We are living in stormy times, when Russia’s history is marching on with seven-league strides, and every year sometimes signifies more than decades of tranquillity. Results of the half-century of the post-Reform period are being summed up, and the corner-stone is being laid for social and political edifices which will determine the fate of the entire country for many, many years to come. The revolutionary movement continues to grow with amazing rapidity—and “our trends” are ripening (and withering) uncommonly fast. Trends firmly rooted in the class system of such a rapidly developing capitalist country as Russia almost immediately reach their own level and feel their way to the classes they are related to. An example is the evolution of Mr. Struve, from whom the revolutionary workers proposed to “tear the mask” of a Marxist only one and a half years ago and who has now himself come forward without this mask as the leader (or servant?) of the liberal landlords, people who take pride in their earthiness and their sober judgement. On the other hand, trends expressing only the traditional instability of views held by the intermediate and indefinite sections of the intelligentsia try to substitute noisy declarations for rapprochement with definite classes, declarations which are all the noisier, the louder the thunder of events. “At least we make an infernal noise”¹—such is the slogan of many revolutionarily minded individuals who have been caught up in the maelstrom of events and who have neither theoretical principles nor social roots.

It is to these “noisy” trends that the “Socialist-Revolutionaries,” whose physiognomy is emerging more and more clearly, also belong. And it is high time for the proletariat to have a better look at this physiognomy, and form a clear idea of the real nature of these people, who seek the proletariat’s friendship all the more persistently, the more palpable it becomes to them that they cannot exist as a separate trend without close ties with the truly revolutionary class of society.

Three circumstances have served most to disclose the true face of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. These are, first, the split between the revolutionary Social-Democrats and the opportunists, who are raising their heads under the banner of the “criticism of Marxism.” Secondly, Balmashov’s assassination of Sipyagin and the new swing towards terrorism in the sentiments of some revolutionaries. Thirdly and mainly, the latest movement among the peasantry, which has compelled such that are accustomed to sit between two stools and have no programme whatever to come out post factum with some semblance of a programme. We shall proceed to examine these three circumstances, with the reservation that in a newspaper article it is possible to give only a brief outline of the main points in the argument and that we shall in all likelihood return to the subject and expound it in greater detail in a magazine article, or in a pamphlet.²

It was only in No. 2 of Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsti that the Socialist-Revolutionaries finally decided to come out with a theoretical statement of principle, in an unsigned editorial headed “The World Progress and Crisis of Socialism.” We strongly recommend this article to all who want to get a clear idea of utter unprincipledness and vacillation in matters of theory (as well as of the art of concealing this behind a spate of rhetoric). The entire content of this highly noteworthy article may be expressed in a few words. Socialism has grown into a world force, socialism (=Marxism) is now splitting as a result of the war of the revolutionaries (the “orthodox”) against the opportunists (the “critics”). We, Socialist-Revolutionaries, “of course” have never sympathised with opportunism, but we are over-joyed because of the “criticism” which has freed us from   a dogma; we too are working for a revision of this dogma— and although we have as yet nothing at all to show by way of criticism (except bourgeois-opportunist criticism), although we have as yet revised absolutely nothing, it is nevertheless that freedom from theory which redounds to our credit. That redounds to our credit all the more because, as people free of theory, we stand firmly for general unity and vehemently condemn all theoretical disputes over principles. “A serious revolutionary organisation,” Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsii (No. 2, p. 127) assures us in all seriousness, “would give up trying to settle disputed questions of social theory, which always lead to disunity, although this of course should not hinder theoreticians from seeking their solution”—or, more outspokenly: let the writers do the writing and the readers do the reading³ and in the meantime, while they are busying themselves, we will rejoice at the blank left behind.

There is no need, of course, to engage in a serious analysis of this theory of deviation from socialism (in the event of disputes proper). In our opinion, the crisis of socialism makes it incumbent upon any in the least serious socialists to devote redoubled attention to theory—to adopt more resolutely a strictly definite stand, to draw a sharper line of demarcation between themselves and wavering and unreliable elements. In the opinion of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, however, if such things as confusion and splits are possible “even among Germans,” then it is God’s will that we, Russians, should pride ourselves on our ignorance of whither we are drifting. In our opinion, the absence of theory deprives a revolutionary trend of the right to existence and inevitably condemns it, sooner or later, to political bankruptcy. In the opinion of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, however, the absence of theory is a most excellent thing, most favourable “for unity.” As you see, we cannot reach agreement with them, for the fact of the matter is that we even speak different languages. There is one hope: perhaps they will be made to see reason by Mr. Struve, who also (only more seriously) speaks about the elimination of dogma and says that “our” business (as is the, business of any bourgeoisie that appeals to the proletariat) is not to disunite, but to unite. Will not the Socialist-Revolutionaries ever see, with the help of   Mr. Struve, what is really signified by their stand of liberation from socialism for the purpose of unity, and unity on the occasion of liberation from socialism?

Let us go over to the second point, the question of terrorism.

In their defence of terrorism, which the experience of the Russian revolutionary movement has so clearly proved to be ineffective, the Socialist-Revolutionaries are talking themselves blue in the face in asseverating that they recognise terrorism only in conjunction with work among the masses, and that therefore the arguments used by the Russian Social-Democrats to refute the efficacy of this method of struggle (and which have indeed been refuted for a long time to come) do not apply to them. Here something very similar to their attitude towards “criticism” is repeating itself. We are not opportunists, cry the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and at the same time they are shelving the dogma of proletarian socialism, for reason of sheer opportunist criticism and no other. We are not repeating the terrorists’ mistakes and are not diverting attention from work among the masses, the Socialist-Revolutionaries assure us, and at the same time enthusiastically recommend to the Party acts such as Balmashov’s assassination of Sipyagin, although everyone knows and sees perfectly well that this act was in no way connected with the masses and, moreover, could not have been by reason of the very way in which it was carried out—that the persons who committed this terrorist act neither counted on nor hoped for any definite action or support on the part of the masses. In their naïveté, the Socialist-Revolutionaries do not realise that their predilection for terrorism is causally most intimately linked with the fact that, from the very outset, they have always kept, and still keep, aloof from the working-class movement, without even attempting to become a party of the revolutionary class which is waging its class struggle. Over-ardent protestations very often lead one to doubt and suspect the worth of whatever it is that requires such strong seasoning. Do not these protestations weary them?—I often think of these words, when I read assurances by the Socialist-Revolutionaries: “by terrorism we are not relegating work among the masses into the background.”After all, these assurances come from the very people who have already   drifted away from the Social-Democratic labour movement, which really rouses the masses; they come from people who are continuing to drift away from this movement, clutching at fragments of any kind of theory.

The leaflet issued by the “Party of the Socialist-Revolutionaries” on April 3,1902, may serve as a splendid illustration of what has been stated above. It is a most realistic source, one that is very close to the immediate leaders, a most authentic source. The “presentation of the question of terrorist struggle” in this leaflet “coincides in full” also “with the Party views,” according to the valuable testimony of Revolutsionnaya Rossiya (No. 7, p. 24).⁴

The April 3 leaflet follows the pattern of the terrorists’ “latest” arguments with remarkable accuracy. The first thing that strikes the eye is the words: “we advocate terrorism, not in place of work among the masses, but precisely for and simultaneously with that work.” They strike the eye particularly because these words are printed in letters three times as large as the rest of the text (a device that is of course repeated by Revolutsionnaya Rossiya). It is all really so simple! One has only to set “not in place of, but together with” in bold type—and all the arguments of the Social-Democrats, all that history has taught, will fall to the ground. But just read the whole leaflet and you will see that the protestation in bold type takes the name of the masses in vain. The day “when the working people will emerge from the shadows” and “the mighty popular wave will shatter the iron gates to smithereens”—“alas!” (literally, “alas!”) “is still a long way off, and it is frightful   to think of the future toll of victims!” Do not these words “alas, still a long way off” reflect an utter failure to under stand the mass movement and a lack of faith in it? Is not this argument meant as a deliberate sneer at the fact that the working people are already beginning to rise? And, finally, even if this trite argument were just as well-founded as it is actually stuff and nonsense, what would emerge from it in particularly bold relief would be the inefficacy of terrorism, for without the working people all bombs are power less, patently powerless.

Just listen to what follows: “Every terrorist blow, as it were, takes away part of the strength of the autocracy and transfers [!] all this strength [!] to the side of the fighters for freedom.” “And if terrorism is practised systematically [!], it is obvious that the scales of the balance will finally weigh down on our side.” Yes, indeed, it is obvious to all that we have here in its grossest form one of the greatest prejudices of the terrorists: political assassination of itself “transfers strength”! Thus, on the one hand you have the theory of the transference of strength, and on the other— “not in place of, but together with”…. Do not these protestations weary them?

But this is just the beginning. The real thing is yet to come. “Whom are we to strike down?” asks the party of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and replies: the ministers, and not the tsar, for “the tsar will not allow matters to go to extremes” (!! How did they find that out??), and besides “it is also easier” (this is literally what they say!): “No minister can ensconce himself in a palace as in a fortress.” And this argument concludes with the following piece of reasoning, which deserves to be immortalised as a model of the “theory” of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. “Against the crowd the autocracy has its soldiers; against the revolutionary organisations its secret and uniformed police; but what will save it…” (what kind of “it” is this? The autocracy? The author has unwittingly identified the autocracy with a target in the person of a minister whom it is easier to strike down!) “… from individuals or small groups that are ceaselessly, and even in ignorance of one another [!!], preparing for attack, and are attacking? No force will be of avail against elusiveness. Hence, our task is clear: to remove every one of the autocracy’s brutal oppressors by the only means that has been left [!] us by the autocracy–death.” No matter how many reams of paper the Socialist-Revolutionaries may fill with assurances that they are not relegating work among the masses into the background or disorganising it by their advocacy of terrorism—their spate of words cannot disprove the fact that the actual psychology of the modern terrorist is faithfully conveyed in the leaflet we have quoted. The theory of the transference of strength finds its natural complement in the theory of elusiveness, a theory which turns upside down, not only all past experience, but all common sense as well. That the only “hope” of the revolution is the “crowd”; that only a revolutionary organisation which leads this crowd (in deed and not in word) can fight against the police—all this is ABC. It is shameful to have to prove this. And only people who have forgotten everything and learned absolutely nothing could have decided “the other way about,” arriving at the fabulous, howling stupidity that the autocracy can be “saved” from the crowd by soldiers, and from the revolutionary organisations by the police, but that there is no salvation from individuals who hunt down ministers!!

This fabulous argument, which we are convinced is destined to become notorious, is by no means simply a curiosity. No, it is instructive because, through a sweeping reduction to an absurdity, it reveals the principal mistake of the terrorists, which they share with the “economists” (perhaps one might already say, with the former representatives of deceased “economism”?). This mistake, as we have already pointed out on numerous occasions, consists in the failure to understand the basic defect of our movement. Because of the extremely rapid growth of the movement, the leaders lagged behind the masses, the revolutionary organisations did not come up to the level of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat, were incapable of marching on in front and leading the masses. That a discrepancy of this sort exists cannot be doubted by any conscientious person who has even the slightest acquaintance with the movement. And if that is so, it is evident that the present-day terrorists are really “economists” turned inside out, going to the equally foolish but opposite extreme. At a time when the revolutionaries are short of the forces and means to lead the masses,   who are already rising, an appeal to resort to such terrorist acts as the organisation of attempts on the lives of ministers by individuals and groups that are not known to one another means, not only thereby breaking off work among the masses, but also introducing downright disorganisation into that work.

We, revolutionaries, “are accustomed to huddling together in timid knots,” we read in the April 3 leaflet, “and even [N.B.] the new, bold spirit that has appeared during the last two or three years has so far done more to raise the sentiments of the crowd than of individuals.” These words unintentionally express much that is true. And it is this very truth that deals a smashing rebuff to the propagandists of terrorism. From this truth every thinking socialist draws the conclusion that it is necessary to use group action more energetically, boldly, and harmoniously. The Socialist-Revolutionaries, however, conclude: “Shoot, elusive individual, for the knot of people, alas, is still a long way off, and besides there are soldiers against the knot.” This really defies all reason, gentlemen!

Nor does the leaflet eschew the theory of excitative terrorism. “Each time a hero engages in single combat, this arouses in us all a spirit of struggle and courage,” we are told. But we know from the past and see in the present that only new forms of the mass movement or the awakening of new sections of the masses to independent struggle really rouses a spirit of struggle and courage in all. Single combat however, inasmuch as it remains single combat waged by the Balmashovs, has the immediate effect of simply creating a short-lived sensation, while indirectly it even leads to apathy and passive waiting for the next bout. We are further assured that “every flash of terrorism lights up the mind,” which, unfortunately, we have not noticed to be the case with the terrorism-preaching party of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. We are presented with the theory of big work and petty work. “Let not those who have greater strength, greater opportunities and resolution rest content with petty [!] work; let them find and devote themselves to a big cause—the propaganda of terrorism among the masses [!l, the preparation of the intricate… [the theory of elusiveness is already forgotten!]… terrorist   ventures.” How amazingly clever this is in all truth: to sacrifice the Life of a revolutionary for the sake of wreaking vengeance on the scoundrel Sipyagin, who is then replaced by the scoundrel Plehve—that is big work. But to prepare, for instance, the masses for an armed demonstration—that is petty work. This very point is explained in No. 8 of Revolutsionnaya Rossiya, which declares that “it is easy to write and speak” of armed demonstrations “as a matter of the vague and distant future,” “but up till now all this talk has been merely of a theoretical nature.” How well we know this Language of people who are free of the constraint of firm socialist convictions, of the burdensome experience of each and every kind of popular movement! They confuse immediately tangible and sensational results with practicalness. To them the demand to adhere steadfastly to the class standpoint and to maintain the mass nature of the movement is “vague” “theorising.” In their eyes definitiveness is slavish compliance with every turn of sentiment and … and, by reason of this compliance, inevitable helplessness at each turn. Demonstrations begin— and blood thirsty words, talk about the beginning of the end, flow from the lips of such people. The demonstrations halt— their hands drop helplessly, and before they have had time to wear out a pair of boots they are already shouting: “The people, alas, are still a long way off….” Some new outrage is perpetrated by the tsar’s henchmen—and they demand to be shown a “definite” measure that would serve as an exhaustive reply to that particular outrage, a measure that would bring about an immediate “transference of strength,” and they proudly promise this transference! These people do not understand that this very promise to “transfer” strength constitutes political adventurism, and that their adventurism stems from their lack of principle.

