Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought. Georg Lukacs 19241. The Actuality of the Revolution

Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution. It is so because its essence is an intellectual synthesis of the social existence which produces and fundamentally determines the proletariat; and because the proletariat straggling for liberation finds its clear self-consciousness in it. The stature of a proletarian thinker, of a representative of historical materialism, can therefore be measured by the depth and breadth of his grasp of this and the problems arising from it; by the extent to which he is able accurately to detect beneath the appearances of bourgeois society those tendencies towards proletarian revolution which work themselves in and through it to their effective being and distinct consciousness.

By these criteria Lenin is the greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working-class movement since Marx. Opportunists, unable either to deny or ignore his importance, vainly say that Lenin was a great political figure in Russia, but that he lacked the necessary insight into the difference between Russia and the more developed countries to become leader of the world proletariat. They claim that his historical limitation was that he generalized uncritically the problems and solutions of Russian reality and applied them universally. They forget what is today only too rightly forgotten: that the same accusation was also made, in his time, against Marx. It was said that he formulated his observations of English economic life and of the English factory system uncritically as general laws of all social development; that his observations may in themselves have been quite correct but, precisely because they were distorted into general laws, they became incorrect. It is by now unnecessary to refute this error in detail and show that Marx never ‘generalized’ from particular experiences limited in time and space. On the contrary – true to the methods of genuine historical and political genius – he detected, both theoretically and historically, in the microcosm of the English factory system, in its social premises, its conditions and consequences, and in the historical trends which both lead to, and in turn eventually threaten its development, precisely the macrocosm of capitalist development as a whole.

For, in science or in politics, this is what sets the genius apart from the mediocre scholar. The latter can only understand and differentiate between immediately given, isolated moments of the social process. When he wants to draw general conclusions he in fact does nothing more than interpret as ‘general laws’, in a truly abstract way, certain aspects of phenomena limited in time and space, and apply them accordingly. The genius, on the other hand, for whom the true essence, the living, active main trends of an age are clear, sees them at work behind every event of his time and continues to write about the decisive basic issues of the whole epoch even when he himself thinks he is only dealing with everyday affairs.

Today we know that this was Marx’s greatness. From the structure of the English factory system he identified and explained all the decisive tendencies of modern capitalism. He always pictured capitalist development as a whole. This enabled him to see both its totality in any one of its phenomena, and the dynamic of its structure.

However, there are today only few who know that Lenin did for our time what Marx did for the whole of capitalist development. In the problems of the development of modern Russia – from those of the beginnings of capitalism in a semi-feudal absolutist state to those of establishing socialism in a backward peasant country – Lenin always saw the problems of the age as a whole: the onset of the last phase of capitalism and the possibilities of turning the now inevitable final struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat in favor of the proletariat – of human salvation.

Like Marx, Lenin never generalized from parochially Russian experiences limited in time and space. He did however, with the perception of genius, immediately recognize the fundamental problem of our time – the approaching revolution – at the time and place of its first appearance. From then on he understood and explained all events, Russian as well as international, from this perspective -from the perspective of the actuality of the revolution.

The actuality of the revolution: this is the core of Lenin’s thought and his decisive link with Marx. For historical materialism as the conceptual expression of the proletariat’s struggle for liberation could only be conceived and formulated theoretically when revolution was already on the historical agenda as a practical reality; when, in the misery of the proletariat, in Marx’s words, was to be seen not only the misery itself but also the revolutionary element ‘which will bring down the old order’. Even at that time it was necessary to have the undaunted insight of genius to be able to see the actuality of the proletarian revolution. For the average man first sees the proletarian revolution when the working masses are already fighting on the barricades, and – if he happens also to have enjoyed a vulgar-Marxist education – not even then. For to a vulgar Marxist, the foundations of bourgeois society are so unshakeable that, even when they are most visibly shaking, he only hopes and prays for a return to ‘normality’, sees its crises as temporary episodes, and regards a struggle even at such times as an irrational and irresponsible rebellion against the ever-invincible capitalist system. To him, the fighters on the barricades are madmen, the defeated revolution is a mistake, and the builders of socialism, in a successful revolution – which in the eyes of an opportunist can only be transitory – are outright criminals.

The theory of historical materialism therefore presupposes the universal actuality of the proletarian revolution. In this sense, as both the objective basis of the whole epoch and the key to an understanding of it, the proletarian revolution constitutes the living core of Marxism. Despite this delimitation, expressed in the absolute rejection of all unfounded illusions and in the rigorous condemnation of all putschism, the opportunist interpretation of Marxism immediately fastens on to the so-called errors of Marx’s individual predictions in order to eliminate revolution root and branch from Marxism as a whole. Moreover, the ‘orthodox’ defenders of Marx meet his critics half way: Kautsky explains to Bernstein that the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat can quite easily be left to the future – to a very distant future.

