What is Wrong with “One Solution, Revolution!”?

Submitted by Anon on 16 July, 2007 - 11:52

by Albert Glotzer
Many of the core activists of today’s left had their thinking shaped by the dramatic struggles of 1979-84, or of the late 1960s and early 70s — times when capitalism seemed to be in intractable crisis, and mass working-class action to change society was a prospect near at hand.

Adjusting to the huge expansion of capitalism since the 1980s, and the ebb of labour movements (a temporary ebb, but a long temporary ebb) is difficult.

Many leftists patch over the problem by pretending that “revolution” is still at hand, a pretence they can sustain only by accrediting the successes of Islamist clerical-fascism as “revolutionary”. This stance leads to much revolutionary verbiage, but very far from working-class policies.

The article we here reprint (abridged) by Albert Glotzer can help us. Essentially, it is a discussion of an earlier experience with the same problem — how to respond to capitalist revival and working-class ebb — as it presented itself in the aftermath of World War Two.

Writing in 1946 for the American Trotskyist magazine New International, under the name Albert Gates,, Glotzer discuss the issues by reference to and comparison with yet an earlier experience of the problem — the ebb of working-class struggle, and relative capitalist revival, which came around 1921, after the tumult and revolutionary risings of 1918-20. He does it in the form of a review of the first volume of Trotsky’s book The First Five Years of the Communist International.

Glotzer starts off by recounting the ideas and efforts of the Communist International in its earliest days, when it strove with desperate urgency to extend the workers’ revolution which had been victorious in Russia in November 1917 to the more industrially-advanced countries in Europe.

He then goes on to discuss the debates which the revolutionaries had in 1921. A large section of the Communist Parties argued for a policy of “uninterrupted revolutionary offensive”. Trotsky, with Lenin, was on the “right wing” of the debate.

The “uninterrupted offensive” advocates represented the freshest, most “innocent”, “cleanest” of those who were unable to adjust to reality. Even in those days, there were other devotees of the simplistic idea “one solution, revolution” who ended up embracing reactionary movements.

In 1919, a faction of the German Communist Party around Heinrich Laufenberg and Friedrich Wolfheim saw revolutionary potential in the German-nationalist reaction (led by the incipient Nazi movement) against defeat in World War One. They advocated an alliance with the nationalists to drive French troops out of the parts of Germany they occupied and smash the post-war peace settlement, the Treaty of Versailles. Lenin discussed this faction briefly in his pamphlet Left Wing Communism.

In 1923 the maverick Bolshevik Karl Radek advocated similar foolishness, in his infamous “Schlageter speech”. He called on German workers to hail as a martyr the Nazi Albert Schlageter, who had been arrested, court-martialled and executed by the French when attempting guerrilla resistance against them. “Hundreds of Schlageters”, claimed Radek, would rally to the Communist cause if the Communists identified themselves with the nationalists.

In 1946 Glotzer was polemicising against Joseph Hansen and other “orthodox Trotskyists” who then advocated something not too different from the early-1920s “uninterrupted revolutionary offensive”. Self-deludingly, they saw the working class as “far more receptive to the programme of Bolshevism than in 1917-19”.

The self-delusion disoriented the “orthodox Trotskyists”. Within a couple of years it would have disoriented them so much that they came to accept Stalinist revolution — as carried out by Tito in Yugoslavia or Mao in China — as the “actually existing” revolution of their day, in much the same way as some leftists today adopt the cause of Islamist revolution, or the German “national Bolsheviks” adopted Nazi revolution.

Glotzer’s article cites an important passage from Trotsky’s main report at the Third Congress in the Communist International (1921) in which Trotsky outlined the conditions in which — after the decades of chaos, slump, and war which actually followed in the next 25 years — “a new epoch of capitalist upswing” might emerge.