The Social-Democrats will always warn against adventurism and ruthlessly expose illusions which inevitably end in complete disappointment. We must bear in mind that a revolutionary party is worthy of its name only when it quides [sic.] in deed the movement of a revolutionary class. We must bear in mind that any popular movement assumes an infinite variety of forms, is constantly developing new forms and discarding the old, and effecting modifications or new   combinations of old and new forms. It is our duty to participate actively in this process of working out means and methods of struggle. When the students’ movement became sharper, we began to call on the workers to come to the aid of the students (Iskra, No. 2[See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 414-19.—Ed.]) without taking it upon our selves to forecast the forms of the demonstrations, without promising that they would result in an immediate transference of strength, in lighting up the mind, or a special elusiveness. When the demonstrations became consolidated, we began to call for their organisation and for the arming of the masses, and put forward the task of preparing a popular uprising. Without in the least denying violence and terrorism in principle, we demanded work for the preparation of such forms of violence as were calculated to bring about the direct participation of the masses and which guaranteed that participation. We do not close our eyes to the difficulties of this task, but will work at it steadfastly and persistently, undeterred by the objections that this is a matter of the “vague and distant future.” Yes, gentlemen, we stand for future and not only past forms of the movement. We give preference to long and arduous work on what promises a future rather than to an “easy” repetition of what has been condemned by the past. We shall always expose people who in word war against hackneyed dogmas and in practice hold exclusively to such moth-eaten and harmful commonplaces as the theory of the transference of strength, the difference between big work and petty work and, of course, the theory of single combat. “Just as in the days of yore the peoples’ battles were fought out by their leaders in single combat, so now the terrorists will win Russia’s freedom in single combat with the autocracy,” the April 3 leaflet concludes. The mere reprinting of such sentences provides their refutation.

Anyone who really carries on his revolutionary work in conjunction with the class struggle of the proletariat very well knows, sees and feels what vast numbers of immediate and direct demands of the proletariat (and of the sections of the people capable of supporting the latter) remain unsatisfied. He knows that in very many places, throughout vast areas, the working people are literally   straining to go into action, and that their ardour runs to waste because of the scarcity of literature and leadership, the lack of forces and means in the revolutionary organisations. And we find ourselves—we see that we find our selves—in the same old vicious circle that has so long hemmed in the Russian revolution like an omen of evil. On the one hand, the revolutionary ardour of the insufficiently enlightened and unorganised crowd runs to waste. On the other hand, shots fired by the “elusive individuals” who are losing faith in the possibility of marching in formation and working hand in hand with the masses also end in smoke.

But things can still be put to rights, comrades! Loss of faith in a real cause is the rare exception rather than the rule. The urge to commit terrorist acts is a passing mood. Then let the Social-Democrats close their ranks, and we shall fuse the militant organisation of revolutionaries and the mass heroism of the Russian proletariat into a single whole!

In the next article we shall deal with the agrarian programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

II

The Socialist-Revolutionaries’ attitude to the peasant movement is of particular interest. It is precisely in the agrarian question that representatives of the old Russian socialism, their liberal-Narodnik descendants, and also adherents of opportunist criticism who are so numerous in Russia and so vociferously pass assurances that on this score Marxism has already been conclusively disproved by the “critics,” have always considered themselves especially strong. Our Socialist-Revolutionaries too are tearing Marxism to shreds, so to speak: “dogmatic prejudices… outlived dogmas long since refuted by life … the revolutionary intelligentsia has shut its eyes to the countryside, revolutionary work among the peasantry was forbidden by orthodoxy,” and much else in this vein. It is the current fashion to kick out at orthodoxy. But to what subspecies must one relegate those of the kickers who did not even manage to draw up an outline for an agrarian programme of their own before   the commencement of the peasant movement? When Iskra sketched its agrarian programme as early as in No. 3,[See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 420-28.—Ed.] Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsii could only mutter: “Given such a presentation of the question, still another of our differences is fading away”—what happened here is that the editors of Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsii had the mishap of utterly failing to understand Iskra’s presentation of the question (the “introduction of the class struggle into the country side”). Revolutsionnaya Rossiya now belatedly refers to the pamphlet entitled The Next Question, although it contains no programme whatever, but only panegyrics on such “celebrated” opportunists as Hertz.

And now these same people—who before the commencement of the movement were in agreement both with Iskra and with Hertz—come out, on the day following the peasant uprising, with a manifesto “from the peasant league [!] of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party,” a manifesto in which you will not find a single syllable really emanating from the peasantry, but only a literal repetition of what you have read hundreds of times in the writings of the Narodniks, the liberals, and the “critics.” … It is said that courage can move mountains. That is so, Messrs. the Socialist-Revolutionaries, but it is not to such courage that your garish advertisement testifies.

We have seen that the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ greatest “advantage” lies in their freedom from theory; their greatest skill consists in their ability to speak without saying anything. But in order to present a programme, one must nevertheless say something. It is necessary, for instance, to throw overboard the “dogma of the Russian Social-Democrats of the late eighties and early nineties to the effect that there is no revolutionary force save the urban proletariat.” What a handy little word “dogma” is! One need only slightly twist an opposing theory, cover up this twist with the bogy of “dogma”—and there you are!

Beginning with the Communist Manifesto, all modern socialism rests on the indisputable truth that the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class in capitalist society. The other classes may and do become revolutionary only in part and only under certain conditions. What, then, must one think of people who have “transformed” this truth into a dogma of the Russian Social-Democrats of a definite period and who try to convince the naive reader that this dogma was “based entirely on the belief that open political struggle lay far in the future”?

To counter Marx’s doctrine that there is only one really revolutionary class in modern society, the Socialist-Revolutionaries advance the trinity: “the intelligentsia, the proletariat, and the peasantry,” thereby revealing a hope less confusion of concepts. If one sets the intelligentsia against the proletariat and the peasantry it means that one considers the former a definite social stratum, a group of per sons occupying just as definite a social position as is occupied by the wage-workers and the peasants. But as such a stratum the Russian intelligentsia is precisely a bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. With regard to this stratum, Mr. Struve is quite right in calling his paper the mouthpiece of the Russian intelligentsia. However, if one is referring to those intellectuals who have not yet taken any definite social stand, or have already been thrown off their normal stand by the facts of life, and are passing over to the side of the proletariat, then it is altogether absurd to contrapose this intelligentsia to the proletariat. Like any other class in modern society, the proletariat is not only advancing intellectuals from its own midst, but also accepts into its ranks supporters from the midst of all and sundry educated people. The campaign of the Socialist-Revolutionaries against the basic “dogma” of Marxism is merely additional proof that the entire strength of this party is represented by the handful of Russian intellectuals who have broken away from the old, but have not yet adhered to the new.

The Socialist-Revolutionaries’ views on the peasantry are even more muddled. To take just the posing of the question: “What social classes in general [!] always 1!! cling to the existing… Ithe autocratic only? or bourgeois in general?]… order, guard it and do not yield to revolutionisation?” As a matter of fact, this question can be answered only by another question: what elements of the intelligentsia in general always cling to the existing chaos of ideas, guard it and do not yield to a definite socialist world out look? But the Socialist-Revolutionaries want to give a serious answer to an insignificant question. To “these” classes they refer, first, the bourgeoisie, since its “interests have been satisfied.” This old prejudice that the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie have already been satisfied to such a degree that we neither have nor can have bourgeois democracy in our country (cf. Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsii, No. 2, pp. 132-33) is now shared by the “economists” and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Again, won’t Mr. Struve teach them some common sense?

Secondly, the Socialist-Revolutionaries include among these classes the “petty-bourgeois strata” “whose interests are individualistic, undefined as class interests, and do not lend themselves to formulation in a reformative or revolutionary socio-political programme.” Whence this has come, the Lord alone knows. It is common knowledge that the petty bourgeoisie does not always and in general guard the existing order, but on the contrary often takes revolutionary action even against the bourgeoisie (specifically, when it joins the proletariat) and very often against absolutism, and that it almost always formulates programmes of social reform. Our author has simply come out with a “noisier” declaration against the petty bourgeoisie, in accordance with the “practical rule,” which Turgenev expressed through an “old fox” in one of his “Poems in Prose”: “Cry out most loudly against those vices you yourself feel guilty of.”⁵ And so, since the Socialist-Revolutionaries feel that the only social basis of their position between two stools can be perhaps provided only by certain petty-bourgeois sections of the intelligentsia, they therefore write about the petty bourgeoisie as if this term does not signify a social category, but is simply a polemical turn of speech. They likewise want to evade the unpleasant fact of their failure to understand that the peasantry of today belongs, as a whole, to the “petty-bourgeois strata.” Won’t you try to give us an answer on this score, Messrs. the Socialist-Revolutionaries? Won’t you tell us why it is that, while repeating snatches of the theory of Russian Marxism (for example, about the progressive significance of peasant outside employment and tramping), you turn a blind eye to the fact that this same Marxism has revealed the petty-bourgeois make-up of Russian peasant economy? Won’t you explain to us how it is possible in con temporary society for “proprietors or semi-proprietors” not to belong to the petty-bourgeois strata?

No, harbour no hopes! The Socialist-Revolutionaries will not reply; they will not say or explain anything bearing upon the matter, for they (again like the “economists”) have thoroughly learned the tactic of pleading ignorance when it comes to theory. Revolutsionnaya Rossiya looks meaningly towards Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsit—that is their job, they say (cf. No. 4, reply to Zarya), while Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsii informs its readers of the exploits of the opportunist critics and keeps on threatening to make its criticism ever sharper. That is hardly enough, gentlemen!

The Socialist-Revolutionaries have kept themselves pure of the baneful influence of modern socialist doctrines. They have fully preserved the good old methods of vulgar socialism. We are confronted by a new historical fact, a new movement among a certain section of the people. They do not examine the condition of this section or set themselves the aim of explaining its movement by the nature of that section and its relation to the developing economic structure of society as a whole. To them, all this is an empty dogma, outlived orthodoxy. They do things more simply: what is it that the representatives of the rising section themselves are speaking about? Land, additional allotments, redistribution of the land. There it is in a nutshell. You have a “semi-socialist programme,” “a thoroughly correct principle,” “a bright idea,” “an ideal which already lives in the peasant’s mind in embryo form,” etc. All that is necessary is to “brush up and elaborate this ideal,” bring out the “pure idea of socialism.” You find this hard to believe, reader? It seems incredible to you that this Narodnik junk should again be dragged into the light of day by people who so glibly repeat whatever the latest book may tell them? And yet this is a fact, and all the words we have quoted are in the declaration “from the peasant league” published in No. 8 of Revolutstonnaya Rossiya.

The Socialist-Revolutionaries accuse Iskra of having prematurely tolled the knell of the peasant movement by describing it as the last peasant revolt. The peasantry,   they inform us, can participate in the socialist movement of the proletariat as well. This accusation testifies to the confusion of thought among the Socialist-Revolutionaries. They have not even grasped that the democratic movement against the remnants of serf-ownership is one thing, and the socialist movement against the bourgeoisie is quite another. Since they have failed to understand the peasant movement itself, they have likewise been unable to under stand that the words in Iskra, which frightened them so, refer only to the former movement. Not only has Iskra stated in its programme that the small producers (including the peasants), who are being ruined, can and should participate in the socialist movement of the proletariat, but it has also defined the exact conditions for this participation. The peasant movement of today, however, is not at all a socialist movement directed against the bourgeoisie and capitalism. On the contrary, it unites the bourgeois and the proletarian elements in the peasantry, which are really one in the struggle against the remnants of the serf-owning system. The peasant movement of today is leading—and will lead—to the establishment, not of a socialist or a semi-socialist way of life in the countryside, but of a bourgeois way of life, and will clear away the feudal debris cluttering up the bourgeois foundations that have already arisen in our countryside.

But all this is a sealed book to the Socialist-Revolutionaries. They even assure Iskra in all seriousness that to clear the way for the development of capitalism is an empty dogma, since the “reforms” (of the sixties) “did clear 1!] full [!! I space for the development of capitalism.” That is what can be written by a glib person who lets a facile pen run away with him and who imagines that the “peasant league” can get away with anything: the peasant won’t see through it! But kindly reflect for a moment, my dear author: have you never heard that remnants of the serf-owning system retard the development of capitalism? Don’t you think that this is even all but tautological? And haven’t you read somewhere about the remnants of serf-ownership in the present-day Russian countryside?

Iskra says that the impending revolution will be a bourgeois revolution. The Socialist-Revolutionaries object:   it will be “primarily a political revolution and to a certain extent a democratic revolution.” Won’t the authors of this pretty objection try to explain this to us— does history know of any bourgeois revolution, or is such a bourgeois revolution conceivable, that is not “to a certain extent a democratic revolution”? Why, even the programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves (equalitarian tenure of land that has become social property) does not go beyond the limits of a bourgeois programme, since the preservation of commodity production and toleration of private farming, even if it is conducted on common land, in no way eliminates capitalist relationships in agriculture.

The greater the levity with which the Socialist-Revolutionaries approach the most elementary truths of modern socialism, the more easily do they invent “most elementary deductions,” even taking pride in the fact that their “programme reduces itself” to such. Let us then examine all three of their deductions, which most probably will long remain a monument to the keen wit and profound socialist convictions of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Deduction No. 1: “A large portion of the territory of Russia now already belongs to the state—what we need is that all the territory should belong to the people.” Our teeth are “now already” on edge from the touching references to state ownership of land in Russia contained in the writings of the police Narodniks (à la Sazonov, etc.) and the various Katheder-reformers.⁶ “What we need” is that people who style themselves socialists and even revolutionaries should trail in the rear of these gentlemen. “What we need” is that socialists should lay stress on the alleged omnipotence of the “state” (forgetting even that a large share of the state land is concentrated in the uninhabited marginal regions of the country), and not on the class antagonism between the semi-serf peasantry and the privileged handful of big landowners, who own most of the best cultivated land and with whom the “state” has always been on the best of terms. Our Socialist-Revolutionaries, who imagine that they are deducing a pure idea of socialism, are in actual fact sullying this idea by their uncritical attitude towards the old Narodism.

Deduction No. 2: “The land is now already passing from capital to labour—what we need is that this process be completed by the state.” The deeper you go into the forest, the thicker the trees.[A Russian saying.—Ed.] Let us take another step towards police Narodism; let us call on the (class!) “state” to extend peasant landownership in general. This is remarkably socialistic and amazingly revolutionary. But what can one expect of people who call the purchase and lease of land by the peasants a transfer “from capital to labour” and not transfer of land from the feudal-minded landlords to the rural bourgeoisie. Let us remind these people at least of the statistics on the actual distribution of the land that is “passing to labour”: between six- and nine-tenths of all peas ant-purchased land, and from five- to eight-tenths of all leased land are concentrated in the hands of one-filth of the peasant households, i.e., in the hands of a small minority of well-to-do peasants. From this one can judge whether there is much truth in the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ words when they assert “we do not at all count” on the well-to-do peasants but only on the “labouring sections exclusively.”