Lenin re-established the purity of Marxist theory on this issue. But it was also precisely here that he conceived it more clearly and more concretely. Not that he in any way tried to improve on Marx. He merely incorporated into the theory the further development of the historical process since Marx’s death. This means that the actuality of the proletarian revolution is no longer only a world historical horizon arching above the self-liberating working class, but that revolution is already on its agenda. It was easy for Lenin to bear the accusations of Blanquism, etc., which this position brought him, not only because he was in good company – for he had to share these accusations with Marx (with ‘certain aspects’ of Marx) – but because he had well and truly earned his place alongside such company. On the one hand, neither Marx nor Lenin ever thought of the actuality of the proletarian revolution and its aims as being readily realizable at any given moment. On the other hand, however, it was through this actuality that both gained a sure touchstone for evaluating all questions of the day. The actuality of the revolution provides the key-note of a whole epoch. Individual actions can only be considered revolutionary or counter-revolutionary when related to the central issue of revolution, which is only to be discovered by an accurate analysis of the socio-historic whole. The actuality of the revolution therefore implies study of each individual daily problem in concrete association with the socio-historic whole, as moments in the liberation of the proletariat. The development which Marxism thus underwent through Lenin consists merely – merely! – in its increasing grasp of the intimate, visible, and momentous connection between individual actions and general destiny – the revolutionary destiny of the whole working class. It merely means that every question of the day – precisely as a question of the day – at the same time became a fundamental problem of the revolution.

The development of capitalism turned proletarian revolution into an everyday issue. Lenin was not alone in seeing this revolution approaching. However, he stood out not only by his courage, devotion and capacity for self-sacrifice from those who beat a cowardly retreat when the proletarian revolution they had themselves acclaimed in theory as imminent became an actuality. His theoretical clarity also distinguished him from the best, most dedicated and far-sighted of his contemporaries. For even they only interpreted the actuality of the revolution as Marx had been able to in his time – as the fundamental problem of the period as a whole. From an exclusively universal point of view, their interpretation was correct. They were, however, incapable of applying it and using it to establish firm guide-lines for all questions on the daily agenda, whether they were political or economic, involved theory or tactics, agitation or organization. Lenin alone took this step towards making Marxism, now a quite practical force, concrete. That is why he is in a world historical sense the only theoretician equal to Marx yet produced by the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat.

The Actuality of the Revolution: Reflections on Lenin’s State and Revolution

POSTED BY SALAR MOHANDESI ⋅ APRIL 9, 2012 ⋅ 11 COMMENTS This is a slightly edited version of a talk delivered at the Left Forum on March 18, for a panel

called “State and Revolution : Is Lenin Still Relevant ? ” (You can listen to the audio of the panel here.) We have posted a few more articles debating this history and its implications for the present: see the responses by Todd Chretien, Malcolm Harris , and Pham Binh .

Ivan Puni, "Armed workers in a motorcar"

By the first days of July 1917, tensions in the Russian capital were the highest they had been since the February Revolution that deposed the Tsar, announced a Provisional Government, and gave birth to a new wave of soviets. On the third of July, this tension finally exploded as postal workers suddenly went on strike, the workers in the Vyborg Factory District began to stir, and the militant First Machine Gun Regiment launched a plot to overthrow the Provisional Government. The uprising, which was entirely unknown to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, reached its peak the next day. Demonstrators were now joined by sailors from Kronstadt, nearly thirty thousand workers from the Putilov Plant, and soldiers from a number of rebellious regiments. All told, over half a million insurgents were now marching against the Provisional Government.

The Government, for its part, was perhaps in its most hopeless state since its formation. The Kadets, or the Constitutional Democrats, had walked out just two days prior over policy disagreements on the Ukraine; the historically loyal Petrograd Garrison could no longer be relied upon for assistance; and the Baltic Fleet flatly refused orders to block off Kronstadt. In sum, the state found itself suffering its most serious legitimacy crisis at the precise moment when the largest uprising since February was calling for its immediate overthrow.

But while most historians agree that the vast majority of those who took to the streets that day had in mind nothing short of overthrowing the Provisional Government, arresting its ministers, and immediately transferring all power to the soviets, it was also clear that they were uncertain as to precisely how this should be done. Their uncertainty led them to invade the Soviet Executive Committees, force this body to deliberate the transfer of power, and wait for some kind of solution. But the Executive Committees, moderate, indecisive, and increasingly unreliable, could not decide whether to call for a new Provisional Government or hand power directly to the Soviets, and argued until the early hours of the morning. The masses grew weary, workers began to trickle away, and a heavy downpour finally decomposed the crowd back into its constituent elements. The uprising had already undermined itself before loyal reinforcements began making it back to the city from the frontlines.

The reason for this defeat, as many of those who participated that day themselves recognized, was the absence of a binding element. All of a sudden, distinct layers of the working masses had spontaneously come together, taken to the streets, and voiced their united opposition to the Provisional Government, but some political form had to be found in order to make that encounter “take hold.” The masses themselves knew this, which is precisely why the Kronstadt sailors made an important detour before regrouping with the main demonstration in front of the Taurida Palace. They went to find Lenin.

Lenin, who had been in Finland recovering from another one of his famous bursts of overwork when the uprising began, returned to the city only hours before the sailors arrived at the Bolshevik headquarters. Unprepared, undecided, and still unsure about supporting the whole affair, Lenin at first refused to speak to the ten thousand or so insurgents gathering outside. He eventually relented, made his way to the balcony, and delivered his last public speech until after October. It was ambiguous, desultory, and, by all accounts, a great disappointment. The sailors had come to hear a clear program for action and left with nothing but vague warnings about self-restraint, vigilance, and discipline.

