist Social Democratic Labor Party led by August Bebel and Willhelm Liebknecht, and the General German Workers' Association led by Ferdinand Lassalle, a critic of trade unions who looked to state-funded producer cooperatives as labor's panacea. Marx wrote a famous critique of the new party's program, which he believed made too many concessions to the Lassalleans. During its early years, the SPD faced harsh repression in the form of the Exceptional Laws (Bebel was twice imprisoned), and this pushed the party in a more radical and Marxist direction. Banned but not destroyed, the party managed to grow considerably in a period of boom accompanied by relatively little class struggle. From the 1880s right up to the war, strikes were uncommon and workers' living standards rose, even if they didn't keep pace with profits. The party's numbers grew steadily, reaching 1,085,905 members in 1914. Its vote increased from 311,900 in 1881 to 4 million in the 1912 elections, when it sent 110 deputies to the National Assembly (Reichstag), in addition to more than 3,000 other officials into lower bodies. The party maintained 90 daily newspapers, employed 267 full-time journalists and 3,000 manual and clerical workers, and led trade unions totaling 2 million members. In the absence of public institutions, the party created libraries, workers' schools, youth groups, women's groups, sports leagues, and entertainment venues. It was more than a political party-it was a way of life for many workers.
(...) [1905] From then on, Broué argues, the SPD leadership, both the Right and the Center, “categorically turned its back on the party's identification with revolution, and references to revolution in the ensuing debates were few and far between.” (19) This debate within the SPD was not simply a battle of ideas detached from social forces. The ideas of the Right were firmly rooted in the trade-union bureaucracy and the elected officials, whose jobs were most dependent on the political system that supervised German capitalism. The ideas of the Center tended to be strongest among the party officials, who were concerned primarily with holding the SPD together. The Left's positions tended to be championed by journalists or full-time party workers who were not directly responsible for any organizational questions. Of course, there were important exceptions to this description (such as Liebknecht), but Broué's discussion of the rise of the SPD bureaucracy is an important starting point to understand the outcome of the debate.
(...) [not enough Lenin, it seems] Why did it take four months for Leibknecht to break SPD discipline? Why was the Left so weak? According to Broué, despite their hostility to the growing bureaucracy within the SPD and the drift to the right, they never sought to systematically organize themselves as a coherent group to fight for leadership of the SPD. The theoretical basis of their passive attitude to the question of organization lay most clearly in Luxemburg's understanding of the relationship between the socialist party and the working class. She believed that the party bureaucracy was conservative and that it was an outgrowth of the excessive centralism of power in the hands of the full-time party apparatus. She argued that, while the Left should oppose this tendency toward bureaucracy, the spontaneous struggle of the working class would be the key factor in overcoming the bureaucracy's conservatism at the decisive moment. Her book about the 1905 Russian Revolution, The Mass Strike, argued that Russian workers had discovered that the merger of mass economic and political strikes were the means by which to fight capitalism and simultaneously overcome conservative or bureaucratic elements within their midst. Broué agrees with her emphasis on mass struggle. But he notes that her understanding of the Russian situation completely overestimated the role of mass action in overcoming reformism and underplayed the importance of organization, which, from her limited German experience, she assumed generally plays a retarding role in the struggle.
(...) Luxemburg consistently opposed Lenin's method of building up a principled and, crucially, organized group of revolutionaries, with its own press and system of communication that aimed to carry its positions into every party branch and every group of workers possible. She rejected as sectarian Lenin's practice of constructing a faction that had the common experience of working together over the course of years and submitting to a commonly agreed upon discipline. Broué believes that she incorrectly identified Lenin's insistence on limiting membership in the revolutionary group to those who agreed to work in a disciplined and centralized manner as the same tendency towards bureaucracy she was fighting against in the SPD. Paradoxically, her tenacious opposition to bureaucracy and centralism in general blinded her from taking any organizational measures to combat it in specific, as well as a fatalistic attitude towards new forms of organization.
