Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.—V.I.Lenin
I.LW.P. BULLETIN
Weekly newspaper of the International Leninist Workers Party (P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box.50, London SW17  9NL)(GP0 Regd.)                 
 No 536 Wednesday March 7 1990                                                                                            10p
Sales meetings at 1.30 on Saturday. Receipts needed.

Leninist view sharper than ever despite Red Army withdrawal

The capitalist countries, the revisionist bureaucracies, and the 'left' swamp in the West, - are all in turmoil over the supposed conflict about 'socialism or free enterprise' because of ignorant prejudice against historical perspective.

In East Europe, endless argument goes round in circles over formal constitutional questions while the essence of the problem facing the world socialist revolution is avoided.

Reformism, Trotskyism, and centrism snipe at the socialist camp from outside (after the long retreat from Leninism since the 1920s has finally paralysed the workers states), but without the remotest sign of abandoning the hopeless cynicism which makes posturing gestures towards Marxist-Leninist theory but in practice sits back to gleefully cheer on the baby being thrown out with the bathwater all over East Europe and in revolutionary countries further afield.

Among the imperialist states, confusion and foreboding rise steadily. Everyone's instincts sense that the Great Crash is coming, followed by the most merciless trade war in history, and the greatest upheaval in the major powers pecking order that has ever been known, with incalculable consequences for the entire Third World (including ailing imperialist countries like Britain, slumbering giants like India and Brazil, and the vast host of weaker capitalist states.) 

But bourgeois market confidence requires that such thoughts be banished from all official discussions. The time bomb ticks on. The fate of the USSR and Gorbachevism remain one huge central focus containing enormous implications for how the remainder of the massive debate goes over the future of the whole of civilisation's affairs.

The appearance, at last, of a United Workers Opposition (UWO) at least gives a hope that serious Leninist polemics might finally have been sparked off by the ludicrous philistine opportunism of the Marxist-illiterate Gorbachev and his reactionary anti-communist circles.

In an unprecedented situation of revisionism degenerating into outright liquidationism, it still seems a fair bet that four generations of transformed property and production relations including the massive experiences themselves of the original revolution and 5-year civil war against white reaction and imperialist intervention, plus the further scalding jolt and staggering triumph of the second imperialist invasion and defeat (Nazi Germany), - might have built up sufficient sense and spirit of proletarian class leadership to not submit willingly now to the kind of bourgeois society and capitalist exploitation and international-stooge-of-imperialism role that Gorbachevism has mapped out for the Soviet Union.

But even if the long decades of revisionist complacency and bureaucratic stagnation have wiped out hopes of a truly Leninist movement reviving, clear that only world socialist revolution can solve the earth's problems, — then at least it might be hoped that some serious theoretical resistance be put up at last against the obviously treacherous hostility of Gorbachev to socialism, and against the blatant idealist-philosophical fraudulence of his shallow 'theoretical' conmanship.

If Gorbachev is challenged as a crooked charlatan by a sufficiently large movement, it will at least give the steadily-expanding international revolutionary forces something to relate to in the sick turmoil of collapsing revisionist bureaucracies, and also make easier a critique of imperialism's anti-communist hysteria and
triumphalism by reminding the bourgeoisie that there are powerful material interests all round the world which do not go along with the insane 'free-world' press stampede that 'capitalist values and organisation have proved invincible'.

It is a salutary reminder to the screaming petty-bourgeois hordes chanting 'freedom', 'democracy', 'people power', 'free press', 'worker-participation' 'free trade unionism', etc to note that the parliamentary-market system still fails to offer even a semblance of these 'human rights' in 80% of the territory capitalism controls on earth, and that these frauds make no difference to the actual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the 'advanced' handful of countries, - which is why the class-revolutionary front line still snakes right round the planet from the Philippines to El Salvador and from Palestine to South Africa.

It helps to be able to add to the list of the massed ranks, - sympathetic to the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Cuba, etc, - the name of a sizable opposition in the Soviet Union, which has past experience of the alleged 'benefits' that the rule of the capitalist system ('bourgeois democracy') brings, but still resolutely rejects it despite all the organisational chaos and theoretical confusion that revisionist bureaucracy has inflicted on the USSR.

But nothing is yet guaranteed in this curious, first-time-ever collapse of a revisionist bureaucracy, and it is also necessary to prepare to say, - along with Castro, - that the ideal of a one-party workers state of Marxist-Leninist leadership remains the untarnished goal of revolutionary struggle, no matter what degenerate class-collaborating delusions the revisionist-philistine bureaucracy in Moscow has been responsible for, - going it alone if needed.

Building the socialist order requires above all else the greatest flowering of public polemical discussion that the world has ever seen. It is utterly insane for the mountebank Gorbachev to be pretending to be discussing with the people of the USSR whatever it is that is now supposed to be being built in the Soviet Union but to never debate seriously, - with informed Leninist participation, - the actual international political and economic context in which the socialist camp's endeavours are struggling to develop.

This miserable nonsense of failing to try to involve mass understanding in the very highest affairs of state has grown steadily worse since Stalin first began retreating, from Leninism and from open polemics on every matter, in the 1920s to cover up mistakes in the leadership's work. This long retreat from Leninism has deteriorated relentlessly ever since, - until it comes to the point now where Gorbachev postures theatrically about 'glasnost' but hasn't the faintest idea what Marxism Leninism is, and so hasn't a clue what it is he is supposed to be 'open' about. Who knows what the Soviet people might be willing to build under revolutionary leadership if they were again energetically besieged with Leninist world perspectives (updated to take into account the precise present condition of the imperialist system’s terminal crisis) in the way that they were with such dramatic effect in the period of Lenin, and on limited issues and for limited periods subsequently when the Stalin leadership was still occasionally getting some things half-right and had not begun to demoralise the masses and the party cadres with the disgusting arbitrariness and subjectivism which mushroomed as the mistakes and setbacks mounted.

Abandoning the world revolutionary socialist perspective was always going to create terrible problems eventually, one way or another. And now it can be seen that the relentless growth of bureaucratic philistinism has finally resulted in total stagnation.

The world's first workers state is still there, as powerful as ever, and the greatest social achievement in all human history. But it has ended up with a leadership so degenerate and decrepit that it has enabled bourgeois ideology to soar into orbit on the tide of confusion and demoralisation created.

But no matter how impressive some short-term economic and social achievements of capitalism are over a narrow field, - the system's catastrophic record of longterm disasters, impossible unevenness, and anarchic unfairness and injustice is more intolerable to more people on earth now than it has ever been.

It is in their sectarian hatred of having an international balance of class forces analysed in this way that the 'left' swamp spreads its most poisonous defeatist failure.

On the question of German imperialist expansionism, for example, the posturing Trots deliberately ignore the rich and explosive historical issues raised by the Red Army's retreat from vulnerable East Europe (which was so easily dominated by the Third Reich in the pre-war period and with such disastrous consequences). The armchair-socialist Trots do this out of their dogmatic obsession with slandering the remnants of the workers states built under Red Army protection, and with deliberately refusing to see any value in the socialist reconstruction which kept the whole of East Europe out of the orbit of imperialist expansionism and fascist revanchism for 45 years.

Instead of noting the informed horror with which part of the GDR population for example, is reacting against the neo-nazi chauvinism which is creeping back into German political life as the West sinks its ruthless monopoly-finance-capital tentacles into the East, - the SWP anti-communists, for instance, mindlessly declare that "We do not believe that a united Germany will necessarily attempt to take over the rest of Europe".

This gibberish, - abolishing at a stroke the entire Marxist-Leninist history of analysing imperialism and its unavoidable economic expansionist imperatives, -  bilges out, polluting workers' understanding, solely because these fake-'lefts' are dominated by their anti-communist obsession.

Typical of fake-'left’ posturing, the SWP love to cover up their basic political confusion with bold-type phony 'principles' such as: 

"If the majority of East German workers decide they want unity with West Germany, then socialists should not oppose them."

Once again, the naïve armchair-socialist world of zero perspectives. What would be the worth of spouting such empty 'principles' if, for example, the vision of Germany between imperialism and the Soviet camp had lasted until that not-far-distant point when the capitalist trade war had reached such a peak that fully-fledged 'lebensraum' chauvinism was vengefully back in the saddle in Deutschland screaming for retaliation against the 'Anglo-Saxon conspirators', etc, exactly as Hitler's party was voted into power in the 1930s in the course of three general elections. Would the 'principle' still hold then that GDR public opinion 'should be free to adopt unity' with, say, a West Germany led by the neo-nazi Republican Party? 

Of course no such precise conditions apply at the moment, but the point is to expose the irresponsible posturing of these lightweight fake-'lefts' whose sick sectarianism is incapable of considering the actual longer-term imperialist-crisis circumstances which will be facing all workers in Europe before very long. What workers need preparing for in Europe is a communist-internationalist fight against the warmongering-chauvinist crisis that the bourgeois-capitalist states will be attempting to inflict on the masses, - each working class preparing to turn revolutionary weapons on its own bourgeois-state leadership.

What preparation is it, for such an unprecedented (for this generation) Marxist-Leninist outlook, for posturing Trotskyite empty chatter to be pretending to make some 'weighty point' about GDR workers exercising a completely bogus 'principled right' to be sucked into the relentlessly-mounting chauvinist imperialist scene (with the all-powerful monopoly-capitalist German trusts inevitably in the van once again)?

