The Struggle of Revolution for State Power

Leon Trotsky

The Struggle for State Power

(1917)

Peace and Reaction
(May 1917)

In a session of the National Duma held March 3, 1916 M. Miliukov replied as follows to a Criticism from the left : “I do not know for certain whether the government is leading us to defeat – but I do know that a revolution in Russia will unquestionably lead us to a defeat, and our enemies, therefore, have good reason to thirst for it. If anyone should say to me that to organize Russia for victory is equivalent to organizing her for revolution, I should answer : It is better, for the duration of the war, to leave her unorganized, as she is.” This quotation is interesting in two ways. It is not only a proof that, as late as last year, M. Miliukov considered pro-German interests to be at work not in internationalism alone, but in any revolution at all ; it is also a typical expression of liberal sycophancy. Extremely interesting is M. Miliukov’s prediction : “I know that revolution in Russia will unquestionably lead us to defeat.” Why this certainty ? As an historian, M. Miliukov must know that there have been revolutions that led to victory. But as an imperialist statesman, M. Miliukov cannot help seeing that the idea of the conquest of Constantinople, Armenia and Galicia is not capable of arousing the spirit of the revolutionary masses. M. Miliukov felt, and even knew, that in his war, revolution could not bring victory with it.

To be sure, when the revolution broke out M. Miliukov at once attempted to harness it to the chariot of allied imperialism. That is the reason why he was greeted with delight by the sonorous, metallic reverberations of all the bank-vaults of London, Paris and New York. But this attempt met with the almost instinctive resistance of the workers and the soldiers. M. Miliukov was thrown out of the Ministry : the Revolution evidently, did not mean victory for him.

Miliukov went, but the war remained. A coalition government was formed, consisting of petty bourgeois democrats and those representatives of the bourgeoisie that had hitherto concealed, for a time, their imperialist claws. Perhaps nowhere did this combination display its counter-revolutionary character better than in the domain of international politics, that is, above all, in the war. The big bourgeoisie sent its representatives to the cabinet in the name of “an offensive on the front and unalterable fidelity to our allies” (resolution of the Cadet Conference). The petty bourgeois democrats, who call themselves “Socialists”, entered the Cabinet in order, “without tearing themselves away” from the big bourgeoisie and their world allies, to conclude the war in the quickest possible manner and with the least possible offence to all the participants : without annexations, without indemnities and contributions, and even with a guarantee of national self-determination.

The capitalist ministers renounced annexations, until a more favourable time ; in return for this purely verbal concession they received from their petty bourgeois democratic colleagues a binding promise not to desert the ranks of the allies, to reinvigorate the army and make it capable of resuming the offensive. In renouncing Constantinople (for the moment) the imperialists were making a rather worthless sacrifice, for, in the course of three years of war, the road to Constantinople had become not shorter, but longer. But the democrats, to compensate the purely platonic renunciation of a very doubtful Constantinople by the Liberals, took over the whole heritage of the Czarist government, recognized all the treaties which that government had concluded, and put all the authority and prestige of the revolution in the service of discipline and the offensive. This bargain involved, first of all, a renunciation, on the part of the “leaders” of the Revolution, of any such thing as an independent international policy : this conclusion was only natural to the petty bourgeois party, which when it was in the majority, willingly surrendered all its power. Having handed over to Prince Lvov the duty of creating a revolutionary administration ; to M. Shingariev the task of re-making the finances of the Revolution, to M. Konovalov, that of organizing industry ; petty bourgeois democracy could not help handing over to Messrs. Ribot, Lloyd George and Wilson the charge of the international interests of revolutionary Russia.

Even though the Revolution, in its present phase, has not therefore altered the character of the war, it has nevertheless exerted a profound influence on the living agent of the war, namely, the army. The soldier began asking himself what it was for which he was shedding his blood, upon which he now set a higher price than under Czarism. And immediately the question of the secret treaties came up and became imperative. To restore the “preparedness” of the army under these circumstances meant breaking up the revolutionary-democratic resistance of the soldiers, putting to sleep again their newly-awakened political sense, and, until the “revision” of the old treaties should be announced as a principle, placing the revolutionary army in the service of the same old objects. This task was more than a match for the Octobrist-Bourbon Guchkov, who broke down under it. Nothing less than a “socialist” would do for this purpose. And he was found in the person of the “most popular” of the ministers, Kerensky.

Citizen Kerensky exposed his theoretical equipment at one of the first sessions of the All-Russian Congress. One can hardly imagine anything more insipid than his provincial, complacent truisms on the French Revolution and on Marxism. Citizen Kerensky’s political formulas were characterized neither by originality nor by depth. But he possesses, indisputably, the talent of bestowing on Philistine reaction the necessary revolutionary trimmings. In the person of Kerensky the intelligent and semi-intelligent bourgeoisie recognized themselves, in more “representative” form, and in surroundings which are not those of everyday, but rather the trappings of melodrama.

By lavishly exploiting his popularity in accelerating the preparedness for an offensive (on the entire imperialistic front of the Allies), Kerensky naturally becomes the darling of the possessing classes. Not only does Minister of Foreign Affairs Tereschenko express himself approvingly of the high esteem in which our Allies hold the “labours”of Kerensky ; not only does Riech, which so severely criticizes the Ministers of the Left, continually emphasize its favouritism toward the Minister of the Army and Navy, Kerensky – but even Rodzianko considers it his duty to point out “the noble, patriotic endeavours” which our Minister of the Army and Navy, Kerensky, is engaged in : “this young man” (to quote the words of Rodzianko, the Octobrist Chairman of the Duma) “experiences (?) daily a new lease of life, for the benefit of his country and of constructive work.” Which glorious circumstance does not, however, in any way prevent Rodzianko from hoping that when the “constructive work” of Kerensky shall have attained the proper eminence, it may be succeeded by Ouchkov’s labours instead.

Meanwhile, Tereschenko’s Department of Foreign Affairs is endeavouring to persuade the Allies to sacrifice their imperialist appetites on the altar of revolutionary democracy. It would be difficult to imagine any undertaking more fruitless, and – in spite of all the tragic humiliation of it – more ridiculous than this ! When M. Tereschenko in the manner of the provincial newspaper editorial of the democratic variety, endeavours to explain to the hardened ring-leaders of the international plunderbund that the Russian Revolution is really a “powerful intellectual movement, expressive of the will of the Russian people in its struggle for equality,” etc., etc. – when he furthermore “does not doubt” that “a close union between Russia and her allies (the hardened ring-leaders of the international plunderbund) will assure in the fullest measure an agreement on all the questions involved in the principles proclaimed by the Russian Revolution,” it is difficult to free one’s self from a feeling of disgust at this medley of impotence, hypocrisy and stupidity.