(...) The 1917 February Russian Revolution overthrew the Tsar and raised the confidence of the working class and the Left in Germany. The Bolshevik Revolution in October ended the war with Germany in short order (although at great expense to Russia) and convinced millions of workers that socialist revolution was on the order of the day. 1918 was a year of devastating economic hardship for German workers and catastrophic killing of soldiers. The USPD grew by leaps and bounds at the expense of the SPD and the left wing of the USPD became radicalized under the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution. The idea of a Russian-type socialist revolution based on workers' councils became very popular among millions of workers and soldiers. In November 1918, sailors mutinied in Kiel and set into motion a rebellion in the army. Workers launched a general strike, quickly leading to the overthrow of the Kaiser, the collapse of the German government, and the proclamation of the German Republic. Workers' councils were formed in dozens of cities in imitation of the Russian soviets. The Spartacus leaders felt vindicated by the rush of events. “Yet the building of the revolutionary organization lagged behind the audacious political analyses and perspectives of the revolutionaries, and they were unable to take advantage…of the revolutionary ferment that was rising throughout 1918,” writes Broué.
(...) The chaos of revolutionary events allowed the disciplined apparatus of the SPD to gain positions of power all out of proportion to the political mood of the working class.
(...) Meanwhile, a sharp debate broke out within the USPD. The Right of the party favored throwing its weight behind the SPD-USPD government and pushing for new elections to the Reichstag, essentially an attempt to return to the prewar focus on parliamentary elections as the main socialist tactic. Luxemburg spoke for the Spartacus League and in favor of building up the power of the workers' councils as a dual power, aiming to eventually replace the Reichstag and the capitalist state bureaucracy with a Russian-type system based directly on the workers' councils alone. A vote of 485 to 185 at a mid-December conference in favor of the Right's perspective showed that with the war ending, the majority of the USPD leadership were opposed to a renewed wave of workers' struggle to usher in socialism.
(...) During the years 1914 to 1918, the Spartacus leaders never fully clarified the purpose of their work among themselves. Was it to prepare for the founding of a separate revolutionary party or simply to try to push the USPD to the left? At each crucial stage, they were left wondering who was with them and who was against them. Rather than setting the pace, they could only react to events-in August 1914, in January 1917, and again in November 1918. The USPD majority decision to turn away from the workers' councils finally forced the Spartacus leaders to found their own party, but not until after the first phase of the revolution was coming to a close. Broué draws the painful lesson that the Spartacus League's revolutionary ideas and ability to inspire outbursts of struggle proved to be no match for the organized parties of the SPD and USPD. The revolutionaries were pitifully unprepared for the revolution. By way of comparison, in January 1917, the Bolsheviks had roughly 25,000 members with a fifteen-year tradition of common party activity, the experiences of 1905 under their belts, and an impressive underground and legal press that was distributed to tens of thousands of workers. The Spartacus League had a few hundred members, did not have its own regular publication, and possessed very little experience of organized, common struggle against the other factions and parties, or in leading the day-to-day class struggle.But the KPD had no substantial organized base, with only around 3,000 members who had any notion of acting as an organized party. Compared to the national apparatus and mass membership of both the SPD and USPD (both had more than 100,000 members), the KPD was virtually powerless. Its forces were so meager that they struggled simply to communicate between cities and even between sections of Berlin. Compounding this problem was the party's infusion with the ultra-left enthusiasm that Levi described and the lack of an experienced leadership team that commanded the allegiance and respect of the party's rank and file. While Lenin hailed the party's founding, it was a party that could not yet coordinate events regionally or nationally.
(...) Despite their losses, the KPD and the revolutionary vanguard of the working class were not finished. They spent the next four-and-a-half years waging a bitter struggle to solve the riddles left unanswered by the martyrs of 1919. This period will be the subject of Part II of this review.

(...) [I.] First, the First World War confirmed that political ideas matter; indeed, they can lead people to different sides of the barricades. The debate between Bernstein and Luxemburg had real life consequences, even if it was not completely obvious at the time. Kautsky's attempt to paper over these fights, merely served to disorient the Left and gain time for the Right to consolidate its control of the party apparatus.
(...) [II.] Second, the capitalists are ingenious when it comes to patching up their system and passing on the costs of the crisis to the working class. Yet, the ruthless economic competition that lies at the heart of the capitalist system forces the capitalists, and the governments they control, to confront one another in the hopes that they will be the last man standing, even if it threatens their common ruin. Kautsky could not believe European capitalism would plunge into full-scale war. In fact, it did so twice between 1914 and 1945. Capitalism breeds war and that danger will only pass when it is replaced with socialism-a lesson with obvious lasting value in today's world.
(...) [III.] Finally, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were political giants Yet, lacking a powerful political party with clear Marxist ideas based in the working class they could not put their revolutionary principles into practice. Broué's book will help a new generation of revolutionaries learn these truths.

