Pannekoek, Anton - Why past revolutionary movements have failed
Bestand:Pannekoek, Anton - Why past revolutioary movements have failed.pdf
WHY PAST REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS HAVE FAILED
Anton Pannekoek
Written: 1940
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters/Greg Adargo
Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive December, 2001
BACK TO THE ANTON PANNEKOEK INTERNET ARCHIVE
HTTP://WWW.MARXISTS.ORG/ARCHIVE/PANNEKOE/INDEX.HTM
BACK TO THE MARXISTS INTERNET ARCHIVE HTTP://WWW.MARXISTS.ORG/INDEX.HTM>
I.
Thirty years ago every socialist was convinced that the approaching war of the great
capitalist powers would mean the final catastrophe of capitalism and would be
succeeded by the proletarian revolution. Even when the war did break out and the
socialist and labor movement collapsed as a revolutionary factor, the hopes of the
revolutionary workers ran high. Even then they were sure that the world revolution
would follow in the wake of the world war. And indeed it came. Like a bright meteor
the Russian revolution flared up and shone all over the earth, and in all the countries
the workers rose and began to move.
Only a few years alter it became clear that the revolution was decaying, that social
convulsions were decreasing, that the capitalist order was gradually being restored.
Today the revolutionary workers’ movement is at its lowest ebb and capitalism is
more powerful than ever. Once again a great war has come, and again the thoughts of
workers and communists turn to the question: will it affect the capitalistic system to
such a degree that a workers revolution will arise out of it? Will the hope of a
successful struggle for freedom of the working class come true this time?
It is clear that we cannot hope to get an answer to this question so long as we do
not understand why the revolutionary movements after 1918 failed. Only by
investigating all the forces that were then at work can we get a clear insight into the
causes of that failure. So we must turn our attention to what happened twenty years
ago in the workers’ movement of the world.
II.
The growth of the workers movement was not the only important nor even the most
important fact in the history of the past century. Of primary importance was the
growth of capitalism itself. It grew not only in intensity—through concentration of
capital, the increasing perfection of industrial tecnics, the increase of productivity—
but also in extensity. From the first centers of industry and commerce- England,
France, America and Germany—capitalism began to invade foreign countries, and
now is conquering the whole earth. In former centuries foreign continents were
subdued to be exploited as colonies. But at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of
the 20th centuries we see a higher form of conquest. These continents were
assimilated by capitalism; they became themselves capitalistic. This most important
process, that went on with increasing rapidity in the last century, meant a fundamental
change in their economic structure. In short, there was the basis of a series of worldwide
revolutions.
The central countries of developed capitalism, with the middle class—the
bourgeoisie—as the ruling class, were formerly surrounded by a fringe of other, less
developed countries. Here the social structure was still entirely agrarian and more-orless
feudal; the large plains were cultivated by farmers who were exploited by
landowners and stood in continuous, more-or-less open struggle against them and the
reining autocrats. In the case of the colonies this internal pressure was intensified
through exploitation by European colonial capital that made the landowners and kings
its agents. In other cases this stronger exploitation by European capital was brought
about by financial loans of governments, which laid heavy taxes upon the farmers.
Railways, introducing the factory products that destroyed the old home industries and
carried away raw material and food, were built. this gradually drew the farmers into
world commerce and aroused in them the desire to become free producers for the
market. Factories were constructed; a class of business men and dealers developed in
the towns who felt the necessity of better government for their interest. Young
people, studying at western universities, became the revolutionary spokesmen of
these tendencies. they formulated these tendencies in theoretical programs,
advocating chiefly national freedom and independence, a responsible democratic
government, civil rights and liberties, in order that they may find their useful place as
officials and politicians in a modern state.