It is no preparation at all, of course, but once more just empty Trotskyite bilge spewing out to cover up more sectarian posturing against the real issues posed by the disintegration of the revisionist workers states.

On another point, the SWP describe the imperialist Kohl as running fast on the reunification issue to capitalise quickly before the end-of-year elections. It is certain that the SWP would make it a 'point of principle' to refuse considering that Kohl might just be hurrying for fear that Gorbachev could soon be ousted by a more anti-imperialist regime in the Soviet workers state which could insist on reviving the socialist GDR and spiking imperialism's more immediate Central European expansionist plans.

Trotskyism's sectarian anti-communist hatred reached its sickest expression in the SWP's Paul Foot sneers at Mandela and the triumphant ANC/SACP revolutionary struggle which has forced half the white imperialist establishment to sue for peace. It is a doctrine more rigid than five times-a-day prayers toward Mecca for Trots to denounce 'in principle' anything remotely pro-Soviet as an obvious 'sell-out':

But reaction started to set in for me when I read Nelson Mandela's first speech to a huge meeting in Cape Town. Not to put too fine a point on it, it read like a legal brief which had been carved up by lawyers. For instance, in the middle of the speech he used the phrase "inter alia".

It is only a small point perhaps, but I felt it was a sign that Nelson Mandela and his advisers have already decided that reforms in South Africa are best left to the small minority, black and white, who know what inter alia means.

These forebodings grew the following day, when Nelson Mandela returned to an enormous welcome in Soweto. Though he conceded that the ANC had waged a defensive war against apartheid, he spent paragraph after paragraph denouncing black violence of one kind or another.

In all great revolutionary moments there are people representing the masses who rush forward in the belief that they, as the masses' representatives, can win reforms without the active help of the masses. Every time the only beneficiary is repression.

What a shocking comment on the politics of his organisation that Nelson Mandela, one of the most courageous and famous of all political prisoners in history, should now be preparing to play out that discredited role.

The ANC/SACP may yet fall into some appalling popular-frontist errors emanating from rotten Third International revisionist traditions, but the practical perspective in southern Africa (for anyone not diseased with subjective sectarian bias, endemic among anti-theory philistinism in the West) is that since breaking from the revisionist 'peaceful road to socialism' delusion 30 years ago, the pro-Soviet mass movement there has achieved some historic revolutionary overthrows of imperialism, arms in hand.

The MPLA drove Portuguese colonialism out of Angola, and then thrashed the Western-backed stooge armies of Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi to take power and begin building socialism. Later the MPLA, backed by Cuban revolutionary forces, delivered a cataclysmic revolutionary defeat to South African invasion forces (backing Savimbi's remnants) at Cuito Cuanavale and in several air battles, which forced Pretoria not only to quit its interference in Angola but also convinced the apartheid regime that SWAPO, based in Angola, would now become unbeatable. Thus SWAPO's long and heroic revolutionary struggle, arms in hand, finally achieved the liberation of Namibia against the most powerful imperialist armed force in the whole of African history.

In Mozambique, FRELIMO achieved equally brilliant feats in defeating the savage colonialist forces of Portugal, then more recently in resisting the brutal terrorist subversion of the South African trained and Western-backed Renamo fascist-mercenaries.

Once again, the socialist camp helped FRELIMO, (cause enough for the sick anti-communist SWP to hate it), and FRELIMO in turn helped the brilliant ZANU guerrilla-war triumph over the murderous Smith fascist regime backed for 14 years by Western arms and sanctions-busting (initially masterminded by the Wilson government of the British labour movement, a reactionary scene into which Foot fits so cosily).

And now 30 years of heroic ANC/SACP mass revolutionary struggle and organisation and armed action, bearing huge casualties, - is finally on the verge of one of the great historic triumphs in all world revolutionary history. And all that the demented anti-communist SWP Foot can do is sneer dismissively, - from the armchair-socialist Trot camp which has never won any victories over imperialism anywhere, and never will.

And this particular Foot Trot is the same SWP cretin who not many months ago incredibly urged the international proletariat to back the 'people power' filthy fraud of the reactionary feudal landowner Cory Aquino in the Philippines as a 'genuine hope for democratic socialism'.

In reality it has only meant a continuation of the same poisonous deathsquad armed fascism for the Filipino masses which has always ruled there; which is why US imperialism backed the sick 'people power' phenomenon in the first place, ousting the discredited Marcos for an alternative reactionary regime which would still guarantee, not 'socialism', but continued anti-communism and continued rights for the huge US imperialist Cold War bases at Subic Bay and Clark airfield.

Once again, this demented Trot criminality, - totally lacking in the slightest common sense or the most routine observation let alone lacking any shred of Marxist perspective, - was dictated solely by venomous subjective hatred by these petty-bourgeois fake-'left' sectarians for the pro-communist New Peoples Army which is waging a genuine revolutionary guerrilla war, which is what really put the skids under the evil Marcos dictatorship (not Aquino), - and is now doing the same to the fraudulent 'people power' feudal landowner regime which replaced it, - the idiot Foot’s hope for 'real democratic socialism'.

A more universally notorious Trot lack of perspective rumbles on in the reactionary form of Lech Walesa and the anti-communist government his CIA-and Vatican-financed Solidarnosc Catholic counter-revolution has just formed in Poland. Walesa is now a star of 'new right' imperialist political stunts worldwide (see below), cashing in on the international admiration which none worked more hysterically to build up than the Trots in the West. Once again, the potentially fascist content of such moronic shallowness meant nothing to the 'armchair socialist' Trot sectarians just so long as it boosted counter-revolution against the Soviet system.

The entire fake-'left' swamp remains all at sea, - from the 'Leninist' CPGB frauds to the SWP, - in venting subjective spleen instead of objective analysis of the revisionist debacle in East Europe.

It is certainly no 'peoples revolution' as the more moronic Trot petty bourgeoisie screech, - but more movements on a par with Cory Aquino and Lech Walesa anti-communist reaction.

But neither is it the 'peaceful counter-revolution from the GDR to the USSR' that the 'Leninist' defeatists utter in bilious despair.

Both the Soviet Union and the East European workers states are afflicted by Gorbachevism's further retreat from Bolshevik responsibility for standing up to world imperialism, but the consequences are quite different in each case.

The primary unique condition is that generally speaking, East Europe became socialist in practice largely as a result of the Red Army's conquest of the Nazi German empire, regardless of what might have happened if Soviet forces had not turned up.

And subsequently, in practice, the continued presence of Moscow's armed might, - coupled with the appalling bureaucratic revisionist policies imposed as far as possible by the CPSU, - still inflicted a huge influence in what happened in the workers states, - regardless of what similar revisionist mess might nevertheless have taken place even if Moscow had not been able to exert such a role (e.g. partly what happened in Yugoslavia and Albania).

First and foremost for East Europe, Gorbachevism has meant a total renunciation of any further role whatever for the Red Army in the workers states regardless of any development there (of a 'purely internal' (not that there is such a thing) character, and also presumably of a non-fascist character.)

Gorbachevism has had other influences too (equally bad) on the bureaucracies running the workers states.

But the effective removal of all further Soviet advice or Red Army control over developments in East Europe (short of an instant fascist-imperialist takeover) is the most far-reaching change.

The vast variety of consequences from this have not been fully analysed yet, and many deeper consequences further on are still not even visible.

But one obvious initial effect, of course, has been the 'counter-revolution' phenomenon by which the long relentless build-up of nationalist resentment at 'Soviet  domination', (as it has been perceived partly truthfully and partly as a result of the wretchedness of the performance by the native revisionist bureaucracy plus the hopeless inadequacy of much of Moscow's policy since 1945), - has immediately swept aside, - or even incorporated, - the socialist camp bureaucrats as soon as it was clear that Gorbachev was totally dismantling the entire Red Army framework of East Europe and not replacing it with anything at all.

Mass nationalist resentment, either of the Soviet role or of 'communism' as it has been perceived, has always been present throughout East Europe. Now the floodgates have been opened to this petty-bourgeois chauvinism, which instantly of course has gravitated towards glitzy Western arrogance and philistinism.

Any extent to which locally-grown socialist-state developments might on their own have stemmed, without Red Army support, the gadarene rush into the West’s arms, has hardly been put to the test because of the complete demoralisation of the ruling parties and bureaucracies (in the wake of Gorbachevite anti-socialist defeatism and counter-revolutionary international class-collaborationism.) 

Isolated pockets of good sense have spoken up in East Europe against the predatory infiltrations, already, of the 'elbow society', - but such was the revisionist theoretical bankruptcy of the remnants of the Third International in East Europe that not a spark of serious revolutionary Leninist perspectives against being taken over by imperialist influences has yet made much of a mark, (in the way that the emergence of the United Workers Opposition in the Soviet Union has raised hopeful questions.)

Moscow revisionist defeatism has done an even more criminal bunk from East Europe than it did from Afghanistan where at least the local revolutionary establishment was itself already well in the groove of giving a fighting rebuff to imperialist-sponsored counter-revolutionary reaction.