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part II:

The futility of isolated uprisings, not coordinated by a centralized, revolutionary party was a lesson learned very dearly. This explains why anarchism never played an important role in the German workers’ movement during the height of the revolution. Paul Levi, who emerged as the principal KPD leader after the murders of Luxemburg and other KPD leaders in 1919, stated:

There is not a single Communist in Germany today who does not regret that the foundation of a Communist Party did not take place long ago, before the war…(453)

(...) The question then became how to build this party. At its founding convention in December of 1918, the KPD had only several thousand members. Although it did grow rapidly during the bloody repression of early 1919 to upwards of 90,000 members, it was shot through with ultra-leftism—recall at its founding conference that the majority opposed running candidates in parliament and refused to work inside existing trade unions—and hardly functioned at all as a coordinated national party. For the young, impatient activists inside the KPD, the question of how to reach the big battalions of the working class that still held illusions in the reformist SPD or the centrist Independent SPD (USPD), was not an issue. Most of the young party’s members refused to recognize the impact of the defeat of early 1919 on the working class. The dismantling of the workers’ councils in December 1918 led most workers to accept that the best way to defend their class interests was to vote for socialist candidates in the parliamentary elections. The SPD gained 11.5 million votes on January 19 and the USPD won another 2 million, together totaling 46 percent of the national vote, and constituting the overwhelming majority of the working-class vote. The KPD’s call for a boycott of the election was entirely ignored. Yet most young communists refused to recognize this reality, instead calling for the immediate overthrow of the newly formed SDP government, including SPD leader Friedrich Ebert, who was elected president of the republic by the new Reichstag in January 1919.
(...) By the fall of 1919, Levi had become convinced that the ultra-lefts had to be expelled at all costs in order to achieve unity with the revolutionary workers who remained in the left wing of the USPD. He reorganized the party from top to bottom and insisted that all members who did not agree to participate in the parliamentary elections and who refused to recognize the authority of the KPD’s central committee be expelled. Levi’s tactics lost the KPD well over half of its membership. Lenin and Radek agreed with Levi’s desire to transform the KPD, but they opposed the split. Lenin even publicly offered to mediate between Levi and some factions of the ultra-lefts.
(...) Levi, Lenin, and Radek, as well as all the principal leaders of Bolsheviks and the KPD, agreed that the only way to transform the KPD into a mass, revolutionary party, was to find a way to win over the hundreds of thousands of militant workers who had refused to join the KPD until then and remained inside the left wing of the USPD...
(...) But this political schizophrenia did not prevent the party from growing rapidly, from 100,000 in November 1918 to 300,000 in March 1919, and to 800,000 by the fall of 1920. The USPD had fifty-seven newspapers and could count on millions voting for it at the polls. It was perceived by millions of workers as the radical alternative to the SPD, while the KPD remained in the shadows.
(...) The radicalization of the USPD and the ongoing debate between Levi and Lenin received a jolt when right-wing army officers and a politician named Wolfgang Kapp launched a coup against the SPD government in March 1919. The coup threatened to install a military dictatorship, wiping out not only the KPD, but the SPD and the USPD as well. While Ebert and all his government ministers fled Berlin to find the safety of a loyal general, the workers of Berlin rose up in a general strike. They were led by left-wing members of the USPD and Carl Legien, who was the main leader of the SPD trade unions in Berlin. Legien was not himself a left-winger, but, unlike Ebert whose main power base was in the electoral apparatus, Legien’s power rested on his strength in the unions and he realized that Kapp and the coup makers intended to smash not only the extreme left wing, but also all workers’ organizations, so he threw his considerable authority into the struggle. On March 15, the coup makers’ government was paralyzed. “The general strike now grips them with its terrible, silent power,” described a Belgian socialist.
(...) The October 1920 USPD convention in Halle, Germany, was a showdown between the Right and the Left. Russian Bolshevik leader, Gregori Zinoviev, in his capacity as leader of the Communist International (Comintern) spoke at the convention, arguing for the USPD to join the Comintern. Broué describes the scene,

The battle really was to begin when Zinoviev mounted the platform. He was to speak for more than four hours, in German, with much difficulty and a certain apprehension at the beginning, and then with an authority which enabled him to win his greatest oratorical triumph in an already distinguished career. (439)

As if to highlight the interwoven nature of the Russian and German Revolutions, Julius Martov, the main leader of the Mensheviks, replied to Zinoviev’s speech, beseeching the USPD militants not to join with the KPD. In the end, Kautsky, Bernstein, and Rudolph Hilferding could not prevent the majority of the USPD delegates from voting in favor of Zinoviev’s proposition, and the right-wingers walked out of the convention. They exacted their revenge on Zinoviev by having him expelled from Germany twelve days later.
