THE ANTI-REVISIONISTS

a Inthe English-speaking world, problems were even more acute. In Britain and the dominions the Marxists were still losing ground while honestly Reformist parties advanced.

In Ireland, the Irish Socialist Republican Party was organized by a genuine Marxist, James Connolly (1868- 1916), but its rank and file were less conscious and, in 1903, he left them forthe U.S.A. In any case, more real electoral support was given the Belfast Labour Party which was in the Independent Labour Party mould. Connolly was not mistaken in seeing the U.S.A. as more promising. It had produced Daniel de Leon (1852-1914), a theoretician whose writings were admired by Lenin and whose Socialist Labour Party became the centre of the major "Bloody Sunday’, St. Petersburg, Jan 9, 1905.

18 speaking world before 1914. The trouble was that it had been founded by German-American Lassalleans and, far more than the German Social Democrats, it upheld the Lassallean principle of close party control of its associated trade unions and their indoctrination with the Lassallean Iron Law of Wages and the resultant futility of strikes for wage rises.

This weakened the Party against its country’ snon-political union organization, the American Federation of Labour. By 1901 it too had provoked Revisionists and genuine Marxists into joining to form a looser, less homogeneous (in effect less Marxist) Socialist Party of America, which would soon win more support than de Leon’s organization.

THE ANTI-REVISIONISTS

The most effective opposition to Revisionism and to the more subtle degeneration of world Marxism was being developed in central and eastem Europe. Rosa Luxembourg was fighting for greater clarity in a revolutionary approach to the issues raised by Bernstein. In Russia, where the movement was less developed, Plekhanov and Lenin (Vladimir IIlyich Ulyanov, 1870-1924) were fighting to build a Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party with the norms they believed existed in the German Social Democracy. This lastbody condemned Revisionism firmly at its 1903 Dresden Congress. At the same time it avoided accepting its practical challenge, as Luxemburg demanded. It sent the motion it hadpassed to the International, which itself passed it at its sixth Congress in Amsterdam the following year. The Amsterdam Congress was to the Second International what the Basle Congress had been to the first.

It was the organizational highpoint that preceded its highpoint in practice. Its affiliates were advancing everywhere. In the Commonwealth of Australia that year, the Labour Party formed a Government. In Belgium, Austriaand the less demo- 19 cratic German states of Prussia and Saxony, the Social Democrats led the fight for the democratic franchise. The chief achievement of the Amsterdam Congress was that it consolidated this growth by passing a motion to unite its national affiliates. On the theoretical side, its ratification of the Dresden motion made a gesture towards the idea that such unity should be on Marxist political lines. In fact, neither was really successful. The French united, though the right-wing Possibilists led by Millerand preferred to break altogether with Socialism. However, the Russians and Americans remained divided. More importantly, the Dresden motion remained a substitute for serious Marxist analysis. Just as Basle had been followed by the Paris Commune, so, now, Amsterdam was followed even more swiftly by the Russian Revolution of 1905. Starting and continuing formally on a bourgeois democratic programme, it stimulated the establishment of working-class councils or soviets in St Petersburg (now Leningrad) and Moscow which posed practically the seizure of state power by workers in a way not seen since and more radically than the

Paris Commune. Fora time it threatened to spread westward. The German and Austrian Emperors considered intervening to save Czarism.

Radicalized by the upsurge, the normally Revisionist German trade union leaders threatened a general strike if this occurred. Helped by the Russian Liberals, the Czar did manage to crush the Revolution with the minimum concession of a Parliament (Duma) with limited powers and elected on a limited franchise. The Austrian Government bought off its own radicalizing workers with manhood suffrage. In the U.S.A, the most radical trade union leaders formed the International Workers of the World (1.W.W) with the support of the S.L.P. 20 For the International, the Revolution was followed by intensification of existing trends. Though capitalist Europe did not move to repression immediately, it had done so by 1910. Unlike the I.W.M.A. after the Commune, the workers’ movement was now too strong for its world organization to collapse. Rather, the Revisionist challenge to its politics intensified and was now matched on the Left by revolutionaries, mainly in Eastern Europe, seeking to develop these politics so that the working-class could take State power and begin to institute Socialism. In the centre Bebel, Kautsky and their equivalents led a majority into trying to reconcile two increasingly opposite trends. This position came to give its name, Centrism, to the practice of Social Democratic Party bureaucracy. At first, Revisionism made the advance. In 1906, Auer and the German Social Democratic Party Executive met the trade union leaders and agreed not to call for any future political strike. The following year, at the International’s seventh Congress in Stuttgart, the Executive’s Report included a proposal for it to accept colonialism. The Socialist Party of America and the Labour Parties of Australia and South Africa went further, moving to bar non-white immigration, particularly to their countries. The International was still principled enough to reject these proposals.