Lenin himself was uncertain. Mikhail Kalinin recalls how he asked Lenin that day whether the uprising could grow into a seizure of power. Lenin responded: “we shall see – right now it is impossible to say!”1 This was no doubt a curious answer for the leader of the proletarian vanguard. It was Lenin’s duty to know what his forces were up to. Instead, he had been caught off-guard. The sore truth is that the party, with Lenin at its head, had misread the capabilities, intentions, and political composition of the working class. It had failed to grasp what Georg Lukács would later call, “the actuality of the revolution,” which is to say, the realization that revolution had already been forced onto the table as an imminent reality by the class struggle itself.2

There may be several reasons why Lenin was unable to anticipate the truly revolutionary project implicit in the struggles of the working class at that moment. First, and perhaps most simply, Lenin had underestimated the militancy, readiness, and political maturity of the masses in the weeks leading up to the July days. The period extending from the tenth of June to the third of July was in fact marked by the highest level of discontent since the

fall of the Tsar in February: strikes, walkouts, and shutdowns became regular occurrences in the cities; mutinies, desertions, and a general sense of insubordination characterized the front; and peasants were starting to directly socialize the land in the countryside. “The real mistake of our Party on July 3-4, as events now reveal,” Lenin later wrote in a retrospective analysis , was “that the Party considered the general situation in the country less revolutionary than it proved to be, that the Party still considered a peaceful development of political changes possible through alteration in the Soviets’ policies, whereas in reality the Mensheviks and S.R.’s had become so much entangled and bound by compromising with the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie had become so counter-revolutionary, that peaceful development was no longer possible.”3

Second, it is likely that Lenin that had been unable to properly account for the rapidly changing class composition of his own party. Petrograd party membership increased from two thousand in February to over thirty-two thousand in late June; in just a matter of months the Bolsheviks went from being a small, professional, clandestine organization of committed revolutionaries to a veritable mass party of factory workers and newly-recruited soldiers drawn from the peasantry. Most of these new members were militant, undisciplined, and impatient, oftentimes striking out on their own, acting autonomously, and flagrantly disregarding orders from the Central Committee in a way that produced a sharp rift between the base and the leadership. While the more conservative party leaders were busily trying to decide whether to support the demonstrations, for instance, much of the rank and file was already in the streets fighting battles, storming the Peter and Paul fortress, and autonomously reconnecting with other segments of the working class, all while calling for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government.

Lastly, it seems that Lenin had been far too concerned with keeping the party leadership together, instead of seriously contemplating a revolutionary seizure of power. In April, in fact on the very day he returned to Petrograd, the Bolsheviks were seriously considering reunification with the Mensheviks. In other words, the very existence of the Bolsheviks, as the distinct vanguard of the proletariat, was under threat. Lenin was able to keep the party together only at the cost of sacrificing the clarity and concreteness of the party program, intentionally leaving the question of the revolution, of the direct seizure of power, ambiguous so as to appease both the left and right factions within his party. But when the time finally came for the party to act in a clear, concrete, and determined manner, to make a resolute decision on the possibilities of directly seizing power and making the revolution, the party leadership found itself unprepared and divided.

The result was a crippling blow to the Bolsheviks. Though we might be led, here in the present, to downplay the seriousness of this defeat, since we all know that the Bolsheviks would recover their forces for a victory some four months later, for contemporaries the July days represented an unmitigated disaster. The Bolsheviks were crushed, much of the leadership was imprisoned, Lenin fled into hiding, the militant soldiers who led the uprising were all dispatched to the front, and a horrible period of reaction began to set it. For all intents and purposes, the Bolsheviks had missed their chance, and the opportunity to make a communist revolution would be closed forever. No one then could foresee any of the turbulent events, like the Kornilov affair, that would eventually transpire to give the Bolsheviks another chance.

Historians have certainly debated whether the July days could have actually produced a sustainable revolution if the party leadership had unreservedly taken the initiative instead of vacillating as they did. My argument, however, is not that victory would have been certain had the Bolsheviks properly anticipated the revolutionary potential of the masses in the weeks leading up to July – though it should be noted in passing that the chances were quite good, as some ranking Bolsheviks would themselves admit after the fact – but rather that the party leadership, with Lenin at the top, by insufficiently grasping the viewpoint of the proletariat, had misdiagnosed the situation, underestimated the potential of the class, and therefore found itself unprepared when the masses themselves thrust the reality, in fact the absolute necessity, of violent revolution onto the agenda.

Lenin, who was one of the first to admit the seriousness of this defeat, immediately drew the proper lessons from the catastrophe. The class had forced the actuality of the revolution; now it was up to the party to draft a new

program that could realize the project proposed by those whose interests it purported to advance. In a set of theses prepared for an emergency strategy session of the Central Committee on July 10, Lenin adumbrated the rudiments of a new program, boldly announcing that the transfer of power from the Provisional Government to the soviets could no longer be a peaceful one, that violent revolution was now not only a possibility but in fact a necessity, and that the party had to immediately begin preparing itself for a decisive struggle. It was a clear break from his position before July, startling many of the other Bolsheviks, and opening up a fierce debate within the party. As historian Alexander Rabinowitch puts it: “In effect, this may have been Lenin’s first open affirmation of the absolute necessity of a direct seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, to be executed at the first suitable moment in the not-too-distant future.”4 Lenin, presently in hiding, now set himself the task of formalizing this new position into a new program for a new conjuncture. And since the experience of July had turned the question of state power into the central problem, both in practice and in theory, it is no surprise that Lenin’s program would take the form of a disquisition on the state. The result, of course, was State and Revolution .

Although the bulk of the pamphlet that would be eventually published as State and Revolution was written

in August and September of 1917, as Lenin later remarked in his postscript to the first edition, it should be noted that he began collecting notes as early as the second half of 1916, and actually started writing an essay called “Marxism and the State,” by January 1917. The blue-covered copybook, which was left behind in Stockholm when Lenin made the trip back to Russia in April of 1917, did not actually make it back into his hands until July. There is a temptation, then, to see State and Revolution as simply the culmination of the project first outlined in 1916, which would therefore imply that the text is not so much a product of the revolutionary period, but rather, a project from the pre-revolutionary days, whose collation, revision, and completion was simply delayed by the course of history.

