Under the dominion of the Roman Empire the economy had developed in
Italy almost to the threshold of capitalism. But the military and
political collapse of this world power meant at the same time as
result and cause in one the end of the economic development. What
followed was reversion to earlier primitive economic forms and
centuries-long stagnation. Only the crusades brought back the
impulse to new development. Conceived as raids which were to
open up the orient with its treasures to the conquering pressure
and avarice of western freebooters and adventurers, they introduced
for the following period a chain of very successful trade connections,
of which the North Italian states became the bases. Via Venice,
Florence, Pisa, Genoa, the merchandise found its way on ancient
army and trade routes to Nuremburg, Augsburg, Ulm, round from
there out to the north and north-west, especially to be transported
towards Flanders and Brabant. In connection with this grew up,
in Italy first, an indigenous production of goods, which provided
for exchange of commodities; the sudden impetus given to the money
economy, led to the foundation of banks of exchange and to the
concentration of finance capital in the hands of a few families.
The springtime of modern capitalism set in.
Its full development was however interrupted and disturbed by the
advance of the Turks in the Near East and the discovery of the sea
route to the East Indies. The traffic with the orient was cut off;
a total displacement of the trade routes occurred. The bulk of the
commodity exchange between east and west was shifted from Italy to
Portugal. The Italian states became poor and declined; their
Renaissance culture perished; the attempts to attain national
unification on the basis of economic unity, through the chaos
of the struggles between patrician families and state republics,
stopped in the early stages. As no real bourgeoisie, which had
learned to recognise itself as a class in the modern sense,
existed, it also stopped short of a centralised assertion of
capitalist interests on a large scale, short of any independent
economic and state establishment over the surrounding dependencies
of aristocratic dynasties and city guilds, short of a bourgeois
revolution, which would have brought about a fundamental break
with the old order of things and set up a new economic and social
system.
In Portugal and Spain capitalism shot up like a hot-house plant
from the same soil, which was abundantly fertilised with the
riches of newly discovered continents opened up to boundless
exploitation. But the favourable economic situation found for
itself no state power which would have developed from its
political task and would have grasped the essence of the
capitalist element. The Court, schooled and directed towards
territorial internationalisation as a result of marriage,
inheritance and conquest, saw itself, if it wished to safeguard
its interests, bound to the sole international power of its
time, the Catholic Church. This in turn perceived in the state
power the surest defender of the faith, which was basically
only the ideological armoured shield for its economic interests,
anchored in feudalism. Thus Emperor and Pope, state power and
church, were present in the Inquisition, which raged against
the heretics whose unbelief only formed the pretext for the
method of confiscation of goods, high fines, legalised robbery
and systematic combat of the awakening bourgeois class, bearer
of a new economic principle. The movement of the Communeros,
in which the self-consciousness of Castilian towns had risen
up, was smothered in blood; the hopeful blossoming of the
textile industry ended in the chaos of a crisis from which
it never recovered; as representatives of the early-capitalist
epoch there remained behind only crowds of lumpen-proletariat,
who populated an impoverished country, ruined towns and
desolate wastelands. The strength of the bourgeois class,
loaded suddenly with riches which it dissipated, but just
as suddenly pushed into the abyss of poverty, had not found
expression in a bourgeois revolution.
The maritime commerce which formed numerous bonds between
south and north had established in Bruges and later in
Antwerp large depots for the North and Baltic Sea shipping.
Soon the Netherlands were interpenetrated with capitalism,
central to the entirety of European trade and the great
reference point of all nations. The bourgeoisie,, grown
prosperous and conscious of its worth, held on to what it
acquired and was determined to defend property and the
right of property under all circumstances and against
every danger. This danger came from Spain when Philip
sent the dreaded Alba to the Netherlands in order to
secure the continuation of the Spanish crown by plundering
the capitalist riches. Under pressure of the danger, the
Netherlands bourgeoisie welded itself into the compact
unity of a class capable of resistance.
The bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands had no
aggressive character. It is much more a heroic resistance
struggle against an enemy power invading from outside,
more a national defence than a social confrontation.
But precisely in the awareness of common economic interests,
in the alliance for national action occasioned by it, consisted
an important factor for the consolidation of the forces whose
sum total was capitalism. The bourgeois class of the
Netherlands triumphed over the might of the Spaniards
because it stood on the ground of a more developed and
more viable economy,that's understood. But as it
triumphed, the combination into a new national community
was accomplished, and political freedom was proclaimed.
The strong economic potency lived and developed with
national and political vigour.