Glotzer then dismisses that “new capitalist upswing” as something that “will likely never occur”, although in hindsight he was writing just at start of 30 years of capitalist growth far faster than what Marx and Engels saw as the heady expansion of 19th century capitalism. Today we know that upswing happened; that it lurched into a period of acute crises; and that after that period yet another upswing has emerged.

War and the International

The Communist International was not an insidious product of the Russian Bolsheviks, as the bourgeois and social democratic critics of the International maintained. The history of the Russian Revolution, coming on the heels of the collapse of the Second International in the war, made it inevitable that the re-emergence of a new world organization of the proletariat would take place in revolutionary Moscow. How else could it have happened? The Second International was rent by social chauvinism. The leading parties which dominated the International and controlled its policies were at war with each other, having joined their respective ruling classes in the imperialist conflict.

The collapse of the International made inevitable the formation of a new world body. After the fateful date August 4, 1914, new organizations, groups, and factions of revolutionary internationalists made themselves heard all over Europe. Under the leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks and the brave revolutionists of the other Continental countries, a new voice was heard in the din of the war: the voice of revolutionary socialist internationalism. Zimmerwald and Kienthal were the first organized expression of the revival of internationalism in the workers movement in the midst of the war. The Russian Revolution then occurred as the healthiest force for the reconstitution of the new, Third International. The victory of the Russian working class was like a breeze on a Europe befouled by imperialism and the treacherous social democratic leadership.

Given these conditions it was logical that the International reconstituted on the soil of revolutionary Russia which heralded the new society, the new fraternity of the exploited. At the convening of the founding congress in Moscow on March 2, 1919, the continuity and integrity of the revolutionary socialist thought and practice was saved. Its formation marked a new stage and task for the modem proletariat.

Of the Internationals

The First International “laid the foundation of the international struggle of the proletariat for Socialism.” It disseminated scientific principles of socialism developed by Marx and Engels and destroyed for all time the power and influence of utopianism, “true” socialism and anarcho-communism, and gave the coming movement of the proletariat its scientific basis. The First International of Marx and Engels disappeared with the defeat of the Paris Commune and the beginning of a new epoch in the expansion of world capitalism. But it had sown the seed of the future.

In assessing the role of the Second International, ne must not lose sight of the fact that it too had a grand history. Before its collapse in the War, the Second International had been a preparatory school of working class organization. And Lenin, in an historical appraisal of this body, once wrote:

“When it is stated that the Second International is dead and suffered shameful bankruptcy, it needs to be properly understood. It signifies death and bankruptcy of opportunism, reformism, petty bourgeois socialism. Far the Second International has to its credit a service for all time which no intelligent working man will ever repudiate, and is — the building up of mass labor organizations, co-operative, trade union and political; the utilization of bourgeois parliamentarism, and generally all bourgeois democratic inventions, etc.”

The Communist International took over all that was good about the previous history of the Second International, but it gave the new movement a rekindled spirit of internationalism, the lack of which caused the old organization to founder. The historic place of the Communist International is thus secured by the fact that it became the International of proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the “International of the deed.”

Trotsky’s book is a summation of this heroic period of the Communist International. It presents one of the most stirring histories of an era of intense class struggle and presents a panorama of revolutionary strategy, purposeful in design, by the most complete revolutionary internationalists the world has known. Trotsky contributed an enormous amount of this history himself. The vibrant call of the manifesto of the first congress was his. He wrote the manifesto of the second congress. The main report at the third congress, and the theses of that gathering, perhaps the most important in the history of the Comintern, were also his. Between these great documents, there are speeches and articles outlining the strategy of the Comintem which remain living documents to this very day and are invaluable source material to revolutionary Marxist thought.

This volume of Trotsky’s book can be readily divided into two distinct periods: the First and Second Congresses, and the Third Congress. The first two gatherings occur in the post-war revolutionary period; the third in the period following the defeat of the European proletariat in its initial struggles for power. Unavoidably, then, the material which composed the deliberation of these congresses dealt with the problems which arose in the transition from the stage of proletarian offensive to defensive; from the stage of capitalist decomposition to one of relative stabilization.

