[page 25]
BOOK REVIEWS 1903- WHAT REALLY can be shown by a longer-term comparison calculated by the Bank of England which shows profits as a percentage of national income. This does not show the rate of profit (for which the longer term figures are not available) but rather is an indicator of the share of the value produced by the working class appropriated by the capitalists as pre-tax profits directly.
1920-29 1930-34 1935-39 1940-49 1950-59 1960-64 1965-69 1970-73 1974-77 Sources: BEQB Table A By Roger Silverman The history of the Russian revolution is shrouded in myths, but perhaps pervasive than none more the romanticised distortion of the 1903 split in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. For bourgeois historians, it at the 1903 was Congress that Lenin conjured up a "party of professional revolutionaries" for whom the working class was nothing but a 'pliant tool. For their own reasons, the Stalinist historians are content to echo this distortion, as are the pseudo-Marxist sects. It is one of these sects which has published the English translation of the Minutes of the 1903 Congress. We owe thanks to the publishers that Over the last four years, then, the share of profits has been at one half of the level of the slump years of the early 1930s.
Nor have all attempts of the capitalists to restore profitability over the last few years had the desired effect. The table for rate of profit shown above an increase indicates in pre-tax profitability of barely ½% between 1975 and 1977, and after tax no Share of industrial& commercial companies' profits in domestic issues 12 11 15 14 12½ 10% 5½ HAPPENED this has at last been done, 75 years after the event, despite the fact that they least of all have understood what happened at the Congress. On the very cover they declaim that "Lenin and his supporters forged a cast-iron basis for the split with Menshevism".
But in these pages we have at last the refutation of sectarian delusions and of the lies of those who have earned professorships, royalties, knighthoods and Stalinist medals for falsifying history.
Nominally the Second Congress, the 1903 Congress was in reality the founding meeting of the mass party of Russian labour, the RSDLP-a 23 increase at all. Admittedly the figures exclude North Sea Oil, but even when these are added it varies the rate of profit in 1977 by a mere 2% to around 42%. The latest figures for profits show a rise of about one quarter between the third quarter of 1977 and the third quarter of 1978—roughly the period covered by phase 3 of the last Labour government's incomes policy. This rise practically doubled the growth of earnings-will have pushed the rate of profit up a bit further, to about 5% before tax, or 4½% leaving out North Sea Oil profits. But even this increase leaves the rate of profit at well under half the level of the early sixties. In the second quarter of 1978 manufacturing productivity was a wretched 3% 1978—no basis at all on which to rebuild the profitability of British capitalism and its competitive power on world markets.
Party consciously modelled by every tendency within it on the mass Social-Democratic parties of Austria, France, Belgium and above all Germany. For Lenin too, the SPD was the envy of the world labour movement. The discussions raging within the mighty SPD at the turn of the century were followed avidly by the Russian revolutionaries in their clandestine meetings, in the factories and in their Siberian exile. They celebrated the defeat of Bernstein's revisionist theories by Kautsky, Bebel and the other SPD leaders. The counter-revolutionary role to be played by the SPD leadership in 1914 and 1918 could not have crussed
[page 26]
their minds even as a mo!
nightmare, for all their joke the SPD's "respectability" in 1914 lenin believed the
nentary s about c. Even issue of supporto be a General
the SPD paper ting the Kaiser's forgery by the Staff.
When, in the 1903 split, the Struve accused himself against international S Lenin replied:—
•TI:
'Vorwarts'
war credits
German
aftermath of the ex-Marxist liberal Lenin of pitting
the leaders of ocial-Democracy.
"It is sufficient for me to issue a challenge to Mr Struve, which he will never be able to accept. When and where did I call the 'revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky' opportunism? When and where did I ever claim to have created any sort of special trend in international Social-Democracy not identical with the trend of Bebel and Kautsky? When and where have there been brought to light differences between me, on the one hand, and Bebel and Kautsky, on the other? ...Let Mr Struve try to answer these three questions." ("Twe Tactics, 1905).
Plekhanor - lading authority.
Before the 1903 Congress, the RSDLP was a scattered collection of separate committees. In exile, Plekhanov had split with the Union of Russian Social-Democrats and founded the paper 'Iskra' to fight against the ideas of the 'Economist' tendency. This struggle was seen as
the Russian variant of Kautsky's battle against Bernsteinism. The Economists, like Bernstein, considered that the "the movement is everything, the goal nothing" '. By emphasising the spontaneous movement of the proletariat and abandoning the task of political education and organisation, the Economists were in reality bending to the pressure of the liberals and ultimately the Tsarist autocracy. Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov, Zasulich, Axelrod and Potresov came to the Congress united as the editorial board of 'Iskra' , which had by its preparatory work established the elementary framework of a mass Social-Democratic Labour Party, a revolutionary proletarian party, in the underground opposition, as the conditions matured for the great impending storm of the 1905 revolution. To consolidate this framework and build the Party, it was necessary to crush those confused and flabby ideas which endangered it: Economism, which in effect denied the necessity of a Party, and the federalist ideas of the Bund (the Jewish workers' organisation)
which threatened to fragment the
Party and reinforce backward nat-
ionalist prejudices. Never for a
moment could Lenin imagine that
the Congress as it proceeded would
throw him and his closest collabor-
ator Martov-soon afterwards to be
supported by the gigantic authority
of Plekhanov-on opposite sides.