The regimes in East Europe appear to have virtually been advised not even to try fighting counter-revolutionary reaction (of the CIA/Vatican/Solidarnosc type) on their own. And in Romania's case, it is even suspected that Moscow was even willing to help overthrow Ceauşescu's workers state (basically anti-imperialist in spite of all its sick idiosyncrasies).

Thus although counter-revolutionary regimes have resulted in East Europe, or are steadily being put together, the all-powerful decisive action was not by bourgeois revanchism but by the Soviet Union's own decision to deliberately abandon its entire postwar Red Army-imposed socialist structure.

The current Moscow bureaucracy defeatism has decided in effect to retreat all the way back to 1945 and to allow the better-financed imperialist world to control the reconstruction of East Europe as well as West, - (as indeed the imperialists had hoped and wanted to do). This appalling capitulation has been decided upon in the wake of US imperialism being forced to put the Cold War arms race on the back burner (by the deadly threat to American world domination from Japanese and German inter-imperialist economic competition), - and as a result of Moscow's disillusionment at the patchy achievements of its revisionist policies and leadership in East Europe and in the USSR, and also as a result of Gorbachevism's anti-communist demoralisation and extreme anti-Leninist philistine ignorance. Given the chance to back out of some aspects of their costly 'socialist-camp leadership' super-power role by Washington's arms-budget cuts and reduced Cold War emphasis (from having its hands full with cut-throat trade and financial war against Germany and Japan), — Moscow's revisionist bureaucrats have incredibly seized the opportunity to instantly abandon completely all future military, political, and economic subsidising responsibilities for the whole of East Europe, - and possibly for some of the peripheral Soviet republics too.

Such a capitulation of course has nothing whatever to do with any economically-necessary 'Leninist NEP tactic' or politically necessary 'Leninist Brest-Litovsk tactic'. The issue is Gorbachevism's theoretical liquidationism from Marxism-Leninism in its entirety.

And while the effects so far of the issues raised by Gorbachevism are quite different in their destructive influence on East Europe compared to their damaging influence on the USSR, the Soviet case will not remain different unless healthy communist forces rally soon to force Gorbachev out of office.

The Soviet Union is not yet in the same plight as East Europe because of its own vast indigenous revolutionary achievements which are not remotely comparable to a socialist camp created by Red Army occupation.

Gorbachevism's retreat in the USSR is at the moment limited to incipient pluralism, flirtation with market forces, and an attempted ideological destruction of the entire Marxist-Leninist theoretical upbringing of the Soviet workers state. He has not yet dismantled the communist state structure of the Soviet Union as he has done to East Europe.

Therefore while as fully counter-revolutionary in his Soviet policies as in his demoralised capitulation to bourgeois imperialism in East Europe (and further afield too, it will inevitably emerge around the revolutionary socialist front line of the Third World in due course), Gorbachev is simply not in a position domestically to end Bolshevik development at a stroke, as he is doing abroad.

In the USSR, the fight should be on. Workers state forces healthier than Gorbachevism should emerge.

It will be hard to dismantle the whole Soviet Union into bourgeois-imperialist hands overnight, as seems to be virtually happening in parts of East Europe. And meanwhile, the primary world crisis (capitalism) is roaring ahead.

The colossal financial might produced by monopoly-capitalist markets is at the moment on the crest of a wave in destabilising the USSR, balkanising East Europe and Ethiopia, trapping the Sandinistas, and stomping on Panama, - but it is a fool's paradise.

The 'conquest rivalry' between the giants of the bourgeois 'free world' is plunging closer every day towards all-out trade war, which can only be followed by fascist-slump, rampant chauvinism, and inter-imperialist armed hostilities, - either fought out by proxies or the main protagonists.

The urgent summons to Japan's premier Kaifu by US imperialism to hear the strength of American complaints against 'unfair competition' (after the breakdown in US-Japanese trade talks) is the most significant news item of the week.

The 'free market' capitalist system cannot function at all, at any level, if the ultimate in capital accumulation is denied to it. It is as impossible to ask water to run uphill as it is to ask Japanese monopolists to stop being so successful.

Imperialism's capital-accumulation triumph, which has enabled it to subvert the socialist camp towards part-downfall, is entirely dependent upon the stimulation (for the monopolist bourgeoisie) of being able to conquer markets. It is not possible for the system's biggest military power, US imperialism, to do a deal with its biggest financial power, Japan, to artificially 'limit' the extent of the trade-war success of Tokyo's banking and manufacturing monopolies, - to 'give the Americans a breather'. If Japan's international monopolies do not push their cut-throat competitive edge to the limit, then other rival imperialist groupings will, - in turn ousting the Japanese. 

As Marx explained: 

"The final cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." 

(See ILWP Perspectives).

At the higher (imperialist) stage of capitalism, Engels was describing this phenomenon in 1891 as "rivalry in conquest" among the Great Powers which was developing the role and might of the imperialist state "to such a pitch that it threatens to swallow the whole of society". These irresistible monopoly-capitalist interests, operating through state power, began battering the rest of Western society (and parts of the whole world) towards the point of catastrophe in 1914 at the climax of an immense international trade war.

And it was just at that moment that Kautskyite revisionism had been evolving its notion of 'super-imperialism' claiming that international agreements would soon regulate all outstanding economic and political differences between the Great Powers. It did not happen, and only the Bolshevik Revolution put a stop to the Armageddon.

And by 1940, the major imperialist powers were at it again, imposing on the world yet another holocaust. Once again, only the role of the Bolshevik Revolution and its threat to spread via the Red Army's decisive intervention into the capitalist conflict, brought an early end to the imperialist catastrophe.

Imperialism’s next all-out 'rivalry in conquest' warmongering has only been delayed by the super-dominant position American monopolies had built up (on the basis of Germany and Japan's destruction, in World War II), and by fear of socialist camp influence which persuaded Washington to moderate its period of absolute financial international dominance by extending world credit conditions far beyond prudent limits.

The price was always going to have to be paid (for all these delays) by the postwar sustained capitalist inflationary boom eventually plunging into the worst markets-collapse and fascist-slump conditions ever recorded.

The ultimate irresistible emergence once again of irreconcilable conflict for world leadership between the leading imperialist powers (and regional groupings) has    disposed of fear that the socialist camp might take advantage of capitalism's unrestrained cut-throat competition.

The revisionist bureaucracies in the workers states have merely used the growing split in the imperialist camp to abandon totally their pretence of 'holding the balance' to worldwide imperialist warmongering aggression, - taking advantage of Washington's reduced Cold War emphasis (made necessary by trade and budget deficits which were dangerously weakening the USA in face of Japanese and German rivalry) to make clear that revisionism had no world leadership pretensions of its own and was even willing to see socialism itself undermined by international class collaboration. 

Least of all are the anti-Leninist bureaucracies capable of analysing the growing inter-imperialist conflict, or warning the international proletariat of what to expect from it, or how to fight it. Therefore this disintegrating response will only help to speed up the ever-more-frank expression by the capitalist powers of uncompromising inter-imperialist rivalry.

This descent towards renewed inter-imperialist warmongering and chauvinism will in fact initially be marked by protestations of its exact opposite, of course. Deluded by the peak of boomtime affluence for the wealthiest capitalist countries, there will be worldwide bourgeois outpourings about 'justice', 'negotiated settlements', 'human rights', etc, - even including attempted regional 'peace solutions' to longstanding sores such as South African apartheid, the Palestinian question, the Irish question, and others.

But even as all these 'one Europe', or 'common world home' middle-class sentiments swell the disarmament and ecology pacifist lobbies, the screws of increased exploitation (over all who fail to make it in the universal rat-race) are being progressively tightened right round the globe, - on personal debtors, on Third World debtors, and on inter-imperialist debtors. The capitalist 'free market' still rules.

Petty-bourgeois sentiment is not what will decide how this greatest-ever capitalist boom ends. The iron laws of inter-imperialist rivalry-conquest will once again crush the whole of human society towards catastrophe.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin (see quotes below) explicitly described why universal suffrage and the democratic republic are the best possible vehicles for the capitalist class to become all-powerful. In this light, the tragic consequences of a non-Leninist commitment to 'pluralism’, espoused from the Sandinistas to Gorbachev, - become more clear. Bourgeois (parliamentary) democracy is a tool of imperialism, first and foremost, - and not necessarily an 'enemy' of imperialist reaction at all, (- as revisionist soft-mindedness appears to believe.)

It is always out of weakness that capitalist counter-revolution has to rely on naked military dictatorship to hold onto power, and it is frequently a prelude to the bourgeoisie's overthrow.

The quotes below, the ILWP Perspectives, and ILWP Books vols 3,4,5,6,7,10 etc, give at length the Marxist-Leninist scientific explanation why the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a not-necessarily-elected vanguard party, provides the only possible form of transitional rule during the construction of the socialist order, (leading ultimately to the possibility of the withering away of the state entirely, in mature self-regulating communist societies, where the administration of things replaces the governing of people.)

The Sandinistas' bitter experience raises some of the questions involved.

No matter what form capitalist crisis takes under various conditions, it can always only be resolved by proletarian revolution.

The FSLN reached that momentous conclusion with the armed overthrow of 50 years of US-backed Somoza fascism. But its grasp of Leninism did not go much further.

