Red Star Over the Third World Read online

  Competitive capitalism produced rapid developments in technology and in production. Vast amounts of goods were created at the same time as the bourgeoisie put immense pressure on workers to earn less and work more. There emerged quite rapidly a problem of overproduction (too many goods produced) and underconsumption (too few goods purchased) – workers toiled to make the plethora of goods but earned far too little to buy them back. One crisis after another tore through the system. Karl Marx’s Capital (1867) assessed the endemic nature of the crises precisely. Marx saw that capitalism was both devilishly productive and dangerously unstable. It impoverished workers to produce a grand civilization, but through this impoverishment, it undercut its own ability to survive. Solutions to these crises came through the expansion of national militaries and through wars for colonialism and for markets. Famine for the workers was mirrored in the feasts for the bourgeoisie. It was in this context that the heirs of the French and Haitian Revolutions emerged – the workers’ movement in the industrial belts and the anti-colonial peasant and worker movement in the colonies. These twin movements would later form the heart of international communism.

  It was the Great War of 1914-18 that set the clock faster for international communism. At a small gathering in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in 1915, the socialists offered a unique – Marxist – interpretation of World War I. In their Zimmerwald Manifesto, drafted by Lenin, Alexandra Kollontai and Karl Radek, they wrote, ‘Irrespective of the truth as to the direct responsibility for the outbreak of the war, one thing is certain: The war which has produced this chaos is the outcome of imperialism, of the attempt on the part of the capitalist classes of each nation to foster their greed for profit by exploitation of human labour and of the natural treasures of the entire globe.’ This war was not a war of the people, but a war against the people. The Zimmerwald Left urged the working classes to resist the wars, to defy their rulers and create a society in their own image.

  The red-hot contradictions of the war provoked a serious crisis in the weakest link of the imperialist chain – in Tsarist Russia. An International Working Women’s Day demonstration on March 8, 1917, set off the workers of the main cities into full-scale rebellion. The International Working Women’s Day march had been a staple of the world socialist movement over the past decade since the First International Conference of Socialist Women made this call in 1907. In 1917, the Petrograd Inter-district Committee released a pamphlet, calling on women workers to go on strike. It is an impassioned document, whose flavour can be gleaned from these paragraphs,

  Comrades, working women, for whose sake is a war waged? Do we need to kill millions of Austrian and German workers and peasants? German workers did not want to fight either. Our close ones do not go willingly to the front. They are forced to go. The Austrian, English, and German workers go just as unwillingly. Tears accompany them in their countries as in ours. War is waged for the sake of gold, which glitters in the eyes of capitalists, who profit from it. Ministers, mill owners, and bankers hope to fish in troubled waters. They become rich in wartime. After the war, they will not pay military taxes. Workers and peasants will bear all the sacrifices and pay all the costs.

  Dear women comrades, will we keep on tolerating this silently for very long, with occasional outbursts of boiling rage against smalltime traders? Indeed, it is not they who are at fault for the people’s calamities. They have ruined themselves. The government is guilty. It began this war and cannot end it. It ravages the country. It is its fault that you are starving. The capitalists are guilty. It is waged for their profit. It’s well-nigh time to shout to them: Enough! Down with the criminal government and its entire gang of thieves and murderers. Long Live Peace!

  The Committee did not expect the vital reaction that they got from the working women. Women workers left their factories in the thousands. Working men and slowly the peasantry came alongside them. Soldiers, who came from these classes, joined in. They decided that this war was not their war. Their real war was against the aristocracy and its authoritarian state. That had to be confronted directly. Two days after International Women’s Day, fifty thousand workers in St. Petersburg were on strike. It was the most powerful demonstration of worker power in Russia to date. The Tsarist system collapsed on March 16, just over a week after the International Women’s day demonstrations.

  Confidence that workers could govern had to be built. Things moved slowly. The first government to take power was headed by an aristocrat – Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov – and then by a liberal lawyer – Alexander Kerensky. The workers did not go home. The energy of the revolution was quite ferocious. When the Provisional Government seemed to dither on equal rights for women, the Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai wrote in Pravda, ‘Weren’t we women first out on the streets? Why now does the freedom won by the heroic proletariat of both sexes, by the soldiers and soldiers’ wives, ignore half the population of liberated Russia?’ The League for Women’s Equal Rights – led by Poliksena Shishkina-lavein – and other political parties held a massive demonstration on March 19 to demand equal rights, which they won only through their resolute struggle. Workers of all political parties – electrified by this energy – formed Soviets or Councils that developed ‘dual power’, a situation where they created their own institutions that had legitimacy from popular acclamation. Lenin understood that this new situation was the making of the workers. It was their innovation. ‘The most highly remarkable feature of our revolution’, he wrote in April 1917, ‘is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old formulas, for example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realization has turned out to be different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.’