Deduction No. 3: “The peasant already has land, and in most cases on the basis of equalitarian land distribution—what we need is that this labour tenure should be carried through to the end … and culminate in collective agricultural production through the development of co-operatives of every kind.” Scratch a Socialist-Revolutionary and you find Mr. V. V.!⁷ When it came to action, all the old prejudices of Narodism, which had safely preserved themselves behind shifty phrasing, crept to the surface at once. State ownership of the land—the completion by the state of the transference of the land to the peasantry—the village commune—co-operatives—collectivism— in this magnificent scheme of Messrs. Sazonov, Yuzov, N.—on,⁸ the Socialist Revolutionaries, Hofstetter, Totomiants, and so on, and so forth—in this scheme a mere trifle is lacking. It takes account neither of developing capitalism, nor of the class struggle. But then how could this trifle enter the minds of people whose entire ideological luggage consists of Narodnik rags and smart patches of fashionable criticism? Did not Mr. Bulgakov himself say that there is no place for the class struggle in the countryside? Will the replacement of the class struggle by “co-operatives of every kind” fail to satisfy both the liberals and the “critics,” and in general all those to whom socialism is no more than a traditional label? And is it not possible to try to soothe naive people with the assurance: “Of course, any idealisation of the village commune is alien to us,” although right next to this assurance you read some colossal bombast about the “colossal organisation of the mir peasants,” then bombast that “in certain respects no other class in Russia is so impelled towards a purely III political struggle as the peasantry,” that peasant self-determination (!) is far broader in scope and in competence than that of the Zemstvo, that this combination of “broad” … (up to the very boundary of the village?) … “independent activity” with an absence of the “most elementary civic rights” “seems to have been deliberately designed for the purpose of … rousing and exercising H] political instincts and habits of social struggle.” If you don’t like all this, you don’t have to listen, but….

“One has to be blind not to see how much easier it is to pass to the idea of socialising the land from the traditions of communal land tenure.” Is it not the other way round, gentlemen? Are not those people hopelessly deaf and blind who to this very day do not know that it is precisely the medieval seclusion of the semi-serf commune, which splits the peasantry into tiny unions and binds the rural proletariat hand and foot, that maintains the traditions of stagnation, oppression, and barbarism? Are you not defeating your own purpose by recognising the usefulness of outside employment, which has already destroyed by three-quarters the much-vaunted traditions of equalitarian land tenure in the commune, and reduced these traditions to meddling by the police?

The minimum programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, based as it is on the theory we have just analysed, is a real curiosity. This “programme” includes two items: 1) “socialisation of the land, i.e., its conversion into the property of the whole of society, to be used by the working people”; 2) “the development among the peasantry of all possible types of public associations and economic co-operatives … [for a “purely” political struggle?]… for the gradual emancipation of the peasantry from the sway of money capital … [and subjugation to industrial?] … and for the preparation of collective agricultural production of the future.” Just as the sun is reflected in a drop of water, so is the entire spirit of the present-day “Social-Revolutionarism” reflected in these two items. In theory, revolutionary phrase mongering instead of a considered and integral system of views; in practice—helpless snatching at this or that modish petty expedient instead of participation in the class struggle—that is all they have to show. We must admit that it has required rare civic courage to place socialisation of the land alongside of co-operation in a minimum programme. Their minimum programme: Babeuf, on the one hand, and Mr. Levitsky, on the other.⁹ This is inimitable.

If it were possible to take this programme seriously, we should have to say that, in deceiving themselves with grandiloquent words, the Socialist-Revolutionaries are also deceiving the peasants. It is deception to assert that “co-operatives of every kind” play a revolutionary role in present-day society and prepare the way for collectivism rather than strengthen the rural bourgeoisie. It is deception to assert that socialisation of the land can be placed before the “peasantry” as a “minimum,” as something just as close at hand as the establishment of co-operatives. Any socialist could explain to our Socialist-Revolutionaries that today the abolition of private ownership of land can only be the immediate prelude to its abolition in general; that the mere transfer of the land “to be used by the working people” would still not satisfy the proletariat, since millions and tens of millions of ruined peasants are no longer able to work the land, even if they had it. And to supply these ruined millions with implements, cattle, etc., would amount to the socialisation of all the means of production and would require a socialist revolution of the proletariat and not a peasant movement against the remnants of the serf owning system. The Socialist-Revolutionaries are confusing socialisation of the land with bourgeois nationalisation of the land. Speaking in the abstract, the latter is conceivable on the basis of capitalism too, without abolishing wage labour. But the very example of these same Socialist-Revolutionaries   is vivid confirmation of the truth that to advance the demand for nationalisation of the land in a police state is tantamount to obscuring the only revolutionary principle, that of the class struggle, and bringing grist to the mill of every kind of bureaucracy.

Not only that. The Socialist-Revolutionaries descend to outright reaction when they rise up against the demand of our draft programme for the “annulment of all laws restricting the peasant in the free disposal of his land.” For the sake of the Narodnik prejudice about the “commune principle” and the “equalitarian principle” they deny to the peasant such a “most elementary civic right” as the right freely to dispose of his land; they complacently shut their eyes to the fact that the village commune of today is hemmed in by its social-estate reality; they become champions of the police interdictions established and supported by the “state” … of the rural superintendents! We believe that not only Mr. Levitsky but Mr. Pobedonostsev¹⁰ too will not be very much alarmed over the demand for socialisation of the land for the purpose of establishing equalitarian land tenure, once this demand is put forth as a minimum demand alongside of which such things figure as co-operatives and the defence of the police system of keeping the muzhik tied down to the official allotment which supports him.

Let the agrarian programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries serve as a lesson and a warning to all socialists, a glaring example of what results from an absence of ideology and principles, which some unthinking people call freedom from dogma. When it came to action, the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not reveal even a single of the three conditions essential for the elaboration of a consistent socialist programme: a clear idea of the ultimate aim; a correct understanding of the path leading to that aim; an accurate conception of the true state of affairs at the given moment or of the immediate tasks of that moment. They simply obscured the ultimate aim of socialism by con fusing socialisation of the land with bourgeois nationalisation and by confusing the primitive peasant idea about small-scale equalitarian land tenure with the doctrine of modern socialism on the conversion of all means of production   into public property and the organisation of socialist production. Their conception of the path leading to socialism is peerlessly characterised by their substitution of the development of co-operatives for the class struggle. In their estimation of the present stage in the agrarian evolution of Russia, they have forgotten a trifle: the remnants of serf-ownership, which weigh so heavily on our country side. The famous trinity which reflects their theoretical views—the intelligentsia, the proletariat, and the peasantry—has its complement in the no less famous three-point “programme”—socialisation of the land, co-operatives, and attachment to the allotment.

Compare this with Iskra’s programme, which indicates to the entire militant proletariat one ultimate aim, with out reducing it to a “minimum,” without debasing it so as to adapt it to the ideas of certain backward sections of the proletariat or of the small producers. The road leading to this aim is the same in town and countryside—the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. But besides this class struggle, another struggle is going on in our countryside: the struggle of the entire peasantry against the remnants of serf-ownership. And in this struggle the party of the proletariat promises its support to the entire peasantry and strives to provide its revolutionary ardour with a real objective, and guide its uprising against its real enemy, considering it dishonest and unworthy to treat the muzhik as though he were under tutelage or to conceal from him the fact that at present and immediately he can achieve only the complete eradication of all traces and remnants of the serf-owning system, and only clear the way for the broader and more difficult struggle of the entire proletariat against the whole of bourgeois society.

1. “At least we make an infernal noise.” Words spoken by Repetilov, a character in Griboyedov’s well-known comedy, Wit Works Woe, Act IV, Scene 4. ︎
2. V.I. Lenin’s intention “to return in a magazine article, or in a pamphlet” to a more detailed exposition of the arguments against the programmatic views and tactics of the Socialist-Revolutionaries remained unfulfilled. The following is the preliminary material for the intended pamphlet: “Extract from an Article Against the Socialist-Revolutionaries” (December 1902) (see pp. 287-88 of this volume), “Outline of a Pamphlet Against the Socialist-Revolutionaries” (spring 1903) (see Proletarskaya Revolutsia, 1939, No. 1, pp. 22-28), and “Outline of an Article Against the Socialist-Revolutionaries” (first half of July 1903) (see pp. 464-65 of this volume). ︎
3. “Let the writers do the writing and the readers do the reading”—a sentence from M. Y. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Miscellaneous Letters, Letter One. ︎
4. ︎
5. The reference is to one of Turgenev’s Poems in Prose—“A Rule of Life” (see I. S. Turgenev, Collected Works, Russ. ed., Vol. 8, 1956, p. 464). ︎
6. Katheder-reformers, Katheder-Socialists—representatives of a trend in bourgeois political economy, which arose in Germany in the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century. Under the guise of socialism the Katheder-Socialists advocated from the university chairs (Katheder in German) bourgeois-liberal reformism. Katheder-Socialism was motivated by the exploiting classes’ fear of the spread of Marxism and the growth of the working-class movement, and also by the effor True, Revolzststonnaya Rossiya does some juggling with this point also. On the one hand—“coincides in full,” on the other—a hint about “exaggerations.” On the one hand, Revolntsionnaya Rossiya declares that this leaflet comes from only “one group” of Socialist-Revolutionaries. On the other hand, it is a fact that the leaflet bears the imprint: “Published by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.” Moreover, it carries the motto of. this same Revolutsionnaya Rosaiga (“By struggle you will achieve your rights”). We appreciate that Revolutsionnaya Rossiya finds it disagreeable to touch on this ticklish point, but we believe that it is simply unseemly to play at hide-and-seek in such cases. The existence of “economism” was just as disagreeable to revolutionary Social-Democracy, but the latter exposed it openly, without ever making the slightest attempt to mislead anyone. —Lenints of bourgeois ideologists to find fresh means of keeping the working people in subjugation.
   Representatives of Katheder-Socialism (Adolf Wagner, Gustav Schmoller, Lorenz Brentano, Werner Sombart, and others) asserted that the bourgeois state stands above classes and is capable of reconciling the hostile classes and of gradually introducing “socialism,” without affecting the interests of the capitalists and, as far as possible, with due account of the working people’s demands. They proposed giving police regulation of wage-labour the force of law and reviving the medieval guilds. Marx, Engels and Lenin exposed the reactionary nature of Ketheder-Socialism, which in Russia was spread by the “legal Marxists.” ︎
7. V.V. (pseudonym of V. P. Vorontsov)—one of the ideologists of liberal Narodism in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century. ︎
8. N.—on or Nikolai—on (pseudonym of N. F. Danielson)—one of the ideologists of liberal Narodism in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century. ︎
9. Babeuf (1760-1797)—revolutionary Communist and leader of the French bourgeois revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. He organised a secret society, which in 1796 tried to over throw the power of the exploiting classes.
   Levitsky—liberal Narodnik, founder of agricultural artels in Kherson Gubernia in the nineties of the nineteenth century. ︎
10. Pobedonostsev—reactionary tsarist statesman, Procurator-General of the Synod, actually head of the government and chief inspirer of the savage feudal reaction under Alexander III. He continued to play a prominent part under Nicholas II. ︎

The post Lenin on Revolutionary Adventurism appeared first on The Communist.

The situation preceding the general crisis of world capitalism before World War II called for this basically correct policy as well as that of thoroughly fighting against forces on the left that ultimately serve to weaken and break the workers resistance against capitalist aggression. With the practical effect being the victory of fascism if the workers are beaten. These forces are what we call social-fascists.

However, once the victory of fascism was achieved in Germany, Italy, and Japan, the conditions ostensibly called for a more advanced policy. The presence of fascism had a deleterious effect on the entire world and threatened to pull the whole of humanity down with it. No longer could the struggle against social-fascists be carried on in the same way.

The international situation called for the policy of a People’s Front. This differs from the United Front as its basis of unity extends beyond the working class and seeks to unite an entire people, the progressive elements which for one reason or another stand against fascism and against the capitalists offloading the crisis onto the workers.

As well, the stronghold of world socialism, the USSR, was under threat of invasion by the German fascist forces. The defense of the international position of communism required a tacit alliance on the lines of anti-fascism between the socialist camp and the capitalist camp which had not fallen into fascism. Dimitrov, secretary of the Comintern, explains the reasoning for this at the 7th congress of the Comintern in 1938:

“We Communists employ methods of struggle which differ from those of the other parties; but, while using our own methods in combating fascism, we Communists will also support the methods of struggle used by other parties however inadequate they  may seem, if these methods are really directed against fascism.

“We are ready to do all this because, in countries of bourgeois democracy, we want to block the way of reaction and the offensive of capital and fascism, prevent the abolition of bourgeois-democratic liberties, forestall fascism’s terrorist vengeance upon the proletariat and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intellectuals, and save the young generation from physical and spiritual degeneracy.

“We are ready to do all this because in the fascist countries we want to prepare and hasten the overthrow of fascist dictatorship.

“We are ready to do all this because we want to save the world from fascist barbarity and the horrors of imperialist war.

“Ours is a Congress of struggle for the maintenance of peace, against the threat of imperialist war”

”

The struggle of the French people, led by the Communist Party of France on the lines of a People’s Front against the rising tide of fascism before WWII proved effective at preventing the rise of fascism in France before Hitler invaded. The resolve of the French people to resist fascism was a boon to the world anti-fascist movement. Even though with the defeat of France during WWII, their people carried on the anti-fascist fight which was best represented by the heroic resolve of the French Partisans. 

The Communist Party USA, seeked the same success as the tendrils of fascism crept over our own country in the wake of the Great Depression. The threat of fascism in the US was real and presented a revolutionary situation as Stalin outlined at the ECCI in 1929. Twice US finance capital seeked to overthrow the bourgeois-republic, first with the American Liberty League, and a few years later with the American First Committee. 

As Dimitrov and Stalin outlined at the 7th congress, the fascists rummage through history and uphold or revise it in order to validate and achieve support for their anti-democratic and anti-people aims. CPUSA general secretary Browder took on the task of combating this by trying to show the progressive side of American history which the capitalists all too often obscure and suppress. 

Simultaneously, the cooperation between the Soviet Union and the USA in anti-fascist efforts produced great expectations about the possibility of a lasting alliance. In fact, the feeling was so pronounced that many in the party leadership came to see the US bourgeoisie as basically progressive, beyond the context of the Anti-Fascist People’s Front. 

During the war, the party even went as far as to restrict its agitation among the workers in order to further alliances with center-left forces. This meant ceasing criticism against social democrats and the like, as well as ending political education among the workers to further relations with bourgeois organizations or even calling attention to the anti-worker policies of the big capitalists.

In order to achieve the unity required for the People’s Front, the concept of National Unity was needed. This concept was essentially an all-class alliance against fascism. As Browder explained in Victory – and After, it had the goal of “uniting the entire nation, including the biggest capitalists, for a complete and all-out drive for victory.” 

The defeat of fascism, as argued by Dimitrov and Stalin, necessitated the party to uphold the progressive elements of our national history, to open the scope of our agitation to appeal to all elements of society and lead the American people against fascism. This meant that the party would appeal to cultivated bourgeois sentiments among the people in regards to the “Founding Fathers” and the first American Revolution. This was showcased by “Jeffersonian Democracy” being enshrined in the CPUSA constitution and argued to be the American path towards communism. 