The shower of sparks from the Netherlands revolution
had set fire to the decaying structure of the English
feudal economy. The change to the capitalist economic
method proceeded very swiftly; trade spread its net
over the seas; domestic industry took up all the
liberated energies of the impoverished peasantry;
big trading and industrial centres with depots,
warehouses and counting-houses, mills and banks,
wharves and overseas companies were already
growing up. And in the parliament of estates, the
bourgeois class won an important position after
the other classes.
For the first time in world history the Parliament in
England became the arena for the fighting out of
bourgeois-capitalist interests. Crown and money-bag,
royal power and burghers' will, exploded at each other
in the fiercest and most embittered quarrels. The king
clung to prerogative and privileges, monopolies and
tax-raising, highest power of command and Divine Right;
the bourgeoisie with total energy and obstinacy stood
up for freedom of trade and competition, security of
property and fruit of enterprise, free play in
energies, markets, profit. In order to break the
reactionary power of the crown, the Parliament under
Cromwell organised an army which, after it had
destroyed the monarchy, at once set about securing
private property through suppression of the Levellers,
and winning in Ireland and Scotland a greater Britain
for capital's need to expand. Even when the bourgeoisie,
dependent on the support of the military, could not
prevent the return of the monarchy, it divested it of
all real power in affairs and questions of economic
life and reduced its existence to the luxury of a
decorative accessory, which it could accomplish
nolens volens.
In the English revolution was demonstrated the entire
strength and determination of the bourgeois class,
already grown economically firmly rooted and politically
independent, which smashes old traditions as soon as
they become a hindrance to it, recognises no sentimentality,
knows exactly what it wants and shrinks back from no step
which its interests order it to take.
The most spectacular of all bourgeois revolutions the
'Great Revolution' took place in France. It is without
equal in its elan, its class character and its historical
import. The historiographers see in it the landmark for
the beginning of the modern period, of the bourgeois
epoch proper.
A general-staff of the most outstanding minds had ideologically
prepared the revolution, which had become inevitable through the
catastrophic breakdown of the feudal system under Louis XIV and
his successors. Montesquieu's 'L'Esprit des Lois' provided the
building-stone for the foundation of the later revolutionary
constitutions; Rousseau in his 'Social Contract' sketched the
picture of a new condition of society; the Encyclopaedists
advocated with much wit and fervour the 'transformation of
the general mode of thinking'; Voltaire destroyed the
prestige of traditional authorities and propagated the new
precepts of a natural morality; Sivyes established with
cogent logic and stirring eloquence the political claims
of the 'Third Estate'. And while the mass of petty bourgeois
and workers did the rough work, while they stormed the
Bastille, marched to Versailles, seized the Tuileries
and dragged the king to the scaffold, the bourgeoisie,
according to the intentions of their political leaders
and intellectual mentors, built up the edifice of a new
state, which was to come for them a comfortable residential
palace; for the proletariat a hated militarily-secured
fortress. All attempts to obtain for those cheated of the
fruits of the revolution a voice within the new order
were bloodily repulsed: Marat, the Herbertists, Danton
and finally Ropespierre,the head of the Republic of
Virtue having become inconvenient,fell by the wayside.
'The thieves have won!' cried Ropespierre on being arrested,
in fact, the bourgeoisie, greedy for booty, came into power.
The petty bourgeoisie were burdened with taxation beyond
their means, the proletariat was refused the right of
coalition. Freedom and equality of franchise disappeared
under the brutal fraud of the Two-Chamber system. Baboeuf's
desperate attempt to rescue the betrayed communism, even
at the eleventh hour, ended on the scaffold. Instead
Napoleon sprang from the bourgeoisie as the hero who
was to bring them the garland of glory and material
success from the heavens. They were going to produce,
sell, earn, conquer the world market, rake in wealth.
Capitalism was to triumph. Thus the Emperor Bonaparte
became the latest and essential executor of the will
to power, economically based and politically established,
of the bourgeoisie.
The line of the bourgeois revolutions, which reached
its high point in France, took a sudden downward turn
in the German Revolution of 1848.
The capitalist development begun in the Middle Ages,
which had received impetus and nourishment from the
Eastern and Levantine trade of the North Italian towns
and had radiated its ideological reflections in the
Reformation, had slowly died away with the shifting
of the trade routes and finally expired completely.
Feudalism had struck roots again; with the Peasants'
War and the Thirty Years' War the people had been so
thoroughly bled that they bore the yoke of blackest
reaction for years with dumb submission. Around 1800
the dominant form of manufacturing was still petty
handicrafts. Where capitalism had gone over to
production, it prolonged a miserable existence in
domestic industry or in state manufactures under
the police baton of mercantile regimentation. Not
until Napoleon opened the eastern markets by force
of arms to the acquisitiveness of his capitalist
bosses, but especially when he decreed the continental
blockade, did a current of fresh air enter the dull
and narrow Prussian-German servants' hall. Soon
machines were clattering, factories grew up, and
in Rhineland, Saxony and Thuringia a great industry
developed. The bourgeoisie began to awaken as a
class and to announce its political demands. But
seemingly everywhere crown and nobility as representatives
of the feudal system stood obstructing its path. The
call for a constitution which would suit the claims
of the bourgeois class was answered by the Hohenzollerns
with persecution, treachery and provocative scorn.