  What was ‘dual power’? The workers could not merely accept the rule of the Provisional Government, then run by Kerensky and the bourgeoisie. Parallel to that Government, in order to satisfy their deeper ambitions, the workers created their own government – the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. This was a parliament of the working class and the peasantry, not a parliament of the merchants, industrialists and their service class. Lenin saw that this new form – the Soviet – had a direct ancestor in the Paris Commune of 1871. What he did not know is that this form of rule had other ancestors – such as the communes (quilombo) created by the insurrection of the slaves in Brazil. These are examples from the history of working people who created their own forms of rule – often democratic – against the hierarchies of the masters of property.

  What was of great importance is that the workers found their intellectual in Lenin, who listened carefully to what was going on in the factories and in the streets and drove the Bolsheviks close to the mood of the workers. Lenin had, since the 1890s, been in direct touch with the Bolshevik agitators – the rank and file of his party such as Cecilia Bobrovskaya, Concordia Nikolayevna Gromova-Samoilova and Ivan Babushkin – who showed him the limitations of their work and also what kind of avenues had to be explored to enrich their politics. It was this interaction that fed Lenin with the material for the production of a theory of the Bolsheviks, which armed them for the rapid-moving events from February to October 1917.

  Lenin’s study of the penetration of capitalism in Russian agriculture (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899) showed the class breaks in the peasantry, something not fully grasped by the agrarian populists. He found that 81 per cent of the peasantry were poor, landless peasants whose situation was akin to the industrial proletariat. The existence of this section of the peasantry – the vast mass of the Russian population – suggested that they would be political allies of the industrial proletariat, the working class. Here was the theoretical basis for the worker-peasant alliance. It would form the central political dimension of the Bolshevik party. Lenin would continue to update this information, such as in the long pamphlet from 1908 – T
he Agrarian Question in Russia Towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century – which was not published until 1918 for reasons of censorship.

  Lenin’s two major political texts – What Is To Be Done? (1902) and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party) (1904) – provided the Bolsheviks with two lessons. First, that it was necessary to create a disciplined party of the working class and agricultural proletariat along with their class allies. Such a party would train its cadre to be amongst the people, build their confidence and prepare for the inevitable spontaneous outbreak of unrest. When people protest, a party’s experience and political clarity are necessary to ensure that the movement is not overrun by the apparatus of the state – and by a loss of confidence. Second, that the Social Democratic parties would be ready to swallow the energy of the workers and peasants for their own conciliatory ends. It was necessary to show how the Social Democrats often spoke the language of the people, but they were not grounded in the class instincts and class positions of the workers and the peasants. They would, therefore, betray the workers and peasants cavalierly. A party of the workers and the peasants had to be ready for their spontaneous uprising. When the spontaneous strikes broke out in the St. Petersburg factories in 1896, Lenin argued, the ‘revolutionaries lagged behind this upsurge, both in their theories and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organization capable of leading the whole movement’. This lag had to be rectified. The party of the Bolsheviks had to be of a ‘new type’, disciplined, centralized and armed with a strong theory of capitalism, imperialism and socialism. ‘Give us an organization of revolutionaries’, Lenin wrote boldly and seemingly fantastically, ‘and we will overturn Russia’.

  The key text that came from Lenin was in 1916, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It was here that Lenin laid out the entanglement of the Tsarist state in the world imperialist system. The tentacles of monopoly capitalism from outside the Tsarist territory had strangled the state. If a workers’ government came to power, it would be unable to move an alternative agenda unless it confronted these tentacles of monopoly capitalism, the manifestation of imperialism. The overthrow of the Tsar was essential, of course, but it would be insufficient. A new state, a workers’ state, would have to confront imperialism, detach itself from those tentacles and use its own considerable resources for the well-being of its own people. The February Revolution had overthrown the Tsar, but the vacillating government of Kerensky had begun to offer concessions to imperialism. This meant that the Kerensky government was suffocating the essence of the revolutionary process. The choice that lay before the Bolsheviks during the long and confusing summer of 1917 was to either witness the destruction of the revolution or to act to save it from the Russian bourgeoisie, which was unwilling to confront imperialism. In April, Lenin wrote that the point was not the seizure of power by a minority – for that would be merely an unpopular coup. ‘We are Marxists,’ he wrote, ‘we stand for proletarian class struggle against petty-bourgeois intoxication, against chauvinism-defencism, phrase-mongering and dependence on the bourgeoisie.’ The goal of the Marxists should be to harness the actual experience of the workers and drive an agenda that would make the worker and peasant power into the power of society. For that, the February revolution had to be saved from minority power – the seizure of power by the bourgeoisie in the service of imperialism.