(...) Having achieved the prerequisites of mass size, clear principles, and organizational independence, and operating in a field of acute capitalist crisis, it seemed that the KPD and the German working class were finally on the road to revolution. However, very quickly, two closely related problems emerged. First, could the leadership of this new party function effectively as a guiding force for the hundreds of thousands of party members; and, second, what strategy and tactics would help the party win the decisive section of the working class over to revolution?
(...) The most remarkable thing about the Bolshevik leadership is that, despite the immense pressure that was brought down upon it in 1917, it did not split, but expanded. Even Zinoviev and Kamenev’s leaking of the plans for the October insurrection did not lead to its fragmentation. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of why this was the case, but some factors that account for the Bolshevik success were: the shared experience of revolution and repression in 1905; Lenin’s appreciation of the role of leading cadre; and the existence of a long-standing leadership team that was accustomed to carrying out sharp debates but then acting in unison. The united KPD Zentrale certainly had shared the experience of revolution and repression, but they had not done so in a common party. Even within the core of the historic Spartacus leadership, Heinrich Brandler and Wilhelm Pieck did not have much experience working with Levi, and even less so with Clara Zetkin. Worse, within three months of the party’s formation, Levi, Däumig, Brass, and Hoffman all resigned from the party and Geyer left shortly thereafter. Zetkin did not quit the party, but she resigned from the Zentrale along with Levi. In other words, six of twelve of its elected leaders, including its two co-chairmen were gone entirely from the party or its leadership soon after its founding.
(...) Broué goes to great lengths to trace the impact of the Comintern on the KPD, which he gives as the third reason for the KPD leadership’s split.
(...) During this crisis, Lenin and Trotsky were absorbed with the work of keeping the revolution afloat and the leadership of the Comintern fell more and more exclusively on Zinoviev and a small group of doubtful international “commissars” whom he dispatched to carry out his orders. Increasingly, the International retreated from the ideal of democratic debate into bureaucratic fiat. In the context of the KPD, this meant that Zinoviev’s agent in Germany pounded away at Levi’s supposed opportunism, insisting on driving him out of the Zentrale. Broué points out that it is certainly possible that at least part of Zinoviev and Radek’s attacks on Levi had to do with a desperate attempt at “artificially accelerating the speed of the revolution” in order to break Russia out of its isolation. (532) However, even if this is entirely true, it only goes to point out that the KPD leadership was not strong enough to stand up to this type of intervention, and was easily picked apart.
(...) The KPD Zentrale launched an irresponsible attempt to “provoke” a strike and armed insurrection, even though the working class was in a passive and demoralized mood. In other words, to embark upon the type of action that the KPD had done in January of 1919 and which Levi and Radek and Brandler had fought against for the proceeding two years. Indeed, it was this type of action that had repelled the left wing of the USPD from joining the KPD back in December of 1918. Frölich was ideologically predisposed to ultra-leftism, but it is more difficult to understand why Brandler, who had always supported Levi against the ultra-lefts, went along with it, and in fact, was the lead organizer of it. In the end, the so-called March Action was an unmitigated disaster. The KPD call for a general strike was met with indifference by the mass of workers, so party leaders ordered unemployed members to attempt to physically stop workers from going to work. This provoked fist fights and even gun fights between communists and other workers. (501) In the aftermath of the fiasco, the party was driven back underground and lost over 200,000 members, reducing the party to some 150,000 members. Hundreds of party activists were jailed, four were sentenced to death, and Brandler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. (506)
(...) the French army occupied the main coal- and iron- producing region of Germany, the Ruhr Valley, in order to extract war debts mandated in the Treaty of Versailles. Ebert’s SPD government and the German ruling class tried to use the invasion to win German workers, especially in the Ruhr, to unite with them against the French. The KPD agreed that the French should be resisted, but refused to agree to ally with the SPD or the bosses.