This development in the capitalistic world proper took place simultaneously with
the development of the workers’ movement within the central countries of big
capitalism. Here then were two revolutionary movements, not only parallel and
simultaneous, but also with many points of contact. they had a common foe,
capitalism, that in the form of industrial capitalism exploited the workers, and in the
form of colonial and financial capitalism exploited the farmers in the Eastern and
colonial countries and sustained these despotic rulers. the revolutionary groups from
these countries found understanding and assistance only from the socialist workers of
western Europe. So they called themselves socialists too. the old illusions that middle
class revolutions would bring freedom and equality to the entire population were
reborn,
In reality there was a deep and fundamental difference between these two kinds of
revolutionary aims, the so-called Western and eastern. The proletarian revolution can
be the result only of the highest development of capitalism. It puts an end to
capitalism. the revolutions in the eastern countries were the consequences of the
beginning of capitalism in these countries. Viewed thus, they resemble the middle
class revolutions in the Western countries and—with due consideration for the fact
that their special character must somewhat different in different countries- they must
be regarded as middle class revolutions. Though there was not such a numerous
middle class of artisans, petty bourgeois and wealthy peasants as there was in the
French and the English revolutions (because in the East, capitalism came suddenly,
with a smaller number of big factories) still the general character is analogous. Here
also we have the awakening out of the provincial view of an agrarian village to the
consciousness of a nation-wide community and to interest in the whole world; the
rising of individualism that frees itself from the old group bonds; the growth of
energy to win personal power and wealth; the liberation of the mind from old
superstitions, and the desire for knowledge as a means of progress. All this is the
mental equipment necessary to bring mankind from the slow life of pre-capitalist
conditions into the rapid industrial and economic progress that later on will open the
way for communism.
The general character of a proletarian revolution must be quite different. Instead of
reckless fighting for personal interests there must be a common action for the
interests of the class community. A worker, a single person, is powerless; only as part
of his class, as a member of a strongly connected economic group can he get power.
Workers individualities are disciplined into line by their habit of working and fighting
together. Their minds must be freed from social superstitions and they must see as a
commonplace truth that once they are strongly united that they can produce
abundance and liberate society from misery and want. This is part of the mental
equipment necessary to bring mankind from class exploitation, the misery, the mutual
destruction of capitalism into communism itself.
Thus the two kinds of revolution are as widely different as are the beginning and
end of capitalism. We can see this clearly now, thirty years later. we can understand
too, how at the time they could be considered not only as allies, but were thrown
together as two sides of the same great world-revolution. The great day was supposed
to be near; the working class, with its large socialist parties and still larger unions,
would soon conquer power. And then at the same time, with the power of western
capitalism breaking down, all the colonies and eastern countries would be freed from
western domination and take up their own national life.
Another reason for confusing these different social aims was that at that time the
minds of the western workers were entirely occupied by reformist ideas about
reforming capitalism into the democratic forms of its beginning and only a few
among them realized the meaning of a proletarian revolution.
III.
The world war of 1914-18, with it’s utter destruction of productive forces, cut deep
furrows through the social structure, especially of central and eastern Europe.
emperors disappeared, old out-moded governments were overthrown, social forces
from below were loosened, different classes of different peoples, in a series of
revolutionary movements, tried to win power and to realize their class aims.
In the highly industrialized countries the class struggle of the workers was already
the dominating factor of history. Now these workers had gone through a world war.
They learned that capitalism not only lays claim on their working power, but upon
their lives too; completely, body and soul, they are owned by capital. The destruction
and impoverishment of the productive apparatus, the misery and privation suffered
during the war, the disappointment and distress after the peace brought waves of
unrest and rebelliousness over all participating countries. Because Germany had lost,
the rebellion here of the workers was greatest. In the place of pre-war conservatism,
there arose a new spirit in the German workers, compounded of courage, energy,
yearnings for freedom and for revolutionary struggle against capitalism. It was only a
beginning but it was the first beginning of a proletarian revolution.
In the eastern countries of Europe the class struggle had a different composition.
the land owning nobility was dispossessed; the farmers seized the land; a class of
small or middle-sized free landownders arose. Former revolutionary conspirators
became leaders and ministers and generals in the new national states. These
revolutions were middle-class revolutions and as such indicated the beginning of an
unlimited development of capitalism and industry.
In Russia this revolution went deeper than anywhere else. Because it destroyed the
Czarist world power which for a century had been a dominating power in Europe and
the most hated enemy of all democracy and socialism, the Russian revolution led all
the revolutionary movements in Europe. It’s leader had been associated for many
years with the socialist leaders of Western Europe just as the Czar had been the ally
of the English and French governments. It is true that the chief social contents of the
Russian Revolution—the land seizures by the peasants and the smashing of the
autocracy and nobility—show it to be a middle-class revolution and the Bolsheviks
themselves accentuated this character by often comparing themselves with the
jacobins of the French Revolution.
But the workers in the west, themselves full of traditions of petty bourgeois
freedom, did not consider this foreign to them. And the Russian revolution did more
than simply rouse their admiration; it showed them an example in methods of action.
It’s power in decisive moments was the power of spontaneous mass action of the
industrial workers in the big towns. Out of these actions the Russian workers also
built up that form of organization most appropriate to independent action—the soviets
or councils. Thus they became the guides and teachers of the workers in other
countries.