Socialist
Conciousness
The fraternal delegate from Poland remarked to the Congress that as recently as 1894 the Polish nationalists could still call the Social Democrats "utopians and fantasists, saying that a proletarian revolutionary movement in Russia was an impossible dream"! This, less than a quarter-century before the proletarian revolution in Russia! The 1903 Congress therefore took place in the conditions to be expected of an underground party in its formative years. To gather the delegates together despite arrests, interception of letters, harrassment throughout Europe, etc, was a superhuman achievement. The minutes reflect
24
The young Lenin.
only some of these difficulties. Delegates having scrambled across the frontiers, arriving in Brussels, had to be met at the street corner to protect their host from eviction. They met in a warehouse infested by fleas and rats. Delegates were summarily deported and the Congress had to break up in mid-session and reconvene in London. There were no stenographers, and speakers had to hand in summaries of their own contributions, thus ensuring laborious wrangles whenever minutes were submitted for approval. Much secondary content is omitted.
Nevertheless, an astonishingly clear picture emerges of the discussion and the personalities at the Congress. From the beginning, Plekhanov looms over the Congress, as Chairman and father of the Party. But as it progresses, he interposes heavy professorial sarcasm, overblown classical quotations, choice examples
of dialectics, and occasionally irri-
table and malicious reproofs, as it to remind delegates that he is Plek-
hanov, betraying his consciousness
that the movement was outgrowing
him and that he was already a
shadow from a bygone age.
On the other hand, Lenin's
confidence and authority visibly
grows in the course of the Congress,
at 33 already no longer a mere
disciple of Plekhanov, transparently
motivated solely by the needs of the
Party no matter where they might
lead, utterly lacking in considerations
of personal prestige. Other promin-
ent characters are Trotsky, young
and brilliant, a little impulsive, with
[page 27]
the eagerness
youth; Martov,
earnest, sincere, prepared to chal-
lenge the right wing with verbal
eloquence but shocked by the
relentless conclusions the fight led
to, and breaking with Lenin out of a
creditable but sentimental loyalty to
individuals not equipped to face the
responsibilities of leadership; Marty-
nov, the most articulate spokesman
for the Economists; Akimov and
Lieber the latter being the only
prominent Compromiser of 1917
present at the Congress, making a
distasteful impression as sharp
lawyers exploiting the working class
movement.
The Congress was marked by the
unsentimental realities of any nas-
cent organisation: it was infested by
people who were there by accident or
were to play no further part. Out of
the 50-odd delegates, only three were
workers. The petty-bourgeois composition of the Congress, the rivalries of different cliques, suspicious of each other, the jealousies and frictions of emigres, the lack of an acknowledged and authoritative leadership (apart from Plekhanov, respected only as a theoretician), combined with the infancy of the labour movement and its relative lack of traditions, to lead to interminable and unedifying procedural wrangles.
The perfection of the Bolshevik Party as the instrument of proletarian revolution was the result of a dialectical process. Marxism arose in Russia in opposition to the Narodniks, (with their reactionary rural idyll of peasant communes) emphasising the historical role of industry and the proletariat. They were vindicated in practice by the elemental movement of Russian labour in the 1890s, culminating in the 1905 revolution. But Russian liberalism, puny, sterile and bereft of ideology, found it could adapt Marxism to its needs by justifying the historic mission of capitalism. The Economists in their turn fought both against Narodnik-SR conspiratorial conceptions, and nominally against the so-called 'Legal Marxists' (Struve) by emphasising the innate and spontaneous consciousness of the working class, thus in reality providing themselves with an alibi for refusing to build the Party.
Lenim and Martor, allies until 1903, pletured with other members of the St Petersburg League
Struggle for the liberation of the working class.
It is here that the celebrated
argument of What Is To Be Done?'
comes in. With grateful surprise,
every sectarian clutches triumph-
antly at the passage in which Lenin argues that the working class left to its own devices is capable of attainıng
only a trade-union consciousness; the revolutionary intelligentsia is needed to bring to it a socialist consciousness." Isn't this a justification for the sects' petty-bourgeois composition, and their contempt for the labour movement? What a monstrous travesty! Lenin was describing the role of a mass Marxist party of the proletariat, not a whimpering sect on the sidelines.