(...) On January 23, 1923, the dollar was worth 8,000 marks; by September 7, it was worth 60 million, and a miner had to work for an hour to buy one egg. Hyperinflation wiped out wages and savings, and led to a dramatic rise in unemployment and homelessness. By the summer of 1923, the crisis was laying bare the uselessness of the reformist socialists’ belief in the sanctity of capitalism and the trade union bureaucracy’s reliance on negotiating pay raises once a year. The KPD’s influence grew quickly and 20,000 factory and workers’ councils sprang up all over Germany in the desperate struggle for food. These councils were not the same as the soviets that grew up in November of 1918 because they organized only within individual workplaces. And, unlike the Russian soviets in 1917, they did not represent the rank and file of the army. However, the massive surge of rank-and-file organization at the factory level, surpassed no more than a handful of times in the international history of the working class, was clearly once again raising the question of the potential for dual power. Furthermore, the KPD became the leading force in the workers’ council movement, gaining the allegiance of millions of workers beyond their membership. To defend workers from the police and from the far Right, the KPD initiated a militia called the “proletarian hundreds.” By May 1, 1923, 25,000 of these men marched through downtown Berlin with red armbands, a “real workers’ militia,” says Broué.
(...) To Brandler’s credit, he realized that the KPD had to show that it could lead a nationwide movement to coordinate the disconnected strike waves rolling across Germany as well as give leadership to the brewing civil war between the police and the fascists on the one hand and the workers’ councils and militias on the other. If the KPD did not lead, then the danger loomed of useless and scattered resistance burning itself out across the country, as it had done in 1919. He proposed an “Anti-Fascist Day” on July 29, 1923.
(...) Unable to decide for themselves, they sent a telegram to Moscow asking what to do. Lenin was incapacitated by a series of strokes. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin were all on vacation. Radek received the telegram and warned against the mistakes of 1921. Zinoviev and Bukharin, by telegraph, argued to defy the ban. Stalin disagreed. In the end, Radek telegraphed to Brandler, “We fear a trap,” and the Anti-Fascist Day was called off. (741) Certainly it was not a crime in asking the Bolsheviks for their advice, but canceling what might have been the start of the fight for power in Germany on the strength of a telegram once again exposed the weaknesses of the KPD’s leadership.
(...) It is clear that within weeks of calling off the protest, the government of conservative Prime Minister Cuno collapsed under the pressure of a wave of mass strikes. The fall of the Cuno government in mid-August finally jarred the KPD and the Communist International into realizing that the crisis in Germany was analogous to Russia in the months of September and October 1917, that is to say, a pre-revolutionary situation was maturing and the KPD would soon be faced with a fight for power.
(...) In October 1917, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks led the insurrection through the Soviets, that is, in alliance with the extreme left wing of several other parties, but at no time did they give the leadership of those other parties, who were caught between reform and revolution, the opportunity to veto their actions. Unfortunately, in Germany, Brandler, with Zinoviev’s blessing, publicly proposed in late October to the leadership of the left wing of the SPD to start the revolution together. When the SPD minister refused to go along with a KDP-proposed general strike at a conference of factory committees, Brandler called off the insurrection. To add insult to injury, in Hamburg, the KPD did not receive the news that the insurrection had been canceled. There, the party proceeded with its plan and was isolated and wiped out. Twenty-one were killed, and hundreds were wounded or taken prisoner.
(...) Now, having raised the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file KPD members and millions of radicalized workers to the point of the fight for power, the sudden, and chaotic letdown destroyed the party as a fighting force. For some weeks, Zinoviev tried to pretend that everything was fine and that the insurrection was simply delayed. But as time wore on, the German bourgeoisie took the opportunity to impose martial law and it became obvious that the revolution was defeated.

(...) Broué’s conclusion must be the starting point for Marxists to come to grips with the defeat in Germany. The objective economic circumstances of prewar German capitalism dialectically conditioned the political forms of organization adopted by the working class and this history, in turn, shaped the ideas and experiences of the leading socialist revolutionaries. Looking back on it, Levi was certainly correct to conclude that they should have begun in 1903 to build an independent revolutionary party, but that presupposes Luxemburg and Liebknecht drawing lessons from circumstances that did not occur in Germany (as they did in Russia) or had not yet occurred in Germany. Having realized their error too late, the political leaders most capable of correcting it (Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Mehring, Jogiches) were all gunned down in early 1919. What they left behind was not an organized Bolshevik Party, but the idea of a party, supported by Lenin to be sure, but populated by unstable and impatient ultra-lefts, hostile and separate from the working-class revolutionary leaders who remained in the USPD until 1920.