When a year later, November 1918, the German empire collapsed, the appeal to
world revolution issued by the Russian Bolsheviks was hailed and welcomed by the
foremost revolutionary groups in Western Europe. these groups, calling themselves
communists, were so strongly impressed by the proletarian character of the
revolutionary struggle in Russia that they overlooked the fact that, economically,
Russia stood only at the threshold of capitalism, and that the proletarian centers were
only small islands in the ocean of primitive peasantry. Moreover they reasoned that
when a world revolution came, Russia would be only a world-province—the place
where the struggle started—whereas the more advanced countries of big capitalism
would soon take the lead and determine the world’s real course.
But the first rebellious movement among the German workers was beaten down. It
was only an advanced minority that took part; the great mass held aloof, nursing the
illusion that quiet and peace were now possible. Against these rebels stood a coalition
of the Social-Democratic party, whose leaders occupied the government seats, and the
old governing classes, bourgeoisie and army officers. While the former lulled the
masses into inactivity, the latter organized armed bands that crushed the rebellious
movement and murdered the revolutionary leaders, Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
The Russian revolution, through fear, had aroused the bourgeoisie to greater energy
than it had aroused the proletariat through hope. Though, for the moment, the political
organization of the bourgeoisie had collapsed, it’s real material and spiritual power
was enormous. The socialist leadership did nothing to weaken this power; they feared
the proletarian revolution no less than the bourgeoisie did. They did everything to
restore the capitalist order, in which, for the moment, they were ministers and
presidents.
This did not mean that the proletarian revolution in Germany was a complete
failure. Only the first attack, the first rebellion had failed. The military collapse had
not led directly to proletarian rule. The real power of the working class—clear
consciousness on the part of the masses of their social position and the necessity for
fighting, eager activity in all these hundreds of thousands, enthusiasm, solidarity and
strong unity in action, awareness of the supreme aim: to take the means of production
in their own hands—had to come up and grow gradually in any case. So much misery
and crisis was threatening in the exhausted, shattered and impoverished post-war
society that new fights were bound to come.
In all capitalist countries, in England, France, America as well as Germany,
revolutionary groups arose among the workers in 1919. They published papers and
pamphlets, they showed their fellow workers new facts, new conditions and new
methods of fighting, and they found a good hearing among the alarmed masses. They
pointed to the Russian revolution as their great example, it’s methods of mass action
and it’s soviet or council form of organization. They organized into communist
parties and groups, associating themselves with the Bolshevist, the Russian
Communist party. Thus the campaign for world revolution was launched.
IV.
Soon, however, these groups became aware with increasingly painful surprise that
under the name of communism other principles and ideas than their own were being
propagated from Moscow. they pointed to the Russian Soviets as the worker’s new
organs for self-rule in production. But gradually it became known that the Russian
factories were again ruled by directors appointed from above, and that, the important
political position had been seized by the Communist Party. These Western groups
promulgated the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in opposition to the
parliamentary democracy embodied the principle of self-rule of the working class as
the political form of the proletarian revolution.
But the spokesmen and leaders which Moscow sent to Germany and Western
Europe proclaimed that the dictatorship of the proletariat was embodied in the
dictatorship of the Communist Party.
The Western Communists saw as their chief task the enlightening of workers
concerning the role of the socialist party and the u unions. They pointed out that in
these organizations the actions and decisions of the leaders were substituted for
actions and decisions of the workers, and that the leaders were never able to wage a
revolutionary fight because a revolution consists in this very self-action of the
workers; that the trade union actions and parliamentary practice are good in a young
and quiet capitalist world, but are entirely unfit for revolutionary times, where, by
diverting the attention of the workers from important aims and goals and directing
them to unreal reforms, they work as hostile, reactionary forces; that all the power of
these organizations, in the hands of leaders, is used against the revolution. Moscow,
however, demanded that communist parties should take part in parliamentary
elections as well as in all union work. The Western communists preached
independence, development of initiative, self-reliance, the ejection of dependence on
and belief in leaders. But Moscow preached, in ever stronger terms that obedience to
the leaders was the chief virtue of the true communist.
Western communists did not immediately realize how fundamental was the
contradiction. They saw that Russia, attacked from all sides by counter-revolutionary
armies, which were supported by the English and French governments, needed
sympathy and assistance from the western working classes; not from small groups
that fiercely attacked the old organizations, but from the old mass organizations
themselves. They tried to convince Lenin and the Russian leaders that they were illinformed
about the real conditions and the future of the proletarian movement in the
West. In vain, of course. They did not see, at the time, that in reality it was the
conflict of two concepts of revolution, the middle class revolution and the proletarian
revolution.