The bourgeoisie secured for itself, in this document of Tereschenko’s, it appears, all the decisive words : “unfaltering fidelity to the general cause of the allies,”“inviolability of the agreement not to make a separate peace,”and a postponement of the revision of the aims of the war until “a favourable opportunity” ; which amounts to asking the Russian soldier, until this “favourable opportunity” arrives, to shed his blood for those same imperialist aims of the war which it seems so undesirable to publish, so undesirable to revise. And Tseretelli’s whole political horizon is revealed in the complacent smugness with which he recommended to the attention of the All-Russian Congress this diplomatic document in which “there is clear and open speech, in the language of a revolutionary government, concerning the strivings of the Russian Revolution.” One thing cannot be denied : the cowardly and impotent appeals addressed to Lloyd George and Wilson are couched in the same terms as the appeals of the Soviet Executive Committee addressed to Albert Thomas, the Scheidemanns and the Hendersons. In both there is all along the line an identity of purpose, and – who knows ? – perhaps even an identity of authorship. [1]

A perfect appreciation of these latest diplomatic notes of the Tereschenko-Tseretelli combination we shall find in a place where we might at first not expect to find it, namely, in L’Entente, a newspaper published in French in Petrograd, and the organ of those very Allies to whom Tereschenko and Chernov swear an “unfaltering allegiance”. “We readily admit,” says this paper, “that in diplomatic circles the appearance of this note was awaited with a certain concern ...”

In fact it is not easy, as this official organ admits, to find a formulation of the conflicting aims of the Allies.

“As far as Russia is concerned, particularly, the position of the Provisional Government was rather delicate and full of danger. On the one hand, it was necessary to reckon with the standpoint of the Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates, and, as far as possible, to represent this standpoint : on the other hand, it was necessary to handle with kid gloves the international relations and the friendly powers, upon whom it was impossible to force the decision of the Council.”

“And the Provisional Government has come out of the quandary shining and stainless ...”

In the document before us, therefore, we have the main points of the revolutionary catechism set down, registered and sealed with the authority of the Provisional Government. There is no lack of any essential. All the lovely dreams, all the fine words of the dictionary, are properly mobilized. You will find there equality, liberty and justice in international relations – Donc tout yest [“everything is there” – Ed.] at least in words. The reddest of the comrades can make no reply ; from this quarter the Provisional Government has nothing to fear ...

“But – how about the Allies ?” asks L’Entente. “With the aid of close study and reading between the lines (!), with the aid of goodwill and friendship for the young Russian democracy, the Allies will be able to find at various points in the note certain pleasant words which are of a nature to reassure their somewhat waning confidence. They well know that the position of the Provisional Government is not an easy one, and that its efforts in prose must not be taken too literally ... The fundamental guarantee that the Government gives to the Allies consists in the fact that the agreement signed at London on September 5, 1914 (pledging no separate peace) is not to be revised. That completely satisfies us for the present.”

And us too. As a matter of fact it would be difficult to utter a more contemptuous judgement on the Tereschenko-Tseretelli “prose” than that published by the official L’Entente, which draws its inspiration from the French Embassy. This estimate, which it is by no means unfriendly to Tereschenko or to those who stand behind him, is positively murderous to the “constructive labours” of Tseretelli, who has so warmly recommended to us the “plain, open language” of this document. “Nothing has been left out,” he swears before the Congress, “it will satisfy the conscience of the reddest comrades.”

But they are mistaken, these adepts in diplomatic prose : they don’t satisfy anybody. Isn’t it significant that the facts of actual life should answer the appeals of Kerensky and the remonstrances and threats of Tseretelli with such an awful blow as the revolt of the Black Sea sailors ? We had been previously told that there among these sailors was Kerensky’s citadel, the home of the “patriotism” that demanded an offensive. The facts once more administered a merciless correction. By adhering to the position of the old imperialist agreements and obligations in external politics, and in internal politics, capitulating before the propertied classes, it was impossible to unite the army through a combination of revolutionary enthusiasm and discipline. And Kerensky’s “big stick” has fortunately thus far been too short.

No, this path, truly, leads nowhere.

May 1917

Note

4. In the first flush of the Revolution, the moderates in the Soviets through the Executive Committee appealed to the Socialists and the proletariat of the belligerent countries to break with their imperialist governments ; but gradually this revolutionary policy was abandoned, and the Executive Committee cooperated with the infamous gathering of the Social Patriots at Stockholm, against the protests of the Bolsheviks. It required only this to emphasize the non-revolutionary character of the Executive Committee, that they joined hands with Scheidemann, Albert Thomas of France, Henderson of England, and the other Social Patriots. Moderate Socialism acted as the commis voyageur [travelling salesman] of bourgeois diplomacy. One of the secret documents published after the Bolsheviks came to power shows the true character of the Stockholm Conference with which, by the way, the Independent Socialists of Germany refused to have any dealings : it is a telegram dated August 18th, 1917, from the Russian Ambassador in Stockholm to the Provisional Government, reporting a conversation with Branting, one of the social-patriotic organizers of the Conference, who declared that he was willing to drop the Conference if Kerensky considered it untimely and that Branting would use his influence with the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee to this end. The telegram concludes by asking secrecy, in order not to compromise Branting, as otherwise a valuable source of information would be lost. The Socialist Conference the willing tool of diplomacy ! No wonder it was a miserable failure. – L.C.F.

The Farce of Dual Power
(June 1917)

The war conditions are twisting and obscuring the action of the internal forces of the Revolution. But none the less the course of the Revolution will be determined by these same internal forces, namely, the classes.

The revolution which has been gathering strength from 1912 on, was, at first, broken off by the war, and later, owing to the heroic intervention of an infuriated army, was quickened into an unprecedented aggressiveness. The power of resistance on the part of the old regime had been, once for all undermined by the progress of the war. The political parties which might have taken up the function of mediators between the monarchy and the people suddenly found themselves hanging in the air, owing to powerful blows from below, and were obliged at the last moment to accomplish the dangerous leap to the secure shores of the Revolution. This imparted to the Revolution, for a time, the outward appearance of complete national harmony. For the first time in its entire history, bourgeois liberalism felt itself “bound up” with the masses – and it is this that must have given them the idea of utilizing the “universal” revolutionary spirit in the service of the war.

The conditions, the aims, the participants of the war did not change. Guchkov and Miliukov, the most outspoken of the imperialists on the political staff of the old regime, were now the managers of the destinies of revolutionary Russia. Naturally, the war, the fundamental character of which remained the same as it had been under Czarism – against the same enemy, with the same allies, and the same international obligations – now had to be transformed into a “war for the Revolution.” For the capitalist classes, this task was equivalent to a moblization of the Revolution, and of the powers and passions it had stimulated, in the interests of imperialism. The Miliukovs magnanimously consented to call the “red rag” a sacred emblem – if only the working masses would show their readiness to die with ecstasy under this red rag, for Constantinople and the Straits.

But the imperialist cloven hoof of Miliukov was sticking out too plainly. In order to win over the awakened masses and guide their revolutionary energy into the channel of an offensive on the external front, more intricate methods were required – but, chiefly, different political parties were needed, with platforms that had not yet been compromised, and reputations that had not yet been sullied.