But just as we should avoid mistake of reading the history of the Russian Revolution teleogically, so too

should we be on guard against such a reading of State and Revolution. Just as we cannot deceive ourselves into believing that defeat in July would inevitably lead to victory in October, so too must we avoid the idea that State and Revolution was the text Lenin intended to write in 1916. Indeed, in between these moments, the winter of 1916 on the one hand and August of 1917 on the other, lay an entire revolution. When Lenin sat down to write State and Revolution in August of 1917 he had something entirely different in mind than when he started drafting “Marxism and the State” in the winter of 1916. Although some of the raw materials were collected before the revolution, the text we now know as State and Revolution was entirely a product of the conjuncture that came into being after the revolution, and more specifically, after the July Days. Its intentions, objectives, and problematic were a product of the cycle of struggle that emerged after the defeat in July. As Lenin wrote soon after that defeat :

The cycle of development of the class and party struggle in Russia from February 27 to July 4 is complete. A new cycle is beginning, one that involves not the old classes, not the old parties, not the old Soviets, but classes, parties and Soviets rejuvenated in the fire of struggle, tempered, schooled and refashioned by the process of the struggle. We must look forward, not backward. We must operate not with the old, but with the new, post-July, class and party categories.5

State and Revolution is in large part an attempt to refashion these new categories, rethink the changed political composition of the proletariat, and reexamine the possibility of a seizure of state power.

So although State and Revolution deals in large part with the state, it is actually about the necessity, character, and form of the proletarian revolution. As I have shown above, the greatest lesson Lenin learned from July was that the proletariat was actually more politically developed than he had expected; it had already put the question of the revolution on the table and concretely demanded the seizure of power – in fact, it had already put forth the actuality of the revolution. State and Revolution represents Lenin’s attempt to articulate that actuality at the level of theory, advance a program that would resonate with the changed political composition of the proletariat, and anticipate the future contours of the class struggle in a way that would allow the party to take the

initiative by decisively intervening in the class struggle, rather than sitting by as events simply unfolded, as they did in July. He wanted to be prepared in case another opportunity presented itself. So in October, when the party was given “another chance,” there was no longer any hesitation. Lenin would not think to himself, “right now it is impossible to say”; instead, we would be armed with a clear program, a plan, a line of action.

Realizing that project, however, necessarily involved, at that historical moment, an attempt to develop a concrete theory of the state, precisely because July had already made the question of the state paramount. State and Revolution would be the attempt to definitively show, by way of an investigation into the state form, that only a violent revolution could replace the bourgeois state with a proletarian one. The final line of the preface, which Lenin penned in August of 1917, expresses the objective of the entire booklet: “The question of the relation of the socialist proletarian revolution to the state, therefore, is acquiring not only practical importance, but also the significance of a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny.”6

Consequently, despite its form of presentation, the primary objective of State and Revolution is not the scholarly exegesis of the works of Marx and Engels on the state but the production of the proletarian revolution. Given that much of the text is a long commentary on Marx and Engels, there is the danger of reading the text as Lenin’s attempt to provide the definitive Marxist account of the state by sticking as faithfully as possible to the essential teachings of the masters. But if we look closely, it’s clear that Lenin does not at all compose a faithful, disinterested, or objective intellectual history. Lenin gives a rather biased reading, picking phrases from here and there, offering very liberal interpretations of certain passages, and, to put it bluntly, distorting Marx and Engels almost as much as Bernstein or Kautsky, the figures he attacks in State and Revolution precisely for their own distortions of the pure teachings of Marx and Engels. Far from offering a loyal presentation of the Marxist theory of the state, Lenin is carefully extracting out of Marx and Engels those elements necessary for properly theorizing the actuality of the revolution in his own time.

As he put it earlier in 1917 : “For the present, it is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognizance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”7 Instead of fidelity to a theory of yesterday, Lenin aims for the concreteness of the present situation, a task which may at times call a deliberate transgression of those past theories. The fundamentally historical, and therefore provisional, character of all these theories includes that of State and Revolution itself. It is ultimately a program hurriedly thrown together in order to prepare Lenin for the task of making a revolution in case another opportunity were to present itself. It is temporary, conditional, intentionally left open.

Indeed, it is no wonder that Lenin actually never finished the text. As he wrote in the famous Postface: “I was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis – the eve of the October Revolution of 1917.”8 The humor cannot be lost on us: practice did not interrupt theory; the theory found its fitting conclusion in the practice of revolution. With its purpose served, Lenin saw no reason to go back and finish off that which was always intended to be provisional anyway. The pamphlet kept its unfinished form, finally appearing in print in 1918, in a changed historical conjuncture marked by changed needs.

Given this provisional character, then, and recognizing its historically conditional purpose, how relevant is State and Revolution to us today? On the one hand, not a great deal, since historical conditions have changed so much as to render that text largely inadequate to our needs in the present. State and Revolution, as I have tried to show, should not be read as the definitive Marxist theory of the state, applicable anywhere and at all times, but rather as a historical program for a historical class that happened to take the form of an exegetical, at times polemical, disquisition on the state; just as, for instance, the Manifesto of the Communist Party is not the definitive Marxist theory of history, but rather another historical program for another historical class that happened to take the form of an historical, at times polemical, narrative of the class struggle.