However, it could not move decisively the other way. The problems created by colonialism were not faced. Moreover, though there was support for an attack by Luxemburg’s friend and political ally, Klara Zetkin (1857-1932) on the Austrian compromise that fell short of women’s suffrage, proposals for an international campaign for universal suffrage in all the States were shelved. The most significant debate at Stuttgart concerned the prevention of war. From 1905, each frightened State Government had been trying to consolidate support by calling for national unity against others. Now the International debated four motions, three from tendencies in the French section. The most radical was that debated by Gustave Herve (1871-1944) : influenced by Syndicalism, it called for a general strike in the participating countries. It had the sympathy of Connolly, in America, who tended to Syndicalism, but was attacked not only by the German trade unionists but by Lenin and others of the Revolutionary Left as being impossible and, hence, diversionary. Jules Guesde’s proposal argued that militarism was just another aspect of capitalism and thus not to be opposed in a single campaign. Jaures and the old Blanquist, Edouard Vaillant (1840-1915) called for action against war but recognized a right of national defence.

Bebel was close to this position but stressed both the central role of capitalism and went further in distinguishing between offensive and defensive war. In the end, a compromise was passed unanimously.

It included two paragraphs drafted by the Leftists Lenin, Luxemburg and the Russian Centrist Menshevik, Yuli Martov (1873-1923). They provided the theoretical core for the movement from which the Communist International would arise : “If a war threatens to break out, it is a duty of the working-class in the countries affected and a duty for their Parliamentary representatives, with the aid of the International Bureau as an active and coordinating power, to make every effort to prevent war by all means which vary naturally according to the intensity of the class struggle and to the political situation in general. Should war break out nonetheless, itis their duty to intervene in order to bring it promptly to an end, and with all their strength to make use of the economic and political crisis created by the war to stir up the deepest strata of the people and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination.” These guidelines for future action were vague enough but they did represent a position from which Socialists could advance their cause even in the teeth of a crisis such as that which would eventually smash their International. 21

Rosa Luxemburg (is70-1 919) In the meantime, this continued to grow. Australia had more Labour Governments. The German Social Democrats became the largest single party in the Reichstag. The Socialist Party of America had a member elected to Congress. Yet, increasingly, this organizational advance was accompanied by political fudges by the centre to keep the movement united. The International’s last two Congresses, Copenhagen (1910) and Basle (1912) showed little political advance and were mainly irrelevant to the debates being conducted within the International’s Left wing. The projected Vienna Congress, which the outbreak of the 1914 War aborted, was expected to move to expel the most vital political part of this wing, Lenin’s Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (Bolshevik).

Few of the old-guard took part inthis new left. In 1908 Kautsky tried to relate the day-to-day struggle to the ultimate revolution. He succeeded less in clarifying the probabilities than in annoying his Party’s leadership. Under pressure from it, he rewrote the offending sections, making the work more moderate.

Plekhanov still blocked with Lenin on the need to maintain a tightlydisciplined and conscious workingclass political party in Russia : he opposed him on nearly everything else. In the U.S.A, de Leon had failed to win control of the I.W.W. his party became an isolated sect.

The big weakness of the Left was that its varying answers to the questions it faced kept it divided against itself, weakening what was already numerically small compared to the Centre and the Right. Its members were ready to block with some who can be seen now as its political opponents to defeat other Leftists.

After breaking with de Leon and before he returned toIreland in 1910, Connolly worked with both Leftists and Reformists in the Socialist Party of America. By 1910, after five years of repression, the Bolsheviks within Russia itself numbered less than fifty. Lenin blocked with the Right Centrist Plekhanov against the Left Centrist Martov and against Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879-1940), who tried to actas honestbroker in Russian Social Democracy between the Bolsheviks and the more Right-wing Mensheviks. Trotsky related better to Kautsky than to Luxemburg and Lenin 22 himself could not understand Luxemburg’s opposition to Kautsky. For her part, she was not too upset when it looked as if Lenin and Bolsheviks would be expelled from the International. Of all the Left, history would prove Lenin the greatest. His position as citizen of the most oppressive State in Europe made him less ready than his comrades in countries of the West to compromise on,the need for revolution. However, he insisted, against the Mensheviks, that this revolution would have to be led by the workers and small farmers who would provide the revolutionary government, rather than by the bourgeoisie who had done this in democratic revolutions previously. His Stuttgart provision showed him ready to turn even imperialist war, if it could not be stopped, to advance this end.

More generally it required an International of tight homogeneous revolutionary parties to lead the workers; though Lenin did not yet realize this, such parties would be as different from German Social Democracy as that was to Britain’s Independent Labour Party. Such parties would be firmly dialectically materialist; the ‘private’ nature of religion asserted by Marx and Engels and used by Centrists and Revisionists as a party norm could not be maintained as the latter. It was on the concept of the party as a professional elite that Luxemburg and Trotsky had their first disagreement with Lenin. They also differed with him on two other points, one of which he did not consider significant. This last was the question of how the revolutionary proletariat would take state power and what it would do with it. Lenin accepted simply that, at least in an underdeveloped country such as Russia, it would administer what would be a bourgeois democratic state until the revolution spread to establish worldwide Socialism. Trotsky and to a certain extent Luxemburg recognized that the revolutionary Government would have tomove against the capitalists immediately on a social and economic as well as a political front : the strategy of Permanent Revolution. Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) 23