It was only natural that Lenin and his comrades were utterly unable to see that the
impending proletarian revolution of the West was quite a different thing from their
Russian revolution. Lenin did not know capitalism from within, at its highest
development, as a world of enlarging proletarian masses, moving up to the time when
they could seize power to lay hands on a potentially perfect production apparatus.
Lenin knew capitalism only from without, as a foreign, robbing, devastating usurer,
such as the western financial and colonial capital must have appeared to him in
Russia and other Asiatic countries. His idea was that in order to conquer, the Western
masses had only to join the anti-capitalistic power established in Russia; they should
not obstinately try to seek other ways but were to follow the Russian example. Hence
flexible tactics were needed in the west to win the great masses of socialist and union
members as soon as possible, to induce them to leave their own leaders and parties
that were bound to their national governments, and to join the communist parties,
without the necessity of changing their own ideas and convictions. So Moscow tactics
followed logically from the basic misunderstanding.
And what had Moscow propagated had by far the greatest weight. it had the
authority of a victorious against a defeated (German) revolution. Will you be wiser
than your teachers? The moral authority of Russian Communism was so undisputed
that even a year later the excluded German opposition asked to be admitted as a
’sympathizing“ adherent to the Third International. But besides moral authority, the
Russians had the material authority of money behind them. An enormous amount of
literature, easily paid for by Moscow subsidies, flooded the western countries: weekly
papers, pamphlets, exciting news about successes in Russia, scientific reviews, all
explaining Moscow’s views. Against this overwhelming offensive of noisy
propaganda, the small groups of Western communists, with their lack of financial
means, had no chance. So the new and sprouting recognition of the conditions
necessary for revolution were beaten down and strangled by Moscow’s powerful
weapons. Moreover Russian subsidies were used to support a number of salaried
party secretaries, who, under threat of being fired, naturally turned into defenders of
Russian tactics.
When it became apparent that even all this was not sufficient, Lenin himself wrote
his well known pamphlet ”Left-Wing Communism _ An Infantile Disorder.“ Though
his arguments showed only his lack of understanding of western conditions, the fact
that Lenin, with his still unbroken authority, so openly took sides in the internal
differences, had a great influence on a number of western communists. And yet,
notwithstanding all this, the majority of the German communist party stuck to the
knowledge they had gained through their experience of proletarian struggles. So at
their next congress at Heidelberg, Dr. Levi, by some dirty tricks, had first to divide
the majority—to excluded one part, and then to outvote the other part—in order to
win a formal and apparent victory for the Moscow tactics.
The excluded groups went on for some years disseminating their ideas. But their
views were drowned out by the enormous noise of Moscow propaganda, they had no
appreciable influence on the political events of the next years. They could only
maintain and further develop, by mutual theoretical discussions and some
publications, their understanding of the conditions of proletarian revolution and keep
them alive for times to come.
The beginnings of a proletarian revolution in the West had been killed by the
powerful middle class revolution of the East.
V.
Is it correct to call this Russian revolution that destroyed the bourgeoisie and
introduced socialism a middle class revolution?
Some years afterwards in the big towns of poverty-stricken Russia special shops
with plate glass fronts and exquisite, expensive delicacies appeared, especially for the
rich, and luxurious night clubs were opened, frequented by gentlemen and ladies in
evening dress—chiefs of departments, high officials, directors of factories and
committees. they were stared at in surprise by the poor in the streets, and the
disillusioned communists said: “There go the new bourgeoisie.” They were wrong. It
was not a new bourgeoisie; but it was a new ruling class. When a new ruling class
comes up, disappointed revolutionaries always call it by the name of the former ruling
class. In the French revolution, the rising capitalists were called “the new
aristocracy.” Here in Russia the new class firmly seated in the saddle as masters of
the production apparatus was the bureaucracy. It had to play in Russia the same role
that in the West the middle class, the bourgeoisie, had played: to develop the country
by industrialization from primitive conditions to high productivity.
Just as in Western Europe the bourgeoisie had risen out of the common people of
artisans and peasants, including some aristocrats, by ability, luck and cunning, so the
Russian ruling bureaucracy had risen from the working class and the peasants
(including former officials) by ability, luck and cunning. The difference is that in the
USSR they did not own the means of production individually but collectively; so their
mutual competition, too, must go on in other forms. This means a fundamental
difference in the economic system; collective, planned production and exploitation
instead of individual haphazard production and exploitation; state capitalism instead
of private capitalism. For the working masses, however, the difference is slight, not
fundamental; once more they are exploited by a middle class. But now this
exploitation is intensified by the dictatorial form of government, by the total lack of
all those liberties which in the West render fighting against the bourgeoisie possible.