The First Congress of the Communist International was held in Moscow on March 2, 1919. It was attended by 51 delegates from 17 countries. The Allied blockade of Russia prevented wider representation. Delegates sent by their respective organizations never arrived in Moscow, but representatives of the most important areas of Europe were present.

Manifesto of the First Congress

The manifesto which Trotsky wrote and presented to the congress clearly delineates the purposes of the new international and the period in which it emerged: Capitalist chaos and disintegration! Mass unrest and a will to struggle on the part of the working masses. Toward the revolutionary seizure of power! No wonder the manifesto is a stirring call to action:

“Our task is to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class, to purge the movement of the corroding admixture of opportunism and social patriotism, to unify the efforts of all genuinely revolutionary parties of the world proletariat and thereby facilitate and hasten the victory of the Communist revolution throughout the world.”

And it concludes with this ringing challenge:

“Bourgeois world order has been sufficiently lashed by Socialist criticism. The task of the International Communist Party consists in overthrowing this order and erecting in its place the edifice of the socialist order. We summon the working men and women of all countries to unite under the Communist banner which is already the banner of the first great victories.

“Workers of the world — in the struggle against imperialist barbarism, against monarchy, against the privileged estates, against the bourgeois state and bourgeois property, against all kinds and forms of class or national oppression — unite!

“Under the banner of Workers’ Soviets, under the banner of revolutionary struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the banner of the Third International — workers of the world unite!”

The manifesto of 1919 became a rallying force for the new world organization of the revolutionary proletariat. Eighteen months later the Second Congress convened. This intervening period was the most revolutionary in the history of Europe. Throughout the continent the Communist International established new sections. Its growth was phenomenal and reflected the turbulent character of the class war that girdled the globe. Thus, the Second Congress concerned itself chiefly with the struggle for power as an immediate prospect.

Theoretical Clarity and Political Struggle

Clarification of principle became indispensable for the future development of the new movement; a world party engaged in the struggle for power in the name of the only progressive class in society.

As in all periods of revolutionary upswing, the movement attracted dubious elements of every description, organized in their own parties, factions or groups, or unattached. These hybrid elements brought with them an assortment of theoretical and political ideas which ran the gamut from sectarianism to opportunism. The excursion train was long one and tended to slow the progress of the revolutionary engine at its head.

The congress therefore had to return to basic principles: the role of a revolutionary party, shall revolutionaries participate in parliamentary activity? Shall Communists work in reactionary trade unions? On all these questions, the congress rejected the sterile doctrines of sectarianism which could only lead to isolation from the masses. It then adopted conditions for admission into the Communist International, the basic premise of which was the acceptance of the revolutionary doctrines of Marxism.

The continuation of the intensive revolutionary offensive was also reflected in the manifesto of the Second Congress, which Trotsky wrote, too. So sure of the future were the leaders of the International, that the manifesto, issued again as a call to action, proclaimed:

“Civil war is on the order of the day throughout the world. Its banner is the Soviet Power. . . In different countries the struggle is passing through different. stages. But it is the final struggle.”

How nearly true these stirring words were, we can only appreciate in retrospect. The failure of the victory, however, was revealed as a failure of leadership. Only a few years afterward, Trotsky was able to write:

“War did not lead directly to the victory of the proletariat in Western Europe. It is all too obvious today just what was lacking for victory in 1919 and 1920: a revolutionary party was lacking.”

This statement by Trotsky is in apparent contradiction to the reality, the existence of the Communist International. Yet, actually, its formation was belated. Had the Communist International been formed during the war, it is likely that the parties which adhered to it would have passed through their formative, preparatory stages in time.

Instead, the First and Second Congresses met in the course of the revolutionary wave and had to carry through the task of clarification and education during the battles itself. Thus, the struggle for power was pursued in the midst of a process of clarification and education in which the advance guard of the proletariat had to discard the ideological trash of social democracy and to learn, for the first time, the theory and practice of revolutionary Marxism, of revolutionary strategy and tactics. Before this process of rearming was nearly completed, the revolutionary wave had passed.