Finally, the February Revolution in Paris in 1848
produced as a weak echo the German Revolution. The
circumstance that the definitive impulse for a
rising against obsolete conditions and privileges
came from outside and found a bourgeoisie which,
timid and politically innocent, had not acquired
the determination of a revolutionary class, had as
a consequence that the movement was not adequate to
smashing the existing bases of the state and creating
a unified state with republican forms in accordance
with the interests of the ascending capitalist economy.
The German bourgeoisie, achieving meagre success,
showed itself content with half freedoms, lame concessions
and rotten compromises. It abandoned the leadership
of the revolution to a clique of confused and rival
ideologists, while the pillars of the industrial development,
frightened by the class goals vigorously placed on the
agenda by the French proletariat, quickly fled back into
the wide-open arms of the princely reaction. Indeed, then
the June battle in Paris had shot down the fighting
proletariat and the reaction breathed freely again, to
raise its head more boldly than ever, in Germany even
these meagre gains were again lost by the bourgeoisie.
Political ambitions were renounced, people contented
themselves with the business of profit-making and went
on living in the old servility.
In the end it was Bismarck who helped the bourgeoisie
towards its historic role by means of Prussian domestic
power politics. On the way to a German unified state
under Prussian hegemony, which offered the rapidly
growing capitalism a large market and opened up new
possibilities of development, he knocked Austria out
of the running as a political competitor in 1866; in
1870-71, France as an economic one. With the right to
vote in the Reichstag, he granted the bourgeoisie a
political voice. At the head of the state he set a
half-absolute empire, a symbol for the compromise
arrived at between feudal power and bourgeoisie,
crown and moneybag.
When Germany collapsed after four years of world war,
the bourgeoisie, massively strengthened in the meantime,
in desperation found the strength to make an abrupt end
of the compromise which had become a danger to its
dominance and existence. In the choice between throne
and bank-vaults, it shortly decided with revolution
for the latter; threw the Kaisers and Kings overboard,
set up the republic, gave itself a new constitution
and completed with the active assistance of the
working class organised in parties and trade unions,
the bourgeois revolution of 1848.
As the last in the line of the great bourgeois
revolutions of Europe, the Russian Revolution followed.
Russian feudalism, an economic colossus of bearlike primitiveness
and strength of resistance to which the tyranny of tsarism lent
the political form, had experienced through the war with Japan
a shock that immediately set free energies in which the need
for political liberties and innovations of the classes
committed to the capitalist economic mode found its expression.
The desire of the bourgeoisie for a constitution was however
at once extended and strengthened through the demand of the
industrial proletariat for minimum wages, 8-hour day,
protection of labour; until now never recorded in the
bourgeois revolutions: the Russian Revolution had from
the beginning a strong proletarian-socialist strand.
Certainly in earlier uprisings greater and smaller
sections of the working class had also joined in the
struggle and shed blood: but they had always been
only appendages and following-troops of the bourgeois
class. Even in the German revolution of 1848 the March
fighters in Berlin had fallen as plain, mostly unknown
workers, not as conscious proletarians and class
combatants. In Russia on the other hand the proletarians
among the social-democrats, cut off for the first
time from the political part played by the bourgeoisie,
came on to the stage of history with their own revolutionary
demands and aims. Certainly the first phase, starting
from the march of the petitioning masses to the Winter
Palace under the leadership of the priest Gapon, until
the decreeing of the October Manifesto, still took the
typical course of all bourgeois revolutions, which are
concerned with liberal goals. But already in the next
phase the bourgeois-liberal voices,thin and timorous
enough given the Russian reaction's hardness of hearing,
got lost in the roaring gale of the mass demands of
proletarian deprived of rights, and bloodily tortured,
impoverished and neglected peasants. Even if the
strongly rooted counter-revolution might succeed
in snatching away again from the bourgeois element
the first parliamentary and legal concessions, and
stifling the revolutionary outcry of the masses
with bloody executions and behind prison walls,
it still gained by that only a respite, but no
rescue. Indeed, on the contrary, the forcibly
dammed-up strength of the revolution erupted,
after three years of world war loosened the chains,
in an explosion of such power that the whole
system of tsarism was scattered like dust and
left no more trace behind. The thin voice of
the Russian bourgeoisie was certainly aptly
accompanied by a weak energy: it was not capable
of fulfilling its historical task. Then the
proletariat put its shoulder to the wheel and
seized government power for itself. It concluded
peace, proclaimed the dictatorship of the
proletariat and set about causing the dancing
star of socialism to rise out of the chaos of
the sinking world of tsarism.