(...) But if the KPD failed to lead the revolution, the peaceful, reformist capitalist democracy that Bernstein and Kautsky had dreamed of turned out to be a cruel joke. It ended in the victory of Hitler’s Nazis in 1933 and the total liquidation of the workers’ movement in Germany, and in much of Europe. The defeat also doomed the Russian Revolution to permanent isolation, creating the desperate conditions upon which Stalin built his bureaucratic state capitalist monstrosity, which politically and physically negated the core of Bolshevik theory and practice. At a terrible price, Rosa Luxemburg’s warning that either socialism or barbarism would prevail proved prophetic. But only those who believe that capitalism is humanity’s highest and final product can fail to appreciate the heroics, alongside the follies, of the generation of men and women of the KPD who gave their lives for a better world.

The autonomists did not grasp that the oppressors took advantage of the limitations of a rebellion that took militant action, but lacked organization, leadership, and ideological coherence. Moreover, they celebrate these features as a sign of the uprising’s novelty (“a festival without programs, nor objectives”). The assemblies emerged when the collapse of government institutions turned neoliberal propaganda against politicians and the “government” into a radicalized mobilization against the entire regime. The assemblies focused popular participation in the key moments of the uprising, but they declined when the ruling class regained the reigns of power. Many autonomists refuse to see this, forgetting that the oppressed cannot liberate themselves if they do not develop their own political project. They do not consider this to be an obstacle because they think that the social movements will construct a new society from the spontaneous act of rebellion.
(...) The autonomists refuse to grasp the fact that the representatives of the ruling classes co-opt many popular movements. They do not recognize the importance of the challenges that confront the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, the landless of Brazil, or the cocaleros of Bolivia in the face of betrayals, neoliberal policies, and right-wing repression from the governments that emerged from their struggles. They promote an idyllic image of the social movements, acting as if these groups advance from strength to strength.
(...) The autonomists trust in the sufficiency of the social struggle and dismiss the necessity of a socialist political project of the oppressed. They think that the accumulated experience in popular action leads to the spontaneous development of anti-capitalist sentiments within the population. But if it were so simple, the MST of Brazil would not be forced to fight the disillusionment created by Lula and the piqueteros would not be fragmented in the face of Kirchner’s machinery of cooptation. Nor would the Zapatistas feel compelled to participate in the crisis unleashed by the attempt to drive López Obrador out of office.
(...) Actions of this type would permit the development of an emancipatory political practice in the face of the alienation of capitalism. Holloway11 correctly emphasizes that the fetishism created by this system not only conceals exploitation, but it also unleashes liberating responses from the oppressed. But he reduces these acts of resistance to spontaneous anti-commercial acts (“the child that forgets to pay”) or to basic expressions of rebellion (“the worker who resists”). He disregards the fact that these acts alone can only lead to experiments with fleeting forms of liberation. In order to do away with capitalist domination, the exploited need to go further than Holloway’s “constant anti-fetishization” to embrace a socialist political program and action.
(...) These characterizations adequately take account of the brutal changes that have been created by the opening of local markets to imports, the corporatization of agriculture, the shuttering of numerous industries, and the recession in the world market. But from the recognition of these transformations it does not follow that there has been a radical change in the protagonists of social struggle. The autonomists do not see that the map of resistance in Latin America is very diverse and differentiated. The weight of rural sectors in the Andean region coexists with the preeminence of urban workers in the Southern Cone and the notable presence of public employees in all countries. The most significant feature of this process is the mixture of traditions between social subjects who share methods of struggle. To emphasize the role of the excluded at the expense of formal workers is to downplay this multiplicity and convergence.
(...) The autonomists magnify the role of the excluded at the expense of traditional workers, because they place more weight on the relations of domination than on the forms of exploitation. They have lost sight of the neurological center of capitalist reproduction located in the extraction of surplus value. For this reason, they tend to take up certain notions of post-industrialism and interpret the retreat of the traditional workers’ movement as a symptom of the structural decline of work. They forget that, whatever the dislocations or changes in the labor process there have been, capitalism would cease to exist without workers’ labor. Understood this way, the arguments of the autonomists lose all meaning.