In his Third International After Lenin, Trotsky wrote of this period between the second and third congresses, relating specifically to the lack of maturity of the communist parties

“When we looked forward at that time to an immediate seizure of power by the proletariat, we reckoned that a revolutionary party would mature rapidly in the fire of the civil war. But the two terms did not coincide. The revolutionary wave of the post-war period ebbed before the communist parties grew up and reached maturity in the struggle with the social democracy so as to assume the leadership of the insurrection.”

(Henceforth, in at least four other significantly revolutionary situations, especially in Germany in 1923, the defeats of the proletariat were attributable to a new failure in leadership resulting this time from the degeneration of the Communist International under the aegis of Stalinist revisionism.)

THIRD CONGRESS

When the CI arrived at its very important Third Congress, the revolutionary wave had subsided. The proletariat, worn out from years of war and revolutionary struggle, exhibited marked tendencies of fatigue and disillusionment at the future of their revolutionary parties. The failure of the revolution gave capitalism a new breathing spell and the opportunity to reestablish a measure of economic equilibrium.

The Third Congress which met mid-year of 1921, was attended by more than 500 delegates from 48 countries. The most important subject before the congress was the report made by Trotsky (in complete agreement with Lenin) on World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International. The main content of this report and the revolution which formed its basis is already indicated.

In summary, Trotsky’s report showed the delegates the dialectical relationship between an objectively revolutionary situation and the problem of leadership, the subjective element. He illustrated, by example, how the failure of the revolution gave world capitalism the opportunity for reorganizing the chaotic economy and reestablishing a measure of stabilization. Given the failure of the revolutionary parties, the exhaustion of the proletariat, Trotsky was able to pose for the first time since the end of the war this type of question:

“Does development actually proceed even now in the dire failure of revolution? Or is it necessary to recognize that capitalism has succeeded in coping with the difficulties arising from war? And if it has not already restored, is it either restoring or close to restoring capitalist equilibrium upon new post-war foundations?”

The report already indicated the answer in its opening remarks in which Trotsky said:

“Capitalist equilibrium is an extremely complex phenomenon. Capitalism produces this equilibrium, disrupts it, restores it to new in order to disrupt it anew, concurrently extending the limits of its domination.... Capitalism thus possesses a dynamic equilibrium, one which is always in the process of either disruption or restoration. But at the same time this equilibrium has a great power of resistance, the best proof of which is the fact that the capitalist world has not toppled to this day.”

There follows a mass of evidence indicating how capitalism was gaining strength and confidence, repairing its tottering economy, plugging gaps here and there and reaching a stabilization of the system. “The bourgeoisie gains appeasement” said Trotsky. But with this difference: whereas the period of capitalist growth and expansion, crises were of “prosperity” longer lasting, in this period of capitalist decay and decline, the “crises are of a prolonged character while the booms are fleeting, superficial and speculative”. Thus the prospects of economic crises and sharp dislocations are ever present.

Then Trotsky made clear that even boom and stabilization did not automatically preclude the prospects of great class struggle. On the contrary, a favorable economic conjuncture can “reassemble the demoralized workers who had lost their courage.” And then he led, “Such a change (stabilization) could prove harmful only in the event of a long epoch of prosperity.” Denying this prospect, Trotsky contends that the future will offer favorable opportunities for victory. And it did.

The “Uninterrupted Revolution”

The emphasis given to this problem by Trotsky was made necessary by the presence at the congress of an ultra-leftist faction led by Bukharin whose major premise was his own version of the “permanent revolution”: “Since capitalism had exhausted itself, therefore the victory must be gained through an uninterrupted revolutionary offensive.”