By 1940 however, the CPUSA had left the Comintern in order to further its National Unity policy.[1] This is due to the capitalist Allies accusing the comintern of fomenting the “Bolshevization” of the US and others. For the Party’s policy to succeed, it required it to make every effort to prove its commitment to the American people and their national interests. It was feared that not having left the Comintern would have hurt the campaign of National Unity. In fact, Browder later argued in 1944 after the Teheran conference that it was essential for the Communist Party to not “push” the progressive elements of US capital towards reaction.

Because of the policy of National Unity and bringing into the fold both the workers and big capitalists against fascism, it was said to have required on the part of the big capitalists a progressive interest to do so. Browder suggested in his 1944 work Teheran – Our Path in War and Peace that this National Unity was possible owing in part to the immaturity of US capitalism and the classes therein not fully understanding their own class interests or positions.[2] His ultimate point being that US capitalism constituted a peculiarity of world capitalism, ie., not bound to the same laws of capitalist political-economy which was true of all other capitalist countries.

This progressive interest was in the petty-bourgeois concern for “free-enterprise.” On this line of appealing to US capital’s concern for “free-enterprise,” rested the Anti-Fascist People’s Front, ie, the alliance of the CPUSA and the US bourgeoisie to redivide the world market. And this “peculiarity” of the immaturity of US capitalism was said to have stemmed from the same conditions of the US that gave rise to “Jeffersonian Democracy.” This referred to a particular period of the US that saw Jefferson elected on a popular campaign against large landowners and bankers who retarded the development of industry. 

Jefferson’s campaign consisted of both working class elements and that of the industrial bourgeoisie that was prevented from developing under the conditions of the monopoly-landowners, otherwise known as the planter class, or land speculators. This unity of the American workers and elements of the bourgeoisie in opposition against certain monopoly forms (particularly land and slave owners) formed the basis of the “peculiarity” of US capitalism which set it apart from world capitalism. The American values which comprise this unity such as rights of free speech, assembly, worship, trial by jury, expansion of the franchise, and the like all aided Jefferson’s ability to garner the support of the budding bourgeoisie. 

As early as 1938, this perspective on Jefferson and US capitalism became the party line: “A full and complete application of Jefferson’s principles, the consistent application of democratic ideas to the conditions of today, will lead naturally and inevitably to the full program of the Communist Party, to the socialist reorganization of the United States, to the common ownership and operation of our economy for the benefit of all.” Though, four years prior in 1934 the slogan of “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism” had already been popularized by the party leadership. And here the concept of “Americanism” refers to the democratic ideals of Jeffersonian democracy, a wholly bourgeois concept. 

With this foundation of a progressive essence to US capitalism, the context of the unity between the capitalist and socialist camps against fascism took on a different perspective than initially thought of as that of a tacit strategic alliance. Not only the possibility[3] for a progressive interest among the capitalists became considered by party leadership, but its actuality.[4] And if the US represents a progressive form of capitalism capable of peacefully, inevitably, leading to communism, then it should be the work of communists to aid the development of US capitalism.[5]

This campaign of unity with the national interests of the US bourgeoisie in its progressive drive against fascism, required, too, that in the spirit of proving communist commitment to the US that the party withdraw from the Comintern in 1940. This is because the capitalist “allies” wasted no effort in accusing all the communist parties and the Comintern itself of acting in a concerted effort to “Bolshevize” them. It is a long standing accusation of the party as receiving orders from Moscow. Stalin explained the dissolution to Reuters shortly after its finalization in 1943:

“The dissolution of the Communist International is proper because:
(a)   It exposes the lie of the Hitlerites to the effect that “Moscow” allegedly intends to intervene in the life of other nations and to “Bolshevize” them. From now on an end is put to this lie.

(b)   It exposes the calumny of the adversaries of Communism within the Labour movement to the effect that Communist Parties in various countries are allegedly acting not in the interests of their people but on orders from outside. From now on an end is also put to this calumny.

(c)   It facilitates the work of patriots of all countries for uniting the progressive forces of their respective countries, regardless of party or religious faith, into a single camp of national liberation—for unfolding the struggle against fascism.

(d)   It facilitates the work of patriots of all countries for uniting all freedom-loving peoples into a single international camp for the fight against the menace of world domination by Hitlerism, thus clearing the way for the future organization of a companionship of nations based upon their equality.”

Furthermore, the conditions of World War II for the Soviet Union meant intense battles mainly being fought on the eastern front. The allies refused to attack from the west until after the comintern was dissolved. 

In the international context of the alliance between the capitalist and socialist camps, this international camp against fascism, led many to believe a new world was on the horizon. The prospect of both camps working together for the benefit of all was a seemingly tangible possibility. Many assurances from both sides were made on the post-war order of the world. 

In fact, peaceful coexistence was not a new idea. Lenin also considered it not only possible, but a necessity for building socialism while encircled by capitalism. This is because a global revolution at the same time was not possible. So naturally, socialism would crop up in one country or another while existing side by side with capitalist states. Peace as a matter of foreign policy is then not negotiable, it’s a requirement of survival for the proletarian state until socialism has sufficiently encircled capitalism. [6] 

Yet, in the conditions of the Anti-Fascist People’s Front, the threat of fascist terror proved to be a far more pressing concern, and rendered the antagonism between the two systems secondary while fascism existed. In 1947, Stalin explained that “[t]he difference between them [capitalism and socialism] is not important so far as co-operation is concerned. The systems in Germany and the United States are the same but war broke out between them. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. systems are different but we didn’t wage war against each other and the U.S.S.R. does not propose to. If during the war they could co-operate, why can’t they today in peace, given the wish to co-operate?“[7]

Peaceful coexistence as a practical possibility was thus built upon the concessions of the international communist movement to unite both camps against fascism. And owing to the progressive aspirations of the people from both camps toward a post-war world, no sacrifice was too sacred to further the Anti-Fascist People’s Front, up to and including the dissolution of the Communist International. Thus, the international communist line was set on the facilitation of national interests to build “national unity”, rather than an international centre for proletarian revolution. 

However the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) thoroughly repudiates the long believed purpose of the dissolution of the comintern. The characterization of the war by the comintern to be initially that of an imperialist war to redivide the world market was abruptly changed to being anti-fascist once Germany invaded the USSR. The KKE argues that the real character of the war as being an imperialist war was inescapable and unavoidably part and parcel of the underlying conditions of the war but underestimated in the line of the Anti-Fascist People’s Front. The KKE explains in its report on the Comintern by the Section of the International Relations of the Central Committee of the KKE:

This position underestimated the fact that the character of the war is determined by which class wages the war and for what purpose, whether it is originally and at that particular moment on the defense or on the attack. The struggle against fascism and the liberation from foreign occupation, for democratic rights and freedoms, was detached from the struggle against capital.

The contradictions in the CI’s (Communist International) line on the character of World War II were also influenced by the aspirations of the USSR’s foreign policy and by its attempt to defend itself from an imperialist war. However, in any case, the needs of the foreign policy of one socialist state cannot supplant the necessity of a revolutionary strategy for every capitalist country. The ultimate security of a socialist state is determined by the worldwide victory of socialism or its prevalence in a powerful group of countries and hence, the struggle for revolution in each country.

Further, the change in policy of the communist parties to this new reality meant doing away with previous methods of work as was done before the rise of fascism. To prevent a collapse of the international camp, and its tenuous alliance, the role of the communist party was redirected away from an exposure of the oppressive policies of the bourgeoisie. The party saw such agitation as a threat which could culminate in driving progressive capital towards reaction. [8]

Through this context of national unity, progressive capitalism, and peaceful coexistence, the dissolution of the Communist Party USA took place and its re-formation into the Communist Political Association (C.P.A.) in 1944. This was an organization not for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie, but for “Marxist edification” of the American people who by means of the existing bourgeois political structure of the country would realize socialism peacefully in alliance with progressive monopoly capital. The party of a new type, Leninism itself, finally being rejected.

It is quite easy and convenient to attribute all of the incorrect policies of the party during the war period to Browder. He was of course the general secretary of the party in the period. The theoretical leader of the party. However, this would fall into the easiest traps of analyzing this period. The Popular Front, National Unity, Progressive Capital, and Peaceful Coexistence were not solely Browder’s ideas. These all came from the international movement and its leaders. As well, almost every communist party in the advanced capitalist countries fell into similar mistakes.

Ultimately, we cannot ignore the reason why the Communist International was dissolved to further the national unity campaigns of the parties in the advanced capitalist countries in order to gather bourgeois support against the Axis. Neither can we ignore the extent to which peaceful coexistence was believed to be not only possible, but probable in a post-war world. That hostile attitudes and imperialist interests would dissipate in the absence of the unifying threat of fascism was not seriously considered.

What many call Browderism was in reality then a global right-opportunist phenomena which stemmed from imperialism and its effect on the policies of the international communist movement during the war. Browderism is only how it manifested under the conditions of the US. This also explains why all the advanced capitalist countries fell victim to their own national variants of Browderism. Nevertheless, in essence, it can be said to have arisen in part out of an upward swing in conditions, a lull in the growth of the movement and from political immaturity. As well as the social composition of the parties in the advanced capitalist countries. Plainly, from opportunism.

By virtue of our analysis coming some 80 years after the policies of the Popular Front, some truths are self-evident. Such being that many parties in the absence of the Communist International fell into social-democracy, the capitalist camp vehemently attacked and subverted the People’s Democracies of Europe, and finally, had a hand in the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The long desired peaceful coexistence, its technical possibility, and historical necessity only resulting in the loss of the international position of the communist movement. 

Perhaps the alliance between the capitalist and socialist camps was only possible through the shared interest in destroying the rise of fascism, and ultimately in furthering imperialist interests. Stalin further qualified such an alliance as being possible only if the underpinning impetus to its continuation in the context of shared interests overcoming the fundamental contradiction between states remained intact.[9] Alliances between capitalists states are predicated on the build-up of forces for the re-division of markets, this is indisputable, alliances between imperialist bourgeois-democracies and socialism are, as evidenced by the practical result of the second world war, predicated on the existence of a threat to both bourgeois-democracies and socialism. 

The “desire,” so to speak, which conditions the unity between the two camps against fascism stems from the very nature of fascism. Without this threat, the domination of imperialism becomes the overriding interest of the capitalist camp if it is not all along. 

The economic logic of imperialism necessitates war, it requires the penetration of new markets. Peace between the socialist and capitalist camps can then only ever be tenuous at best. The capitalists will never stop looking for weak points in the proletarian state to subjugate it to the interests of capital. The only way to maintain peace between the camps then is through trials of strength, otherwise the capitalists will attack with force and destroy the socialist state.[10] Lenin was very clear that peaceful coexistence was limited and conditional:

“the very thought of peacefully subordinating the capitalists to the will of the majority of the exploited, of the peaceful, reformist transition to Socialism is not only extreme philistine stupidity, but also downright deception of the workers, the embellishment of capitalist wage slavery, concealment of the truth.”[11]

In fact, the entire purpose of the Communist International was to serve as an organizing body of the world proletariat to combat the encirclement of the young Soviet Republic, the stronghold of socialism.

In the final analysis, the Axis was defeated, but at a severe cost to the international communist movement which still struggles against fascist reaction today. The factors which contributed to the degradation of the western communist parties are situated in a deeper analysis of the conditions of capitalism retarding the ideological development of the workers and subsequently the communist parties therein. 

Reflecting on the collapse of the Second International in 1972, Gus Hall remarked, 

“The unity between parties was first diluted to a formal unity. But very quickly even the formal ties became obstacles to carrying out opportunist policies. World and class ties between parties became an embarrassment. Each party stated its internationalism would be expressed through effective work, each within each of the national entities.

The leaders of these socialist parties very quickly made “new” discoveries. They decided Marx was wrong. There were no laws of capitalist development that applied universally. There were no worldwide concepts of the class struggle. In each country they discovered “fundamental” national peculiarities that overshadowed international similarities. The working-class interests were watered down to where they did not appear in contradiction with the interests of the ruling class.

The class struggle became purely a “people’s struggle.” Class concepts became national concepts. No party openly condemned internationalism, they just put it on the shelf for “the duration.”

Many of the parties became large mass parties. This was good. But what was not good, was that they became broad popular parties by going along with popular concepts of nationalism and classlessness. They became mass parties by giving up their advanced working-class positions. Their growth was fed by opportunism”

A very apropos analysis of the Second International that has an all-too coincidental similarity to the objective consequences of the 7th Congress of the Comintern line. Opportunism is at the heart of its self-dissolution. 

    *    *    * 

Some Implications and Consequences

If the Popular Front line of the 7th Congress of the Comintern is examined to its end in 1943 it is unquestionable that its primary thesis forms the foundation for several party leaders later on. Let us outline this connection.

As stated previously, it was fully argued under the 7th congress line that the previous periods of the Comintern were a mistake and were ultra-leftist. The development and popularity of fascism had come out of the “failure” of the communist movement to have adequately embedded itself in the large petty-bourgeois, and nationalist populations. The new line was to correct this mistake by shifting the movement away from “left-sectarian” methods. 

In effect, a move away from combating the bourgeoisie ideologically to form the popular front through concessions to it was the systematic dismantlement of proletarian internationalism. “Peaceful Coexistence” as a matter of foreign policy thereafter for the communist movement became perverted to mean outright submission to the capitalists who were now “progressive.”

The “broad masses” as defined in the line of 7th Congress of the Comintern were not compelled out of necessity to unite with the communists here as much as was the case in war torn Europe. While all western communist parties eventually devolved into social democracy over several decades, the US party did so not two years after the 7th Congress. No one can deny the fascist threat which loomed and looms in the US, yet the US party was destroyed easily by opportunism. 

Again, we cannot stress enough that Browder is merely applying the line of 7th Congress of the Comintern to its logical end. All understandings of Browderism while correct superficially are hollow when examined at a deeper level. Browder was many things, but in the final analysis their failure is primarily to be found in their uncritical approach to the line of 7th Congress of the Comintern. We must also mention that while Foster was correct in recognizing the folly of what came under Browder’s leadership, they failed to see its real connection to the 7th Congress of the Comintern.

Even after the disastrous effects under Browder, Foster and the CP leadership failed to see what truly upended the communist movement. As a further consequence, the CPUSA never abandoned the rightist line of the 7th Congress of the Comintern and to this day puts forward the path to socialism as through a “peaceful revolution” literally at the ballot box. The “Communist Party” of the US is purposefully ignoring the class character of bourgeois democracy. This is why with the deaths of Foster and later Gus Hall, the last vestiges of militancy in the CP died as well. Rank opportunism having claimed victory in the CPUSA.

The distortions of Marxism-Leninism by the 7th Congress of the Comintern must be studied and fought against to rebuild and bring about Socialism-Communism. 

Timothy Dirte is the Educational Secretary of the Party of Communists USA and Editor-in-Chief of “The Communist”.

[1] In fact, Browder says as much in the early 1943 issue of The Communist when the Comintern was dissolved.