They were found. In the years of counter-revolution, and particularly in the period of the latest industrial boom, capital had subjected to itself and had mentally tamed many thousands of revolutionists of 1905, being in no wise concerned about their Labourite or Marxist “notions”. And among the “Socialistic” intellectuals there were therefore rather numerous groups whose palms were itching to take part in the checking of the class struggle and in the training of the masses for “patriotic” ends. Hand in hand with the intelligentsia, which had been brought into prominence in the counter-revolutionary epoch, went the compromise-workers, who had been frightened definitely and finally by the failure of the 1905 Revolution, and had since then developed in themselves the sole talent of being agreeable to all sides.

The opposition of the bourgeois classes to Czarism – upon an imperialist foundation, however – had, even before the Revolution, provided the necessary basis for a rapprochement between the opportunist Socialists and the propertied classes. In the Duma, Kerensky and Chkheidze built up their policy as an annex to the progressive bloc and the “Socialistic” Gvozdievs and Bogdanovs merged with the Guchkovs on the War Industry Committees. But the existence of Czarism made an open advocacy of the “government” patriotism standpoint very difficult. The Revolution cleared away all obstacles of this nature. Capitulating to the capitalist parties was now called “a democratic unity”, and the discipline of the bourgeois state suddenly became “revolutionary discipline,” and finally, participation in a capitalist war was looked upon as a defence of the Revolution from external defeat.

This nationalist intelligentsia, which the social-patriot Struve had prophesied, invoked and trained, in his paper Vyekhi, suddenly met with an unexpectedly generous support in the helpessness of the most backward masses of the people, who had been forcibly organized as an army.

It was only because the Revolution broke out in the course of a war that the petty bourgeois elements of city and country at once automatically took on the appearance of an organized force, and began to exert, upon the personnel of the Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates, an influence which could have been far beyond the powers of these scattered and backward classes in any but war times. The Menshevik-populist intelligentsia found in this great number of backwoods, provincial, for the most part as yet hardly awakened persons, a support that was at first entirely natural. By leading the petty bourgeois classes on to the path of an agreement with capitalist liberalism, which had again beautifully demonstrated its inability to guide the masses of the people independently, the Menshevik-populist intelligentsia, through the pressure of the masses, acquired a certain position even among the proletarian sections, which had been momentarily relegated to a secondary position by the numerical impressiveness of the army.

It might at first seem that all class contradictions had been destroyed, that all social fixtures had been patched up with fragments of a populist-Menshevik ideology, and that, thanks to the “constructive labours”of Kerensky, Chkheidse and Dan, a national Burgfrieden [1] truce between the classes had been realized. Therefore, the unparalleled surprise and wonder when an independent proletarian policy again asserted itself, and therefore the savage, in truth, disgusting wail against the revolutionary Socialists, the destroyers of the universal harmony.

The petty bourgeois intellectuals, after they had been raised by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates to heights for which they were entirely unprepared, were frightened more by the idea of responsibility than by anything else, and therefore respectfully handed over their power to the capitalist-feudal government which had issued forth from the womb of the Duma of June 3. The organic terror of the petty bourgeois in the presence of the sanctity of state power, which was transparent in the case of the populists (Labourites), was veiled, in the case of the Menshevik-patriots, by doctrinaire notions as to the inadmissibility of having Socialists assume the burden of power in a bourgeois revolution.

Thus there came about the “dual power”, which might with much more truth be termed a Dual Impotence. The bourgeoisie assumed authority in the name of order and of a war for victory ; yet, without the Soviets, it could not rule ; the latter’s relation to the government was that of an awed half-confidence, combined with a fear lest the revolutionary proletariat might, in some unguarded gesture, upset the whole business.

The cynically provocative foreign policy of Miliukov brought forth a crisis. Being aware of the full extent of the panic in the ranks of the petty bourgeois leaders when confronted with problems of power, the bourgeois party began availing itself, in this domain, of downright blackmail : by threatening a government strike, that is, to resign any participation in authority, they demanded that the Soviet furnish them with a number of decoy Socialists, whose function in the coalition ministry was to be the general strengthening of confidence in the government on the part of the masses, and, in his way, the cessation of “dual power.”

Before the pistol-point of ultimatum, the Menshevik patriots hastened to slough off their last vestiges of Marxist prejudice against participation in a bourgeois government, and brought on to the same path the Labourite “leaders” of the Soviet, who were not embarrassed by any super-cargo of principle or prejudice. This was most manifest in the person of Chernov, who came back from the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences where he had excommunicated Vandervelde, Guesde and Sembat out of Socialism – only to enter the ministry of Prince Lvov and Shingariev. To be sure, the Russian Menshevik patriots did point out that Russian ministerialism had nothing in common with French and Belgian ministerialism, being an outgrowth of very exceptional circumstances, as had been foreseen in the resolution against ministerialism of the Amsterdam Socialist Congress (1904). Yet they were merely repeating, in parrot fashion, the arguments of French and Belgian ministerialism, while they continued constantly invoking the “exceptional nature of the circumstances”. Kerensky, under whose wordy theatricality there are nevertheless, some traces of reality, very appropriately classed Russian Ministerialism in the same category as that of Western Europe, and stated in his Helsingfors speech, that thanks chiefly to him, Kerensky, the Russian Socialists had in two months travelled a distance that it had taken the West-European Socialists ten years to accomplish. Truly, Marx was not wrong when he called revolution the locomotive of history !

The coalition government had been sentenced by History before it was established. If it had been formed immediately after the downfall of Czarism, as an expression of the “revolutionary unity of the nation”, it might possibly have held in check, for a time, the struggle of the forces of the Revolution. But the first government was the Guchkov-Miliukov governnment. It was permitted to exist only long enough to expose the full falsity of “national unity” and to awaken the revolutionary resistance of the proletariat against the bourgeois propaganda to prostitute the Revolution in the interests of Imperialism. The obviously makeshift coalition ministry could not, under these circumstances, stave off a calamity ; it was itself destined to become the chief bone of contention, the chief source of schism and divergence in the ranks of “revolutionary democracy.” Its political existence – for of its “activities” we shall not speak – is simply one long dissolution, decently enveloped in vast quantities of words.

To contend against a complete breakdown on the economic and, particularly, on the food question, the Economic Department of the Executive Committee of the Soviets worked out a plan for an extensive system of state management in the most important branches of industry. The members of the Economic Department differ from the political managers of the Soviet not so much in their political tendencies as in a serious acquaintance with the economic situation of the country. For this very reason they were led to conclusions of a profoundly revolutionary character. The only thing their structure lacks is the driving force of a revolutionary policy. The government, for the most part capitalist, could not possibly give birth to a system that was diametrically opposed to the selfish interests of the propertied classes. If Skobeley, the Menshevik Minister of Labour, did not understand this, it was fully understood by the serious and efficient Konovaloy, the representative of trade and industry.

Konovalov’s resignation was an irreparable blow to the coalition ministry. The whole bourgeois press gave unmistakeable expression to this fact. Then began anew the exploitation of the panic terror of the present leaders of the Soviet : the bourgeoisie threatened to lay the babe of power at their door. The “leaders” answered by making believe that nothing special had happened. If the responsible representative of capital has left us, let us invite M. Buryshkin. But Buryshkin ostentatiously refused to have anything to do with surgical operations on private property. And then began the search for an “independent” minister of commerce and industry, a man behind whom stood nothing and nobody, and who might serve as an inoffensive letter-box, in which the opposing demands of labour and capital might be dropped. Meanwhile the economic expenses continue on their course, and the government activity assumed the form, chiefly, of the printing of paper-money, assignats.