And yet Lenin's arguments too were by no means the last word. They were defended at the Congress against the Economists by the future leaders of Menshevism no less spiritedly than by those of Bolshevism: that was not the cause of the split. But Lenin's formulation was overstated and injudiciously posed, as was natural in the heat of battle against an insidious threat to the very idea of a Party. The vanguard of the working class is not an alien body graited on to it, but its purest expression. Lenin gave unnecessary ammunition to Martynov, who in a lengthy learned lecture (quoting from several languages, as another delegate pointed out!) used some choice quotations from Marx and Engels to testify to the fact that it is the working class which teaches socialism to intellectuals. But by
their deeds shall ye know them! Lenin's whole life is a refutation of his passing slip of 1902, while the real conscious movement of the proletariat in 1917 passed Martynov by. (He resumed activity only with the ebb and degeneration of the Russian revolution, to become the theoretical mentor to...Stalin!)
Lenin himself, at the very Congress where he was under fire, by implication acknowledged his error:
"Obviously, an episode in the struggle against Economism has here been confused with a principled presentation of a major theoretical question, namely, the formation of an ideology... We all know now that the Economists bent the stick in one direction. In order to straighten the stick it was necessary to bend it in the other direction, and that is what I did." (pp.168-170)
Plekhanov too pointed out that "Lenin was writing not a treatise on the philosophy of history, but a polemical article against the Economists, who said: we must wait for the working class to catch up." Trotsky in his last work confirms Lenin's repudiation of the position ascribed to him by his enemies:—
"The author of What To Do himself subsequently acknowledged the biased nature, and therewith the erroneousness, of his theory, which he had parenthetically interjected as a battery in the battle against 'Economism' and its deference to the elemental nature of the labour movement." ('Stalin', 1940)
25
[page 28]
On this question as on others too-including the vital question of the permanent revolution-it was not Lenin's way to indulge in ritual Lenin's mind, fertile penances.
expressed in word and deed, engaged in concentrated moment at every effort to fight immediate dangers to the proletarian cause, corrected the record in action.
It was on entirely unexpected and the split issues that secondary occurred: on the personal compositeditorial board.
ion of the 'Iskra'
How did Lenin see it? Did he return from the Congress triumphant at decisively"
with "broken having opportunism and "forged a cast-iron basis for the split with Menshevfell the contrary: he ism"? On prostrate with a nervous illness at the shock. Krupskaya tells us that "he still could not believe that there was no way out. To wreck the decisions of a Congress, to jeopardise work in Russia and the working capacity of the newly-formed Party, seemed to Viadimir Ilyich simply madnesssomething incredible." ('Memories of Lenin'). Lenin wrote to the Menshevik Potresov:- "And so I ask myself: over what, in point of fact, would we be parting company?...I go over all the events and impressions of the Congress; I realise that I often behaved acted in a state of frightful irritation, 'frenziedly'; I am quite willing to admit this fault of mine to anyone, if that can be called a fault which was a natural product of the atmosphere, the reactions, the interjections, the struggle, etc. But examining now, quite unfrenziedly, the results attained...I can detect...absolutely nothing that is an affront or insult to the minority... Caúse a rupture on that account? Break up the Party because of it?...To cause a split because someone has been excluded from a central body seems to me a piece of inconceivable folly." (Quoted in 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Back').
Bolshevik Party founded in 1912 Lenin voluntarily relinquished his as editor of "Iskra' and position hanced it over to the Mensheviks in a Moscow 1905: the barricades go up. spirit of conciliation. It was they who insisted on maintaining the split despite his repeated reunification (which was for a time achieved). Only in 1912, after the long black years of reaction during which the Party was almost smashed, a period when the Mensheviks were the underprepared to dissolve ground Party while a handful of Bolsheviks-the hardest of the 'hard' —fought shoulder to shoulder with the workers, and together with them surged forward with the rallying of the proletariat from 1911 onwards... ..only then was it time to say: break forever with the emigres advocates, the fairweather friends of the working class, and build the Party on the basis of the real struggle of the proletariat as it emerges from the hell-hole of counter-revolution! Many of the issues discussed at the Congress are of direct relevance to the issues facing the British labour movement today: devolution, 35-hour week, the struggle against racism...The attitude of the Congthe Bund is itself an instructive lesson to modern which patronise black consciousness' and sow distrust of the 'white left'. For all its ugliness, racism in Britain today bears no comparison with Russian anti-Semitism, with its pogroms in which thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The recent Kishimassacre overshadowed the Congress. In many areas the Jews spoke their own language (Yiddish). The Bund had played an important role in pioneering Marxist ideas in Russia; it had a proud record of struggle against Zionism; and it openly acknowledged its subordination to the Party as a whole. Taking into account all these factors, which Bund a thousand times gave the more justification than the so-called socialist groups today...
"black ..nevertheless, with the exception of the five Bund delegates, the Congress voted unanimously-Lenin, Martov, Martynov and all-against the Bund's federalist proposals by which it claimed sole authority to represent the Jewish workers. These and other deliberations are of careful study by all worthy Marxists. The minutes provide unique insight into the workshop in which the forging of the razor-sharp of a mass Marxist Party sword began. But those who expect to see of Menshevism fabrications the confirmed will be disappointed. 1903: 2nd Congress of the Russian Party.
Social-Democratic Labour Published by New Park Publications. Available from World Books for f6, post free.
[page 29]