But if this is the case, then do those texts, whose projects have been clearly obviated by the subsequent course of history, no longer hold any value for us in present? Not quite; indeed, they can be invaluable, but their value can only be unlocked after we have first learned how to read them. Unsurprisingly, it is none other than Lenin himself, in State and Revolution, who provides us the key to such a reading. When Lenin read Marx, he did so not under the impression that Marx had bequeathed a number of invariant theories to posterity, but rather that he had written a congeries of programs all tied to concrete historical moments in the class struggle. Speaking of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , for instance, Lenin comments in State and Revolution that such a work was not the product of “logical reasoning,” but of “actual developments, the actual experience of 1848-1851.”9 For Lenin, all of Marx’s work was a theoretical “summing up”10 of the most recent concrete proletarian experiences in a way that would prepare him for a decisive intervention in future struggles.

And so we must try to read Lenin the way Lenin read Marx. We must use State and Revolution as an entry point into Lenin’s mode of operating, his understanding of the relationship between theory and practice, his estimation of the role of communist theory. Lenin always looked to accessing, articulating, and advancing the proletarian viewpoint at the level of theory. This meant closely reading the composition of the proletariat in order to discover the political project already implicit in its struggles, using that inquiry to fashion a political program capable of making that project explicit, and then concretizing that program in a way that would allow him to anticipate the next moves in the struggle. This is the real meaning of practicing the art of politics: matching an historically specific program to an historically specific class. This is what we must relearn from Lenin today.

Salar Mohandesi is a graduate student at UPenn and an editor of Viewpoint.

1. Quoted in Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1968), 184.

2. Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso, 2009), 9-13.3. V. I. Lenin, “Draft Resolution on the Present Political Situation,” Collected Works, Volume 25: June-

September 1917 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 313.4. Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising

(Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1968, 216).5. Lenin, “On Slogans,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 190.6. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 384.7. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics, First Letter: Assessment of the Present Situation,” Collected Works, Volume

24: April-June 1917 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 45.8. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 492.9. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 409.10. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 405.

V . I . Lenin

On Slogans

Written: Written in mid-July 1917 Published: Published in pamphlet form in 1917 by the Kronstadt Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.

(B.). Published according to the pamphlet text.

Too often has it happened that, when history has taken a sharp turn, even progressive parties have for some time been unable to adapt themselves to the new situation and have repeated slogans which had formerly been correct hut had now lost all meaning—lost it as “suddenly” as the sharp turn in history was “sudden”.

Something of the sort seems likely to recur in connection with the slogan calling for the transfer of all state power to the Soviets. That slogan was correct during a period of our revolution—say, from February 27 to July 4—that has now passed irrevocably. It has patently ceased to be correct now. Unless this is understood, it is impossible to understand anything of the urgent questions of the day. Every particular slogan must be deduced from the totality of specific features of a definite political situation. And the political situation in Russia now, after July 4, differs radically from the situation between February 27 and July 4.

During that period of the revolution now past, the so-called “dual power” existed in the country, which both materially and formally expressed the indefinite and transitional condition of state power. Let us not forget that the issue of power is the fundamental issue of every revolution.

At that time state power was unstable. It was shared, by voluntary agreement, between the Provisional Government and the Soviets. The Soviets were delegations from the mass of free—i.e., not subject to external coercion—and armed workers and soldiers. Whatreally mattered was that arms were in the hands of the people and that there was no coercion of the people from without. That is what opened up and ensured a peaceful path for the progress of the revolution. The slogan “All Power Must Be Transferred to the Soviets” was a slogan for the next step, the immediately feasible step, on that peaceful path of development. It was a slogan for the peaceful development of the revolution, which was possible and, of course, most desirable between February 27 and July 4 but which is now absolutely impossible.

Apparently, not all the supporters of the slogan “All Power Must Be Transferred to the Soviets” have given adequate thought to the fact that it was a slogan for peaceful progress of the revolution—peaceful not only in the sense that nobody, no class, no force of any importance, would then (between February 27 and July 4) have been able to resist and prevent the transfer of power to the Soviets. That is not all. Peaceful development would then have been possible, even in the sense that the struggle of classes and parties withinthe Soviets could have assumed a most peaceful and painless form, provided full state power had passed to the Soviets in good time.

The latter aspect of the matter has similarly not yet received adequate attention. In their class composition, the Soviets were organs of the movement of the workers and peasants, a ready-made form of their dictatorship. Had they possessed full state power, the main shortcoming of the petty-bourgeois groups, their chief sin, that of trusting the capitalists, really would have been overcome, would have been criticised by the experience of their own measures. The change of classes and parties in power could have proceeded peacefully within the Soviets, provided the latter wielded exclusive and undivided power. The contact between all the Soviet parties and the people could have remained stable and unimpaired. One must not forget for a single moment that only such a close contact between the Soviet parties and the people, freely growing in extent and depth, could have helped peacefully to get rid of the illusion of petty-bourgeois compromise with the bourgeoisie. The transfer of power to the Soviets would not, and could not, in itself have changed the correlation of classes; it would in no way have changed the petty-bourgeois nature of the peas ants. But it would have taken a big and timely step towards separating the peasants from the bourgeoisie, towards bringing them closer to, and then uniting them with, the workers.

This is what might have happened had power passed to the Soviets at the proper time. That would have been the easiest and the most advantageous course for the people. This course would have been the least painful, and it was therefore necessary to fight for it most energetically. Now, however, this struggle,

the struggle for the timely transfer of power to the Soviets, has ended. A peaceful course of development has be come impossible. A non-peaceful and most painful course has begun.

