It’s 1918 and the freshly minted Russian Soviet republic is facing invasion, sabotage, and rebellion. The monarchists, landowners, capitalists, and imperialists are incensed by the revolutionary conquest of power by the Russian workers and peasants. They’re dead set on crushing it.
In February, 53 divisions of the German Kaiser’s army rampage across the Eastern front, taking 150 miles of Russian territory in a week.
In the south, the Volunteer Army led by Tsarist generals begins a campaign of terror. Nearby, the Mensheviks invite the British imperialists into Baku to establish an anti-Soviet dictatorship.
In May, the Czechoslovak Legion inside Russia takes up arms and seizes towns and railways.
In September, anti-Bolshevik forces set up a Siberian Provisional Government in opposition to the Soviet republic. This is backed by the British imperialists, who also begin invasions in central Asia and Estonia.
In July, two Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), who are supposed to be allied to the Bolsheviks, assassinate the German ambassador, hoping to provoke a further German invasion into Russia. The Left SRs then stage an uprising in Moscow against the Bolsheviks.
Surrounded on all sides by the snapping jaws of imperialists and counter-revolutionaries, the Soviet republic is fighting for its life.
Here is a scene of fire and death, of a titanic battle between the old world and the new. And into this scene waltzes an “armchair fool” by the name of Karl Kautsky.
Kautsky was once a highly respected Marxist theoretician / Image: public domain
Kautsky was once a highly respected Marxist theoretician. Some people called him the ‘Pope of Marxism’. Lenin himself learned a lot from Kautsky.
But Kautsky failed to oppose German imperialism at the outbreak of the war, and only later came out against German war aims under pressure from the masses. By 1918, he is to be found publicly attacking the Bolsheviks for leading the Russian masses to power. He has switched sides in the class struggle, and as such, Lenin brands his former teacher a ‘renegade’.
But this renegade isn’t a hardened right-wing capitalist. His treachery instead takes the form of legalistic, hand-wringing liberalism.
Kautsky looks around at the fire and death of the class struggle in Russia, 1918 and is horrified. “Why can’t we just have a nice civilised discussion instead of all this?”, he asks. “What about democracy? What about the rule of law?”
“It’s your fault,” Kautsky tells the workers and peasants of Russia, “you should’ve compromised with the monarchists, landowners, capitalists, and imperialists instead of kicking them out. Now you’ve upset them and caused this fighting.”
This is the age-old argument of liberals. They complain about the exploitation of the masses by the ruling class. But when the masses fight back, they get scared and cling to the status quo. Their natural state is idle whinging. They condemn any form of class struggle that goes beyond that.
Kautsky dresses up his liberalism in Marxist phraseology, and publishes it in a pamphlet called The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is an attack on the Bolsheviks. If Kautsky’s arguments were to gain any traction it would mean the end of the Russian Revolution; the restoration of capitalism and landlordism; and a bloody retribution against the workers and peasants.
This opens a new, ideological, front in the war being waged by the young Soviet republic. While Trotsky is building and commanding the Red Army on the military front, Lenin leads the charge in this battle of ideas. His pamphlet, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky is his devastating response.
Democracy and dictatorship
Democracy is Kautsky’s main concern. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he says, have trampled all over democracy during the revolution. They’ve dissolved the Constituent Assembly, and they’ve restricted the democratic rights of some people.
Real socialists, says Kautsky, would never do such things. If the revolution was genuinely popular, he argues, then violence would never happen in the first place.
These arguments, says Lenin, make Kautsky either “a most learned armchair fool” or an “innocent ten-year-old schoolgirl”, neither of which is particularly useful in a revolutionary struggle.
Becoming president of the United States is impossible unless you’re a millionaire with dozens of billionaire friends / Image: fair use
Lenin points out that it’s only liberals who talk about democracy in general. Marxists always ask: democracy for which class?
After all, the foundations of democracy are in the ancient slave states of Athens and Rome. University students today still study Roman Law as an early example of the principles of the rule of law. Democracy, freedom, and rights all existed, but only for the slave-owning class.
In 13th century England, a struggle was waged by the barons against the King for the right to have a democratic vote over questions of taxation. The Magna Carta established a council of 25 barons to exercise that right. Needless to say, none of their serfs got a vote. This was democracy within the feudal ruling class, all the better to exercise their dictatorship over the toiling masses.
The bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries established democracies in which voting was based on property ownership. This was a huge step forward compared to feudalism. But it was a partial and limited democracy. It was democracy for the rich and dictatorship for the poor.