If in 1917 the imperialism of the Russian bourgeoisie
had conquered, taken Constantinople and achieved all
its war-aims, a bourgeois liberal epoch on the English,
French and German model would have been instituted
in Russia. But as it was, the world war had cut the
ground from under the feet not only of the old
feudal despotism but also of every capitalist
bourgeois government that was at all on the cards.
For foreign capital was chased out: domestic
capital, anyway only moderately developed, was
destroyed. The fiasco of Miliukov, Gutschkov,
Kerensky was therefore inevitable. In the end
there remained. to last out through everything
to the conclusion of the war, only the proletariat
as bearer of the state power and executor of the
people's will.
But the proletariat stood under the political
leadership of intellectuals who had been schooled
in the spirit of west-European social democracy.
They were socialists and wanted socialism. Now the
seizure of state power in Russia seemed to them
to offer the chance for the realisation of the
socialist idea.
The surrounding world was faced with a sensation:
the Russian Revolution, recently still an overdue,
feeble bourgeois revolution, turned in an instant
into a proletarian revolution. Beginning and end
of the bourgeois revolution came together in one.
Was that reality or illusion?
2 THE RUSSIAN PROBLEM
It is the historical task of the bourgeois revolution to overcome
the absolutism of the feudal era and to procure for capitalism,
as the new economic system, legal recognition and social acceptance
in the framework of the bourgeois-liberal state order.
In all countries with a formerly feudal economy and absolutist
form of government the bourgeois revolution has fulfilled this
task.
It never had the aim and function of infringing or even suspending
the principle of the economic basis and the social order dependent
on it, that is private property in the means of production. It
only changed, for the time being, the class which exercised
authority over the whole as the representative of this
principle.
While in the feudal epoch the nobility forms this class, supported
fundamentally by private property, holding dominion in the
despotically administered patriarchal state, organised by
estates with the monarch at its head, in the capitalist era
the bourgeoisie as private possessor of goods and money
takes over the government, which is established in the
constitutional state with Parliament and Cabinet, at its
most ideal in the form of the parliamentary republic.
The bourgeois revolution, everywhere it has manifested
itself, brought the bourgeois class to the fore. This
class was more or less conscious of its historical mission.
It had also prepared the revolutionary movement, at least
economically, often ideologically to. Under the pressure
of unavoidable necessities resulting from the conflict of
the old and new tendencies, it had finally become the
leader of the revolutionary action and had won political
power, in order to use it immediately after the victory
for the erection of the bourgeois state and social order.
The success alone of the revolution, which consists in the
creation of the capitalist economic order and the social
order appropriate to it, determines it nature as a bourgeois
revolution. The circumstances that proletarian strata also
form a part, now smaller, now greater, of the revolutionary
fighters, does not come into consideration in determining
the historical nature of the revolution. Even when the
proletariat is already formed as a class and marches in
the revolution with its own political class aims perhaps
indeed influences its development considerably or even
controls nothing of the historical nature of the revolution
is changed. The weak or strong proletarian admixture in a
bourgeois revolution can slow down or accelerate, sometimes
deflect or disturb, its completion; can temporarily
obliterate or deform its face; can affect or sometimes
endanger its success, but to the essence of the
revolution, its socio-economic content, it can make
no difference. Likewise in the bourgeois state and
in the army the workers form the strongest contingent,
they make up a large class grouping and yet no one
will be tempted on this account to call the bourgeois
state proletarian or to speak of a proletarian army.
Even the Red Army of Soviet Russia, consisting solely
of peasants and workers, is a military machine
constructed on a bourgeois model and functioning
according to the laws of bourgeois state policy,
which only political demagogy, with the intention
to deceive, can describe as a 'proletarian' army.
Where and whenever proletarian strata play a role in
the bourgeois revolution, they always appear in the
train of the bourgeois class, partly as paid mercenaries,
partly as fellow-travellers, partly as political
auxiliaries of uncertain tendency. They often form
the rump, mostly the tail of the movement, never the
head. The last is always with the merchants, bankers,
professional politicians, lawyers, intellectuals, literati.
Here the demands are formulated, the programme developed,
the goals fixed, the statements given out. Here bourgeois
policy is made. The historical face of the revolution
receives its imprint from here outwards.