Having as his senior colleagues, Messrs. Lvov and Shingariev, it turned out that Chernov was prevented from revealing, in the domain of agrarian matters, even the radicalism of words only, which is so characteristic of this typical representative of the petty bourgeoisie. Fully aware of the role that was assigned to him, Chernoy introduced himself to society as the representative, not of the agrarian revolution, but of agrarian statistics ! According to the liberal bourgeois interpretation, which the Socialist ministers also made their own, revolution must be suspended among the masses in a passive waiting for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and as soon as the Social-Revolutionists enter the ministry of the land-holders and manufacturers, the attacks of the peasants against the feudal agricultural system are stigmatized as anarchy.

In the field of international policy, the collapse of the “peace programmes” proclaimed by the coalition government came about more swiftly and more catastrophically than could possibly have been expected. M. Ribot, the Premier of France, not only categorically and unceremoniously rejected the Russian peace formula and pompously reiterated the absolute necessity of continuing the war until a “complete victory” should be secured, but also denied the patriotic French Socialists their passports to the Stockholm Conference, which had been arranged with the cooperation of M. Ribot’s colleagues and allies, the Russian Socialist Ministers. The Italian Government, whose policy of colonial conquests has always been distinguished by exceptional shamelessness, by a “Holy Egotism”, replied to the formula of a “peace without annexations” with its separate annexation of Albania. Our government, and that includes the Socialist ministers, held up for two weeks the publication of the answers of the Allies, evidently trusting in the efficacy of such petty devices to stave off the bankruptcy of their policy. In short order, the question as to the international situation of Russia, the question of what it is that the Russian soldier should be ready to fight and die for, is still just as acute as on the day when the portfolio of Minister of Foreign Affairs was washed from the hands of Miliukov.

In the Army and Navy Department, which is still eating up the lion’s share of the national powers and of the national resources, the policy of prose and rhetoric holds undisputed sway. The material and psychological causes for the condition of the army are too deep to be disposed of by ministerial prose and poetry. The substitution of General Srussilov for General Alexeyev meant a change of these two officers, no doubt, but not a change in the army. The working up of the popular mind and of the army into an “offensive”, and then the sudden dropping of this catchword in favour of the less definite catchword of a “preparation for an offensive”, show that the Army and Navy Ministry is still as little capable of leading the nation to victory, as M. Tereschenko’s Department was of leading the nation to peace.

The picture of the impotence of the Provisional Government reaches its climax in the labour of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which, to use the words of the most loyal Soviet of Peasants’ Delegates, “with partiality” filled the offices of the local administrations with feudal landholders. The efforts of the active portion of the population which gain for them the communal self-governments, by right of conquest, and without waiting for the Constituent Assembly, are immediately stigmatized in the state-police jargon of the Dans as anarchy, and are greeted by the energetic opposition of the government which, by its very composition, is fully protected against all energetic action when it is really of creative character.

In the course of the last few days, this policy of general bankruptcy has found its most repulsive expression in the Kronstadt incident.[2]

The vile and out-and-out corrupt campaign of the bourgeois press against Kronstadt, which is for them the symbol of revolutionary internationalism and of distrust in the government coalition, both of which are emblems of the independent policy of the great masses of the people, not only took possession of the government and of the Soviet leaders, but turned Tseretelli and Skobolev into ring-leaders in the disgusting persecution of the Kronstadt sailors, soldiers and workers.

At a moment when revolutionary internationalism was systematically displacing patriotic Socialism in the factories and workshops and among the soldiers at the front, the Socialists in the ministry, obedient to their masters were risking the hazardous game of overthrowing the revolutionary proletarian advance-guard with one single blow, and thus preparing the “psychological moment” for the session of the All Russian Congress of Soviets. To rally the peasant-petty bourgeois democracy around the banner of bourgeois liberalism that ally and captive of Anglo-French and American capital, politically to isolate and “discipline” the proletariat – that is now the principal task in the realization of which the government bloc of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionists is expending all its energies. An essential part of this policy is found in the shameless threats of bloody repressions and the provocations of open violence.

The death agony of the coalition ministry began on the day of its birth. Revolutionary Socialism must do everything in its power to prevent this death agony from terminating in the convulsion of civil war. The only way to do this is not by a policy of yielding and dodging, which merely whets the appetite of the fresh-baked statesmen, but rather a policy of aggressive action all along the line. We must not permit them to isolate themselves : we must isolate them. We must answer the wretched and contemptible actions of the Coalition government by making clear even to the most backward among the labouring masses the full meaning of this hostile alliance which masquerades publicly in the name of the Revolution. To the methods of the propertied classes and of their Menshevik-Social Revolutionist appendage in dealing with the questions of food, of industry, of agriculture, of war, we must oppose the methods of the proletariat. Only in this way can liberalism be isolated and a leading influence be assured to the revolutionary proletariat over the urban and rural masses. Together with the inevitable downfall of the present government will come the downfall of the present leaders of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates. To preserve the authority of the Soviet as a representative of the Revolution, and to secure for it a continuance of its functions as a directive power, is now within the power only of the present minority of the Soviet. This will become clearer every day. The epoch of Dual Impotence, with the government able and the Soviet not daring, is inevitably culminating in a crisis of unheard-of severity. It is our part to husband our energies for this moment, so that the question of power may be met with in all its proportions.

June 1917

Notes

1. “Party Truce”. At the outbreak of the First World War, the German Social Democracy declared a “Burgfieden” truce with the bourgeoisie and gave up all opposition to the Kaiser’s Government. The French Socialists had their “L’Union Sacrée”or Sacred Union of the Nation.

2. Early in June the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and the Kronstadt masses generally rose against the Provisional Government : the mildest epithet used against them, in the Russian and foreign press, was “anarchists”. The Kronstadt Council of Workers and Soldiers had, by a vote of 210 to 40, repudiated the Provisional Government, declaring that it recognized only the authority of the Petrograd Council. This action was distorted into an attempt to secede from Russia. The Baltic sailors were an active revolutionary force in all stages of the Revolution – against Czarism, against the Provisional Government, and in the overthrow of Kerensky by the Bolsheviks. – L.C.F.

Democracy, Pacifism and Imperialism
(June 30, 1917)

There have never been so many pacifists as at this moment, when people are slaying each other on all the great highways of our planet. Each epoch has not only its own technology and political forms, but also its own style of hypocrisy. Time was when the nations destroyed each other for the glory of Christ’s teachings and the love of one’s neighbour. Now Christ is invoked only by backward governments. The advanced nations cut each other’s throats under the banners of pacifism a league of nations and a durable peace. Kerensky and Tseretelli shout for an offensive, in the name of an “early conclusion of peace.”

There is no Juvenal for this epoch, to depict it with biting satire. Yet we are forced to admit that even the most powerful satire would appear weak and insignificant in the presence of blatant baseness and cringing stupidity, two of the elements which have been released by the present war.