The turning-point of July 4 was precisely a drastic change in the objective situation. The unstable condition of state power has come to an end. At the decisive point, power has passed into the hands of the counter-revolution. The development of the parties on the basis of the collaboration of the petty-bourgeois Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties and the counter-revolutionary Cadets has brought about a situation in which both these petty-bourgeois parties have virtually become participants in and abettors of counter revolutionary butchery. As the struggle between parties developed, the unreasoning trust which the petty bourgeoisie put in the capitalists led to their deliberate support of the counter-revolutionaries. The development of party relations has completed its cycle. On February 27, all classes found themselves united against the monarchy. After July 4, the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, working hand in glove with the monarchists and the Black Hundreds, secured the support of the petty-bourgeois Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, partly by intimidating them, and handed over real state power to the Cavaignacs, the military gang, who are shooting insubordinate soldiers at the front and smashing the Bolsheviks in Petrograd.

The slogan calling for the transfer of state power to the Soviets would now sound quixotic or mocking. Objectively it would be deceiving the people; it would be fostering in them the delusion that even now it is enough for the Soviets to want to take power, or to pass such a decision, for power to be theirs, that there are still parties in the Soviets which have not been tainted by abetting the butchers, that it is possible to undo what has been done.

It would be a profound error to think that the revolutionary proletariat is capable of “refusing” to support the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks against the counter-revolution by way of “revenge”, so to speak, for the support they gave in smashing the Bolsheviks, in shooting down soldiers at the front and in disarming the workers. First, this would be applying philistine conceptions of morality to the proletariat (since, for the good of the cause, the proletariat will always support not only the vacillating petty bourgeoisie but even the big bourgeoisie); secondly—and that is the important thing—it would be a philistine attempt to obscure the political substance of the situation by “moralising”.

And the political substance is that power can no longer be taken peacefully. It can be obtained only by winning a decisive struggle against those actually in power at the moment, namely, the military gang, the Cavaignacs, who are relying for support on the reactionary troops brought to Petrograd and on the Cadets and monarchists.

The substance of the situation is that these new holders of state power can be defeated only by the revolutionary masses, who, to be brought into motion, must not only be led by the proletariat, but must also turn their backs on the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties, which have betrayed the cause of the revolution.

Those who introduce philistine morals into politics reason as follows: let us assume that the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks did commit an “error” in supporting the Cavaignacs, who are disarming the proletariat and the revolutionary regiments; still, they must be given a chance to “rectify” their “error”; the rectification of the “error” “should not be made difficult” for them; the swing of the petty bourgeoisie towards the workers should be facilitated. Such reasoning would be childishly naive or simply stupid, if not a new deception of the workers. For the swing of the petty-bourgeois masses towards the workers would mean, and could only mean, that these masses had turned their backs upon the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties could now rectify their “error” only by denouncing Tsereteli, Chernov, Dan and Rakitnikov as the butchers’ aides. We are wholly and unconditionally in favour of their “error” being “rectified” in this way....

We said that the fundamental issue of revolution is the issue of power. We must add that it is revolutions that show us at every step how the question of where actual power lies is obscured, and reveal the divergence between formal and real power. .That is one of the chief characteristics of every revolutionary period. It was not clear in March and April 1917 whether real power was in the hands of the government or the Soviet.

Now, however, it is particularly important for class- conscious workers to soberly face the fundamental issue of revolution, namely, who holds state power at the moment? Consider its material manifestations, do not mistake words for deeds, and you will have no difficulty in finding the answer.

Frederick Engels once wrote the state is primarily contingents of armed men with material adjuncts, such as prisons.[1] Now it is the military cadets and the reactionary Cossacks, who have been specially brought to Petrograd, those who are keeping Kamenev and the others in prison, who closed down Pravda, who disarmed the workers and a certain section of the soldiers, who are shooting down an equally certain section of the soldiers, who are shooting down an equally certain section of troops in the army. These butchers are the real power. The Tseretelis and Chernovs are ministers without power, puppet Ministers, leaders of parties that support the butchery. That is a fact. And the fact is no less true because Tsereteli and Chernov themselves probably “do not approve” of the butchery, or because their papers timidly dissociate themselves from it. Such changes of political garb change nothing in substance.

The newspaper of 150,000 Petrograd voters has been closed down. The military cadets on July 6 killed the worker Voinov for carrying Listok “Pravdy” out of the printers’. Isn’t that butchery? Isn’t that the handiwork of Cavaignacs? But neither the government nor the Soviets are to “blame” for this, they may tell us.

So much the worse for the government and the Soviets, we reply; for that means that they are mere figureheads, puppets, and that real power is not in their hands.

Primarily, and above all, the people must know the truth—they must know who actually wields state power. The people must be told the whole truth, namely, that power is in the hands of a military clique of Cavaignacs (Kerensky, certain generals, officers, etc.), who are supported by the bourgeois class headed by the Cadet Party, and by all the monarchists, acting through the Black Hundred papers, Novoye Vremya, Zhivoye Slovo, etc., etc.

That power must be overthrown. Unless this is done, all talk of fighting the counter-revolution is so much phrase-mongering, “self-deception and deception of the people”.

That power now has the support both of the Tseretelis and Chernovs in the Cabinet and of their parties. We must explain to the people the butcher’s role they are playing and the fact that such a “finale” for these parties was inevitable after their “errors” of April 21, May 5, June 9 and July 4 and after their approval of the policy of an offensive, a policy which went nine-tenths of the way to predetermining the victory of the Cavaignacs in July.