The key to running proletarian rule, (replacing bourgeois dictatorship), is the quality of party cadres. The greater the grasp of scientific Leninism developed by the revolution, the better the chances of the workers state defying all efforts by imperialist counter-revolution to bring it down.

Crucial to this spread of revolutionary consciousness is the correct perspective on the international balance of class forces and future world developments.

Given its coalition movement origins, a lack of an assured tactical approach to problems would occasionally not be surprising about the Sandinistas. But that confusion would have tended to be less damaging the more a consciously Leninist understanding of history had been fought for in all Nicaraguan education and propaganda.

It is not obvious that given its initial commitment to 'pluralism', the FSLN should or could have avoided accepting Washington's challenge to take on bourgeois-democracy subversion at its own game or else face non-stop military destabilisation and economic sabotage.

But the greater any Sandinista illusions about how suited to capitalism’s interests was the democratic process in general, or how capable Washington's might could be in taking advantage of Managua's agreement to elections, - the more likely it would be that the FSLN might badly miscalculate what the outcome would be, or hopelessly fool itself about what it thought the state of public opinion to be.

In the appalling circumstances created in Nicaragua by being constantly undermined from Washington, - some 'electoral' answer or other to bourgeois propaganda challenging the Sandinistas' 'legitimacy' might have worked.

What was undoubtedly a catastrophe was to hold the kind of elections which were held, - and to lose them. And any degree to which any Sandinistas have been conned that 'the democratic process must be accepted' in such circumstances would make it a tragic farce as well as being a hopeless miscalculation.

Obviously the Nicaraguan revolution had no need at all to give the pro-American bourgeois reaction any opportunity whatever to recapture power at Sandinista-arranged elections (which had been denied to the Nicaraguan people for 50 years by the pro-American bourgeois reaction under Somoza, - a fascist regime imposed by US imperialist influence in the first place to thwart the original Sandino revolution.) 

And it only adds appalling insult to the grievous self-inflicted injury to try compensating with the deceitful notion that "at least democratic procedures have now been established".

The imperialist bourgeoisie will know easily how to overcome that little problem if and when the time comes for Nicaraguan reaction to face any challenge about holding onto power.

In the first place, the universal suffrage-democratic republic is the ideal cover for capitalism to thrive under, - unchallenged.

Secondly, if things did get difficult (as they inevitably will eventually when initial lavish US aid runs out and the mounting worldwide capitalist crisis proves to be more than Washington can manage on an ever-widening revolutionary front line), - then there are endless temporary tricks from electoral rackets to crude military dictatorship by which reaction can, and will, hang on in the hope of better times to come.

Obviously, the Nicaraguan people can always then make another revolution. And eventually they certainly will. But what a pointless sacrifice to ignorant anti-Leninist philistinism to have to go through all the terrible suffering of the revolutionary struggle against imperialist reaction for a second time.

It is hardly likely that the FSLN will now come to its senses and declare that all 'opinion-poll' sampling in what remains a basically bourgeois electoral scene (surrounded by powerful imperialist influences, and with the might of bourgeois property and Catholic Church domination scarcely curbed at all) is a rotten deception on the real interests of the proletariat at this late stage in capitalism's terminal crisis. It is therefore a bit academic to recommend such a response.

What must now be fought for is to learn the combined lessons of Cuba, Chile, Grenada, and Nicaragua (and of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, and other earlier examples) and understand that US imperialist interests are going to have their way by one route or another and that only the firmest dictatorship of the proletariat can ever hope to hold them off. 

Further, it must be grasped that the final successful resolution of this permanent state-of-siege with Washington, imposed on anti-imperialist movements everywhere, does not rest in "finally defeating US imperialism once and for all" in one particular conflict, which is an illusion as the people of Indo-China have discovered. It rests in the final defeat of imperialism everywhere - by the final triumph of worldwide proletarian dictatorship.

These are the understandings which must be permanently fought for. Within such a Leninist perspective, it will be possible to join forces with broader anti-imperialist struggles in unconditional support with a view to fighting for an ever-growing level of Marxist-Leninist consciousness around every activity of the revolutionary movement.

One of the worst aspects of Sandinista naïveness (equally shared by many other revolutionary movements) has been the willingness to let consciously backward political elements control all solidarity political work on behalf of the Sandinistas in the West. These activities have not merely "concentrated on peaceful coexistence diplomacy" as is pretended. These circles of "solidarity with the revolution" (manipulating the propaganda work in the West on behalf of Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador's FMLN, Vietnam, etc) are consciously hostile to the spread of revolutionary understanding (Leninism).

Tolerating such political backwardness in their name is a sad reflection on how badly the Sandinistas lagged in their own political education.

A worldwide debate on the essence of Marxist-Leninist political science is not some esoteric luxury punted out by a weird sect or two. Leninism is the vital necessity for all mankind. Or imperialism rules.

The pathetic responses by these anti-Leninist 'solidarity' circles at the wake held following Ortega's electoral defeat revealed fully their appalling philistine middle-class bankruptcy.

Remarks like: "I am sure many voted for the opposition with a heavy heart"; "There is no sense in which this is a catastrophe"; "The support seemed very solid"; "The assault that this country has had to sustain would have made it quite extraordinary for the Sandinistas to survive this election"; "Obviously there have been difficulties, but they have been very open about responding to them"; "I suspect a lot of people are still Sandinista in their hearts"; etc etc, show daft sentiment disastrously dominant over serious political understanding.

Decision-making by petty bourgeois subjectivism does not at all produce the 'caring', 'kind', 'liberal-minded' 'compromise' society that its soft-in-the-head advocates posture about. Just the opposite. Such woolly-brained capitulation to bourgeois ideology's non-stop propaganda for class-collaboration (in order to smash revolution) ends up inevitably handing power back to US imperialism's latest stooges.

Similar international 'left'-swamp philistinism around the Allende movement doomed the people of Chile to fascist barbarism; it seduced the indisciplined Maurice Bishop to self-destruct, abandoning the Grenada revolution; it prepared for new popular-front disasters in Chile around the Aylwin fraud (a man so anti-communist that he supported Pinochet's coup); and now it has helped lull the Sandinistas to destruction.

Such incurable petty-bourgeois political philistinism is no 'kindness' at all. Anti-Leninism is a catastrophe for the international proletariat. 

The unstated claim in this emotional drivel about the FSLN defeat is that persistent struggle will eventually be rewarded at almost every election by a majority of votes being cast for 'doing the right thing', etc. This is a monstrous deception.

If American destruction of Nicaragua "would have made it extraordinary for the Sandinistas (and their 'staggering' achievements) to survive this election", - then don't hold it.

The implication that the FSLN's goodness is bound to be rewarded at future elections is more sick than stupid, - the demented ramblings of a one-track mind which insists that 'democracy' is the solution to all things despite the repeated incontrovertible evidence of history that it provides no such answer, - indicating that the 'democracy' label is insisted upon by many for purely class or psychological ulterior motives.

After all the rottenness inflicted on the masses from the Philippines to El Salvador by pro-Western institutions, it is utterly perverse for these 'solidarity' anti-Leninist types to calmly accept more of the same now being inflicted again on the Nicaraguan people after all that they have had to suffer and sacrifice in order to overcome bourgeois rule in the first place.

Capitalist corruption and its inevitable shadow, social-democratic corruption, - plus the bureaucratic corruption which has always occurred wherever socialist revolutions have retreated from a severe Marxist-Leninist approach, — will all flourish endlessly until a proletarian dictatorship internationally imposes a new socialist order on the entire planet.

However quickly things become offensive and damaging to Nicaragua's revolutionary achievements under the rule of the pro-imperialist Chamorro bourgeoisie, it is sheer self-deception by the anti-Leninist 'solidarity' circles to pretend that reaction (in the form of the new regime) will be limited to just local conditions and difficulties, or will only be able to degenerate so far 'given the important impact that 10 years of Sandinismo have created', etc. What Chamorro stands for is hardly relevant. World imperialist crisis will inflict itself on Nicaragua just as it will on everywhere else. And that means renewed fascist slump (represented by Somoza in the 1930s) followed by warmongering chauvinism on an international inter-imperialist basis, - again just like after the two previous great capitalist slump-crises this century. 

Exactly how Nicaragua is affected is irrelevant. In general, this is what the international proletariat is in for, - and policies on, for, or by Nicaraguans must be drawn up on this world revolutionary socialist basis or become mere empty posturing by petty-bourgeois philistines, - (the exact sum total of what was produced by the London wake of the anti-Leninist 'solidarity' circles over Ortega's defeat.)

The FSLN's own response to its disaster reveals more of a good fighting-revolutionary pedigree but in the end is just as barren of convincing Marxist-Leninist science.

The time to make defiant speeches such as: "We shall oppose all those actions which go against the popular will" was before the curtained-booth farce (of secretly-expressed political shallowness in favour of Chamorro's bourgeois opportunism) had done its damage, opening the door to untold reactionary torment ahead. It does not take much leadership sense to know that the policies of the US imperialist bourgeoisie mean no good in the long run for the 'will' of the masses everywhere (including Nicaragua) to live under cooperative world peace and harmony with planned economic possibilities for the flourishing of every family and nation on earth. It does not require much far-sighted understanding to give a firm lead for keeping such solutions to mankind's problems on course, - defying imperialist sabotage and Contra subversion by resolute action, but also refusing to allow the Voice of America or the pro-capitalist La Prensa, or the confusions of Radio Catolica and the Church, to have victory handed to them on a plate by stupidly holding bourgeois-style elections (which were by no means strictly necessary to the revolutionary course the FSLN began to pursue after first having to win power arms-in-hand as a self-elected revolutionary vanguard.)