(...) The operation of the contemporary economy and the complexity of the political choices that confront society today demand that we delegate authority and use legislative tools. The different forms of direct democracy proposed by autonomists could only contribute in a complementary way to the organization of society in the process of constructing a socialist society.
(...) Other critics of the radical Left question the Leninist conception of constructing firm political organizations dedicated to promoting socialist consciousness. They think that this strategy disdains the self-emancipatory capacity of workers and leads to Stalinist totalitarianism. This appraisal distorts Lenin’s advocacy of building of stable organizations in order to transform the social struggle into conscious workers’ political action. The Bolshevik leader also emphasized the role of organization in confronting powerful enemies. In the conditions of clandestine struggle against Tsarism he argued for rigorous organization, but he never claimed this was a universal model of revolutionary action. He always encouraged the adaptation of forms of organization to changing political realities (for example, emphasizing professionalism in some periods and flexibility in others). To present Lenin as a precursor to Stalinist massacres is a liberal caricature. To interpret any political discipline as inexorably leading to terror would mean that we would have to object to all forms of collective structure, including those adopted by social movements that the autonomists support!
(...) “Changing the world without taking power” is the strategic project of many autonomists. But how can one avoid the state? How can the target of every popular demand be ignored? The state can be combated or reformed, but it cannot be ignored. All demands made by social movements are directed towards the state. The Zapatistas demand pro-indigenous legislation from the Mexican congress, the piqueteros demand unemployment benefits from the Argentine Ministry of Labor, and the MST raises the demand of expropriation of land and the legalization of landless peasants’ encampments to the Brazilian parliament. In “developed” countries, “illegal” immigrants demand citizenship rights (France) and public housing residents ask for social legislation. The last of these are particularly “statist” demands.
(...) Holloway counsels against any form of power because he concludes that any exercise of power will reproduce oppression. But he doesn’t take into account the fact that refusing to take over the state leads to the preservation of the status quo and the consolidation of the impoverishment of the dispossessed. If we want to change the world, it is not enough to reject the state. We have to look for strategies to extinguish it progressively until the end of a process of socialist transition. This transformation would necessarily begin with the establishment of a new state administered by the popular majority. The proposal to change the world without taking power disqualifies one road without suggesting another. Thus, it leaves us with a bitter sensation of impotence. It demands insubordination and rebelliousness, but it never suggests how to triumph in the difficult battle against oppression.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward, written by Lenin, an outstanding member of the Iskra group, is a methodical exposition of the ideas of the ultra-centralist tendency in the Russian movement. The viewpoint presented with incomparable vigor and logic in this book, is that of pitiless centralism. Laid down as principles are: 1. The necessity of selecting, and constituting as a separate corps, all the active revolutionists, as distinguished from the unorganized, though revolutionary, mass surrounding this elite.
(...) Looking at the matter from the angle of the formal tasks of the Social Democracy, in its capacity as a party of class struggle, it appears at first that the power and energy of the party are directly dependent on the possibility of centralizing the party. However, these formal tasks apply to all active parties. In the case of the Social Democracy, they are less important than is the influence of historic conditions. The Social Democratic movement is the first in the history of class societies which reckons, in all its phases and through its entire course, on the organization and the direct, independent action of the masses. Because of this, the Social Democracy creates an organizational type that is entirely different from those common to earlier revolutionary movements, such as those of the Jacobins and the adherents of Blanqui. Lenin seems to slight this fact when he presents in his book (page 140) the opinion that the revolutionary Social Democrat is nothing else than a "Jacobin indissolubly joined to the organization of the proletariat, which has become conscious of its class interests." For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and Blanquism is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself.
(...) Social Democratic activity is carried on under radically different conditions. It arises historically out of the elementary class struggle. It spreads and develops in accordance with the following dialectical contradiction. The proletarian army is recruited and becomes aware of its objectives in the course of the struggle itself. The activity of the party organization, the growth of the proletarians' awareness of the objectives of the struggle and the struggle itself, are not different things separated chronologically and mechanically. They are only different aspects of the same struggle, there do not exist for the Social Democracy detailed sets of tactics which a Central Committee can teach the party membership in the same way as troops are instructed in their training camps. Furthermore, the range of influence of the socialist party is constantly fluctuating with the ups and downs of the struggle in the course of which the organization is created and grows. For this reason Social Democratic centralism cannot be based on the mechanical subordination and blind obedience of the party membership to the leading party center. For this reason, the Social Democratic movement cannot allow the erection of an air-tight partition between the class-conscious nucleus of the proletariat already in the party and its immediate popular environment, the nonparty sections of the proletariat.