[2] First of all, it would be well to clear up a certain paradox which gives rise to many confusions. The paradox can be stated in this form: that American capitalism is the most advanced in the world, but not the most mature. It is the most advanced, in that it is the strongest, it has brought the technique of production to its highest known point, and it has carried over and preserved the least proportion of pre-capitalist social, political, and economic forms. It is not the most mature, in the sense that it does not exhibit the full evolution of its inherent tendencies of development, it retains some of the characteristics of a young capitalism, and lags in self-understanding and self-consciousness. (E. Browder, Teheran: Our Path in War and Peace, 1944)

[3] Regulation and limitation of monopoly capital, in a society in which it plays a dominant role, are not simple and easy matters. If big capital unites its forces against the rest of society, and fights for unrestricted domination, then it is extremely doubtful whether it can be regulated successfully, short of a major political and social struggle, and a crisis resulting in a socialistic system replacing the present one.

   If, however, in the ranks of big capital there is a sufficient number of men of vision and understanding who recognize the suicidal results to their own system that inevitably flow from a failure strictly to subordinate its operations to a broadly conceived and definitely planned program of national and international expansion of well-being for all – then such men, integrated in or working with the democratic-progressive camp of the people, can become the decisive leaders of big capital in a maximum of self-limitation to meet a minimum of governmentally-imposed regulation that will effectively curb the anti-social and anti-national tendencies of big capital, sufficient for it to participate in the national unity in support of the program of Teheran. (Ibid)

[4] There is a growing volume of evidence that there are such men of vision and understanding in the ranks of big capital. Their number will grow, and their initiative and leadership will become stronger, to the degree that it is made evident that there exists a practical platform upon which they can unite, and are uniting, with the broad democratic-progressive camp inclusive of the organized labor movement, which promotes the general interest of the whole nation. (Ibid)

[5] Therefore, the policy for Marxists and all adherents of socialism in the United States is to face with all its consequences the perspective of a capitalist United States in the period of postwar reconstruction of the world, to evaluate all plans on that basis, and to collaborate actively with the most democratic and progressive majority in the country in a national unity sufficiently broad and effective to realize the policies of Teheran. (Ibid)

[6] [..]the lesson all workers and peasants must master is that we must be on our guard and remember that we are surrounded by men, classes and governments openly expressing their extreme hatred for us. We must remember that we are always at a hair’s breadth from all kinds of invasions. (“On the Domestic and Foreign Policies of the Republic, Report Delivered at the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets”, Collected Works, fourth Russian ed., Moscow, Vol. 33, p. 122.)

[7] J. V. Stalin Coexistence, American-Soviet Cooperation, Atomic Energy, Europe, 1947.

[8] We must all learn to welcome their appearance and prove in practical life that such cooperative effort in the spirit of national unity is both possible and profitable. Nothing can be more fatal for the perspective of Teheran, so far as the United States is concerned, than an attitude of uniform and undifferentiated hostility to the ranks of big capital from the side of the labor and liberal sectors of our democracy. That only drives the intelligent capitalists back into the arms of their most reactionary fellows and unites the most powerful group in American society solidly against all progress.

   There can be no effective national unity in America to secure and unfold the program of Teheran that does not include big capitalists able to fight for and win at least a certain minimum of participation on the part of their whole group. (E. Browder, Teheran: Our Path in War and Peace, 1944)

[9] Of course, if there is no desire to co-operate, even with the same economic system they may fall out as was the case with Germany. – J. V. Stalin Coexistence, American-Soviet Cooperation, Atomic Energy, Europe

[10] That is the way it always is  —  when the enemy is beaten, he begins talking peace. We have told these gentlemen, the imperialists of Europe, time and again that we agree to make peace, but they continued to dream of enslaving Russia. Now they have realized that their dreams are not fated to come true. (“Speech Delivered at the First All-Russian Conference on Party Work in the Countryside”. Alliance of the Working Class and the Peasantry, FLPH, Moscow 1959, p. 326.)

[11] V.I. Lenin, Theses on the Fundamental Tasks of the Second Congress of the Communist International, 1920

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The eyes of the whole world are focused on the United States, despite the discreet commitment of certain Italian media which, for evidently political reasons, succeed in the arduous task of giving considerably greater importance to the protests in Hong Kong. The virality of the video showing the death of 46-year-old African American George Floyd and the indignation that ensued sparked a spontaneous mass movement that spread from Minneapolis to the whole country in a few days.

This is a just, legitimate protest. And not only that: what days ago could be defined as a protest movement, today takes on the characteristics of a real revolt of the urban proletariat, right in the metropolitan center of imperialism. Just look at what is happening. Protests in more than 40 cities where a curfew was imposed with the intervention of the National Guard; more than 10,000 people arrested, dozens of injured by the police who make extensive use of tear gas and rubber bullets. The repressive response of the state has raised the bar of confrontation day by day. Donald Trump has openly addressed the governors of the various states, accusing them of being too weak and asking for more arrests and to intervene to “restore order”, an invitation that seems to have already been taken up by far-right groups and supporters of white supremacists. of the President. A few days ago, taking refuge in the security bunker while the White House was surrounded by demonstrators, Trump announced the banning of the “Antifa” network and declared that the protests are led by terrorist organizations. In part it is an electoral campaign, in part it is unmistakable signs of the high level of the conflict in which the country finds itself today.

Police abuse of African Americans in the United States and racial discrimination[1] , which has never really disappeared from American society, have always been known. But it would be highly reductive to think of the protests of recent days as a simply anti-racist movement . From the riots of the last few days, a political rejection of the American model, of the injustice of that model of society has emerged . The target of the protests does not appear to be just the Trump government, but the entire scaffolding that large sections of US society perceive as grossly unfair. And in fact, in all the cities, demonstrators are seen waving US flags upside down.

The African American question in the USA, which today also extends to Hispanics, has always been intertwined with the class character of American society. Police abuses of African Americans are the icing on a deeply unfair system. To cite some data, African Americans are 13% of the US population, but they own 1.5% of the wealth. A white household earns on average ten times more than a black household, and inequality rose sharply during the crisis 10 years ago (before the crisis the proportion was one to seven). The health emergency from Covid-19 has hit African Americans in considerably greater proportions, in a country without a true public health service, which does not consider health a right, making it accessible only to those who can afford it. All the statistics have highlighted a trend: the sick and especially the dead from Covid are African Americans. According to data from the Washington Post and the New York Times, in counties with a majority of African Americans there are three times the number of infections and six times the deaths. In New York, the main outbreaks of the epidemic are in the working-class neighborhoods: Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. The data of the individual states make the situation even clearer: In Michigan, African Americans are 14% of the population, but they represent 40% of deaths from Covid. In Louisiana, 70% of Covid deaths are African American, but blacks are only 32% of the population. This happens because the black communities, being the poorest, they have less access to treatment as they cannot afford to pay for them and therefore have more frequent previous pathologies, which increase mortality. Many work underpaid and exploited precisely in those essential sectors that are not affected by lockdown measures and are therefore more exposed to infections. All this happens to increase the dose in a context, that of the health emergency, in which thousands of people are deprived of their income, lose their jobs, have no access to medical assistance.

The killing of George Floyd acted as a detonator for the exasperation of the popular classes to turn into revolt. A class revolt, because those who live in African-American neighborhoods are proletarians, and it is the proletarians who are affected by racial discrimination. It is against this exasperation that the police, the National Guard are mobilized today in the US and the opportunity to use even the army to suppress protests is discussed. It is a response that is far from atypical for the United States: a country that has 6% of the world population, and which at the same time boasts 25% of the world’s prison population.

Any reflection on the violence, on the police stations set on fire, on the destroyed shop windows or on the episodes of looting, must take steps starting from this context, because they are typical phenomena of a context of revolt like the one in progress, they have to do with the effective mass participation in the protests that have been going on for more than a week now. This net of reports of infiltration by police and provocateurs by the protesters themselves. The talk of beautiful souls about violence that calls more violence, about “there is a way and way to manifest”, really leave the time they find when faced with a real mass movement that points the finger at the power of the ruling classes. It is a context that physiologically presupposes, by its very definition, the presence of violence, which comes primarily from the state. Those who hasten to “condemn” the violence of the demonstrators, real or alleged, only show that they prefer the daily violence of the bosses. Those who even from the “left” distance themselves from looting do not realize that there is no popular uprising in history without such episodes, in which exasperation for their living conditions finds an outlet in the act of appropriating goods and merchandise which normally could not be afforded for economic reasons. It is a phenomenon explained by the context. Rather, we should ask ourselves what are the reasons why the anger of the popular classes in the US does not find a more advanced outlet than this. What for the right-thinking and for the theorists of order and discipline would be enough to condemn that movement?

What Are The Prospects?

The United States is a country in which the insufficiency of the forces of the labor and communist movement has emerged for some time and much more than in other countries. The historical CPUSA, who started with a troubled history, suffers the profound limits due to an opportunist political leadership that has led him for years to support the Democratic Party of the USA, also and above all electorally. The Communists in the USA operate in a context of weakness and fragmentation, in the absence of a party that can express today a real political and fighting alternative. The US trade union system imposes an entirely company-based structure in the total absence of collective agreements and therefore an enormous fragmentation of workers’ organizations. An overall picture that shares many aspects with other Anglo-Saxon countries;

The movement these days is paying the price for these shortcomings, for which the young people who animate it are not to blame. It is a great protest movement, a revolt that certainly sees black and non-black men and women as protagonists, workers and precarious workers, and students but that does not see the support of a large, organized workers movement that is capable of giving the protests an outlet for struggle for a more advanced policy. This movement does not exist in the USA, just as there is no communist party rooted and present throughout the national territory, despite some interesting and important experiences, but still in an embryonic phase. These days it is a movement animated by proletarians, by waged, precarious, unemployed workers, who however are not organized as such, and one would wonder if they are aware of it.

The United States is no stranger to the explosion of this kind of movement. Indeed, it can be said that in the last 10 years there has been more mass movement in the US than in Italy. But they take place in a context in which the forces capable of directing anger and rebellion in the direction of the revolutionary struggle , of the struggle against the imperialist system of which the US has been the main global player for years, are lacking .

It is not a question, mind you, of discrediting a movement for these shortcomings. Those who think that the role of the Communists is to pontificate at the window by excommunicating any mass movement that is not born on its own initiative, without asking the question of what kind of intervention should be put on the real level, have understood very little of Marxism. However, it is a question of remembering the lesson of the many movements seen in recent decades. We think of Occupy (born in the USA), the Indignados and so on, which were also movements with more “political” connotations when compared with this which really expresses the characteristics of a people’s revolt. The irrational and romantic fascination for protest movements should rather be contrasted with a mature reflection on how the communists should act.

In Italy the movements have shown one thing: without a communist party and an organized workers’ movement, but even if the communists do not prove themselves politically up to it, a spontaneous protest movement can run out, or slowly ebb, without there having been no advancement for the class forces. In the years of the G8 in Genoa, the two communist parties present in Italy at the time, Rifondazione and the Pdci, were respectively engaged in theorising the movement of movements (a sort of Bertinottian version of the multitudes of Toni Negri, which in fact dragged that party to the tail and not at the head of those movements) and to study the best alliance for each region to obtain councilors and elect councilors. That movement, which posed important fundamental questions in the opposition to the G8 and saw the participation of large proletarian and trade union sectors, found itself lacking a vanguard leadership and a real perspective. A merciless picture if observed today in retrospect, which reminds us that that is not enough in itself there are communist parties, but it is also necessary that the right objectives be set.

A separate discussion applies to the individual days of protest that resulted in pitched clashes with the police, which is linked to the reflections on the violence. On the specific theme of street clashes, some clarifications are important and it may be useful to recall the recent experiences of our country to clarify some aspects. A day that the not so young will remember is that of December 14, 2010. A large mass movement, participated in spite of the fact that it mostly saw students at the center (unlike the movement against the G8 in Genoa which saw a wider mass participation), culminated in that day that saw the explosion of the clash in the street after the Berlusconi government did not fall in the Chamber by three votes from the center-left. The last blow of the tail of that movement was, in hindsight, on October 15, 2011, where the contradictions of an ever less spontaneous street conflict were already emerging and more and more practiced on the precise choice of individual organized groups. But it is perhaps the march of 1 May 2015 in Milan that made a reflection on how the mere simulation of a conflict that does not correspond to the reality of the class struggle (which certainly cannot be reduced to the aesthetics of a clash with the police) really necessary. ) risks even being counterproductive and lending its side to reaction and repression. Here, when it comes to violence and clashes that take place during a protest, this should be the main discriminator for communists. But it is perhaps the march of 1 May 2015 in Milan that made a reflection on how the mere simulation of a conflict that does not correspond to the reality of the class struggle (which certainly cannot be reduced to the aesthetics of a clash with the police) really necessary. ) risks even being counterproductive and lending its side to reaction and repression.  The condemnation of spontaneous episodes of violence typical of a mass movement does not belong to the communists, much less the condemnation of violence in general in the name of that “pacifism” which would like the unilateral disarmament of the oppressed. On the other hand, it is entirely legitimate and right to criticize the political tactics of certain minority groups which envisage the simulation of that violence even when the real mass movement does not exist or does not express advanced positions, for the reasons mentioned above. In the case of the current uprising in the United States, however, it seems that we are more in the first case than in the second.

The attempt to “absorb” the protest and the tasks of the Communists

When a movement is born and develops outside the organized workers’ movement, but above all when there is no political vanguard of the class capable of taking over it, it is physiologically that this movement expresses backward conceptions and that above all the conditions are met for which it can be absorbed by bourgeois political forces.

Recent news is the announcement of the participation in the funeral of George Floyd of Joe Biden, candidate of the Democrats in the US presidential elections highlighted an election campaign logic that seeks to transform the anger that is setting the United States to fire and sword into political consensus, without any form of real political discontinuity. Suffice it to say that the Democratic candidate, even in a similar situation, did not go much further than affirming the need to teach the police to “shoot in the legs instead of the heart”. And beyond Biden, all the political, media, cultural, and even economic apparatuses are already working to “normalize” the protest. Big companies are scrambling to take part for the demonstrators, for many big monopolies #BlackLivesMatter has already become a marketing campaign, much like what happens annually in the month of Pride (which “normalization” has already seen. for quite a while), in which even large companies are tinged with the rainbow.

For some time now the hands of those “left” sectors of the Democratic Party of the USA have been reaching out to the Black Lives Matter movement, from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which more than representing a real alternative of struggle capable of undermining the American bipartisan system, are successfully carrying out the function of reabsorbing even the most radical elements of protest emerging from American society into the confines of that system. A function similar to that performed throughout Europe by the parties of the European Left with respect to movements against austerity. Experiences of government or support for bourgeois governments of the European Left in countries such as Greece, Spain, Portugal have fully demonstrated the historical function of those forces that are now fully integrated into the bourgeois political system (Syriza, Podemos, Bloco de Esquerda…), for the sake of those in Italy who still think they are taking that road out of time. The “left” of the US Democratic Party does not express anything qualitatively different from these experiences, and manages to be more backward even on the political level.