It took leadership for the FSLN to declare in the first place: "We'll make a revolution". That was a dramatic imposition on the life of Nicaragua, properly interpreting the will of the people over far more decisive matters and far-reaching perspectives than the trivial issues given in explanation this week for letting US imperialism’s latest stooges back in to rule the roost, - for example: "The UNO voters thought they could improve the situation with the opposition. They will now get the chance to find out for themselves which government has defended the people".

Such pathetic bourgeois-democratic confusion is a farcical let-down on the revolutionary heroism which in tiny numbers, at first, vowed to carry through a whole civil war against US imperialism's then-stooges, the Somoza bourgeoisie, (most of whom will now be back in power.)

The only science of social development in the revolutionary turmoil of the imperialist-crisis epoch is Marxism-Leninism. Such understanding would have helped the revolutionary struggle from the start. It would have been priceless for helping the Sandinistas to avoid some of the mistakes they made subsequently (e.g. in their tactical handling of the national question, the peasant question, etc, etc). Above all, it would have prevented the FSLN from ludicrously succumbing to bourgeois-imperialist pressure to risk committing suicide through parliamentary-elections for a second time in six years, - especially in the light of US imperialism completely ignoring the 1984 election results (won easily by the FSLN) and carrying on its fascist-Contra terror-tyranny (non-elected) more savagely than ever before.

It remains to be seen how closely the Sandinistas can live up to their post-election boast: "We have the force to smash those who damage democracy. The FSLN has the responsibility to guard and guarantee the progress of the revolution. The change of government will not mean the end of the revolution."

It is simply nonsense, for example, for Ortega to pretend that the nationalisations of the banking system and other key resources were "irreversible". US imperialism will be the paymaster now, once more, and it is likely to get the tunes it wants to hear, just as the IMF is doing even without stooge regimes, representing imperialist interests, directly controlling every Third World government.

And as for the pledge that constitutional rights like union membership, the right to strike and demonstrate, and freedom of the press were also 'irreversible', it hardly requires Leninist science to note that the most democratic bourgeois republics in the world have been brilliantly able to keep the working class from power indefinitely by using a variety of devious methods to limit the potentially revolutionary effects of such 'constitutional rights' whenever it was in their interest to do so.

Equally, nothing can stop the pro-American capitalist class reimposing its own stamp on the police and military forces of Nicaragua by one means or another, without necessarily staging any confrontation with the "integrity and professionalism" of the Sandinista forces against which the 'revolution' might find cause for resistance, as Ortega defiantly pretended in defeat. Once again, the FSLN show great spirit but insufficient Marxist-Leninist grasp of the essential questions about class power and so-called 'democracy'.

Trying to discuss the Nicaraguan revolution's plight solely in the light of potential imminent American imperialist invasion is certainly a materialist approach but does not necessarily pose the problems in the correct longterm perspective.

It is mere wishful indulgence to try to draw comfort from such hypotheses as "If they keep their heads down now and don't give the USA an excuse to impose a Panama or Grenada blitzkrieg, then any serious counter-revolutionary moves by Chamorro can be opposed later, as Ortega said".

But this very high-risk and very dubious assumption, depends entirely on a notion which is completely unsustainable, - that the reactionary dangers from the imperialist system's crisis are particularly intense now but will ease as time goes by.

It is much more likely that the imminent decade of fascist slump is going to witness some quite serious attempted revivals of international nazism as the petty-bourgeois 'answer' to the capitalist crisis. At the ever-swelling Republican Party rallies in West and now in East Germany, the swastika and the 'lebensraum' map of the pre-war Reich, back to its old Prussian frontiers, are now openly paraded. The racist National Front is a huge force in France. In Italy, the neo-fascists have never been so active. 

Even more interestingly, one of Chamorro's first engagements after winning power in Nicaragua (thanks to Washington's billions, economic sabotage, and terrorist disruption), - is to lend support to a Vargas Llosa rally in Peru where the US-backed 'New Right’ hope to oust independent-minded social-democrat President Garcia soon. Other 'libertarian' stars lending a hand include Sir Alan Walters (Thatcher's economic guru) and Lech Walesa (via a satellite link).

These anti-socialist ideologues are currently absorbed in pushing conventional political structures to unexpected new limits.

But this is exactly the same reactionary imperialist movement internationally which so eagerly embraced Pinochet in Chile, with many far-right economic agitators associated with the Chicago-Friedman school being active inside Chile even before Allende's overthrow.

These are the circles which have been so subversively and sinisterly involved with dissident affairs in East Europe which eventually have undermined the feeble revisionist bureaucracies and produced governments so favourable to Western imperialist interests.

Since 1945, rightwing reaction has made a full-time industry, led by the fabulously-funded CIA, of perfecting a variety of methods for trying to overthrow leftwing regimes. 

The measures used in Chile after 1973 to crush the Popular Front do not bear thinking about. The deathsquad barbarisms operating in El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua under Somoza, etc, etc, at different times over the past 40 years demonstrate that nothing is too evil, savage, or treacherous for imperialism to contemplate to keep Latin America pacified.

There is nothing whatever, for instance, to stop the pro-American Chamorro bourgeoisie from imposing a Pinochet-fascist coup on Nicaragua from inside the presidential palace itself in due course. Anything is possible, given the mercenary power of US billions in such a badly exploited continent.

In which case, what then are the supposed attractions of waiting in Nicaragua to be wretchedly butchered at some future date by nazi thugs as opposed to standing up now against US imperialist domination and declaring that the revolution refuses to hand the country back to Washington's bourgeois stooges, - and risking a 'Panamanian-type' invasion by US forces. At least such a fight would be in the open; would have the advantage of being a correct revolutionary initiative rather than a passive waiting for reaction to make the first move; might attract a great deal of international sympathy (since it is not obviously anyone's job to intervene in Nicaragua's internal affairs, and least of all the USA's which only has a record of installing dictatorships in the Americas, not removing them); and above all might be victorious. (Having already put up with running a wrecked country thanks to endless Contra and CIA sabotage and terrorism, and the US economic blockade,— it might even have clarified politics remarkably for the region, to draw Washington into a direct invasion.)

As it is, the Sandinistas' ignorant fear of the dictatorship of the proletariat has now allowed US reaction to wreck the country and then spend more billions bribing the shallow 'opinion poll' electoral system to blame the FSLN for the consequences.

Ortega & Co would have been far better off putting all their energies into internationalising their understanding of the revolutionary process they themselves had brilliantly carried out, so as to be able to employ the full scientific strength of Marxism-Leninism, and to begin finding new ways for endlessly deepening the Nicaraguan masses' grasp of the anti-imperialist struggle, as Castro has done in Cuba with the party's heroic contributions to the fight for socialism in southern Africa and elsewhere, and the growing (at last) contributions to international communist polemics. 

Havana is still a long way from considering a complete Leninist Third International programme of revolutionary education, but every step taken in that direction undoubtedly strengthens immeasurably the cohesive strength of the Cuban workers state. The Sandinistas, on the other hand, frequently avoided making any statements at all on important matters of the international class struggle, not just to avoid giving Washington more cause for provocations, but apparently also out of an attraction towards Popular Frontist compromise politics.

Rather than give the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie electoral opportunities that these US imperialist stooges do not deserve, the FSLN would have been better off sounding out the United Workers Opposition in the Soviet Union to discover what chances there were for a return to Leninism in the USSR, and what international polemical help might be given to the UWO to overcome Gorbachev. 

A detailed analysis of other Sandinista policy errors would be instructive but a combination of the absence of any system of public analysis of mistakes made by the revolutionary government or its local cadres, - plus the presence of such pettifogging bureaucracy as the compulsory crash-helmet law (an echo of Gorbachev’s disastrous stupidity of thinking to control alcohol abuse by destroying valuable vineyards and distilleries & the brewing industry), - gives a flavour of how spontaneous philistinism and a tinge of self-righteousness might have prevailed over a serious scientific study of revolutionary government mixed with down-to-earth common sense.

It has been correct for the ILWP to give unconditional support to the FSLN revolution throughout while always openly agitating for Leninist scientific consciousness to play an ever more prominent role in Nicaragua's affairs.

The ILWP has notably never ceased trumpeting its understanding that the only route towards real democracy lies through the ever-strengthening power of proletarian dictatorship, the only possible government for a reliable and viable workers state.

The ILWP has always declared its unqualified contempt for 'pluralism' and for every similar capitulation to bourgeois-idealist philosophical garbage.

The ILWP openly denounced the philistine petty-bourgeois subjectivism of the socialist camp (mainly Havana and Moscow, but not excluding the Sandinistas) who all fell for Maurice Bishop's rule of personalised indiscipline on Grenada and treacherously turned on the Leninist-leaning New Jewel Movement majority central committee faction, abandoning them (and Grenada's socialist revolution) to US imperialism’s hypocritical nazi blitzkrieg.