Pacifism springs from the same historical roots as democracy. The bourgeoisie made a gigantic effort to rationalize human relations, that is, to supplant a blind and stupid tradition by a system of critical reason. The guild restrictions on industry, class privileges, monarchic autocracy these were the traditional heritage of the middle ages. Bourgeois democracy demanded legal equality, free competition and parliamentary methods in the conduct of public affairs. Naturally, its rationalistic criteria were applied also in the field of international relations. Here it hit upon war, which appeared to it as a method of solving questions that was a complete denial of all “reason”. So bourgeois democracy began to point out to the nations – with the tongues of poesy, moral philosophy and certified accounting that they would profit more by the establishment of a condition of eternal peace. Such were the logical roots of bourgeois pacifism.

From the time of its birth pacifism was afflicted, however, with fundamental defect, one which is characteristic of bourgeois democracy ; its pointed criticisms addressed themselves to the surface of political phenomena, not daring to penetrate to their economic causes. At the hands of capitalist reality the idea of eternal peace, on the basis of a “reasonable” agreement, has fared even more badly then the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity. For Capitalism, when it rationalized industrial conditions, did not rationalize the social organization of ownership, and thus prepared instruments of destruction such as even the “barbarous” Middle Ages never dreamed of.

The constant embitterment of international relations and the ceaseless growth of militarism completely undermined the basis of reality under the feet of pacifism. Yet it was from these very things that pacifism took a new lease of life, a life which differed from its earlier phase as the blood and purple sunset differs from the rosy-fingered dawn.

The decades preceding the present war have been well designated as a period of armed peace. During this whole period campaigns were in uninterrupted progress and battles were being fought, but they were in the colonies alone.

Proceeding, as they did, in the territories of backward and powerless peoples, these wars led to a division of Africa, Polynesia and Asia, and prepared the way for the present world war. As, however, there were no wars in Europe after 1871 – in spite of a long series of sharp conflicts – the general opinion in petty bourgeois circles began gradually to behold in the growth of armies a guarantee of peace, which was destined ultimately to be established by international law with every institutional sanction. Capitalist governments and munition kings naturally had no objections to this “pacifist” interpretation of militarism. But the causes of world conflicts were accumulating and the present cataclysm was getting under way.

Theoretically and politically, pacifism stands on the same foundation as does the theory of the harmony of social interests. The antagonisms between capitalist nations have the same economic roots as the antagonisms between the classes. And if we admit the possibility of a progressive blunting of the edge of the class struggle, it requires but a single step further to accept a gradual softening and regulating of international relations.

The source of the ideology of democracy, with all its traditions and illusions, is the petty bourgeoisie. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it suffered a complete internal transformation, but was by no means eliminated from political life. At the very moment that the development of capitalist technology was inexorably undermining its economic function, the general suffrage right and universal military service were still giving to the petty bourgeoisie, thanks to its numerical strength, an appearance of political importance. Big capital, in so far as it did not wipe out this class, subordinated it to its own ends by means of the applications of the credit system. All that remained for the political representatives of big capital to do was to subjugate the petty bourgeoisie, in the political arena, for their purposes, by opening fictitious credit to the declared theories and prejudices of this class. It is for this reason that, in the decade preceding the war, we witnessed, side by side with the gigantic efforts of a reactionary-imperialist policy, a deceptive flowering of bourgeois democracy with its accompanying reformism and pacifism. Capital was making use of the petty bourgeoisie for the prosecution of capital’s imperialist purposes by exploiting the ideologic prejudices of the petty bourgeoisie.

Probably there is no other country in which this double process was so unmistakably accomplishing itself as in France. France is the classic land of finance capital, which leans for its support on the petty bourgeoisie of the cities and the towns, the most conservative class of the kind in the world, and numerically very strong. Thanks to foreign loans, to the colonies, to the alliance of France with Russia and England, the financial upper crust of the Third Republic found itself involved in all the interests and conflicts of world politics. And yet, the French petty bourgeois is an out-and-out provincial. He has always shown an instinctive aversion to geography and all his life has feared war as the very devil – if only for the reason that he has, in most cases, but one son, who is to inherit his business, together with his chattels. This petty bourgeois sends to Parliament a radical who has promised him to preserve peace – on the one hand, by means of a league of nations and compulsory international arbitration, and on the other, with the cooperation of the Russian Cossacks, who are to hold the German Kaiser in check. This radical depute, drawn from the provincial lawyer class, goes to Paris not only with the best intentions, but also without the slightest conception of the location of the Persian Gulf, and of the use, and to whom, of the Baghdad Railway. This radical-“pacifist” bloc of deputies gives birth to a radical ministry, which at once finds itself bound hand and foot by all the diplomatic and military obligations and financial interests of the French bourse in Russia, Africa and Asia. Never ceasing to pronounce the proper pacifist sentences, the ministry and the parliament automatically continue to carry on a world policy which involves France in war.

English and American pacifism, in spite of the differences in social and ideological forms (or in the absence of such, as in America), is carrying on, at bottom, the same task ; it offers to the petty and the middle bourgeoisie an expression for their fears of world cataclysms in which they may lose their last remnants of independence ; their pacifism chloroforms their consciences – by means of impotent ideas of disarmament, international law and world courts – only to deliver them up body and soul, at the decisive moment, to imperialism, which now mobilizes everything for its own purposes : industry, the church, art, bourgeois pacifism and patriotic “Socialism.”

“We have always been opposed to war : our representatives, our ministry have been opposed to war”, says the French citoyen, “therefore the war must have been forced upon us, and in the name of our pacifist ideals we must fight it to the finish.” And the leader of the French pacifists, Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, endorses this pacifist philosophy of an imperialist war with a pompous jusq’au bout. [To the end – Ed.]

The English Stock Exchange, in its prosecution of the war, has need first of all of pacifists of the Asquith (Liberal) and Lloyd George (radical demagogue) type. “If these people go in for war,” say the English masses, “right must be on our side.” Thus a responsible function is allotted to pacifism in the economy of warfare, by the side of suffocating gases and inflated government loans.

More evident still is the subordinate role played by petty bourgeois pacifism with regard to Imperialism in the United States. The actual policy is there more prominently dictated by banks and trusts than anywhere else. Even before the war the United States, owing to the gigantic development of its industry and its foreign commerce, was being systematically driven in the direction of world interests and world policies. The European war imparted to this imperialistic development a speed that was positively feverish. At a time when many well-meaning persons were hoping that the horrors of the European slaughter might inspire the American bourgeoisie with a hatred of militarism, the actual influence of European events was bearing on American policy not in psychological channels, but in material ones, and was having precisely the opposite effect. The exports of the United States, which in 1913 amounted to 2,466 million dollars, rose in 1916 to 5,481 millions ! Of course, the lion’s share of this export fell to the lot of the war industries. The sudden breaking off of exports to the Allied nations after the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare meant not only the stoppage of a flow of monstrous profits, but threatened with an unprecedented crisis the whole of American industry, which had been organized on a war footing.

It was impossible for this thing to go on without some resistance from the masses of the people. To overcome their unorganized dissatisfaction and to turn it into channels of patriotic cooperation with the government was therefore the first great task of the internal diplomacy of the United States during the first quarter of the war.