The Communists of the USA operate in a difficult context, but also in a historical moment in which – it is now well known – among the young American generations an idea of ​​rehabilitation of “socialism” (certainly conceived in a confused way) is gaining ground. It took place from the time of the protests against the war in Vietnam. This sentiment, certainly confused and contradictory, but which remains indicative, is now being intercepted by the left of the Democrats, which re-proposes the project of a “traditional” social democracy as opposed to the substantially liberal nature of that party.

Of course, the bipartisanism of that system, with the primaries of the two parties now welded as institutional processes in all respects (and not just party-based), has considerable weight. Asking whether the two-party system in Anglo-Saxon countries is the product of the marginalization of the communists in the political scenario or whether it is quite the opposite is a bit like the story of the chicken and the egg. If one thing is certain, it is that that mechanism can only be undermined by the material strength of the workers and organized proletarians; that building this force is all the more necessary in a country like the USA where the electoral system deprives the Communists of even the same parliamentarian illusion and the possibility of building the party as a political / electoral consensus party disconnected from the working class.

It would be a great mistake, however, to cultivate the illusion that those forms of spontaneity can in themselves lead to a real change in the system, and that in this they can replace the organization. History shows that when there is no political reference, even the largest mass movements can ebb and give way to the return of ordinary oppression, or even to responses of a reactionary nature. The images of the White House surrounded by demonstrators are an important signal, but we cannot delude ourselves that the White House “conquers itself”, without an organized force of the oppressed classes capable of leading the assault as it did with the Winter Palace.

The task of the Communists would be first of all not to arrive unprepared. Recent events, not only in the US but also in France, constantly remind us that the possibility of the explosion of movements of struggle and protest also exists outside the forecasts of the organized class forces. When this happens, you risk missing the train of history. The biggest mistake, in a situation of this kind that we know well in Italy, would be to stay at the window launching anathemas, blaming the masses for being backward, blaming the movement for its own limits deriving above all from the unpreparedness of those who should put themselves to the guide of the masses. Conduct such as this has the sole result of facilitating the absorption of a movement of this type by the bourgeois political apparatus,

The experience of the workers’ movement teaches us that the Communists can and must move like fish in water. That even small organized groups, such as the most consequent Communists in the USA who are fighting for the reconstruction of a revolutionary party, can act in the context of a mass movement, gaining positions and prestige, albeit in initially limited sectors; they can place the need for organization on the more advanced and conscious sectors of that movement, absorb the more combative part that has no intention of remaining to witness the reflux of a struggle movement that it has helped to animate. Our whole history is full of episodes that remind us of a lesson: there are no conditions that, however unfavorable they may be, justify the abandonment of the struggle.

To the anger, to the will for change of millions of proletarians in the USA who today point the finger at injustice, we must offer a force capable of truly conquering a different society. This force is the Communist Party. The struggle to organize and strengthen this party, in the US as in all countries, remains the greatest hope of change for a generation that does not want to bow its head in the face of the new capital crisis.

Paolo Spena is a leader in the Italian communist movement.

[1] Let us use the term “race” in its social and non-biological meaning, which has always belonged to the Afro-American movements.

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The Class Character of the State

The fact that every state has the class character is the ABC of Marxism, and Lenin was constantly stressing it. In his article “The Petty-Bourgeois Stand on the Question of Economic Disorganization” Lenin wrote: “to distinguish which class the state serves, whose class interests it stands for”.^[2] And in the book “The State and Revolution” Lenin emphasizes, that “according to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule”.^[3] In the article “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” Lenin asks: “And what is the state?” and gives the following answer: “It is an organization of the ruling class”.^[4] The same idea Lenin explains in his article “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?”: “The state, dear people, is a class concept. The state is an organ or instrument of violence exercised by one class against another”.^[5] In the Report at the Second All-Russia Trade Union Congress, January 20, 1919, Lenin stresses more categorically: “There is and can be only one alternative: either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, disguised by constituent assemblies, all kinds of voting systems, democracy and similar bourgeois frauds that are used to blind fools, and that only people who have become utter renegades from Marxism and socialism all along the line can make play of today—or the dictatorship of the proletariat”.^[6] It is therefore logical that the Program of the RCP(b) developed by Lenin states clearly: “As opposed to the bourgeois democracy, which has been hiding the class character of the state, the Soviet government openly acknowledges the inevitability of the class character of any state. This class character will exist until the division of society into classes will disappear completely together with any respective state authority”.^[7] In the brochure “Letter to the Workers and Peasants Apropos of the Victory Over Kolchak”, Lenin stresses the class character of the state in the strongest terms: “Either the dictatorship (i.e., the iron rule) of the landowners and capitalists, or the dictatorship of the working class.

There is no middle course. The scions of the aristocracy, intellectualists and petty gentry, badly educated on bad books, dream of a middle course. There is no middle course anywhere in the world, nor can there be. Either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (masked by ornate Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik phraseology about a people’s government, a constituent assembly, liberties, and the like), or the dictatorship of the proletariat. He who has not learned this from the whole history of the nineteenth century is a hopeless idiot”.^[8]

The Essence of the Socialist State

In his Concluding Speech On The Report Of The Council Of People’s Commissars, January 12 (25) January 1918 at the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies Lenin said: “Democracy is a form of bourgeois state championed by all traitors to genuine socialism, who now find themselves at the head of official socialism and who assert that democracy is contrary to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Until the revolution transcended the limits of the bourgeois system, we were for democracy; but as soon as we saw the first signs of socialism in the progress of the revolution, we took a firm and resolute stand for the dictatorship of the proletariat”.^[9] In the brochure “The successes and the difficulties of the Soviet power”, Lenin simply made fun of the unfortunate communists who rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat. He wrote: “We, of course, are not opposed to violence. We laugh at those who are opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, we laugh and say that they are fools who do not understand that there must be either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Those who think otherwise are either idiots, or are so politically ignorant that it would be a disgrace to allow them to come anywhere near a meeting, let alone on the platform”.^[10] Lenin defended the same idea in the Report On The Domestic And Foreign Situation Of The Soviet Republic at the Extraordinary Plenary Meeting Of The Moscow Soviet Of Workers’ And Red Army Deputies on April 3 1919:either the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the power and complete dictatorship of the working class; no middle course was ever of any use, nothing came of it”.^[11]

In “The dictatorship of the proletariat” Lenin wrote the following:

“1. The chief reason why the ‘socialists’ do not understand the dictatorship of the proletariat is that they do not carry the idea of the class struggle to its logical conclusion (Cf. Marx, 1852)

“The dictatorship of the proletariat is the continuation of the class struggle of the proletariat in new forms. That is the crux of the matter, and that is what they do not understand.

“The proletariat, as a special class, alone continues to wage its class struggle. 
2. The state is only a weapon of the proletariat in its class struggle. A special kind of cudgel, rien de plus! Nothing more.—Editor.]”.^[12]

In his Speech Delivered at The All-Russia Congress of Transport Workers, March 27, 1921, Lenin once again explained that the question is put “either-or”: “The class that took political power did so in the knowledge that it was doing so alone. That is intrinsic to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It has meaning only when one class knows that it is taking political power alone and does not deceive others or itself with talk about ‘popular government by popular consent through universal suffrage’. You all know that there are very many-far too many-people who love to hold forth on that subject, but, at any rate, you will not find them among proletarians, because they have realized that theirs is a dictatorship of the proletariat, and they say as much in their Constitution, the fundamental law of the Republic”.^[13] In his brochure “The Tax in Kind” Lenin stressed quite simply and briefly: “At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC”.^[14]

The Concept, the Objectives, and the Historical Boundaries of the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat

In his article “Fear Of The Collapse Of Tile Old And The Fight For Tile New” Lenin notes: “What dictatorship implies and means is a state of simmering war, a state of military measures of struggle against the enemies of the proletarian power”.^[15] With that, in his article “Greetings to the Hungarian workers” he emphasizes: “But the essence of proletarian dictatorship is not in force alone, or even mainly in force. Its chief feature is the organization and discipline of the advanced contingent of the working people, of their vanguard; of their sole leader, the proletariat, whose object is to build socialism, abolish the division of society into classes, make all members of society working people, and remove the basis for all exploitation of man by man”.^[16] Lenin explains that “the abolition of classes requires a long, difficult and stubborn class struggle, which, after the overthrow of capitalist rule, after the destruction of the bourgeois state, after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, does not disappear (as the vulgar representatives of the old socialism and the old Social-Democracy imagine), but merely changes its forms and in many respects becomes”.^[17] In his brochure “The Great Beginning” Lenin givesthe following definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat: “If we translate the Latin, scientific, historico-philosophical term “dictatorship of the proletariat” into simpler language, it means just the following:

Only a definite class, namely, the urban workers and the factory, industrial workers in general, is able to lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people in the struggle to throw off the yoke of capital, in actually carrying it out, in the struggle to maintain and consolidate the victory, in the work of creating the new, socialist social system and in the entire struggle for the complete abolition of classes. (Let us observe in parenthesis that the only scientific distinction between socialism and communism is that the first term implies the first stage of the new society arising out of capitalism, while the second implies the next and higher stage.)

The mistake the “Berne” yellow International makes is that its leaders accept the class struggle and the leading role of the proletariat only in word and are afraid to think it out to its logical conclusion. They are afraid of- that inevitable conclusion which particularly terrifies the bourgeoisie, and which is absolutely unacceptable to them. They are afraid to admit that the dictatorship of the proletariat is also a period of class struggle, which is inevitable as long as classes have not been abolished, and which changes in form, being particularly fierce and particularly peculiar in the period immediately following the overthrow of capital. The proletariat does not cease the class struggle after it has captured political power, but continues it until classes are abolished—of course, under different circumstances, in different form and by different means.

And what does the “abolition of classes” mean? All those who call themselves socialists recognize this as the ultimate goal of socialism, but by no means all give thought to its significance. Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.

Clearly, in order to abolish classes completely, it is not enough to overthrow the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, not enough to abolish their rights of ownership; it is necessary also to abolish all private ownership of the means of production, it is necessary to abolish the distinction between town and country, as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers. This requires a very long period of time”^[18] Lenin in his article “Economics and politics in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat” continues to define the boundaries of the dictatorship of the proletariat and highlights the impact of the dictatorship of the proletariat throughout the whole phase of the socialism: “Socialism means the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat has done all it could to abolish classes. But classes cannot be abolished at one stroke.

And classes still remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat, they will not disappear.

Classes have remained, but in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat every class has undergone a change, and the relations between the classes have also changed. The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it merely assumes different forms”.^[19] It should be stressed that Lenin specifically lists these forms for the communists of all countries and of the times to come, in his book “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder”: “The dictatorship of the proletariat means a persistent struggle—bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative – against the forces and traditions of the old society”.^[20] Under the socialism there is a sharp class struggle against the powers and traditions of the capitalist society. At the first place this struggle is aimed against the “petty-bourgeoisness” and against the petty-bourgeois manifestations on the part of representatives of classes and the layers of the social society. In particular this struggle is aimed against the petty-bourgeois aspirations to give to the society as little as possible and to give to the society not the best things while attempting to take from the society the best things and as much as possible. This struggle takes part in the working class, in the party itself and the mind of almost any man.

How long is the dictatorship of the proletariat indispensable? In the Theses on Tactics of the RCP report at the III Congress of the Communist International Lenin answers this question as follows: “The dictatorship of the proletariat does not signify a cessation of the class struggle, but its continuation in a new form and with new weapons. This dictatorship is essential as long as classes exist, as long as the bourgeoisie, overthrown in one country, intensifies tenfold its attacks on socialism on an international scale The dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean the cease of the class struggle”.^[21] And since, as highlighted in the Report on the tactics of the RCP at the III Congress of the Communist International of July 5, 1921, “The aim of socialism is to abolish classes”^[22], the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat shall include the entire first phase of the communism, i.e. the entire period of the socialism.

The Organizational Form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

The essence of any state—the dictatorship of the ruling class. At the same time, this dictatorship rarely openly acts on the surface of the political life. Each type of dictatorship (with all its deviations and temporary retreats) has a definite stable form of display. This form of display, as the organizational form, shall be adequate for the dictatorship of the particular class. This form corresponds to the dictatorship of the given class and provides for the preservation of the dictatorship of such class in the best possible way. The immanent, i.e. the inherent organizational form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is the parliamentary democracy founded on the elections based on the territorial districts’ principal. The organizational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the Soviet power, elected in accordance with the factories’ and plants’ principle. In his “Thesis and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” at the First Congress of the Communist International of March 4,1919, Lenin wrote: “The old, i.e., bourgeois, democracy and the parliamentary system were so organized that it was the mass of working people who were kept farthest away from a machinery of government. Soviet power, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other hand, is so organized as to bring the working people close to the machinery of government. That, too, is the purpose of combining the legislative and executive authority under the Soviet organization of the state and of replacing territorial constituencies by production units—the factory”.^[23]

As mentioned in the Lenin’s brochure “Letter to the Workers and Peasants apropos of the Victory Over Kolchak”, “Soviet power—that is what the ‘dictatorship of the working class’ means in practice.”^[24] Lenin in his article “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” emphasizes explicitly: “Soviet power is nothing but an organizational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.^[25]

Analysis of organizational forms of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (in its most stable modification – the bourgeois democracy) and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of councils (i.e. soviets) demonstrates that the stability and functioning of the mentioned dictatorships is provided for by the objective grounds. The formation of the power is based on such objective grounds. The formation of the parliamentary democracy as a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is based on the monetary resources of the capitalists, on the institution of private capitalist property. The formation of the parliamentary democracy uses the bourgeois ideology which is dominant in society (as the being of the society determines its conscience). The proletarian democracy is based on the objective self-discipline of the working class in the course of working-class labor at the factories and plants. Such factories and plants become the electoral units (districts) of the Soviets. This is not about the title, but about the form of organization of the power which is characteristic for the Soviet power (the power ensuring the dictatorship of the working class).

Waiver of the Organizational Form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a Threat to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Soviets emerged in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in 1905 as organs of strike and organs of self-government of the working class formed at the factories and the plants in accordance with the labor collectives’ principle. The Soviets were at that time elected at factories and plants. In 1917 the Soviets recurred throughout whole of Russia. The constitutive principle of the Soviets is the election of deputies at factories and plants, as the election of deputies at factories and plants provides for the possibility to control the activities of Soviet deputies and the feasibility of their calling off and replacement at the discretion of the labor collectives. This principle was formalized in Program of the RCP (b) adopted by the VIII Congress of the Party of Lenin: “The Soviet state also brings the state apparatus together with the masses by establishing that the electoral unit and the basic unit of the state shall be the production unit (plant, factory), not the territorial district”.^[26]

On the contrary to this program’s provision, in 1936 (in connection with the adoption of the new, supposedly more “democratic” constitution) the transition to the election based on the territorial principle took place. Such territorial principle of election is typical for bourgeois democratic system. This principle makes it impossible to call off the deputies which turned away from the people. The statements made by Stalin at that time on the alleged broadening of the democracy due to the adoption of the Constitution of 1936 shall be acknowledged as incorrect. It would have been more correct to say that a step toward the transition from the Soviet, proletarian democracy to the parliamentary, bourgeois democracy was actually made. Such parliamentary, bourgeois democracy implies formal equality and ignores the actual inequality. A formal onetime’ extension of the voting rights to former members of the exploiting classes could not actually broaden the democracy. The Soviet democracy (the democracy of the working people) gradually comes to all people’s voting on the basis of the gradual withdrawal of the former members of the exploiting class at the historical stage due to the elimination of any exploitation. The renunciation of the principle of elections through labor collectives at factories and plants (such principle is a characteristic principle of the Soviets) and the shift to the election in accordance with the territorial districts principle is equivalent to a throwback. It is the throwback from the Soviets to the parliamentarism and, hence, to the weakening of the real democratism.