The ILWP has ceaselessly campaigned for the socialist camp and the world revolutionary movement to learn the real lessons of the Allende regime's toppling by fascist counter-revolution in Chile, exposing the continued naivete in Havana and Moscow (and echoed throughout the workers states, including Nicaragua) which saw Allende's parliamentary gullibility (backed by OP popular frontism) as entirely blameless, when in fact this pluralist class-collaborationism, allowing the entire capitalist state machinery to survive intact, was the open door to Pinochet's military coup.

Finally, the ILWP has always been to the forefront in welcoming every move towards strengthened proletarian dictatorship by the Castro revolution on Cuba, constantly urging the deepest possible grasp of the priceless Leninist lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution on these questions.

Equally, the ILWP will never be faulted in unrelentingly warning the Soviet Union, the rest of the socialist camp, and what remains of the workers states in East Europe, that all liquidations towards parliamentary democracy and pluralism are nothing but steps towards suicide. Mistaken expectations, - which have just delivered such an unpleasant shock in Nicaragua, have hurt the ILWP's fight for correct perspectives on the socialist countries in general.

While denouncing Gorbachevism from the start (see ILWP Books vol 13), it was not foreseen how quickly and how far revisionism could demoralise the workers states in East Europe, or the extent to which Moscow capitulation to imperialist consumerist glitz and bourgeois ideology could rapidly revive counter-revolutionary idiocy within the socialist camp.

But the ILWP's Perspectives could not make plainer its repeated insistence that the moment that conscious embrace of proletarian-dictatorship rule was ever relaxed, then it was inevitable that all the old bourgeois-idealist crap of capitalist society would unavoidably begin to rise again. 

Either the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. All attempted alternatives such as Allende-ism, Sandinism, or Gorbachevist 'democratisation' in East Europe, can only end in disaster for the international proletariat's revolutionary socialist cause. 

Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin.

Jack Bradshaw

Party of the proletariat (Bolsheviks)                                                                             9,02   million —25%
Petty-bourgeois democratic parties (Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, etc.) 22.62      »           62% 
Parties of landowners and bourgeoisie (Cadets, etc.)........                                           4.62      »           13 %

Total                                                                                                                                 36.26 million     100%	

It is no use thinking that the petty-bourgeois or semi-petty-bourgeois masses can decide in advance the extremely complicated political question: "to be with the working class or with the bourgeoisie". The vacillation of the non-proletarian sections of the working people is inevitable; and inevitable also is their own practical experience, which will enable them to compare leadership by the bourgeoisie with leadership by the proletariat.
This is the circumstance that is constantly lost sight of by those who worship "consistent democracy" and who imagine that extremely important political problems can be solved by voting. Such problems are actually solved by civil war if they are acute and aggravated by struggle, and the experience of the non-proletarian masses (primarily of the peasants), their experience of comparing the rule of the proletariat with the rule of the bourgeoisie, is of tremendous importance in that war.
The Constituent Assembly elections in Russia in November 1917, compared with the two-year Civil War of 1917-19, are highly instructive in this respect.
See which districts proved to be the least Bolshevik. First, the East-Urals and the Siberian where the Bolsheviks polled 12 per cent and 10 per cent, of the votes respectively. Secondly, the Ukraine where the Bolsheviks polled 10 per cent of the votes. Of the other districts, the Bolsheviks polled the smallest percentage of votes in the peasant district of Great Russia, the Volga-Black Earth district, but even there the Bolsheviks polled 16 per cent of the votes.
It was precisely in the districts where the Bolsheviks polled the lowest percentage of votes in November 1917 that the counter-revolutionary movements, the revolts and the organisation of counter-revolutionary forces had the greatest success. It was precisely in those districts that the rule of Kolchak and Denikin lasted for months and months.
The vacillation of the petty-bourgeois population was particularly marked in those districts where the influence of the proletariat is weakest. Vacillation was at first in favour of the Bolsheviks when they granted land and when the demobilised soldiers brought the news about peace; later—against the Bolsheviks when, to promote the international development of the revolution and to protect its centre in Russia, they agreed to sign the Treaty of Brest63 and thereby "offended" patriotic sentiments, the deepest of petty-bourgeois sentiments. The dictatorship of the proletariat was particularly displeasing to the peasants in those places where there were the largest stocks of surplus grain, when the Bolsheviks showed that they would strictly and firmly secure the transfer of those surplus stocks to the state at fixed prices. The peasants in the Urals, Siberia and the Ukraine turned to Kolchak and Denikin.
Further, the experience of Kolchak and Denikin "democracy", about which every hack writer in Kolchakia and Denikia shouted in every issue of the whiteguard newspapers, showed the peasants that phrases about democracy and about the "Constituent Assembly" serve only as a screen to conceal the dictatorship of the landowners and capitalists.
Another turn towards Bolshevism began and peasant revolts spread in the rear of Kolchak and Denikin. The peasants welcomed the Red troops as liberators.
In the long run, it was this vacillation of the peasantry, the main body of the petty-bourgeois working people, that decided the fate of Soviet rule and of the rule of Kolchak and Denikin. But this "long run" was preceded by a fairly lengthy period of severe struggle and painful trial, which have not ended in Russia after two years, have not ended precisely in Siberia and in the Ukraine. And there is no guarantee that they will end completely within, say, another year or so.
The supporters of "consistent" democracy have not given thought to the importance of this historical fact. They invented, and are still inventing, nursery tales about the proletariat under capitalism being able to "convince" the majority of the working people and win them firmly to its side by voting. But reality shows that only in the course of a long and fierce struggle does the stern experience of the vacillating petty bourgeoisie lead it to the conclusion, after comparing the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the capitalists, that the former is better than the latter.
In theory, all socialists who have studied Marxism and are willing to take into account the lessons of the nineteenth-century political history of the advanced countries recognise that the vacillation of the petty bourgeoisie between the proletariat and the capitalist class is inevitable. The economic roots of this vacillation are clearly revealed by economic science, the truths of which have been repeated millions of times in the newspapers, leaflets and pamphlets issued by the socialists of the Second International.
But these people cannot apply those truths to the peculiar epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They substitute petty-bourgeois-democratic prejudices and illusions (about class "equality", about "consistent" or "pure" democracy, about solving great historic problems by voting, and so forth) for the class struggle. They will not understand that after capturing state power the proletariat does not thereby cease its class struggle, but continues it in a different form and by different means. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the class struggle of the proletariat conducted with the aid of an instrument like state power, a class struggle, one of whose aims is to demonstrate to the non-proletarian sections of the working people by means of their long experience and a long list of practical examples that it is more to their advantage to side with the dictatorship of the proletariat than with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and that there can be no third course.
The returns of the Constituent Assembly elections held in November 1917 give us the main background to the picture of the development of the Civil War that, has raged for two years since those elections. The main forces in that war were already clearly evident during the Constituent Assembly elections—the role of the "striking force" of the proletarian army, the role of the vacillating peasantry, and the role of the bourgeoisie were already apparent. In his article N. V. Svyatitsky writes: "The Cadets were most successful in the same regions where the Bolsheviks were most successful—in the Northern and Central-Industrial regions" (p. 116). Naturally, in the most highly developed capitalist centres, the intermediary elements standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were the weakest. Naturally, in those centres, the class struggle was most acute. It was there that the main forces of the bourgeoisie were concentrated and there, only there, could the proletariat defeat the bourgeoisie. Only the proletariat could rout the bourgeoisie, and only after routing the bourgeoisie could the proletariat definitely win the sympathy and support of the petty-bourgeois strata of the population by using an instrument like state power.
If properly used, if correctly read, the returns of the Constituent Assembly elections reveal to us again and again the fundamental truths of the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle.
The comparison of the Constituent Assembly elections in November 1917 with the development of the proletarian revolution in Russia from October 1917 to December 1919 enables us to draw conclusions concerning bourgeois parliamentarism and the proletarian revolution in every capitalist country. Let me try briefly to formulate, or at least to outline, the principal conclusions.
1.Universal suffrage is an index of the level reached by the various classes in their understanding of their problems. It shows how the various classes are inclined to solve their problems. The actual solution of those problems is not provided by voting, but by the class struggle in all its forms, including civil war.
2.The socialists and Social-Democrats of the Second International take the stand of vulgar petty-bourgeois democrats and share the prejudice that the fundamental problems of the class struggle can be solved by voting.
3.The party of the revolutionary proletariat must take part in bourgeois parliaments in order to enlighten the masses; this can be done during elections and in the struggle between parties in parliament. But limiting the class struggle to the parliamentary struggle, or regarding the latter as the highest and decisive form, to which all the other forms of struggle are subordinate, is actually desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
4.All the representatives and supporters of the Second International, and all the leaders of the German, so-called "independent", Social-Democratic Party, actually go over to the bourgeoisie in this way when they recognise the dictatorship of the proletariat in words, but in deeds, by their propaganda, imbue the proletariat with the idea that it must first obtain a formal expression of the will of the majority of the population under capitalism (i.e., a majority of votes in the bourgeois parliament) to transfer political power to the proletariat, which transfer is to take place later.
All the cries, based on this premise, of the German "independent" Social-Democrats and similar leaders of decayed socialism against the "dictatorship of a minority", and so forth, merely indicate that those leaders fail to understand the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which actually reigns even in the most democratic republics; and that they fail to understand the conditions for its destruction by the class struggle of the proletariat.
5. This failure to understand consists, in particular, in the following: they forget that, to: a very large degree, the bourgeois parties are able to rule because they deceive the masses of the people, because of the yoke of capital, and to this is added self-deception concerning the nature of capitalism, a self-deception which is characteristic mostly of the petty-bourgeois parties, which usually want to substitute more or less disguised forms of class conciliation for the class struggle..
"First let the majority of the population, while private property, still exists, i.e., while the rule and yoke of capital still exist, express themselves in favour of the party of the proletariat, and only then can and should the party take power"—-so say the petty-bourgeois democrats who call-themselves socialists but who are in reality the servitors of the bourgeoisie.
"Let the revolutionary proletariat first overthrow the bourgeoisie, break the yoke of capital, and smash the bourgeois state apparatus, then the victorious proletariat will be able rapidly to gain the sympathy and support of the majority of the non-proletarian working people by satisfying their needs at the expense of the exploiters"—say we. The opposite will be rare exception in history (and even in such an exception the bourgeoisie can resort to civil war, as the example of Finland showed64). 
 6. Or in other words: 
"First we shall pledge ourselves to recognise the principle of equality, or consistent democracy, while preserving private properly and the yoke of capital (i.e., actual inequality under formal equality), and try to obtain the decision of the majority on this basis"—say the bourgeoisie and their yes-men, the petty-bourgeois democrats who call themselves socialists and Social-Democrats.
"First the proletarian class struggle, winning state power, will destroy the pillars and foundations of actual inequality, and then
the proletariat, which has defeated the exploiters, will lead all working people to the abolition of classes, i.e., to socialist equality, the only kind that is not a deception"—say we.
7. In all capitalist countries, besides the proletariat, or that part of the proletariat which is conscious of its revolutionary aims and is capable of fighting to achieve them, there are numerous politically immature proletarian, semi-proletarian, semi-petty-bourgeois strata which follow the bourgeoisie and bourgeois democracy (including the "socialists" of the Second International) because they have been deceived, have no confidence in their own strength, or in the strength of the proletariat, are unaware of the possibility of having their urgent needs satisfied by means of the expropriation of the exploiters.
These strata of the working and exploited people provide the vanguard of the proletariat with allies and give it a stable majority of the population; but the proletariat can win these allies only with the aid of an instrument like state power, that is to say, only after it has overthrown the bourgeoisie and has destroyed the bourgeois state apparatus.                        '
8. The strength of the proletariat in any capitalist country is far greater than the proportion it represents of the total population. That is because the proletariat economically dominates the centre and nerve of the entire economic system of capitalism, and also because the proletariat expresses economically and politically the real interests of the overwhelming majority of the working people under capitalism.
 Therefore, the proletariat, even when it constitutes a minority of the population (or when the class-conscious and really revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat constitutes a minority of the population), is capable of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and, after that, of winning to its side numerous allies from a mass of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeoisie who never declare in advance in favour of the rule of the proletariat, who do not understand the conditions and aims of that rule, and only by their subsequent experience become convinced that the  proletarian dictatorship is inevitable, proper and legitimate.
9. Finally, in every capitalist country there are always very broad strata of the petty bourgeoisie which inevitably vacillate between capital and labour. To achieve victory, the proletariat must, first, choose the right moment for its decisive assault on the bourgeoisie, taking into account, among other things, the disunity between the bourgeoisie and its petty-bourgeois allies, or the instability of their alliance, and so forth.. Secondly, the proletariat must, after its victory, utilise this vacillation of the petty bourgeoisie in such a way as to neutralise them, prevent their siding with the exploiters; it must be able to hold on for some time in spite of this vacillation, and so on, and so forth.
10. One of the necessary conditions for preparing the proletariat for its victory is a long, stubborn and ruthless struggle against opportunism, reformism, social-chauvinism, and similar bourgeois influences and trends, which are inevitable, since the proletariat is operating in a capitalist environment. If there is no such struggle, if opportunism in the working-class movement is not utterly defeated beforehand, there can be no dictatorship of the proletariat. Bolshevism would not have defeated the bourgeoisie in 1917-19 if before that, in 1903-17, it had not learned to defeat the Mensheviks, i.e., the opportunists, reformists, social-chauvinists, and ruthlessly expel them from the party of the proletarian vanguard.
At the present time, the verbal recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the leaders of the German "Independents", or by the French Longuetists," and the like, who are actually continuing the old, habitual policy of big and small concessions to and conciliation with opportunism, subservience to the prejudices of bourgeois democracy ("consistent democracy" or "pure democracy" as they, call it) and bourgeois parliamentarism, and so forth, is the most dangerous self-deception—and sometimes sheer fooling of the workers.