And it is the irony of history that orncial “pacifism”, as well as “oppositional pacifism”, should be the chief instruments for the accomplishment of this task : the education of the masses to military ideals.

Bryan rashly and noisily expressed the natural aversion of the farmers and of the “small man”generally to all such things as world-policy, military service and higher taxes. Yet, at the same time that he was sending wagonloads of petitions, as well as deputations, to his pacifist colleagues at the head of the government, Bryan did everything in his power to break the revolutionary edge of the whole movement. “If war should come,” Bryan telegraphed on the occasion of an anti-war meeting in Chicago last February, “we will all support the goverment of course ; yet at this moment it is our sacred duty to do all in our power to preserve the nation from the horrors of war.”These few words contain the entire programme of petty bourgeois pacifism : “to do everything in our power against the war” means to afford the voice of popular indignation an outlet in the form of harmless demonstration, after having previously given the government a guarantee that it will meet with no serious opposition, in the case of war, from the pacifist faction.

Official pacifism could have desired nothing better. It could now give satisfactory assurance of imperialist “preparedness”. After Bryan’s own declaration, only one thing was necessary to dispose of his noisy opposition to war, and that was, simply, to declare war. And Bryan rolled right over into the government camp. And not only the petty bourgeoisie, but also the broad masses of the workers, said to themselves : “If our government, with such an out-spoken pacifist as Wilson at the head, declares war, and if even Bryan supports the government in the war, it must be an unavoidable and righteous war ...” It is now evident why the sanctimonious, Quaker-like pacifism of the bourgeois demagogues is in such high favour in financial and war industry circles.

Our Menshevik and Social-Revolutionist pacifism, in spite of apparent differences, is in reality, playing the same part as American pacifism. The resolution on war passed by the majority of the All Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants, condemns the war not only from a pacifist stand-point, but also because of the imperialist character of the war. The Congress declares the struggle for an early conclusion of the war to be “the most important task of revolutionary democracy”. But all these premises are merely mobilized so that they may lead to the conclusion : “until such time as the war may be ended by the international forces of democracy, the Russian revolutionary democracy will be obliged in every possible way to cooperate in strengthening the fighting power of our army and rendering it efficient for both offensive and defensive action.”

The revision of the old international treaties, the Congress, like the Provisional Government, would make dependent on a voluntary agreement of Allied diplomacy, which in its very nature, neither desires nor is able to relinquish the imperialist aims of the war. The Congress, following its leaders, makes the “international forces of democracy” depend on the will of the social-patriots, who are bound by iron chains to their imperialist governments. Voluntarily restricitng themselves in the question of “an early end of the war to this charmed circle, the majority of the Congress naturally arrives at a very definite conclusion in the domain of practical politics : an offensive on the military front. This “pacifism”, which solidifies and disciplines the petty bourgeois democracy and induces it to support an offensive, ought manifestly to be on most friendly terms not only with the Russian imperialists, but also with those of the Allied nations.

Miliukov says : “In the name of our fidelity to our Allies and to the old (diplomatic) treaties, we must have an offensive.”

Kerensky and Tseretelli say : “Although the old (diplomatic) treaties have not yet been revised, we must have an offensive.”

The argument may differ ; the policy is the same. Nor could it be otherwise, since Kerensky and Tseretelli are indissolubly bound up in the government with the party of Miliukov. As a matter of fact, the social-patriotic pacifism of the Dans, as well as the Quaker pacifism of the Bryans, are both operating in the service of Imperialism.

In view of this state of affairs, the chief task of Russian diplomacy is not to make Allied diplomacy refrain from this act or that or to revise this thing or that, but to make Allied diplomacy believe that the Russian Revolution is safe and sound and solvent. The Russian Ambassador, Bakhmetiev, in his speech before the Congress of the United States, delivered on June 10, characterized the Provisional Government chiefly from this point of view.

“All these circumstances,” said the Ambassador, “point to the fact that the power and significance of the Provisional Government are growing day by day, that with each passing moment the Provisional Government is becoming better able to cope with all those elements that mean disaster, whether they take the form of reactionary propaganda or that of an agitation by the members of the extreme left. At the present time the Provisional Government is determined to take the most drastic steps in this direction, resorting to force, if need be, in spite of its constant ndeavours for a peaceful solution of all questions.”

There is no doubt that the “national honour” of our “defenders” remains absolutely unruffled while the Ambassador of “revolutionary democracy” fervently persuades the parliament of the American plutocracy of the readiness of the Russian government to pour out the blood of the Russian proletariat in the name of “order”, the chief ingredient of which is its fidelity to Allied Capitalism.

And at the very moment when Bakhmetiev stood hat in hand, a humiliating speech passing over his lips, in the presence of the representives of Capitalism, Tseretelli and Kerensky were explaining to the “revolutionary democracy” how impossible it was to dispense with armed force in its fight with “the anarchy of the left”, and threatening to disarm the workers of Petrograd and the regiment which made common cause with them. We know that these threats came just in the nick of time ; they served as a strong argument in favour of the Russian Loan in Wall Street. You see, Mr. Bakhmetiev was in a position to say : “our revolutionary pacifism differs in no respect from your own brand of pacifism, and if you put your faith in Bryan, there is no reason why you should distrust Tseretelli.”

There remains to us only the necessity of putting one question : How much Russian flesh and Russian blood will it take, on theexternal front as well as in the interior, in order to secure the Russian Loan, which, in its turn, is to guarantee our continued fidelity to the Allies ?

June 30, 1917

The July Uprising
(July 1917)

Blood has flowed in the streets of Petrograd. A tragic chapter has been added to the Russian Revolution. Who is to blame ? “The Bolsheviks,” says the man in the street, repeating what his newspapers tell him. The sum total of these tragic happenings is exhausted, as far as the bourgeoisie and the time-serving politicians are concerned, in the words : Arrest the ringleaders and disarm the masses. And the object of this action is to establish “revolutionary order”. The Social-Revolutionists and the Mensheviks, in arresting and disarming the Bolsheviks, are prepared to establish “order”. There is only one question : What kind of order, and for whom ?

The Revolution aroused great hopes in the masses. Among the masses of Petrograd, who played a leading role in the Revolution, these hopes and expectations were cherished with exceptional earnestness. It was the task of the Social-Democratic Party to transform these hopes and expectations into clearly-defined political programmes to direct the revolutionary impatience of the masses in the channel of a planful political action. The Revolution was brought face to face with the question of state power. We, as well as the Bolshevik organization, stood for a handing over of all power to the Central Committee of the Councils of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Delegates. The upper classes, and among them we must include the Social-Revolutionists and the Mensheviks, exhorted the masses to support the Miliukov-Guchkov government. Up to the last moment, that is, up to the time when these more distinctly imperialist figures of the first Provisional Government resigned, both the above-mentioned parties were firmly united with the government all along the line. Only after the reconstruction of the government did the masses learn from their own newspapers that they had not been told the whole truth, that they had been deceived. They were then told they must trust the new “coalition” government. The revolutionary Social Democracy predicted that the new government would not differ essentially from the old, that it would not make any concessions to the Revolution and would again betray the hopes of the masses. And so it came to pass. After two months of a policy of weakness, of demands for confidence, of verbose exhortations, the government’s position of beclouding the issues could no longer be concealed. It became clear that the masses had once more – and this time more cruelly than ever before – been deceived.