Today’s capitalist democracies are similarly partial. They offer us a choice between parties whose main policies are all decided by rich donors and powerful lobbyists. Becoming president of the United States, for example, is impossible unless you’re a millionaire with dozens of billionaire friends.
Since the year 2000, 93 percent of seats in the US House of Representatives have been won by the candidate with more money to spend. It’s the votes of the rich that decide, and it’s dictatorship for the rest of us.
The proletarian revolution, Lenin explains, introduces a system of democracy for the working class and the peasantry. This is based on soviets, workers’ and peasants’ councils that sprang up all over Russia to run factories, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and farms.
The masses are running society for themselves. The ruling class is, for the first time, the vast majority of society, instead of a tiny parasitic minority of landlords and capitalists.
For that tiny minority, it’s true, some of the rights they enjoyed before are curtailed by the workers who are the new ruling class.
Democracy in the Soviets now takes place from the floor of the factory and the peasant community, from which the bosses and landlords are excluded. The franchise is thereby restricted by an inch, but expanded enormously into real, participatory democracy for the millions.
The bosses’ democratic rights are encroached as the newspapers and meeting halls that were once theirs become public property. But the most essential elements of democratic, free expression are thereby laid before millions who never previously had access to them.
Above all, the old capitalists are no longer allowed to exploit workers and peasants for their own profit. They’re no longer allowed to extract rents and force those who can’t pay into homelessness. And they’re no longer allowed to force millions to die fighting wars for their own imperialist interests. These were all rights they enjoyed when their class was in power, but no longer.
This is what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like. It says that certain things, which may have been legal under the dictatorship of capital, are now no longer permitted because they harm the working class. And it says if you try to bring them back, we’ll use force to prevent you from doing so.
It’s a dictatorship to preserve the democratic rights of the vast majority in society: the workers and peasants, against the landlords and capitalists who want to abolish them.
Violence
Kautsky asks why this can’t all be done in a nice civilised way, through parliaments, constituent assemblies, and gentlemanly debates? Why the ‘authoritarian’ use of force?
The answer is that the class struggle isn’t a game of cricket with clean rules and an impartial umpire.
It’s a war to decide who gets to write the rules and pick the umpires.
You cannot have a calm, rational debate with someone pointing a gun at your head / Image: public domain
By insisting that the Bolsheviks should ‘stick to the rules’, Kautsky is saying that the workers and peasants should stay within the limits imposed upon them by the imperialists, capitalists, monarchists and landlords. He says they have the right to protest, but not the right to take power. In short, he makes the bourgeoisie’s arguments for them, and dresses it up as Marxism.
Kautsky complains about violence by the Russian masses in defence of their revolution. But who is responsible for this violence?
The 1917 October insurrection was a bloodless affair, at least in St. Petersburg. Even elsewhere, it was not the workers who initiated violence. In fact, it was the Tsarist generals and the foreign imperialists who turned a peaceful revolution into a bloody civil war.
This is no surprise. No ruling class in history has ever given up its power and privileges without a fight. When its position is threatened, the capitalist class drops the mask and bares its fangs. The capitalists aren’t interested in compromise, only in total, crushing victory.
So back in Russia in 1918, they’re organising uprisings, invasions, and the most brutal campaign of terror against the Russian masses. Should we just expect the workers and peasants to turn the other cheek? Only a cringing petty-bourgeois pacifist would make such a ludicrous suggestion.
You cannot have a calm, rational debate with someone pointing a gun at your head. To do so, as Kautsky suggests, is suicide. The revolution needs to hit back with the firm hand of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
As Trotsky pointed out years later, you cannot equate the violence of the working class to that of the ruling class. The violence used by a slave-owner to keep a slave in chains is not the same, in moral terms, as the violence used by a slave to break those chains.
All of this is either not understood or deliberately ignored by Kautsky. He talks about democracy and violence in general without looking at its class basis and the situation faced by the Russian Revolution in 1918.
Modern renegades
Today’s liberals make many of the same arguments that Kautsky did. Lenin’s counter-arguments are just as relevant today as they were over 100 years ago. His pamphlet is required reading for modern revolutionaries.
There’s no shortage of so-called ‘Lefts’ and trade union leaders today who talk the talk when it comes to fighting the establishment and the capitalist system, but when push comes to shove, they baulk at any serious class struggle.
We must be as clear and as sharp as Lenin against these modern renegades. Communists are ready and willing to fight the class struggle to the finish. Our goal is no less than the seizure and holding of power by the working masses. We’re not going to stop at half measures or compromises. We fight for nothing less than world socialist revolution.