ELECTIONS  AND THE  DICTATORSHIP OF THE  PROLETARIAT  Dec.1919  217

We shall not let ourselves be deceived by formal slogans. The bourgeoisie would like to sit in the Constituent Assembly and at the same time organise civil war. Let them examine the substance of our accusation against the Cadet Party; let them prove that the Cadet Party is not the general staff of the civil war, an obviously hopeless war that is drenching the country in blood.                                                         
Our accusation against the Cadet Party puts an end to petty manoeuvres in the political struggle.
We shall tell the people the truth. We shall tell the people that their interests are superior to the interests of a democratic institution. We must not return to the old prejudices, which subordinate the interests of the people to formal democracy. The Cadets cry, All Power to the Constituent Assembly. But what they mean in fact is, All Power to Kaledin. The people must be told that, and the people will approve our action.

1917. MEETING OP THE ALL-RUSSIA  C.E.C. DECEMBER 1(14)

Passing to the question of the Constituent Assembly, I must say that the Constituent Assembly can help only if the people themselves are free to develop and build up a new life. And I ask you: Is that the case?
We see that the conspiracy of the Cadets is continuing, we see that they are organising a revolt against the Soviets in the interests of the money-bags, of greed and riches, and we publicly proclaim them enemies of the people. At a time when. . . they are conspiring against us, against the Soviets. We therefore declare that the party of the Cadets is a party of the bourgeoisie, that they are enemies of the people, and that we shall fight them.•

Dec 1917 2ND CONGRESS OF SOVIETS OF PEASANTS' DEPUTIES

4.The convocation of the Constituent Assembly in our revolution, on the basis of lists submitted in the middle of October 1917 is taking place under conditions which preclude the possibility of the elections to this Constituent Assembly faithfully expressing the will of the people in general and of the working people in particular.

5. Firstly, proportional representation results in a faithful expression of the will of the people only when the party lists correspond to the real division of the people according to the party groupings reflected in those lists. In our case, however, as is well known, the party which from May to October had the largest number of followers among the people, and especially among the peasants—the Socialist-Revolutionary Party—came out with united election lists for the Constituent Assembly in the middle of October 1917, but split in November 1917, after the elections and before the Assembly met.
For this reason, there is not, nor can there be, even a formal correspondence between the will of the mass of the electors and the composition of the elected Constituent Assembly.
. . .
13. Lastly, the civil war which was started by the Cadet-Kaledin counter-revolutionary revolt against the Soviet authorities, against the workers' and peasants' government, has finally brought the class struggle to a head and has destroyed every chance of setting in a formally democratic way the very acute problems with which history has confronted the peoples of Russia, and in the first place her working class and peasants.

14. Only the complete victory of the workers and peasants over the bourgeois and landowner revolt (as expressed in the Cadet-Kaledin movement), only the ruthless military suppression of this revolt of the slave-owners can really safeguard the  proletarian-peasant revolution. The course of events and the development of the class struggle in the revolution have resulted in the slogan "All Power to the Constituent Assembly!"—which disregards the gains of the workers' and peasants' revolution, which disregards Soviet power, which, disregards the decisions of the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers’ Deputies, of the Second All-Russia Congress of Peasants' Deputies, etc., becoming in fact the slogan of the Cadets and the Kaledinites and of their helpers.
Naturally, the interests of this revolution stand higher than the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly, even if those formal rights were not undermined by the absence in the law on the Constituent Assembly of a provision recognising the right of the people to recall their deputies and hold new elections at any moment.

17. Every direct or indirect attempt to consider the question of the Constituent Assembly from a formal, legal point of view, within the framework of ordinary bourgeois democracy and disregarding the class struggle and civil war, would be a betrayal of the proletariat's cause, and the adoption of the bourgeois standpoint. The revolutionary Social-Democrats are duty bound to warn all and sundry against this error, into which a few Bolshevik leaders, who have been unable to appreciate the significance of the October uprising and the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat, have strayed.

18. The only chance of securing a painless solution to the crisis which has arisen owing to the divergence between the elections to the Constituent Assembly, on the one hand, and the will of the people and the interests of the working and exploited classes, on the other, is for the people to exercise as broadly and as rapidly as possible the right to elect the members of the Constituent Assembly anew, and for the Constituent Assembly to accept the law of the Central Executive. Committee on these new elections, to proclaim that it unreservedly recognises Soviet power, the Soviet revolution, and its policy on the questions of peace, the land and workers' control, and to resolutely join the camp of the enemies of the  Cadet-Kaledin counter-revolution.