The impatience and the mistrust of the great body of workers and soldiers in Petrograd was increasing, not day by day, but hour by hour. These feelings, fed by the prolonged war, so hopeless for all participating in it, by economic disorganization, by an invisible setting up of a general cessation of the most important branches of production, found their immediate political expression in the slogan : “All Power to the Soviets !” The retirement of the Cadets and the definite proof of the internal bankruptcy of the Provisional Government convinced the masses still more thoroughly that they were in the right as opposed to the official leaders of the Soviets. The vacillations of the Social-Revolutionists and the Mensheviks simply added oil to the flames. The demands, almost persecution, addressed to the Petrograd garrison, requiring them to inaugurate an offensive, had a similar effect. An explosion became inevitable.

All parties, including the Bolsheviks, took every step to prevent the masses from making the demonstration of July 16 ; but the masses did demonstrate, and with weapons in their hands, moreover. All the agitators, all the district representatives declared on the evening of July 16 that the July 17 demonstration, since the question of power remained unsettled, was bound to take place, and that no measures could hold back the people. That is the only reason why the Bolshevik Party, and with it our organization, decided not to stand aloof and wash its hands of the consequences, but to do everything in its power to change the July 17 affair into a peaceful mass demonstration. No other was the meaning of the July 17 appeal. It was, of course, clear, in view of the certain intervention of counter-revolutionary gangs, that bloody conflicts would arise. It would have been possible, it is true, to deprive the masses of any political guidance, to decapitate them politically, as it were, and, by refusing to direct them, to leave them to their fate. But we, being the Workers’ Party, neither could nor would follow Pilate’s tactics : we decided to join in with the masses and to stick to them, in order to introduce into their elemental turmoil the greatest measure of organization attainable under the circumstances, and thus to reduce to a minimum the number of probable victims. The facts are well known. Blood has been spilled. And now the “influential” press of the bourgeoisie, and other newspapers serving the bourgeoisie, are attempting to put on our shoulders the entire burden of responsibility for the consequences – for the poverty, the exhaustion, the disaffection and the rebelliousness of the masses. To accomplish this end, to complete this labour of counter-revolutionary mobilization against the party of the proletariat, there issue forth rascals of anonymous, semi-anonymous or publicly branded varieties, who circulate accusations of bribery : blood has flowed because of the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks were acting under the orders of Wilhelm.

We are at present passing through days of trial. The steadfastness of the masses, their self-control, the fidelity of their “friends”, all these things are being put to the acid-test. We are also being subjected to this test, and we shall emerge from it more strengthened, more united, than from any previous trial. Life is with us and fighting for us. The new reconstruction of power, dictated by an inescapable situation, and by the miserable half-heartedness of the ruling parties, will change nothing and will solve nothing. We must have a radical change of the whole system. We need revolutionary power.

The Tseretelli-Kerensky policy is directly intended to disarm and weaken the left wing of the Revolution. If, with the aid of these methods, they succeed in establishing “order”, they will be the first – after us, of course – to fall victims of this “order”. But they will not succeed. The contradiction is too profound, the problems are too enormous to be disposed of by mere police measures.

After the days of trial will come the days of progress and victory.

July 1917

And Now ? What Struggle for the State Power ?

The number one goal of the revolutionary workers : the soviets and their seizure of power

No other perspective for the world than the revolutionary power of workers organized in soviets (which requires the destruction of capitalist state power)

With all due respect to the lackeys of capitalism, the reactionaries, the reformists, the pessimists, the skeptics, the anti-communists, the anti-Bolsheviks, the anti-Trotskyists, the false Trotskyists, the opportunists, the leftists and the anarchists, the only way out for the working people of the world is to organize themselves into soviets with a view to seizing state power and destroying all state powers in the world, starting with those of the imperialist powers.

Some will say that the revolution is not yet topical and that this question is not of burning urgency. For them, it is useless to utter ultra-radical sentences, far too advanced in relation to the situation and misunderstood by the workers, and they are mistaken (and deceive us) seriously and gravely. On the contrary, what must constantly guide our daily political, union and social activity as well as our action is to guide the working class towards its principal task : to seize state power. How can we conceive that this is topical when workers’ struggles are not at all insurrectional and the union apparatuses do not even have difficulty controlling them ? Well, even simple strikes, demonstrations or rallies, but even any problem in the company must be the occasion for meetings, even informal ones, of employees, even the drafting of a leaflet by employees can be the occasion for collective discussions and decisions. However, as Pierre Bois, a Trotskyist activist in the Barta group, a worker at Renault Billancourt and organizer of the 1947 strike committee that defeated the French Stalinist bureaucracy at the highest level of its power, explained, "every revolutionary worker must consider each meeting of workers as a soviet and the soviet is nothing other than the embryo of the workers’ state." This is exactly what we no longer understand at all and what we no longer defend in the false opportunist extreme left (including the false heir of Pierre Bois, linked to the union apparatuses (which leave them a small place and a small role) and to bourgeois elections (which allow the bourgeois State to finance them and them to make people believe in democratic expression under capitalism !) In conclusion, there is no need for insurrectional situations to constantly campaign for the self-organization of workers, on the contrary, this must be the compass of the daily life of the worker activist, the one which first distinguishes the revolutionary from the reformist and the opportunist, the worker activist from the bureaucrat or guarantor of the bureaucrats : no leaflet without discussion between workers, no strike without a decision by workers organized at the base, no demonstration or other action without the most organized collective decision possible by workers on the goals, methods, slogans, demands, no support for the bureaucracy, no guarantor for the negotiators. Those who spend their time in meetings with our enemies are not our friends. Those who do without the workers’ point of view and collective decision are our false friends.The strategies of conquest of the trade union apparatuses by small so-called revolutionary groups are camouflages of opportunism (defined by Engels as the betrayal of revolutionary goals due to the attempt to succeed faster than the progress of the exploited class allows).

It will be noted that the opportunist pseudo-revolutionaries talk a lot about the general denunciation of capitalism, about the revolution to be made (while remaining vague about the consequences in militant activity), about communism for distant days, about the necessity of overthrowing capitalism at a later date, about the revolutionary party to be built from now on and, on all this, they have no direct contradiction with the trade union and state apparatuses. They are careful not to reason as we do above : to center their compass on the North (the role of workers’ councils as future leaders of the workers’ state).

What also characterizes bourgeois politicians, from the right as well as the left or the left of the left, or union or association leaders, is their attachment to the state apparatus : no more statist than Mélenchon ! And none of them in any way envisages the objective of overthrowing the bourgeois state, not to mention its replacement by the state of workers’ soviets (they prefer to pretend that defending this would be Stalinism and that they are hostile to it because they are democrats !).