It was against this pernicious theory of the “uninterrupted revolutionary offensive” that the big guns of the conference were turned. The report declared that the great task, in view of the changing world situation, was to win the support of the majority of the working class everywhere. “To the Masses,” came the slogan of the Congress. But not simply that. “To power through a previous conquest of the masses!” The emphasis laid on this point was to defeat all ultra-leftist and sectarian ideas which arose in the congress.

The ultra-leftists proceeded on a single note: “this is the period of the decay of capitalism. All the objective conditions for the overthrow of capitalism are ripe. Therefore we must adopt the policy of continuous revolution.” And in this way they overlooked the dynamics of the revolutionary struggle and the fact that “the revolution has its own fluctuations, its own crises and its own conjunctures.”

The Third Congress, however, met at the end of one wave of revolution. It was necessary to reorient the International to a new stage of the struggle. This stage Trotsky summarized the Third International After Lenin as follows:

“The Third Congress of the Comintern was a milestone demarcating the first and second periods. It set down the fact that the resources of the communist parties, politically as well as organizationally, were not sufficient for the conquest of power. It advanced the slogan: ‘To the Masses,’ that is, to the conquest of power through a previous conquest of the masses, achieved on the basis of the daily life and struggles. For the mass also continues to live its daily life in a revolutionary epoch, even if in a somewhat different manner.”

And out of this congress came the tactic of the united front to serve as a means of developing the class struggle and achieving leadership of the masses. How? Through the united front tactic, to fuse the masses “on the basis of transitional demands”.

“It is economics that decides;” wrote Trotsky, “but only in the last analysis.” In other words, it is not merely the decay of capitalism, the “objectively revolutionary situation” which is decisive, but the state of the revolutionary movement, the maturity of the parties, their leadership over the masses, the will to struggle on the part of the proletariat and their confidence in the revolutionary party. And the absence of these conditions, given the defeat of the post-war revolutionary movements, brought about a new political stage in Europe and the decisions of the Third Congress.

Capitalism saved itself, but it was a wounded giant. The healing process left it alive but it was not the youthful, strong, expanding capitalism. The fact was, as Trotsky reported at the Third Congress, that “Europe has been hurled back.... The Balkan countries are completely ruined and have been thrown back into the economic and cultural conditions of barbarism.” He speaks of a “regression in economic life.” However, all is not lost for the bourgeoisie so long as the proletariat does not take power.

In 1921, still living under the influence of the post-war revolutionary situation, Trotsky did not believe that capitalism could survive another decade or two. But he did postulate the future, saying:

“If we grant —and let us grant it for the moment — that the working class fails to rise in revolutionary struggle, but allows the bourgeoisie the opportunity to rule the world’s destiny for a long number of years, say, two or three decades, then assuredly some sort of new equilibrium will be reestablished. Europe will be thrown violently into reverse gear. Millions of European workers will die from unemployment and malnutrition. The United States will be compelled to reorient itself on the world market, reconvert its industry, and suffer curtailment for a considerable period. Afterwards, after a new world division of labor is thus established in agony for 15 or 20 or 25 years, a new epoch of capitalist upswing might perhaps ensue.”

How prophetic Trotsky was! A new upswing has not occurred and will likely never occur. But a new period of stabilization did arrive. The United States did orient itself on the world market and did “suffer curtailment for a considerable period.” This whole course of development continued approximately until the outbreak of the Second World War. For a second time within living memory the imperialist powers went to war to seek a new redivision of the earth.

But whereas in 1914 it was possible to depict the great revolutionary upheavals during and after the war, one could not justifiably make such predictions for the recent war and post-war period. And this was due, not to the absence of favorable objective conditions. This period of capitalism remains a period of “wars and revolutions,” of capitalist decline and disintegration.

This past war was far more destructive than the first, far more dislocating in its effects. If Trotsky declared that Europe was “hurled back” after the First World War, what would he have said today! If the Balkan countries lived under “economic and cultural conditions of barbarism” in the 20’s, what can one say of Europe today, Europe of the concentration camps, labor camps, forced migrations of peoples; Europe, the economic wasteland. These, then, are the fruits of modern capitalism.