(...) Now the two principles on which Lenin's centralism rests are precisely these:

1. The blind subordination, in the smallest detail, of all party organs to the party center which alone thinks, guides, and decides for all.
2. The rigorous separation of the organized nucleus of revolutionaries from its social-revolutionary surroundings.

Such centralism is a mechanical transposition of the organizational principles of Blanquism into the mass movement of the socialist working class. In accordance with this view, Lenin defines his "revolutionary Social Democrat" as a "Jacobin joined to the organization of the proletariat, which has become conscious of its class interests."
(...) The fact is that the Social Democracy is not joined to the organization of the proletariat. It is itself the proletariat. And because of this, Social Democratic centralism is essentially different from Blanquist centralism. It can only be the concentrated will of the individuals and groups representative of the working class. It is, so to speak, the "self-centralism" of the advanced sectors of the proletariat. It is the rule of the majority within its own party. The indispensable conditions for the realization of Social Democratic centralism are:

1. The existence of a large contingent of workers educated in the class struggle.
2. The possibility for the workers to develop their own political activity through direct influence on public life, in a party press, and public congresses, etc.

(...) We misuse words and we practice self-deception when we apply the same term -- discipline -- to such dissimilar notions as: 1, the absence of thought and will in a body with a thousand automatically moving hands and legs, and 2, the spontaneous coordination of the conscious, political acts of a body of men. What is there in common between the regulated docility of an oppressed class and the self-discipline and organization of a class struggling for its emancipation?
(...) It is a mistake to believe that it is possible to substitute "provisionally" the absolute power of a Central Committee (acting somehow by "tacit delegation") for the yet unrealizable rule of the majority of conscious workers in the party, and in this way replace the open control of the working masses over the party organs with the reverse control by the Central Committee over the revolutionary proletariat.
(...) Lenin says that intellectuals remain individualists and tend to anarchism even after they have joined the socialist movement. According to him, it is only among intellectuals that we can note a repugnance for the absolute authority of a Central Committee. The authentic proletarian, Lenin suggests, finds by reason of his class instinct a kind of voluptuous pleasure in abandoning himself to the clutch of firm leadership and pitiless discipline. "To oppose bureaucracy to democracy," writes Lenin, "is to contrast the organizational principle of revolutionary Social Democracy to the methods of opportunistic organization," (page 151).
(...) In most socialist parties in Western Europe there is undoubtedly a connection between opportunism and the "intellectuals," as well as between opportunism and decentralizing tendencies within the labor movement. But nothing is more contrary to the historic-dialectic method of Marxist thought than to separate social phenomena from their historic soil and to present these phenomena as abstract formulas having an absolute, general application. Reasoning abstractly, we may say that the "intellectual," a social element which has emerged out of the bourgeoisie and is therefore alien to the proletariat, enters the socialist movement not because of his natural class inclinations but in spite of them. For this reason, he is more liable to opportunist aberrations than the proletarian. The latter, we say, can be expected to find a definite revolutionary point of support in his class interests as long as he does not leave his original environment, the laboring mass. But the concrete form assumed by this inclination of the intellectual toward opportunism and, above all, the manner in which this tendency expresses itself in organizational questions depend every time on his given social milieu.
(...) [BRILLIANT] If, like Lenin, we define opportunism as the tendency that paralyzes the independent revolutionary movement of the working class and transforms it into an instrument of ambitious bourgeois intellectuals, we must also recognize that in the initial stage of a labor movement this end is more easily attained as a result of rigorous centralization rather than by decentralization. It is by extreme centralization that a young, uneducated proletarian movement can be most completely handed over to the intellectual leaders staffing a Central Committee.
(...) If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin's plan of organization. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee. On the other hand there is no more effective guarantee against opportunist intrigue and personal ambition than the independent revolutionary action of the proletariat, as a result of which the workers acquire the sense of political responsibility and self-reliance.
(...) In view of this, we find most astonishing the claim that it is possible to avoid any possibility of opportunism in the Russian movement by writing down certain words, instead of others, in the party constitution. Such an attempt to exercise opportunism by means of a scrap of paper may turn out to be extremely harmful -- not to opportunism but to the socialist movement.
(...) Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.