And curiously, it turns out that on one point, from the most reactionary to the most "left-wing," they happen to converge with the false revolutionaries... It is on the question, fundamental above all, of the workers’ state. The extreme left are also its adversaries, in fact even more so than in theory. For them, the state necessarily has the character of a power outside the working class and, if they try to take power there, is bound to turn against it, as was the case with Stalinism. Bureaucratization seems to them to flow naturally from the constitution of the soviets as the basis of the state. This is the case whether they are bourgeois politicians, anarchists, left communists, councilists, Luxemburgists, Bordigists, supporters of Pannekoek or Korsch, etc. In any case, all call on workers to turn away from any objective of a workers’ state. Others, like the fake Trotskyists, say they are in favor but assert that it is not time to talk about a Soviet state or about soviets, that we must talk about a revolutionary party that campaigns to overthrow capitalism, without talking about building soviets, without talking about breaking the capitalist state, without talking about giving power to workers’ councils, implying that a party that leads the unions, managing to seize the reins of the state, could be perfectly fine. The French organization Lutte Ouvrière, falsely Trotskyist, is, for example, navigating in this type of muddy waters.

Of course, being in favor of the Soviet state does not guarantee against all problems, especially against the risks of bureaucratization. There is no magic formula that protects against real problems, especially the isolation of the proletarian revolution in one of the most backward countries in the capitalist world.

Of course, state power in the hands of the workers means that we are still in barbarism, that the exploiting social classes still exist and that a class war must still be waged against them and that the workers’ state is the instrument of this fight. But to overcome the barbaric stages, we must not reject the only weapons that the proletariat can have, state power. Nevertheless, we revolutionary Marxists have always agreed on one point with the anarchists : the existence of the state, even the workers’ state, is still barbarism and the final objective is the total disappearance of the state. It is for Stalinism that the workers’ state is not, as for Lenin, a state in the process of disappearing, that the "socialist" state is the nec plus ultra, that communism is combined with the strengthening of the power of the state and not with its weakening with the undisguised objective of its disappearance, as Lenin explained more than clearly in "The State and Revolution". And the workers’ state is a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and not a dictatorship against the proletariat. It is a dictatorship only against the tiny minority of capitalists and their armed supporters.

Anarchists, left-wing communists of all kinds, and other socialist purists do not explain to us how to successfully combat the armed forces of imperialism and capitalism without equipping ourselves with the weapon of the State, how to make the Soviets triumph without the State of Soviets.
What is the workers’ state ?

Whether it is called "dictatorship of the proletariat," "workers’ state," "commune state," "soviet power," or "power to the workers," the goal was affirmed and clearly claimed by Marx and Engels as an inevitable step on the road to socialism. However, this notion is no longer defended in a Marxist manner by today’s so-called Marxist far left.

Karl Marx :

"Between capitalist society and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter. This corresponds to a period of political transition in which the State cannot be anything other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

https://www.marxists.org/francais/lenin/works/1917/08/er5.htm

Friedrich Engels : "The social-democratic philistine was recently seized with a salutary terror on hearing the word dictatorship of the proletariat. Well, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like ? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Karl Marx : "When the Paris Commune took the direction of the revolution into its own hands ; when ordinary workers, for the first time, dared to touch the governmental privilege of their ’natural superiors,’ the propertied class, and, under circumstances of unparalleled difficulty, carried out their work modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently (and carried it out for wages the highest of which barely reached one-fifth of what, according to a high scientific authority, Professor Huxley, is the minimum required for a secretary to the London Board of Education), the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the red flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor, waving over the Hôtel de Ville.
And yet, it was the first revolution in which the working class was openly recognized as the only one still capable of social initiative, even by the great mass of the middle class of Paris—shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants—the rich capitalists being the only ones excepted."

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, on the dictatorship of the proletariat

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6870

Lenin : "The Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, Peasants’, etc., Deputies remain misunderstood in the sense that most people do not have a clear idea of the class significance, of the role of the Soviets in the Russian Revolution. But what is also not understood is that they represent a new form of state, or more precisely a new type of state."

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article416

Lenin : "All power to the Soviets"

https://matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7426

https://matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5189

Lenin in "The State and Revolution" : "The workers’ state, that is to say, the proletariat organized as a ruling class."

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article155

What did the Soviets do when they took power in Russia ?

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1583

The dictatorship of the proletariat, according to Leon Trotsky

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1465

How workers can organize themselves and decide the future of society as a whole

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7443

"The exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer free itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie) without at the same time and forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggle ; this central idea belongs solely and exclusively to Marx," wrote Engels.

https://www.marxists.org/english/engels/works/1883/06/fe18830628.htm

The historical mission of the proletariat : to seize state power not to preserve it but to move towards socialism by moving towards the abolition of social classes and states.

https://www.marxists.org/francais/loriot/works/1928/04/loriot_19280401.htm

Seize power by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat

https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/00/dictature/dictature_du_proletariat.pdf

Only one army worth building : the International Workers’ Red Army

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7602

The world of work must govern itself !

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6004

Workers’ power and socialism are vital necessities for humanity

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8073

The state that the Workers’ Struggle organization wants to establish is not the power of workers’ soviets.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7513

Why rejecting the workers’ state and the bourgeois state back to back amounts to... supporting the latter

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7492

Our main difference with the French far left : they are not clear about the nature of the capitalist state !

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5462

The question of power is certainly the most important question of any revolution.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5189

Rejecting the workers’ state disarms even the most dynamic of proletarian revolutions.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2430

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4795

Revolution is an open showdown between social forces struggling for power. The state is not an end in itself. It is only a machine in the hands of the dominant social forces.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1434

The State and Revolution, by Lenin

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article140

Power to the workers after October

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6453

The only possible democracy, in a period of acute crisis of capitalist domination, is to wrest from the bourgeoisie its instruments of domination.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6420

Faced with the current collapse of capitalism, the class politics of the proletariat leads it to take the leadership of the working people in order to seize state power.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5907

This does not mean that socialism is statism.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article373

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article148

Pannekoek and Bourrinet against the workers’ state

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5270

Bordiga against the workers’ state

http://www.pcint.org/04_PC/102/102_programme-revolutionnaire.htm

Michel Olivier against the workers’ state

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5478

Anarchists against the workers’ state

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7433

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article280

The Luxemburgists against the workers’ state

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?breve1280

The NPA against the workers’ state

https://npa-lanticapitaliste.org/actualite/politique/letat-la-democratie-et-la-revolution-retour-sur-lenine-et-1917

The Workers’ Struggle against the Workers’ State organization

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7513

The PCF against the workers’ state

https://www.marxists.org/francais/4int/doc_uc/1976/01/proletariat.html

Mélenchon against the workers’ state

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz-CyIdVdYg

The world’s first experiment with a workers’ state : the Paris Commune of 1871

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3402

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1185

Russia : Soviets in power

https://www.marxists.org/francais/lenin/works/1919/03/vil31031919.pdf

Spain : Soviets who manage but do not move towards power

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2430

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3709

However, it is not enough for the Soviets to take power to move towards socialism.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7423
What is the greatest global danger ? War, nuclear power, climate change, pollution, racism, fascism, immigration ? No ! Let the proletarians lose the opportunity to take control of all of society !