The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 26th July on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.
This chapter just rounds off the book, by illustrating how various supposedly illustrious leaders of the Second International tried desperately to evade the question of the state, and in particular the need to smash the existing, capitalist state machine, that was the core of Marx and Engels developed understanding. As Lenin said, he was addressing these questions briefly. We will obviously address them still more briefly, as this discussion does not have time to go into too much detail. Nor do we need to: the records of Kautsky and Plekhanov in WWI speak for themselves.
Plekhanov was earlier known as the ‘father of Russian Marxism’. Lenin and the Bolsheviks in a sense stood on his shoulders for his pioneering work in the Emancipation of Labour group beginning in 1883, which was also the year of Marx’s death. He certainly was a pioneer, but his politics over time revealed his limitations, and even though he founded Iskra along with Lenin in 1900, and initially sided with Lenin in the dispute over the definition of Party membership that was the basis for the Menshevik-Bolshevik split in 1903, he still gravitated towards the Mensheviks. Though he was in favour of a strong party with an effective paper, he increasingly embraced reformism and social chauvinism, and supported Russia in WWI. Lenin’s brief account of his controversy with the anarchists notes that Plekhanov made no mention of the need to smash the existing capitalist state, and replace it with a state consisting of the armed working class.
Kautsky’s conflict with Eduard Bernstein, the arch-revisionist of the SPD and Second International, is better known. It was paralleled by Rosa Luxemburg’s famous polemic against Bernstein, Reform or Revolution, where she concluded that reform and revolution were not different ways of travelling on the same road (to socialism), but entirely different roads. Kautsky’s own controversy with Bernstein was in an 1899 work called Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Programme. It involved some kind of defence of Marx and Engels against what amounted to a false polemic in which Bernstein attempted to associate the Marxists with Blanquism, the view that a revolutionary minority could seize power without the masses being active participants.
Bernstein likewise tried repeatedly to try to identify Marx’s views on the Paris Commune with those of the French anarchist Pierre Proudhon. And Bernstein repeatedly quoted the most crucial point in the 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels stated that:
“the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”
Bernstein argued that Marx and Engels were there cautioning the working class against being too ambitious about what could be done with the state. In other words, he claimed Marx was cautioning the workers against too much zeal in trying to make use of the existing state. He did not mention the conclusion that Marx drew from that sentence – that the existing state needed to be smashed, broken up, and replaced with the armed workers organised as a state. As Lenin noted: “A cruder more hideous distortion of Marx’s idea cannot be imagined.” Yet Kautsky did not denounce Bernstein for this distortion in his criticism. He implied that Marx’s statement was not an absolute, and that despite this, Marx was agnostic on what could be done with the existing state, and said:
“We can quite safely leave the solution of the problems of the proletarian dictatorship to the future”
He failed to attack this obvious distortion in Bernstein’s work. That would have meant acknowledging Marx’s position on the need to smash the state. As Lenin noted:
“This is not a polemic against Bernstein, but, in essence, a concession to him, a surrender to opportunism; for at present the opportunists ask nothing better than to ‘quite safely leave to the future’ all fundamental questions of the tasks of the proletarian revolution.”
Kautsky again avoided the issue of the state in subsequent, celebrated works. In The Social Revolution (1902), in the words of Lenin again, he:
“…chose as his special theme the question of ‘the proletarian revolution’ and the ‘proletarian regime’. He gave much that was exceedingly valuable, but he avoided the question of the state.”
Lenin noted that:
“Kautsky treats the matter as follows: the victorious proletariat ‘will carry out the democratic programme’, and he goes on to formulate its clauses. But he does not say a word about the new material provided in 1871 on the subject of the replacement of bourgeois democracy by proletarian democracy.
Instead, Kautsky simply said:
“Still, it goes without saying that we shall not achieve supremacy under the present conditions. Revolution itself presupposes long and deep-going struggles, which, in themselves, will change our present political and social structure.”
Changing the “present” structure implies evolution, not the sharp disjuncture signified by the call to smash the existing state and replace it with a proletarian dictatorship. Instead, he wrote that:
“The most varied form of enterprises—bureaucratic, trade unionist, co-operative, private… can exist side by side in socialist society. … There are, for example, enterprises which cannot do without a bureaucratic organization, such as the railways. Here the democratic organization may take the following shape: the workers elect delegates who form a sort of parliament, which establishes the working regulations and supervises the management of the bureaucratic apparatus.
Lenin counterposed to this:
“The workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the ground; they will replace it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and other employees, against whose transformation into bureaucratic will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election, but also recall at any time; (2) pay not to exceed that of a workman; (3) immediate introduction of control by all, so that all may become “bureaucrats” for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a “bureaucrat”.
Lenin then criticises Kautsky’s last work against the opportunists, The Road to Power (1909). As he notes that:
“The author explicitly points to the aggravation of class antagonisms in general and to imperialism, which plays a particularly important part in this respect. After the ‘revolutionary period of 1789-1871’ in Western Europe, he says, a similar period began in the East in 1905. A world war is approaching with menacing rapidity. ‘It [the proletariat] can no longer talk of premature revolution.’ ‘We have entered a revolutionary period.’ The ‘revolutionary era is beginning’.
Yet again, for all this, Lenin notes that:
“… although Kautsky so explicitly declared that the era of revolution had already begun, in the pamphlet which he himself said was devoted to an analysis of the ‘political revolution’, he again completely avoided the question of the state.”
and noted that:
“This pamphlet of Kautsky’s should serve as a measure of comparison of what the German Social-Democrats promised to be before the imperialist war and the depth of degradation to which they, including Kautsky himself, sank when the war broke out…. These evasions of the question, these omissions and equivocations, inevitably added up to that complete swing-over to opportunism with which we shall now have to deal.”