The Meaning of the Struggle for Power

Why did not the proletariat revolt and take power after World War 1? Why no class battles, no revolutionary offensive comparable to 1919 and 1920? The answer is simple: no revolutionary organization of the working class; no revolutionary parties.

Revolutionary Maixists cannot approach this question sentimentally or emotionally. One must apply the power of Marxist analysis to the world situation in order to understand precisely the conditions under which we live, what the prospects of the class struggle are, and how the revolutionary socialists must orient themselves.

Delusion is the greatest danger to the movement today! The delusion lies in the failure to recognize that all talk of an immediate successful overthrow of capitalism in this period is criminally disorienting given the absence of the revolutionary organization of the proletariat, the absence of mass revolutionary parties, the absence of experienced cadres, i.e., leadership, and the absence of a revolutionary international with authority over and the following of the majority of the working class of Europe.

Yet it is upon such leadership and proletarian organization that the whole future depends. If one does not recognize this task, then the reconstruction of the movement is an impossibility!

Can a small party (not of hundreds, but of thousands) achieve the strategic goal? Perhaps. Says Trotsky: “And therefore if it is true — and it is true — that under certain conditions even a small party can become the leading organization not only of the labor movement but also of the workers’ revolution, this can happen only with the proviso that this small party discerns in its smallness not an advantage but the greatest misfortune of which it must be rid as speedily as possible.”

This was said against those who developed putschist concepts and the idea that the revolution is the task of a small minority party whose will is decisive, no matter what the objective conditions and the state of proletarian organization.

“A purely mechanical conception of the proletarian revolution,” said Trotsky, “which proceeds solely from the fact that capitalist economy continues to decay — has led certain groups of comrades to construe theories which are false to the core: the false theory of an initiating minority which by its heroism shatters ‘the wall of universal passivity’ among the proletariat. The false theory of uninterrupted offensives conducted by the proletarian vanguard, as a ‘new method’ of struggle; the false theory of partial battles which are waged by applying the methods of armed insurrection.... It is absolutely self-evident that tactical theories of this sort have nothing in common with Marxism.... “The economic preconditions for the victory of the working class are at hand. Failing this victory, and moreover unless this victory comes in the more or less near future, all civilization is menaced with decline and degeneration. But this victory can be gained only by the skilled conduct of battles and, above all, by first conquering the majority of the working class. This is the main lesson of the Third Congress.”

That the publication of the book is an invaluable contribution to the movement, goes without saying. The explanatory notes, however, are sloppily done and unscholarly. They give the evidence of slip-shod work and petty factional bias, lacking in objectivity.

But even worse than this is the introduction to the book. Nature and God were unkind to Joseph Hansen. They enabled him to write and what flows from his pen is indeed a commentary on the intellectual sterility of the theoreticians of the SWP USA. The introduction has no relation to the ideas in the book. Banalities and assertions replace reality. Sectarian braggadocco substitute for the living movement. Thus, the introduction reaches its high point (or low, depending on your point of view) when Hansen asserts:

“. . . the organizations of the Fourth International ... find the world working class far more receptive to the program of Bolshevism than was the case in 1917-19.”

Were this only true! But one blinks his eyes upon reading such undiluted bureaucratic smugness which proclaims achieved that which is yet to be achieved, which counts as completed that which has to be done. Is it any wonder that the forces of the Fourth International make such slow progress? That despite the heroic activities of the European sections, they have failed to grow more rapidly.

One of the reasons for this failure is that the concepts and practices of the SWP have exercised too great an influence upon these European sections. These sections have not absorbed the great teachings of Trotsky, the theoretician of revolutionary strategy and tactics of our era. They too are saturated with a sectarianism which casts a shadow over what is the main strategic task of our period: the building of the revolutionary socialist party.

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