19. Unless these conditions are fulfilled, the crisis in connection with the Constituent Assembly can be settled only in a revolutionary way, by Soviet power adopting the most energetic, speedy, firm and determined revolutionary measures  against the Cadet-Kaledin counter-revolution, no matter behind what slogans and institutions (even participation in the Constituent Assembly) this counter-revolution may hide. Any attempt to tie the hands of Soviet power in this struggle would be tantamount to aiding counter-revolution.

Dec 25 19I7.     THESES ON THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

To relinquish the sovereign power of the Soviets, to relinquish the Soviet Republic won by the people, for the sake of the bourgeois parliamentary system and the Constituent Assembly, would now be a step backwards and would cause the collapse of the October workers' and peasants' revolution.
Owing to the above-mentioned circumstances, the Party of Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the party of Kerensky, Avksentyev and Chernov, obtained the majority in the Constituent Assembly which met on January 5. Naturally, this party refused to discuss the absolutely clear, precise and unambiguous proposal of the supreme organ of Soviet power, the Central   Executive Committee of the Soviets, to recognise .the programme of Soviet power, to recognise the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, to recognise the October Revolution and Soviet power. By this action the Constituent Assembly severed all ties with the Soviet Republic of Russia. It was inevitable that the Bolshevik group and the Left Socialist-Revolutionary group, who now patently constitute the overwhelming majority in the Soviets and enjoy the confidence of the workers and the majority of the peasants, should withdraw from such a Constituent Assembly.
The Right Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties are in fact carrying on outside the Constituent Assembly a most desperate struggle against Soviet power, calling openly in their press for its overthrow and describing as arbitrary and unlawful the crushing of the resistance of the exploiters by the forces of the working classes, which is essential in the interests of emancipation from exploitation. They are defending the saboteurs, the servants of capital, and are going as far as undisguised calls to terrorism, which certain "unidentified groups" have already begun. It is obvious that under such circumstances the remaining part of the Constituent Assembly could only serve as a screen for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow Soviet power.
Accordingly, the Central Executive Committee resolves that the Constituent Assembly is hereby dissolved.

DRAFT DECREE ON DISSOLUTION OF CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY 6th January 1918

In a democratic republic, Engels continues, "wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely", first, by means of the "direct corruption of officials" (America); secondly, by means of an "alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange" (France and America).
At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have "developed" into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions.
The reason why the omnipotence of "wealth" is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on individual defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.
We must also note that Engels is most explicit in calling universal suffrage an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage, he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is "the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state”.
The petty-bourgeois democrats, such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and also their twin brothers, all the social-chauvinists and opportunists of Western Europe, expect just this "more" from universal suffrage. They themselves share,
and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage "in the present-day state" is really capable of revealing the will of the majority, of the working people and of securing its realisation.
The "free people's state" was a programme demand and a catchword current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies. This catchword is devoid of all political content except that it describes the concept of democracy in a pompous philistine fashion. Insofar as it hinted in a legally permissible manner at a democratic republic, Engels was prepared to "justify" its use "for a time" from an agitational point of view. But it was an opportunist catchword, for it amounted to something more than prettifying bourgeois democracy, and was also failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in general. We are in favour of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a "special force" for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not "free" and not a "people's state". Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies. Fifthly, the same work of Engels's, whose argument about the withering away of the state everyone remembers, also contains an argument of the significance of violent revolution. Engels's historical analysis of its role becomes a veritable panegyric on violent revolution. This "no one remembers". It is not done in modern socialist parties to talk or even think about the significance of this idea, and it plays no part whatever in their daily propaganda and agitation among the people. And yet it is inseparably bound up with the "withering away" of the state into one harmonious whole. Here is Engels's argument:

"...That force, however, plays yet another role [other than that of a diabolical power] in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilised political forms—of this there is not a word in Herr Duhring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of an economy based on exploitation—unfortunately, because all use of force demoralises, he says, the person who uses it. And this in spite of the immense moral and spiritual impetus which has been given by every victorious revolution! And this in Germany, where a violent collision —which may, after all, be forced on the people — would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has penetrated the nation's mentality following the humiliation of the Thirty Years' War.8 And this parson's mode of thought—dull, insipid and impotent —presumes to impose itself on the most revolutionary party that history has known!" (P. 193, third German edition, Part II, end of Chap. IV.) “

How can this panegyric on violent revolution, which Engels insistently brought to the attention of the German Social-Democrats between 1878 and 1894, i.e., right up to the time of his death, be combined with the theory of the "withering away" of the state to form a single theory?
Usually the two are combined by means of eclecticism, by an unprincipled or sophistic selection made arbitrarily (or to please the powers that be) of first one, then another argument, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, if not more, it is the idea of the "withering away" that is placed in the forefront. Dialectics are replaced by eclecticism —this is the most usual, the most widespread practice to be met with in present-day official Social-Democratic literature in relation to Marxism. This sort of substitution is, of course, nothing new; it was observed even in the history of classical Greek philosophy. In falsifying Marxism in opportunist fashion, the substitution of eclecticism for dialectics is the easiest way of deceiving the people. It gives an illusory satisfaction; it seems to take into account all sides of the process, all trends of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it provides no integral and revolutionary conception of the process of social development at all.
We have already said above, and shall show more fully later, that the theory of Marx and Engels, of the inevitability of a violent revolution refers to the bourgeois state. The latter cannot be superseded by the proletarian state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) through the process of "withering away", but, as a general rule, only through a violent revolution. The panegyric Engels sang in its honour, and which fully corresponds to Marx's repeated statements (see the concluding passages of The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto with their proud and open proclamation of the inevitability of a violent revolution; see what Marx wrote nearly thirty years later, in criticising the Gotha Programme of 1875, when he mercilessly castigated the opportunist character of that programme) —this panegyric is by no means a mere "impulse", a mere declamation or a polemical sally. The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of the entire theory of Marx and Engels. The betrayal of their theory by the now prevailing social-chauvinist and Kautskyite trends expresses itself strikingly in both these trends ignoring such propaganda and agitation.
The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of "withering away".
The proletariat needs state power, a centralised organisation of force, an organisation of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population—the   peasants,   the   petty  bourgeoisie,   and   semi- proletarians — in the work of organising a socialist economy.
By educating the workers' party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organising the new system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organising their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. By contrast, the opportunism now prevailing trains the members of the workers' party to be the representatives of the better-paid workers, who lose touch with the masses, "get along" fairly well under capitalism, and sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, i.e., renounce their role as revolutionary leaders of the people against the bourgeoisie.
Marx's theory of "the state, i.e., the proletariat organised as the ruling class", is inseparably bound up with the whole of his doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The culmination of this role is the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat.
In 1907, Mehring, in the magazine Neue Zeiti3(Vol. XXV, 2, p. 164), published extracts from Marx's letter to Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852. This letter, among other things, contains the following remarkable observation:

"And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them.. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Produktion); (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes, and to a classless society."**

In these words, Marx succeeded in expressing with striking clarity, first, the chief and radical difference between his theory and that of the foremost and most profound thinkers of the bourgeoisie; and, secondly, the essence of his theory of the state.
It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bound of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable Philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky's pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, published in August 1918, i.e., long after the first edition of the present book, is a perfect example of petty-bourgeois distortion of Marxism and base renunciation of it in deeds, while hypocritically recognising it in words (see my pamphlet, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Petrograd and Moscow, 1918).
Opportunism today, as represented by its principal spokesman, the ex-Marxist Karl Kautsky, fits in completely with Marx’s characterisation of the bourgeois position quoted above, for this opportunism limits recognition of the class struggle to the sphere of bourgeois relations. (Within this sphere, within its framework, not a single educated liberal will refuse to recognise the class struggle "in principle"!) Opportunism does not extend recognition of the class struggle to the cardinal point, to the period of transition from capitalism to communism, of the overthrow and the complete abolition of the bourgeoisie. In reality, this period inevitably is a period of an unprecedentedly violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms, and, consequently, during this period, the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way.
Further. The essence of Marx's theory of the state has been mastered only by those who realise that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from "classless society", from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out of the question. It is a Utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy —this is not a Utopia, it is the experience of the Commune, the direct and immediate task of the revolution
We are not Utopians, we do not "dream" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control and "foremen and accountants".    We, the workers, shall organise large-scale production on the basis of what capitalism has already created, relying on our own experience as workers, establishing strict, iron discipline backed up by the state power of the armed workers. We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid "foremen and accountants" (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large-scale production, will of itself lead to the gradual "withering away" of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order — an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery —an order under which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit, and will finally die out as the special function., of a special section of the population.
Engels expounds the same ideas in much greater detail and still more popularly. First of all he ridicules the muddled ideas of the Proudhonists, who called themselves "anti-authoritarians", i.e., repudiated all authority, all subordination, all power. Take a factory, a railway, a ship on the high seas, said Engels: is it not clear that not one of these complex technical establishments, based on the use of machinery and the systematic co-operation of many people, could function without a certain amount of subordination and, consequently, without a certain amount of authority or power?
"Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All socialists are agreed that the state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and become mere administrative functions of watching over social interests. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social relations that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority.

"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they arc betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction." (P. 39.) *

THE STATE  AND REVOLUTION       Aug-Nov  1917