So, we pass on to Kautsky’s controversy with the Dutch communist Anton Pannekoek. The latter was one of the ‘left radical’ trend in the Second International, aligned with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Radek. After the war, Pannekoek became one of the ultra-lefts that Lenin was compelled to oppose in the early Comintern. At this stage there are some signs of those flaws, but against Kautsky he was on the right track. Pannekoek in a 1912 article Mass Action and Revolution described Kautsky’s position as ‘passive radicalism’, as a ‘theory of inactive expectancy’ and said that ‘Kautsky refuses to see the process of revolution’. He then went on:
“The struggle of the proletariat is not merely a struggle against the bourgeoisie for state power, but a struggle against state power…. The content of this revolution is the destruction and dissolution of the instruments of power of the state with the aid of the instruments of power of the proletariat.” and he carries on “The struggle will cease only when, as the result of it, the state organization is completely destroyed. The organization of the majority will then have demonstrated its superiority by destroying the organization of the ruling minority.”
This is formulated in an odd way, but on careful examination, it implies that the new state of the proletariat “proves its superiority” by “destroying the [state] organisation of the ruling minority.” A revolutionary position. Kautsky responded to this by saying that:
“Up to now, the antithesis between the Social-Democrats and the anarchists has been that the former wished to win the state power while the latter wished to destroy it. Pannekoek wants to do both.”
As Lenin pointed out, with this criticism, Kautsky “Kautsky completely abandoned the Marxist position and went over wholly to opportunism”, and that:
“His definition of the distinction between the Social-Democrats and the anarchists is absolutely wrong; he completely vulgarizes and distorts Marxism”
Lenin points out the complete dishonesty of Kautsky’s argument against Pannekoek, when he tried to say that Pannekoek wanted to destroy ‘centralism’ in the state whereas Marx had said: “resolute centralization of power in the hands of the state authority” – in a different context. Kautsky lectured that:
“No, not one of the present ministries will be removed by our political struggle against the government…. I repeat, in order to prevent misunderstanding: we are not discussing here the form the ‘future state’ will be given by the victorious Social-Democrats, but how the present state is changed by our opposition.”
Lenin responded that:
“This is an obvious trick. Pannekoek raised the question of revolution. … Kautsky substitutes the opportunist for the revolutionary point of view. What he says means: at present we are an opposition; what we shall be after we have captured power, that we shall see. Revolution has vanished! And that is exactly what the opportunists wanted.
“The point at issue is neither opposition nor political struggle in general, but revolution. Revolution consists in the proletariat destroying the ‘administrative apparatus’ and the whole state machine, replacing it by a new one, made up of the armed workers. Kautsky displays a “superstitious reverence” for “ministries”; but why can they not be replaced, say, by committees of specialists working under sovereign, all-powerful Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies?”
Kautsky’s whole horizon in this discussion was within the terrain of the existing state:
“According to Kautsky, since elected functionaries will remain under socialism, so will officials, so will the bureaucracy! …. Marx, referring to the example of the Commune, showed that under socialism functionaries will cease to be “bureaucrats”, to be “officials”, they will cease to be so in proportion as—in addition to the principle of election of officials—the principle of recall at any time is also introduced, as salaries are reduced to the level of the wages of the average workman, and as parliamentary institutions are replaced by ‘working bodies, executive and legislative at the same time’”
We will not go into too much fine detail here, suffice to say that Lenin’s criticises Kautsky’s reverence for the existing state, its bureaucracies, ministries, etc, and notes that Kautsky completely avoids the question of revolution and the need to destroy the existing state.
He uses sophistry to accuse Pannekoek of opposing “centralisation” when what Pannekoek is actually advocating (albeit using bombastic language that Lenin considers to be counter-productive in explaining the issue) is the smashing of the existing state, and its replacement by the working class itself organised as the new state power. Kautsky pretty much makes clear his opposition to this when he argues:
“Its object [the object of the mass strike] cannot be to destroy the state power; its only object can be to make the government compliant on some specific question, or to replace a government hostile to the proletariat by one willing to meet it half-way…. But never, under no circumstances can it [that is, the proletarian victory over a hostile government] lead to the destruction of the state power; it can lead only to a certain shifting of the balance of forces within the state power…. The aim of our political struggle remains, as in the past, the conquest of state power by winning a majority in parliament and by raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government.”
So, the real content of Kautsky’s earlier left centrism in The Social Revolution and The Road to Power, etc. is revealed. As Lenin said:
“This is nothing but the purest and most vulgar opportunism: repudiating revolution in deeds, while accepting it in words. Kautsky’s thoughts go no further than a ‘government… willing to meet the proletariat half-way’—a step backward to philistinism compared with 1847, when the Communist Manifesto proclaimed “the organization of the proletariat as the ruling class”.
“Kautsky will have to achieve his beloved ‘unity’ with the Scheidmanns, Plekhanovs, and Vanderveldes, all of whom agree to fight for a government ‘willing to meet the proletariat half-way’.
“We, however, shall break with these traitors to socialism, and we shall fight for the complete destruction of the old state machine, in order that the armed proletariat itself may become the government. These are two vastly different things.”
What is instructive in all this is that these issues were all fought out before the decisive betrayal of social democracy in 1914. The signs were there, and Rosa Luxemburg, who was active in the Germany party at the time, picked them up more quickly than Lenin, who was geographically more distant from Kautsky’s real world activities. Kautsky’s centrism, that led him to give a ‘left’ cover to the social chauvinists and social imperialists during the war, and to oppose the creation of a new, Third International to combat and overthrow the Second International once it went over wholesale to imperialism, was clearly visible before the war.