It is interesting to recall that Lenin, while preparing the second Program of RCP(b), considered the possibility of waiver of the form of the Soviets only as the result of the general retreat in the struggle under the pressure of the circumstances and the forces of the enemy. He did not consider such waiver as the move to develop the democracy of workers (proletarians’ or workers’ democracy). In the Resolution on Changing the Name of the Party and the Party Programme of the Seventh Congress RCP (b) Lenin wrote: “the change in the political part of our Programme must consist in the most accurate and comprehensive definition possible of the new type of state, the Soviet Republic, as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and as a continuation of those achievements of the world working-class revolution which the Paris Commune began. The Programme must show that our Party does not reject the use even of bourgeois parliamentarism, should the course of the struggle push us back, for a time, to this historical stage which our revolution has now passed. But in any case and under all circumstances the Party will strive for a Soviet Republic as the highest, from the standpoint of democracy, type of state, as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of abolition of the exploiters’ yoke and of suppression of their resistance».^[27]

Everything seems to be explicit. However, a move to the bourgeois democracy was made. Since Then, due to the liquidation in practice of the possibility to call off the deputies that betrayed the trust of the voters organized as labor collectives, the process of more and more intensive contamination of the state machine by the bureaucracy and careerism started. It is also within the framework of this process the party-and-state machine bred Khrushchev and Gorbachev. The state machine became soiled with careerists and bureaucrats for whom their own interests were the priority compared to the common interests. The title “Soviets” remained but the essence of the soviets started to blur. The dictatorship of the proletariat, having been deprived of its inherent organizational form, was put at risk. After the principal of election on the basis of the labor collectives was eliminated, the proletarian character of the bodies of the power (it still bore the name “soviet”) was only provided for by the still preserved elements of their connection with labor collectives. This connection took place through labor collectives recommending the candidates, through occasional reporting of the deputies to the labor collectives, through the regulation of the social contingent of the soviets by the party. This connection also took place on inertia due to the proletarian character of the party contingent. But even at the time of Stalin (who has vowed to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat by the coffin of V.I. Lenin and who was fighting for the strengthening of the proletarian dictatorship throughout his life) the anti-workers’ majority began gradually accumulating in the Central Committee of the party. This anti-workers’ majority opportunism, evolving into revisionism, was going to alter the class nature of the state after Stalin’s death.

The Waiver of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat —the Waiver of Marxism

A kind of artillery preparation for the direct attack at the main idea of Marxism was held at the Twentieth Party Congress. By the efforts of Khrushchev’s revisionist group everything positive done under Stalin’s leadership was libelously questioned. This Khrushchev’s revisionist group also applied for the revision of the key provisions of Marxism on the class struggle and on the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, Lenin’s program of the RCP(b) was still in effect and, therefore, Khrushchev’s supporters began the preparation of this program’s replacement by a different one that would eliminate the very essence of Marxism-Leninism. A thesis of the final victory of socialism in the USSR (an unwinding and demobilizing thesis for communists, working class and all working people) was put forward by the CPSU’s First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in his report at the XXII Congress “On the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union”.^[28] It was stated in the report that the class struggle is confined only to the transitional period towards the socialism.^[29] Throughout the whole report socialism was understood not as a phase of the communism, but as a separate formation. Accordingly, instead of the typical socialist goal of complete elimination of classes at the first phase of the classless society the goal of building the classless society was put forward. At the same time a purely anti-Marxist, revisionist goal was declared: “From the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the “people’s state”.^[30] It was stated that, allegedly “the working class of the Soviet Union on its own initiative, based on the tasks of building communism, transformed the state of its dictatorship into the people’s state … It is for the first time that we have formed a state which is not based on the dictatorship of any class … the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer indispensable”.^[31] The party, in the contradiction to Lenin’s concept of a political party as the vanguard of the class, was also declared to be not the party of the working class but the party of all people.

These revisionist ideas were not resisted at the Congress. The Congress unanimously adopted the revisionist, essentially anti-Leninist and essentially anti-Marxist program. According to this program, allegedly “the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historical mission and, in terms of the goals of the internal development, has ceased to be indispensable in the USSR. The state which has emerged as the dictatorship of the proletariat, at this new, modern stage, has become a people’s state… As the party understands, the dictatorship of the working class ceases to be indispensable before the state withers away”.^[32] To appraise this position in more detail lets once again turn to Lenin.

In his book State and the Revolution Lenin stressed the class character of every state (until such state continues to exist), the necessity to destroy the old state machine and the necessity to create the new state apparatus which would be able to solve the problems of the proletarian dictatorship for the purpose of the victory of the proletarian revolution; he also developed a number of provisions that have to be observed so that the state (which is the weapon of the working class, the means of ensuring its political domination) would not become the power dominating the working class. In this book and also in the notebook “Marxism on the State” Lenin clearly pursues the idea that the state withers away only with the complete elimination of classes (i.e. while the classes still remain, the state, as the body of the politically dominating class, remains as well). He cites and develops the idea of Engels about State: “When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary”.^[33] Lenin, as if responding to all the doubters, to all those who are hesitant and indecisive, emphasizes: “Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested”.^[34] In his work “The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University of June 11, 1919” Lenin points out that it is the capitalist state which “proclaims liberty for the whole people as its slogan, which declares that it expresses the will of the whole people and denies that it is a class state “. ^[35]

The Khrushchev’s revisionist group, having disoriented, having actually deceived the party and the people with respect to the issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat (the dictatorship which absence makes the development of the socialism into communism impossible), eventually altered the goals of the development of the production and the society. The above is worth considering in more detail.

The Goal of Socialist Production

The essence of history, the progress of the society shall be the movement to the full welfare and the free all-round development of all members of the society.

At the time of primitive-communal communism this essence only appeared in the strictly limited way due to the lack of the development of productive forces. It appeared in satisfying the urgent needs of society members, satisfying their demands based on the available resources and based on the tribal hierarchy.

At the time of slavery, slaves were not considered to be human beings. During the period of slavery the production was being developed for the benefit of the prosperity and all-round development of the members of the ruling class—slave owners.

At the time of the feudalism it was mostly the welfare and all-round development of the feudals that was increasing. The peasants and the craftsmen had to be content with rather poor satisfaction of their needs.

Under capitalism, the goal of the production is the production of the surplus value and profits. Such production leads to the increase of the welfare and all-round development of the capitalists. It limits the satisfaction of the workers’ need to the extent ensuring the reproduction of the work force required to continue the capital’s self-expansion. Under capitalism, as Lenin wrote in “Materials for the Elaboration of RSDWP Program”: “the gigantic development of the productive forces of social labour, which is constantly becoming more socialised labour, is attended by monopolisation of all the principal advantages of this development by a negligible minority of the population. The growth of social wealth proceeds side by side with the growth of social inequality; the gulf between the class of property-owners (the bourgeoisie) and the class of the proletariat is growing”.^[36]

At the same time under capitalism the struggle of the working class begins. It is the struggle against limitation of the progress to the development of the members of the society belonging to the ruling class, the struggle for creation of the communist society in which the essence of the history would be revealed and in which the real purpose of production would be complete well-being and all-round free development of all members of the society.

In the commission’s draft party program prepared for the II Congress of the RSDWP the goal of the socialist production was formulated as a planned organization of social production process “to satisfy the needs of both society as a whole and its individual members” Lenin objects to this: “Not accurate. Such “satisfaction” is “given” by capitalism as well, but not to all members of society and not in equal degree”.^[37] In “Notes on the second draft of the Program of Plekhanov” he wrote: “Nor is the end of the paragraph properly expressed: ‘the planned organisation of the social process of production so as to satisfy the needs of society as a whole, as well as its individual members’. That is not enough. Organisation of that kind will, perhaps, be provided even by the trusts. It would be mere definite to say ‘by society as a whole’ (for this covers planning and indicates who is responsible for that planning), and not merely to satisfy the needs of its members, but with the object of ensuring full well-being and free, all-round development for all the members of society”.^[38] Finally Lenin secured that the Program approved by the Second Congress of the RSDWP Party states as follows: “Having replaced the private ownership of means of production and means of circulation by the respective society’s ownership and having introduced the planned organization of socio-productive process for the welfare and all-round development of all members of society, the social revolution of the proletariat will eliminate the division of society into classes and will set the suppressed mankind free”.^[39]

In view of this program’s objective, the Bolshevik Party raised the Russian working class to the victorious socialist revolution. It is natural that while compiling the second program of the party, Lenin considered it absolutely necessary to keep in the new program the same goal which was recorded in the first program and which, if implemented, leads to the complete elimination of classes, i.e. to the full communism. The Program adopted by the VIII Congress of the RCP(b) reproduces the goal of the socialist production precisely in the wording of the first program, namely: “Having replaced the private ownership of means of production and means of circulation by the respective society’s ownership and having introduced a planned organization of socio-productive process for the welfare and all-round development of all members of society, the social revolution of the proletariat will eliminate the division of society into classes”.^[40]

This scientifically discovered, true goal of the communist production, which was set for the working class (the founder of communist society, stayed in the party program as long as the party remained the party of the working class ensuring the dictatorship of the proletariat. This goal was not, however, mentioned in the third, the revisionist party program adopted by the XXII Congress of the CPSU. It was substituted by satisfying of the constantly growing needs whereas neither well-being, nor development of the people, especially all-round development, may not be reduced to such satisfying of the constantly growing needs. Satisfying the needs alone leads neither to elimination of social inequality, nor to the elimination of classes. To be more specific, the third party program stated that under communism “the highest stage of the planned organization of the whole social economy is reached, the most efficient and rational use of material resources and manpower to meet the growing needs of the members of society is ensured”.^[41] Working members of society, whose development shall be the ultimate goal, turned into the manpower, effectively used to meet the needs of selected members of the society (such selected members of the society later became the oligarchs). It is removal of the development of all members of society from the goal of production, which turned the program’s definition of the goal of production into the camouflaged breaking away from the true goal of the socialism. The revisionists’ third program states: “The goal of the socialism – more and more complete satisfaction of the growing material and cultural needs of the people”.^[42] At the first glance, this definition of goal of socialism seems to be beautiful. At the same time this definition is deeply wrong. The goal of socialism, as defined by the founders of the scientific communism, is the elimination of classes. Such elimination of classes includes the satisfaction of the needs but may not be reduced to such satisfaction; also the elimination of classes does not imply that any and all needs shall be satisfied. At the first place it implies the ensuring of the complete welfare and free all-round development of all members of society, the elimination of any social inequality.

The waiver of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the waiver of the goal of socialism changed the class nature of the state. The state became unable to carry out the interests of the working class. In the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat the interests of the working class shall be deemed the interests of the society as a whole. That is why the state property was gradually ceasing to be a form of the social property. This property was gradually being transformed into a peculiar form of private property of those who actually controlled the public property—top party and state bureaucracy. Thus, the party-state nomenklatura elite succeeded in appropriating the property of the whole society. These elite also succeeded in creating the conditions allow the dividing such property and to appropriate and privatize the resulting shares, formalizing the privatization in accordance with the laws of “all people’s” state. The above was happening at the instigation of Gorbachev during the Yeltsin’s era—first under the slogan of the revisionists’ “movement to the market”, and then, openly, under the anti-communist slogan: “come on, privatize!” This process was ideologically supported by the revisionist concept of “the developed socialism”, which included and strengthened the notorious revisionist “all people’s state”.

The CPSU’s waiver of the main ideas of Marxism, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat, the goal of the socialist production and the goal of the socialism at the XXII Congress could not help resulting and, in the end, has resulted (despite of the active resistance on the part of the communist minority) in the destruction of the party, the state and the country. The above waiver was not only the fault of the renegade CPSU elite, but also the fault of those party members who, instead of studying and understanding Leninism, learnt by heart quotes and slogans, and took on faith the words of the revisionist party elite. And, therefore, consistent communist forces could not overcome the opportunists, revisionists and renegade traitors to socialism. The above is a lesson not only for the communists of the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. It is a lesson for the whole international movement of workers and communists.

Non-Commodity, Direct Society’s Nature of the Socialist Production

This matter is timely as this is, in the end, the question of the reason of the communists’ struggle for the power of their class. This is a question of what they would do if the working class seizes the power. To what extent have the conclusions from the mistakes of the CPSU and from the practice of building socialism in the USSR been made? What should be built in the economy and how should this be built?

Nowadays this issue both continues to be of the interest for the communists’ movement in Russia and abroad, and this issue also divides the communists movement. Herein we will not consider outright apologists of “Swedish socialism” and other improvers of capitalism. We will speak only of those who continue to call themselves Marxists and Communists. Among such Marxists and Communists there are, on one side, a lot of supporters of the so-called “market socialism” (it has been lately more and more often called “China-style market socialism”). On the other side there are people calling themselves pragmatists and realists who are also constantly can be heard. The latter consider it ridiculous when the orthodox communists talk of the non-commodity character of the socialist production. Look around!—they say—the market is everywhere and, hence, starting from the market economy is the only way to go.

The market is, in fact, under capitalism everywhere. Therefore, we believe that it is just time to decide what is happening with the commodity character under capitalism, and what should be done with such character in the process of socialist revolution and building of socialism.

As early as in the First and the Second Bolsheviks’ Programs (as well as in the Program of Russian Communist Workers’ Party (RCWP)) the nature of the capitalism and the bourgeois society was described in the following wording: “The main feature of this society is the commodity character of production which is based on the capitalist production relations. These relations imply that the most important and significant part of the means of production and the circulation of goods is owned by a small (in terms of the head count) class of individuals, whereas the vast majority of the population consists of proletarians and semi-proletarians that are forced, due to their economic status, to continuously or periodically sell their labor power, i.e. hire themselves to the capitalists and create the income for the upper classes of society by their labor”.^[43]

That is, capitalism—primarily the commodity production. With that Lenin in his observations on the second draft of the Program of Plekhanov wrote on the mentioned program provision the following: “That is rather incongruous. Of course, fully developed commodity production is possible only in capitalist society, but ‘commodity production’ in general is both logically and historicallyprius to capitalism”.^[44]

That is, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin specified that capitalism is the result of the development of commodity production. In many of his works Lenin kept pointing out that the commodity production in its development constantly and inevitably gives rise to capitalism.