In the first bourgeois revolutions the proletariat could
not yet figure at all as a class because up till then it
was not developed as such. At first in England it began to
mark itself off as a class from the main body of the
bourgeoisie, combined in strong organisations. But it
was still always closely intermingled with petty-bourgeois
elements and its programmes never went beyond the radicalism
of these sections. Thus the Levellers marched beside the
left Puritan sects at the very front of the revolutionary
forces, yet their whole attitude to the revolutionary
problem stayed bound up with the ideology of their time,
which was at best bourgeois. The pivot of all bourgeois
orientation is: that private property remains protected.
To the extent that radical groups and sects transgressed
this, it arose out of a wrongly understood primitive
Christianity, whose postulates, too literally interpreted,
would have been condemned to be shattered with the very
first attempts at realisation, because all the conditions
of the socio-economic milieu were against them. Likewise
in the French Revolution the proletariat was not present
as a class: the extent of the development of the bourgeois
class did not give rise to it at all. Not even sixty years
later, in the French as in the German revolution, did a
proletarian segment come to light. Only half a generation
later did Lasalle's agitation work begin, with the aim of
preparing, through the awakening of class feeling among
the proletariat the general education towards class
consciousness.
From the beginning, the Russian Revolution,in accordance
with its historical conditions could only be a bourgeois
revolution. It had to get rid of tsarism, to smooth the
way for capitalism, and to help the bourgeoisie in to the
saddle politically.
Through an unusual chain of circumstances the bourgeoisie
found itself in no position to play its historical role.
The proletariat, leaping on to the stage in its place, did
make itself in a moment master of the situation by an
unprecedented exertion of energy, daring, tactical readiness
and intelligence, but fell in the following period into a
fatal predicament.
According to the phaseological pattern of development as
formulated and advocated by Marx, after feudal tsarism in
Russia there had to come the capitalist bourgeois state,
whose creator and representative is the bourgeois class.
But government power from 1917 was occupied not by bourgeois,
but by proletarians who repudiated the bourgeois state and
were ready to institute a new economic and social order
following socialist theory.
Between feudalism and socialism yawned a gap of a full
hundred years, through which the system of the bourgeois
epoch fell unborn and unused.
The Bolsheviks undertook no more and no less than to jump
a whole phase of development in Russia in one bold leap.
Even if one admits that in doing so they reckoned on the
world revolution which was to come to their aid and
compensate for the vacuum in development within by
support from the great fund of culture from outside,
this calculation was still rashness because it based
itself solely on a vague hope. Rash too was the experiment
arising from this calculation.
The first act of the Bolshevik regime was the Peace of Brest-Litovsk.
But this treaty, concluded with an advanced capitalist bourgeois
government, was an act of bourgeois politics. A really proletarian
revolution would have maintained a hostile attitude, would have
tied up the German fighting strength further, to thwart German
imperialism of victory in the west, and on its part would have
mobilised all forces for the furthering of the world
revolution. Rosa Luxemburg gave the sharpest expression to
this view in her time.
In connection with the treaty, the Bolsheviks declared
themselves for the right to self-determination of nations
on the basis of which ensued the severing of Finland,
Poland, the Baltic, the Ukraine and the Caucasus from
Russia. This statement was the outcome of bourgeois
political orientation. The result was on the one hand
the Russian national state which is not a proletarian
goal and on the other the collapse of the proletarian
revolution in the detached states. A proletarian revolution
would have had to establish solidarity over all frontier
posts and beyond national turnpikes.
The Bolsheviks, however, began the greatest fall from grace
with the distribution of the big estates to the peasants.
Through this the peasants obtained private property. But
socialism should begin not with the introduction but with
the elimination of private property. And so the measure was
a slap in the face of the socialist idea. As obvious as this
act would have been for the government of a bourgeois state
power (more or less as at the time of the French Revolution),
it is similarly inadmissible,in fact, grotesque, as an
expression of proletarian policy. For, with the peasantry
having attained private property, about 85% of the population
was thereby recruited to enmity against socialism.
The consequence of this policy is manifest in the irreconcilable
opposition between country and town, peasantry and industrial
proletariat. It led to the boycott of the towns, to the refusing of
food, to the sabotage of the state supply organisations: it compels
tactics of concessions to the capitalist-orientated peasantry
a policy directed towards peasant interests and a capitulation
to profit.
In fact the Bolshevik regime had to go this way. While it still
based itself in 1918 on the landless, and the poor peasants with
the industrial workers made up its surest following, it now sides
with the property owning peasants, creates tenant farmers and big
proprietors, sets the grain trade free, permits and encourages in
this way the rise of a peasantry with capitalist interests, whose
political business it takes care of.