  On April 7, 1917, Pravda, the Bolshevik paper, published Lenin’s April Theses. These ten points captured the sentiments of the masses who had by strike, mutiny and demonstration brought down the Tsar. It was the theory put forward by the April Theses that drew these masses into the Bolshevik party, which had only 10,000 members in April but half a million members by October.

  What were these theses? Here is my summary:

  •That the Great War was an imperialist war.

  •That the Revolution remained in motion and power would transfer from the bourgeoisie to the workers and peasants.

  •That the Provisional Government, the government of capitalists, must not be supported.

  •That the Bolsheviks, a minority in the Soviets, had to explain patiently and systematically that the other parties had made errors, and that it was time to transfer ‘the entire state power’ to the Soviets.

  •That the new order could not be grounded in the parliament but a ‘republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies’. The police, the army and the bureaucracy had to be abolished.

  •That all estates must be confiscated and all land nationalized.

  •That all banks be amalgamated into a single, Soviet-controlled bank.

  •That all social production and the distribution of products should be under the control of the Soviets.

  •That the Party hold a Congress and amend its programme.

  •That a new International be constituted.

  It was clear and precise. Power had to move from the ruling class to the new class that had to rule, the working class and peasantry, the majority of humanity.

  By September 1917, there was impatience amongst the working people to seize power. Early that month, as workers and peasants took to their Soviets and passed resolution after resolution for their own government, Lenin wrote, ‘insurrection is art’. It was time for an uprising to save the February Revolution. In John Reed’s bracing Ten Days that Shook the World, he describes the working-class and peasant energy. ‘Lectures, debates, speeches – in theatres, circuses, school-houses, barracks. . . . Meetings in the trenches at the Front, in village squares, factories. . . . What a marvellous sight to see Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov Factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they talk!’ But they also seemed to want something specific – to found a Soviet Republic. It is this specific demand that led to the October Revolution.

  The Congress of Soldiers’ Representatives wrote to the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, ‘The country needs a firm and democratic authority founded on and responsible to the popular masses. We have had enough of words, rhetoric and parliamentary sleight of hand!’ They demanded a second revolution. In October 1917, the working women of Petrograd who had joined the Bolshevik party held a conference. In the room were people like Concordia ‘Natasha’ Samoilova, Emilya Solnin from the Aivas plant, the spinner Vasina from the Nitka Factory and Vinogradova from the Bassily Island Pipe Factory. These were hard-working women – factory workers and militant revolutionists. They wanted to overthrow the government of Kerensky. They marched to see Lenin in the Smolny, where he lived and worked. ‘Take power, Comrade Lenin: that is what we working women want’, they said to him. Lenin replied, ‘It is not I, but you, the workers who must take power. Return to your factories and tell the workers that.’ This is what they did.

  In October, the second Russian Revolution broke out – pushed by the Bolsheviks. This was a seizure of power by the Soviets, who dismissed the bourgeois parliament (the Duma) and appointed themselves as the governors of their own society. Lenin went to the Petrograd Soviet to celebrate the seizure of power. What was the significance of this revolution, he asked his comrade workers? ‘Its significance is, first of all, that we shall have a Soviet government, our own organ of power, in which the bourgeoisie will have no share whatsoever. The oppressed masses will themselves create a power. The old state apparatus will be shattered to its foundations and a new administrative apparatus set up in the form of the Soviet organizations.’

  Here is Lenin putting into a speech before the Soviets what he had argued in his text – The State and Revolution – written in August-September 1917, but published the following year. He had read closely Marx’s account of the Paris Commune of 1871 as well as the essays by Engels on the state in a socialist society. Engels had suggested that the state must be blown up (sprengung), that it could not be inherited in its old form by the proletariat. Old customs of statecraft, embedded in the institu
tions and practices of the old state, would work like a disease to draw the proletariat into the habits of bourgeois rule. The state had to be ‘smashed’, ‘blown up’, somehow transformed into institutions that would conform to the class objectives of the proletariat and the peasants. State institutions were needed in the interim period, but not adopted without transformation. ‘The proletariat cannot simply win state power in the sense that the old state apparatus passes into new hands’, wrote Lenin in The State and Revolution. The revolution ‘must smash this apparatus, must break it and replace it by a new one’.

  ‘We’ve won’, sang Mayakovsky in his poem after Lenin’s death, ‘but our ship’s all dents and holes, hull in splinters, engines near end, overhaul overdue for floors, ceilings, walls. Come, hammer and rivet, repair and mend!’

  ‘We destroyed our enemies with weapons, we earn our bread with labour – Comrades, roll up your sleeves for work’ (1920). Poster made by Nikolai Kogout (1891-1959).