All agitational work among the people must be reorganised to ensure that it takes account of the specific experience of the present revolution, and particularly of the July days, i. e., that it clearly points to the real enemy of the people, the military clique, the Cadets and the Black Hundreds, and that it definitely unmasks the petty-bourgeois parties, the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties, which played and are playing the part of butcher’s aides.

All agitational work among the people must be reorganised so as to make clear that it is absolutely hopeless to expect the peasants to obtain land as long as the power of the military clique has not been overthrown, and as long as the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties have not been exposed and deprived of the people’s trust. That would be a very long and arduous process under the “normal” conditions of capitalist development, but both the war and economic disruption will tremendously accelerate it. These are “accelerators” that may make a month or even a week equal to a year.

Two objections may perhaps be advanced against what has been said above: first, that to speak now of a decisive struggle is to encourage sporadic action, which would only benefit the counter-revolutionaries; second, that their overthrow would still mean transferring power to the Soviets.

In answer to the first objection, we say: the workers of Russia are already class-conscious enough not to yield to provocation at a moment which is obviously unfavourable to them. It is indisputable that for them to take action and offer resistance at the moment would mean aiding the counter-revolutionaries. It is also indisputable that a decisive struggle will be possible only in the event of a new revolutionary upsurge in the very depths of the masses. But it is not enough to speak in general terms of a revolutionary upsurge, of the rising tide of revolution, of aid by the West-European workers, and so forth; we must draw a definite conclusion from our past, from the lessons we have been given. And that will lead us to the slogan of a decisive struggle against the counter-revolutionaries, who have seized power.

The second objection also amounts to a substitution of arguments of too general a character for concrete realities. No one, no force, can overthrow the bourgeois counter revolutionaries except the revolutionary proletariat. Now, after the experience of July 1917, it is the revolutionary proletariat that must independently take over state power. Without that the victory of the revolution is impossible.The only solution is for power to be in the hands of the proletariat, and for the latter to be supported by the poor peasants or semi-proletarians. And we have already indicated the factors that can enormously accelerate this solution.

Soviets may appear in this new revolution, and indeed are bound to, but not the present Soviets, not organs collaborating with the bourgeoisie, but organs of revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. It is true that even then we shall be in favour of building the whole state on the model of the Soviets. It is not a question of Soviets in general, but of combating the present counter-revolution and the treachery of the present Soviets.

The substitution of the abstract for the concrete is one of the greatest and most dangerous sins in a revolution. The present Soviets have failed, have suffered complete defeat, because they are dominated by the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties. At the moment these Soviets are like sheep brought to the slaughterhouse and bleating pitifully under the knife. The Soviets at present are powerless and helpless against the triumphant and triumphing counter-revolution. The slogan calling for the transfer of power to the Soviets might be construed as a “simple” appeal for the transfer of power to the present Soviets, and to say that, to appeal. for it, would now mean deceiving the people. Nothing is more dangerous than deceit.

The cycle of development of the class and party struggle in Russia from February 27 to July 4 is complete. Anew cycle is beginning, one that involves not the old classes, not the old parties, not the old Soviets, but classes, parties and Soviets rejuvenated in the fire of struggle, tempered, schooled and refashioned by the process of the struggle. We must look forward, not backward. We must operate not with the old, but with the new, post-July, class and party categories. We must, at the beginning of the new cycle, proceed from the triumphant bourgeois counter-revolution,which triumphed because the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks compromised with it, and which can be defeated only by the revolutionary proletariat. Of course, in this new cycle there will be many and various stages, both before the complete victory of the counter-revolution and the complete defeat (without a struggle) of the Socialist- Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and before a new upsurge of a new revolution. But it will only be possible to speak of this later, as each of these stages is reached.

Notes

[1] See Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, in three volumes, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1973, p. 327).

Wikipedia:

Between February and throughout October: "Dual Power" (dvoevlastie)

The effective power of the Provisional Government was challenged by the authority of an institution that claimed to represent the will of workers and soldiers and could, in fact, mobilize and control these groups during the early months of the revolution — the Petrograd Soviet [Council] of Workers' Deputies. The model for the soviet were workers' councils that had been established in scores of Russian cities during the 1905 revolution. In February 1917, striking workers elected deputies to represent them and socialist activists began organizing a citywide council to unite these deputies with representatives of the socialist parties. On 27 February, socialist Duma deputies, mainly Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, took the lead in organizing a citywide council. The Petrograd Soviet met in the Tauride Palace , the same building where the new government was taking shape.

Leon Trotsky inspecting a military battalion of the Red ArmyThe leaders of the Petrograd Soviet believed that they represented particular classes of the population, not

the whole nation. They also believed Russia was not ready for socialism. So they saw their role as limited to pressuring hesitant "bourgeoisie" to rule and to introduce extensive democratic reforms in Russia (the replacement of the monarchy by a republic, guaranteed civil rights, a democratic police and army, abolition of religious and ethnic discrimination, preparation of elections to a constituent assembly, and so on).[21] They met in the same building as the emerging Provisional Government not to compete with the Duma Committee for state power but to best exert pressure on the new government, to act, in other words, as a popular democratic lobby.

Revolutionary Russian sailors in the Baltic Sea in 1917The relationship between these two major powers was complex from the beginning and would shape the

politics of 1917. The representatives of the Provisional Government agreed to "take into account the opinions of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies," though they were also determined to prevent "interference in the actions of the government," which would create "an unacceptable situation of dual power."[22] In fact, this was precisely what was being created, though this "dual power" (dvoevlastie) was the result less of the actions or attitudes of the leaders of these two institutions than of actions outside their control, especially the ongoing social movement taking place on the streets of Russia’s cities, in factories and shops, in barracks and in the trenches, and in the villages.