Parallel to this, in the same bourgeois tracks, ran the economic
policy vis-a-vis industry. The Bolsheviks carried out the
nationalisation of industry, of transport, banks, factories, etc.,
and thus awoke quite generally the belief that socialist measures
were involved here. Nevertheless, nationalisation is not
socialisation. Through nationalisation you can arrive at a
large-scale, tightly centrally-run state capitalism, which
may exhibit various advantages as against private capitalism.
Only it is still capitalism. And however you twist and turn
it gives no way of escape from the constraint of bourgeois
politics. So also in Russia, then, they came to the make great
concession to foreign capitalists, to whom mineral wealth and
labour power have been handed over for exploitation,
profit-sharing with the state. The stock exchange is open
again. A host of dealers, entrepreneurs, agents, brokers,
bankers, profiteers, speculators and jobbers has turned up
again and settled in. By the decree of 27 May 1921 the right
of possession over factories and workshops, industrial and
trading establishments, instruments and means of production,
agricultural and industrial produce, financial stock; the
right to inventions, copyright, trade marks; the right to
take up mortgages or lend money, like the testamentary or
legal right of succession, was expressly acknowledged again.
With this the bourgeois order is established in its entirety
and in all essential components.
To this also belongs, besides the bourgeois jurisdiction whose
organisational structure is being constructed, the Red Army: a
thoroughly bourgeois army functioning in accordance with
bourgeois-capitalist interests. In the context of policies
dictated in the first instance by the protection of the agrarian
profits, it represents the sharpest weapon of basic defence first
against the Cossacks, Denikin, Wrangel and so on, but sooner or
later also against the demands of the proletarian socialist
revolution.
Not last is a striking expression of bourgeois politics, the
dictatorship of the Communist Party leaders set up in Russia,
which is falsely described as the dictatorship of the leadership.
Behind this pseudo-revolutionary protective screen hides, as
everyone knows, the omnipotence of a small handful of people
who are the commanders of the authoritarian, centrally organised
commissariat-bureaucracy. As inverted tsarism this party
dictatorship is a completely bourgeois concern.
These few contentions show and prove that the Russian regime,
contrary to its doubtless honest intention to pursue proletarian
socialist policy, has been pushed step by step by the power of
facts into bourgeois capitalist policy.
Even where they succeeded for a while in developing the shoots of
a social revolution and creating the beginnings of an economic
and social order of a socialist nature, the pains they took ended
finally with a failure, so that they were forced to demolish the
attempts and experiments.
And as the best and most honourable of the fighters for a social
revolution opposed this, the Bolshevik authorities did not shrink
for a minute from throwing them by hundreds and thousands into
prisons quite in the bourgeois-capitalist-tsarist manner sending
them to Siberia, or condemning them to death. A Trotsky played
the executioner of the Kronstadt sailors with the same
coldbloodedness as a Gallifet having French revolutionaries,
or a Noske German revolutionaries slaughtered.
It was an historical error to believe that the Russian Revolution
was the start of a social revolution. And it amounts to a demagogic
fraud to awaken and maintain this belief in the heads of workers.
When the socialists in the Russian government, after the victory
over tsarism, imagined that a phase of historical development
could be skipped and socialism structurally realised, they had
forgotten the ABC of Marxist knowledge according to which
socialism can only be the outcome of an organic development
which has capitalism developed to the limits of its maturity
as its indispensable presupposition. They had to pay for this
forgetfulness by a wide, troublesome and victim-strewn detour
which brings them in a space of time to capitalism.
To institute capitalism and to organise the bourgeois state is
the historical function of the bourgeois revolution. The Russian
Revolution was and is a bourgeois revolution, no more and no
less: the strong socialist admixture changes nothing in this
essence. So it will fulfil its task by throwing away, sooner
or later, the last remnants of its 'War-Communism' and
revealing the face of a real, genuine capitalism. The struggles
within the Bolshevik party are preparing this conclusion, and
with it the end of the Bolshevik party dictatorship. The line
of development whether that of a party coalition which hastens
and alleviates the launching phase of capitalism, or that of
a Bonaparte who protracts and aggravates it is not yet clear;
both are possible.
The parallelogram of forces will find its correct diagonals.
3 THE BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST STATE
The bourgeois economic order rests on the possession of
capital, the production of commodities, the exploitation
of wage-workers and the gaining of profit.
The bourgeois state is the organisation of public and legal
authority into a mechanism of domination, which ensures the
functioning and the success of the bourgeois economic order.
All forces and means, in materials as in ideas, that the
state has at its disposal stand directly or indirectly at
the service of capital. The authority to order the state
power lies in the hands of the bourgeois class. It receives
the directives for the use of the state authority from
economic necessities. In the interest of the highest
expediency in its use, the organisation of the state
has followed in accordance with these economic
necessities.