The commodity is a thing produced for the purpose of exchange. Commodity production is the production of commodities, production of value. Capitalist commodity production is focused on selling goods in order to obtain surplus value, profit to the benefit of the capitalists (owners of the means of production, retail store networks, financial capital and capitalists in other forms of existence). The regulatory role in the production of commodities (this includes the capitalist commodity production) is played by its basic law—the law of value. This law directs the capital and, consequently, the commodity production to the most profitable areas.

And the goal of the socialist production is not generating profit on the capital. This goal is the satisfaction of the society’s interests. The above-mentioned programs of RCP(b) and RCWP state: “Having replaced the private ownership of means of production and circulation by the respective society’s ownership and having introduced a planned organization of socio-productive process for the welfare and all-round development of all members of society, the social revolution of the proletariat will eliminate the division of society into classes and will set the suppressed mankind free, as thus it will put an end to all kinds of exploitation of one part of society by its other part”.^[45]

The core, the essence of the socialist production is not the law of value, but the law of the use value. This law is aimed at the provision of the complete welfare and all-round development of all members of society. It is clear that ensuring the complete welfare and all-round development of all members of society may be possible only through socializing of the means of production and centralization of planning and management, which shall be politically ensured by the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The above is not possible to achieve through the self-regulation of the market of separate private producers.

Notwithstanding the above, it seems that the money, and a number of so-called commodity-money relations formally exist under the socialism, although neither Marx, nor Engels nor Lenin did not mention the term “commodity-money relations”. Does this usage of external commodity forms and titles mean that the socialist production is the commodity production according to its nature? Of course it does not. And the treasury notes, which are used by the socialist society, are not the money in the sense of the political economy. These notes are an additional indirect measurer of the productions volume and the quantity of the required effort that was spent, they play the role of the accounting and planning units. The money under socialism carry out the function of the inventory count and control of the direct society’s production and distribution. Socialism would not be possible if this function is not carried out. It is no coincidence that the Program of the Comintern, adopted in 1928 states: “capitalist forms and methods of economic activity (evaluative account, cash payments, sale and purchase, credits, banks, etc.) which seem to be connected to the market relations, play the role of the balance levers of the socialist overthrow. These balance levers serve at the greater and greater extent the enterprises of consistently socialist type, i.e. the socialist sector of the economy”.^[46]

Supporters of the market socialism usually remind of the NEP (New Economic Policy). They say that it was Lenin who stated that NEP is the radical revision of our views on socialism. It is here to stay. During the early period of the transition from the capitalism to the communism the New Economic Policy (NEP) implied (as a temporary retreat) the increased freedom for commodity production and circulation. Especially, this increased freedom was meant for circulation of commodity between the peasants and the socialist state sector. With that, Lenin was well aware that this increased freedom implies the struggle between the socialist tendency and the capitalist tendency. Bukharin’s book Economics in Transition contains the following thesis: the “dictatorship of the proletariat is inevitably followed by the latent or more or less open struggle between the organizing tendency of the proletariat and the commodity-anarchic tendency of the peasantry”. Lenin noted to that: “It should have been said: between the socialist tendency of the proletariat and the commodity-capitalist tendency of the peasantry”.^[47] Here Lenin also supports the following Bukharin’s analysis: “In the city the main fight for the type of economy [after the seizure of the power—Ed.] ends with the victory of the proletariat. It also ends in the villages due to the defeat of the major capitalists. But at the same time it is being reborn in other forms. It is being reborn in a struggle between the state plan of the proletariat (that embodies the socialized labor) and the commodity anarchy, the speculative licentiousness of the peasantry that embodies the scattered property objects and the market welter.” Lenin appraised the above idea with the brief “That is it!” And then Lenin supported the following Bukharin’s statement “But as a simple commodity economy is exactly an embryo of the capitalist economy, the struggle of the described above tendencies shall be, basically, the continuation of the struggle between the communism and the capitalism” by writing “True. And it is better than the ‘anarchy’.”^[48]

We note that Lenin had never raised the question of the immediate abolishment of the commodity production. He always emphasized that the issue is overcoming the commodity character of the production, escape from the commodity character of the production, denying the mentioned commodity character in the socialist society’s production. Based on the Marx’s position: “Only the products being the results of the different, independent works confront each other as commodities”. Lenin expressed his understanding of the goal of the socialist revolution as follows: “the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, their conversion into public property, and the replacement of capitalist production of commodities by the socialist organisation of the production of articles by society as a whole, with the object of ensuring full well-being and free, all-round development for all its members”.^[49]

And in the Instructions of the Council of Labour and Defence To Local Soviet Bodies, which was compiled in 1921, during the transitional period, Lenin noted, that “the manufactured goods made by socialist factories and exchanged for the foodstuffs produced by the peasants are not commodities in the politico-economic sense of the word; at any rate, they are not only commodities, they are no longer commodities, they are ceasing to be commodities”.^[50]

This idea of overcoming the commodity production even during the construction of the socialist economy Lenin once again confirms in his comments on Bukharin’s book by writing down to his workbook the following thought of Bukharin: “The product may be a universal category only so far as there is a constant, not random social connection to the anarchic basis of the production. Therefore, to the extent the irrationality of the production process disappears (i.e., to the extent a conscious society’s regulator takes the place of the welter), a commodity becomes a product and loses its commodity character”. Lenin notes: “Correct!”, however about the ending he writes: “not quite correct: becomes not a ‘product’ but somewhat differently. ETWA (roughly—Ed.): becomes the product which goes to the society’s consumption not through the market”.^[51]

The adepts of the market usually cite the example of the NEP as an alleged Lenin’s turn towards the understanding of the socialism as the commodity economy. They try to depict it as if Lenin did not consider NEP as the necessary temporary drawback to the market but thought it to be the goal and the perspective. The smartest of them even invented some, allegedly Leninist, methodology of the NEP and the socialist market. However, firstly, it should be noted that the NEP is not the methodology but the policy. Lenin and the Bolsheviks introducing the NEP acknowledged their retreat in the admission of the elements of capitalism—they did not call it the development of characteristics inherent to the socialist production. Secondly, the strongest leverages to overcome the market elements inherent to the period of transition towards the socialist economy were being developed at the time of NEP. In particular, that were the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), State procurement authority (Gossnab) and large manufacturing industry. Also the electrification plan was being developed, etc. That is, while the physical volume of the commodity (according to the title, but not, any longer, according to the nature) was increasing, the directly social nature of the socialist production was being enhanced and the pre-conditions for the further overcoming of the commodity character of the production were being prepared.

Stalin, consistently pursued Lenin’s policy of overcoming the commodity character of the production in practice – the policy of overcoming the commodity character of the production during the transitional period of the production towards the socialism, the policy of giving to the socialist production the characteristics of the direct society’s production. Stalin outlined basic thoughts on this matter in his work “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”. In particular, Stalin formulates the goal of the socialist economy as follows: “Is there a basic economic law of socialism? Yes there is. What are the essential features and requirements of this law? The essential features and requirements of the basic economic law of socialism could be formulated roughly as follows: ensuring of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly growing material and cultural needs of the whole society through the continuous growth and improvement of socialist production on the basis of the most modern technique”.^[52] Thus, Stalin clearly emphasized that the interests of the entire society shall be the definite priority in the system of the socialism.

With that, Stalin based his analysis not only on his “Marxist” views, but on the objective assessment of the available facts. Stalin examined guarantees of the proletarian state that are aimed to prevent the restoration of the capitalist elements in the economy. However, as we believe, Stalin somewhat under-estimated, that the commodity production surely creates the tendencies and the desire to move towards the full-fledged capitalist commodity production and the market (this was eventually implemented in the USSR).

Stalin stated that under socialism the law of value, although with no regulatory significance, is still partially in effect, especially in the sphere of production of the consumer goods. The latter statement is disputable. After all, the law of value is the basic law of capitalism and, therefore, it cannot be a law of the socialism. Engels pointed out in Anti-Dühring, that “the law of value is the basic law of the commodity production. There-fore, it is the basic law of the highest form of the commodity production—the capitalist production”.^[53] In the socialist economy the commodity feature of the production is only the denial of such character’s direct society’s nature. This feature belongs to the residuals of the capitalism that should be overcome in the course of the development of the socialism (as underdeveloped communism) into the ultimate communism. Therefore, we can assert that the development of the socialist economy shall be aimed at the strengthening of its direct society’s nature and at the overcoming of the commodity feature of the production. No matter, what would be the circumstances of the revolution for the communists, no matter what retreats and compromises would the communists have to accept, there should be the clear aspiration to achieve the ultimate goal – to overcome the commodity character of the production and the transition to the socialist, directly society’s character of the production. The socialist economy was moving forward as long as the state power considered the organization of such economy as direct society’s production.

The waiver of the fundamentals of socialism—the dictatorship of the proletariat—by Khrushchev’s leadership in 1961 and the economic reform of 1965 gave rise to the process of gradual accumulation of negative tendencies in the socialist economy and in the socialist relations. Figuratively speaking, the above began the preparation to Gorbachev’s perestroika which changed the social order.

Whatever the current advocates of the capitalism would say, the economics in the Soviet Union was based on the direct society’s production. The above is particularly clear nowadays, when there is a possibility to compare the life in the Soviet Union to the current circumstances. A Soviet citizen was receiving more than half of the consumed goods (as calculated based on the current prices) through funds of public consumption. And that was almost “in accordance to the demand” that some of the crucial needs were being satisfied. The above included: free housing (although with long queues), cold and hot water, electricity, bread, healthcare and education, public transportation and much more.

It is a pity that the waiver of the socialist course, both in terms of the economics and in terms of the politics, was made by the leadership of the party itself, the party that still was called the communist party. The XXII Congress of the CPSU adopted a new party program, which excluded from its main provisions the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the XXVIII Congress of the CPSU approved the transition to the market economy. It was at this Congress that the party and the people were being warned that the transition to the market economy will result in the capitalism and in the collapse of the CPSU and will bring misery for the people. The report of the representative of the Movement of the Communist Initiative, professor A.A. Sergeyev stated: “In addition to the commodity market there are two more markets. That are: the market of the private capital, represented by stock exchanges, and the labor market. So, these two markets, as taken together, will inevitably give the classic capitalist market (even if such capitalist market will be formally called the regulated market). And there is no escape from this… And neither our people, nor the party will survive this perestroika. The party, as the communist party, will disappear”.^[54]

As we can see now, the predictions made by the science have come true. So we have to start anew. Figuratively speaking, we have to address again the question “What should we do?” which Lenin considered in his book with the same title.

The concepts of building the socialism through the development of the market, commodity character of the production and the commodity-money relations (i.e. capitalist relations) and, similarly, through the plans of building different kinds of socially-oriented market economy, even with the best intentions and even under the leadership of the most patriotic and the most trusted government – this is the way of Gorbachev’s which will bring to the capitalism. The opportunism and the revisionism have learnt to compose a lot of patterns of capitalism. They have also learnt to invent many justifications for such patterns. However, the practice has shown to us the following. To separate the economics from its political basis, to consider the politicized economy, economy deprived of the class content in the coherent theory of socialism is an error and a stupidity. Moreover, it is a crime committed by communists with respect to the working class. In the USSR, in the last years of the CPSU’s rule, the market socialism was being built. But as the result, the capitalism has been built.

To paraphrase Lenin, we may say that without fighting this infectious disease of the market, speaking of the commitment to the socialist or the communist choice is simply uttering pompous but deceitful phrases.

Let us then reconcile our course with Lenin, with the science of the communism!

*V.A. Tyulkin is first secretary of the Russian Communist Workers’ Party – Revolutionary Party of Communists,

M.V.Popov is doctor of philosophy, professor, president of the Fund of Working Academy

Representatives of the journal of RCRP-RPC “Soviet Union”

[1] The main idea of Leninism. Lenin on class approach to the analysis of social

phenomena / Comp. Dr. Ph. Sc. M.V. Popov. – St.: Polytechnic Univ. Press,

2009. – 311 p. http://rpw.ru/

[2] Lenin, V.I. Collected Works, Vol. 25; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1977, pp.  562-564.

[3] Ibid., pp. 381-492.

[4] Ibid., pp. 323-369.

[5] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, Vol. 26; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1972, pp. 87-136.

[6] Lenin V.I., Collected Works, Vol. 28; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1972a, pp. 412-428.

[7] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, Vol. 38; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1976, p. 424.

[8] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, Vol. 29; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1972b, pp. 552-560.

[9] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1972, pp. 453-482.

[10] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1972b, pp. 55-88.

[11] Ibid., pp. 255-274.

[12] Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 30; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1965, pp. 93-104.

[13] Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 32; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1965, pp. 272-284.

[14] Ibid., pp. 329-365.

[15] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1972, pp. 400-403

[16] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1972b, pp. 387-391

[17] Ibid., pp. 387-391.

[18] Ibid., pp. 409-434.

[19] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1965, pp. 107-117.

[20] Lenin, V.I.  Collected Works, Vol. 31, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964a, pp. 17—118. 

[21] Lenin, Op. Cit., pp. 451-498.

[22] Ibid., pp. 451-498.

[23] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1972a, pp. 455-477.

[24] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1972a, pp. 552-560.

[25] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, Vol. 27, Pro-gress Publishers, Moscow, 1972c, pp. 235-77.

[26] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1976, pp. 425 – 426.

[27] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1972c, pp. 85-158

[28] XXII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 17 – 31 October 1961, Verbatim record., M. Gospolitizdat, 1962. Vol. I, p.151.

[29] Ibid., p. 166.

[30] Ibid., p. 209.

[31]  Ibid., pp. 210 – 211, 212

[32] Ibid., p. 303.

[33] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1977, p. 381-492.

[34] Ibid., p. 381-492.

[35] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1972b, pp. 470-488.

[36] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, Vol. 6; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1964b, pp. 17-78.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Program of the Russian Social Democratic Worker’s Party, adopted at the Second Party Congress. July–August 1903, Protocols, Moscow, 1959, p. 419.

[40] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1976, p. 419.

[41] XXII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 17 – 31 October 1961, Transcript. Vol. III. M. Gospolitizdat, 1962, p. 274.

[42] Ibid., p. 238.

[43] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1976, pp. 417 – 418.

[44] Lenin, Op. Cit.,1964b,17-78.

[45] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1976, p. 419.

[46] The Communist International in the documents. 1919 – 1932. M. 1933 p. 24.

[47] Lenin, V.I., Miscellany, Vol. XI 1931, 2nd ed., p. 368.

[48] Ibid., p. 370.

[49] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1964b, pp. 17-78.

[50] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1965, pp. 375-398.

[51] Lenin, Miscellany, Vol. XI 1985, p.388.

[52] J.V. Stalin. Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. 2010, St. Petersburg. pp.31–32.

[53] K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20. p.324.

[54] XXVIII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2 – 13 July

1990. Verbatim record. Vol. I. M., Politizdat, 1991, pp. 504.

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