This character of modern Russia determined the character of the fight of the Third
International. Alternating red-hot utterances with the flattest parliamentary
opportunism, or combining both, the 3rd International tried to win the adherence of
the working masses of the West. It exploited the class antagonism of the workers
against capitalism to win power for the Party. It caught up all the revolutionary
enthusiasm of youth and all the rebellious impulses of the masses, prevented them
from developing into a growing proletarian power, and wasted them in worthless
political adventures. It hoped thus to get power over the Western bourgeoisie; but it
was not able to do so, because understanding of the inner-most character of big
capitalism was totally lacking. This capitalism cannot be conquered by an outside
force; it can be destroyed only from within, by the proletarian revolution. Class
domination can be destroyed only by the initiative and insight of a self-reliant
proletarian class: party discipline and obedience of the masses to their leaders can
only lead to a new class domination. Indeed in Italy and Germany this activity of the
Communist Party prepared the way for fascism.
The Communist Parties that belong to the Third International are entirely—
materially and mentally—dependent on Russia, are the obedient servants of the rulers
of Russia. Hence, when Russia, after 1933, felt that it must line up with France
against Germany, all former intransigence was forgotten. The Comintern became the
champion of “democracy” and united not only with socialists but even with some
capitalist parties into the so-called Popular Front. Gradually it’s power to attract,
through pretending that it represented the old revolutionary traditions, began to
disappear; it’s proletarian following diminished.
But at the same time, it’s influence on the intellectual middle classes in Europe and
America began to grow. A large number of books and reviews in all fields of social
thought were issued by more or less camouflaged C.P. publishing houses in England,
France and America. Some of them were valuable historical studies or popular
compilations; but mostly they were worthless expositions of so-called Leninism. All
this was literature evidently not intended for workers, but for intellectuals, in order to
win them over to Russian communism.
The new approach met with some success. The ex-soviet diplomat Alexander
Barmine tells in his memoirs how he perceived with surprise in western Europe that
just when he and other Bolshevists began to have their doubts as to the outcome of
the Russian revolution, the western middle class intellectuals, misled by the lying
praises of the successes of the Five Year Plan, began to feel a sympathetic interest in
Communism. The reason is clear: now that Russia was obviously not a worker’s state
any more, they felt that this state-capitalistic rule of a bureaucracy came nearer to
their own ideals of rule by the intelligentsia than did the Europenan and American
rule of big finance. Now that a new ruling minority over and above the masses was
established in Russia, the Communist Party, it’s foreign servant had to turn to those
classes from which, when private capitalism collapsed, new rulers for exploiting the
masses could arise.
Of course, to succed in this way, they needed a worker’s revolution to put down
capitalist power. Then they must try to divert it from it’s own aims and make it an
instrument for their party rule. So we see what kind of difficulties the future working
class revolution may have to face. It will have to fight not only the bourgeoisie but
the enemies of the bourgeoisie as well. It has not only to throw off the yoke of it’s
present masters; it must also keep from those who would try to be it’s future masters.
VI.
The world has now entered into it’s new great imperialistic war. Cautious though
the warring governments may be in handling the economic and social forces and in
trying to prevent hell from breaking loose entirely, they will not be able to hold back
a social catastrophe. With the general exhaustion and impoverishment, most severe
on the European continent, with the spirit of fierce aggressiveness still mighty, violent
class struggles will accompany the unavoidable new adjustments of the system of
production. Then, with private capitalism broken down, the issues will be planned
economy, state capitalism, worker’s exploitation on the one side; worker’s freedom
and mastery over production on the other.
The working class is going into this war burdened with the capitalistic tradition of
Party leadership and the phantom tradition of a revolution of the Russian kind. the
tremendous pressure of this war will drive the workers into spontaneous resistance
against their governments and into the beginnings of new forms of real fight. When it
happens that Russia enters the field against the Western powers, it will reopen it’s old
box of slogans and make an appeal to the workers for ’world revolution against
capitalism” in an attempt to get the rebellious-minded workers on it’s side. So
Bolshevism would have it’s chance once more. But this would be no solution for the
problems of the workers. when the general misery increases and conflicts between
classes become fiercer, the working class must, out of it’s own necessity, seize the
means of production and find ways to free itself from the influence of Bolshevism.
Anton Pannekoek