In the capitalist economy the capitalist is master of the
process of production. He buys the raw materials, owns the
means of production, decides the managing of production,
sells the commodities, reaps the profit. He builds the
factories, seeks out the markets, takes care of the
customers, regulates the circulation of money, pays
out the wage. He is commander, representative, supreme
court. He has money. He is authority.
As in the economy, so in the state. The capitalist demands
liberties which the feudal state refuses him: freedom of
trade, freedom of occupation, freedom of competition. He
needs freedom of movement, liberation from feudal charges
and guild barriers, the right to self-determination, the
right of personality. He demands the guaranteeing of his
title of ownership, the legal protection of the exploitation
process, the legitimising of profit, the social sanctioning
of his authority.
In the state-scientific theory of liberalism are set down
all the points and principles according to which the
capitalist bourgeois wants to see his state, the
bourgeois-capitalist state, organised. All the liberal
demands and goals, aimed at obtaining and securing for
capitalism the fullest freedom for its development, are
here woven into a system. The philosophical anchorage of
this system is given in individualism as it has been
founded, formulated and completed in England by Locke,
Shaftesbury, Hume; in France by Bayle, Voltaire,
Helvetius, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists; in
Germany by Leibnitz, Lessing, Fichte. Begun as
'Enlightenment', this philosophical school came to
dominate the political and social provinces first
in England, where after the Revolution the track
had been cleared for the unfettered development of
bourgeois-materialist interests, and finally found
its formulation and strongest emphasis in the
principle of Manchester liberalism, 'Laissez faire,
laissez aller'. The whole atmosphere of the great
French Revolution is dominated by the spirit of
bourgeois individualism, where its manifestation
resulted in the boldest gestures and most vigorous
exaltations as an answer to the heavy pressure of
the old state and ecclesiastical situation. In
Germany, whose bourgeois class distinguished itself
from the beginning by lack of imagination and
calculating cowardice, the philosophical thought-content
of individualism faded very quickly to an empty egoism,
which enjoyed a predominantly materialist life. The
bourgeois class also produced no statesmen from its
ranks who would have taken care of its business: it
entrusted its interests to the Junker Bismarck who
according to his own words saw it as his task to
cultivate millionaires. These millionaires symbolise
bourgeois-capitalist authority.
Thus the bourgeois class, as soon as it has first won
power over feudalism, arrives at a state order according
to its needs, in its interests, for its use. Its wishes
are decisive, its attitude determines. For it is authority.
Its state is an authoritarian state.
In the capitalist economy all commodities develop the
tendency to follow the market in order to be exchanged
there. This market can be a shop, a department store,
an annual market, a fair or the world market. The market
is the point to which the centripetal force of all
commodities tends. It is, however, also the point from
which the centrifugal force of all commodities pushes
apart again as soon as they are exchanged, i.e. fulfilled
their capitalist purpose. If the commodity is money, the
market is stock exchange or bank. Always the market
stands at the middle point of a process working in two
directions. The market is the centre.
To the law of motion of the capitalist economy corresponds
that of the bourgeois state. All the forces of the government
collect at one point, there receive their orders and then
act back centrifugally. The bureaucracy escalates up to its
highest peak, the minister; the army organisation up to the
generalissimo; there the decision is taken, the command
given, the decree proclaimed; and with the precision of
a mechanical apparatus, the organisation functions
according to the will of one head, the centre, down to
its last errand boy and lowest organ. Only the central
office is autonomous: it is the brain and thinks for
the whole. Its decision is definitive, it is to be obeyed
unconditionally. Strict order and discipline prevail.
In the feudal era, when every socage-farm with its
copyholders formed a small economic unit, more or
less self-contained and self-supporting, the individual's
power to give orders did not have much scope. One was
situated beside the other and each was to the same extent
his own master. The system of organisation in which every
part of the whole enjoys its full autonomy is called
federalism. The feudal state, then, had been a federal
state.
The bourgeoisie had gained from the conditions of its
capitalist economy the insight that centralism was in
many respects superior to federalism. Especially insofar
as it united all the dispersed and isolated forces into
a whole. They came out in favour of a centralised will
and therewith won the ability to do great things. When
the capitalist brought the hand-workers together in the
factory, went over from domestic industry to co-operation,
finally evolved this into manufacture, he went through
practical schools of centralism. All the experiences and
knowledge thus gained the bourgeois class now utilised
in establishing its state structure. It needed a large
centralised mechanism that obeyed every finger-touch at
the highest point. A mechanism with which it, the small
minority, could be the brain, issuing commands,
accomplishing its will. And with which the large mass,
the proletariat, was subjected to its dominance through
strict order and discipline. This mechanism was provided
by the centralist system of organisation. It made
possible in the best and surest way the domination of
few over many. So the bourgeoisie created its state
for itself as a centralised state.