The 2nd Moscow Women Death Battalion protecting the Winter Palace as the last guards of the strongholdA series of political crises — see the chronology below — in the relationship between population and

government and between the Provisional government and the soviets (which developed into a nationwide movement with a national leadership, The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK)) undermined the authority of the Provisional Government but also of the moderate socialist leaders of the Soviet. Although the Soviet leadership initially refused to participate in the "bourgeois" Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky , a young and popular lawyer and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRP), agreed to join the new cabinet, and became an increasingly central figure in the government, eventually taking leadership of the Provisional Government. As minister of war and later Prime Minister, Kerensky promoted freedom of speech, released thousands of political prisoners, did his very best to continue the war effort and even organised

another offensive (which, however, was no more successful than its predecessors). Nevertheless, Kerensky still faced several great challenges, highlighted by the soldiers, urban workers and peasants, who claimed that they had gained nothing by the revolution:

§ Other political groups were trying to undermine him.§ Heavy military losses were being suffered on the front.§ The soldiers were dissatisfied, demoralised and had started to defect. (On arrival back in Russia, these soldiers

were either imprisoned or sent straight back into the front.)§ There was enormous discontent with Russia's involvement in the war, and many were calling for an end to it.§ There were great shortages of food and supplies, which was difficult to remedy because of the wartime economic

conditions.The political group that proved most troublesome for Kerensky, and would eventually overthrow him, was

the Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin . Lenin had been living in exile in neutral Switzerland and, due to democratization of politics after the February Revolution, which legalized formerly banned political parties, he perceived the opportunity for his Marxist revolution. Although return to Russia had become a possibility, the war made it logistically difficult. Eventually, German officials arranged for Lenin to pass through their territory, hoping that his activities would weaken Russia or even — if the Bolsheviks came to power — lead to Russia's withdrawal from the war. Lenin and his associates, however, had to agree to travel to Russia in a sealed train: Germany would not take the chance that he would foment revolution in Germany. After passing through the front, he arrived in Petrograd in April 1917.

Street demonstration on Nevsky Prospekt inPetrograd just after troops of the Provisional Government opened fire in the July Days

With Lenin's arrival, the popularity of the Bolsheviks increased steadily. Over the course of the spring, public dissatisfaction with the Provisional Government and the war, in particular among workers, soldiers and peasants, pushed these groups to radical parties. Despite growing support for the Bolsheviks, buoyed by maxims that called most famously for "all power to the Soviets," the party held very little real power in the moderate dominated Petrograd Soviet. In fact, historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick have asserted that Lenin's exhortations for the Soviet Council to take power were intended to arouse indignation both with the Provisional Government, whose policies were viewed as conservative, and the Soviet itself, which was viewed as subservient to the conservative government. By most historians' accounts, Lenin and his followers were unprepared for how their groundswell of support, especially among influential worker and soldier groups, would translate into real power in the summer of 1917.

Soviets attacking the Czar's police in the early days of the March RevolutionOn 18 June, the Provisional Government launched an attack against Germany that failed miserably. Soon

after, the government ordered soldiers to go to the front, reneging on a promise. The soldiers refused to follow the new orders. The arrival of radical Kronstadt sailors — who had tried and executed many officers, including one admiral — further fueled the growing revolutionary atmosphere. The sailors and soldiers, along with Petrograd workers, took to the streets in violent protest, calling for "all power to the Soviets." The revolt, however, was disowned by Lenin[23] and the Bolshevik leaders and dissipated within a few days. In the aftermath, Lenin fled to Finland under threat of arrest while Trotsky, among other prominent Bolsheviks, was arrested. The July Days confirmed the popularity of the anti-war, radical Bolsheviks, but their unpreparedness at the moment of revolt was an embarrassing gaffe that lost them support among their main constituent groups: soldiers and workers.

Chief of Staff General Lavr KornilovThe Bolshevik failure in the July Days proved temporary. In August, poor or misleading, communication

led General Lavr Kornilov , the recently appointed Supreme Commander of Russian military forces, to believe that the Petrograd government had been captured by radicals, or was in serious danger thereof. In response, he ordered troops to Petrograd to pacify the city. To secure his position, Kerensky had to ask for Bolshevik assistance. He also sought help from the Petrograd Soviet, which called upon armed Red Guards to "defend the revolution." This Kornilov Affair failed largely due to the efforts of the Bolsheviks, whose influence over railroad and telegraph workers proved vital in stopping the movement of troops. With his coup failing, Kornilov surrendered and was relieved of his position. The Bolsheviks' role in stopping the attempted coup immensely strengthened their position.

In early September, the Petrograd Soviet freed all jailed Bolsheviks and Trotsky became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Growing numbers of socialists and lower-class Russians viewed the government less and less as a force in support of their needs and interests. The Bolsheviks benefited as the only major organized opposition party that had refused to compromise with the Provisional Government, and they benefited from growing frustration and even disgust with other parties, such as the Mensheviks and SRs, who stubbornly refused to break with the idea of national unity across all classes.

In Finland, Lenin had worked on his book State and Revolution and continued to lead his party writing newspaper articles and policy decrees. By October, he returned to Petrograd, aware that the increasingly radical city presented him no legal danger and a second opportunity for revolution. The Bolshevik Central Committee drafted a resolution, calling for the dissolution of the Provisional Government in favor of the Petrograd Soviet. The resolution was passed 10–2 (Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev prominently dissenting) and the October Revolution began.