In the capitalist economy the production of commodities soon
becomes mass production. But the absorption capacity of the
existing market is quickly sated. New, bigger selling
outlets become necessary. Capitalism develops a drive to
expand, which threatens to burst the boundaries of the
state. Thus every young capitalist state seeks, through
wars, conquest, colonial acquisitions, etc., to become a
bigger state. This requires a certain mental and spiritual
preparation and influencing of the citizens a certain
ideology which interprets the pressure towards expansion
and extension in the interest of profit as the expression
of imaginary forces and needs, and lyingly converts warlike
conquests into achievements for the common good. This
ideology invents the concept nation, exploits sentiments
about home and fatherland and misuses them for class-interested
purposes of enrichment. It deals in national interests,
national honour, national duties and national responsibility,
until it gets involved in the national war, which is
falsified into a war of national defence. To wage the
war a national army has been provided, the schools have
been made into abodes of national incitement; in national
politics a special national phraseology has been cultivated
which furnishes every war, however notoriously for plunder
and conquest, with the requisite intellectual and moral
justification. When the SPD defended the world war from
1914 to 1918 as a national war, when the KPD, during the
collapse of the Ruhr, joined in supporting the national
defence of the Ruhr zone alongside Schlageter, then both
parties proved their character as national auxiliary
organs of the bourgeois state, which is always a national
state.
The capitalist economy, once it has entered the arena
of large-scale enterprises and beyond that, the formation
of stock companies, has created for itself a complicated
apparatus of management, very appropriate for its
requirements. In it all forces are well weighed up
against each other, all functions cleverly distributed,
all individual actions bound into an exact collective
action. The technology of the machine is its model.
In broad outline, the management structure of a large
modern factory looks like this: nominal owners and with
them actual interested parties, and so the real beneficiaries
of the capitalist large-scale concern are the shareholders.
These come together in the shareholders' meeting which
passes important resolutions, exercises control, calls
in reports, relieves and appoints officials, and concedes
wages. From the shareholders' meeting issues the board of
directors, which supervises the management, comes to final
decisions, constitutes the supreme court in all the vital
questions of the works, but is still responsible vis-a-vis
the shareholders' meeting.
An image of this large-scale industry's machinery is the
bourgeois state. There the bearers of a mandate from the
electorate sit in the parliament, a large meeting of the
shareholders entitled to vote who, discussing and resolving,
equipped with important powers, decide about the weal and woe
of the state as a whole. From its midst issues the board of
directors, the Cabinet, which has the task of looking after,
with special care and heightened vigilance, the interests
served by the functioning of the state machinery. The Cabinet
members (ministers) represent the state at its highest point;
they supervise the work of the management bureaucracy placed
under them, make the big contacts within the competing firms
abroad, i.e. the capitalist foreign states, but always they
stay dependent on Parliament and responsible to it; by it
they are appointed and recalled.
As in the assembly of shareholders, so too in Parliament
questions and proposals often manage to be carried through
and dismissed which already are foregone conclusions and
are only put to the vote for form's sake. They have already
been put forward and decided on in another place, whose
importance more or less strongly controls the vote of the
shareholders' meeting or the parliament. This other place
is identical with the offices of the great banks or of the
captains of industry. Here, where the most significant
decisions of the capitalist economy come down, the decisive
resolutions of bourgeois politics are passed. And indeed
by the same people in the same case. For politics is nothing
other than struggle for the legal protection of economic
interests is the defence of profit with the weapons of
paragraphs in law, the securing of the capitalist system
of exploitation with the means of state authority.
With tirelessness and zeal the bourgeoisie has worked at
the construction of its state form and at the development
of its legislature. For this it found its most reliable
tool in Parliament, which in turn found its auxiliary organs
in the parties. Today, having reached the highest peak of
capitalist development, big capital feels the power of
Parliament and parties as burdensome. It avoids it by
Enabling Acts, military dictatorships, and shifting
important authority and decisions to other bodies in
which the representatives of capital and economic concerns
have the upper hand (state economic council). Open
antagonism towards Parliament and parliamentarism is
no longer at all concealed in big-capitalist circles;
in fact attacks directed against parliament and
parliamentary government are debated quite openly
without inhibition. The slave, Parliament, has done
his duty. When the idea of a Directory was being
discussed in the bonapartist tendency, Herr Minoux
was selected as the supreme holder of power. Herr
Minoux the General Director of Stinnes.