Material conditions necessary for socialism, communism

Yes, protecting workers' rights, fighting for higher wages, etc. does not make a revolution. If there is a socialist party the workers could of course learn as well about socialism. Only then, when they have become socialists, could they chose to bring the socialist party to power by a revolution. Of course the workers need the peasants with them. One of the first things a workers' government would do is legalize the trade unions, give freedom of speech, improve workers' conditions, nationalize the resources where beneficial, and so forth. For the peasants they would take away the monopoly of the landlords. The difficulties they'd face are enormous, so even after doing all this, the economic situation for the working people might not change much from what it was when 'oppressed', even if now the oppressors are gone.
If workers understand the limits imposed by the material conditions they will not believe any party that makes promises about being able to establish socialism and abolish their exploitation. So in this case they'll still have to wait on a socialist revolution in the industrially advanced states.

But waiting is very difficult, as you know Alex, especially when prospects are so dim; they have no reason or guarantee for an international revolution. Let's assume they are socialist and hold their breath, it's so difficult! They can do nothing, except maybe link up with their brethren in the central nations. And also maybe advise the western workers in how to struggle. I know this shouldn't be the task of New Guinean revolutionaries, but if they don't like waiting and if the western revolutionaries aren't up to the task by themselves, why not.

Now in your scenario, the workers from the start don't expect an international revolution, because they were never socialists and don't like holding their breath. Fine, they're not perfect. Would they sacrifice their lives, without even a hope for socialism, knowing that afterward they not only face the risk, but the certainty of mass enslavement? Is it very difficult to imagine this, but out of their sheer desperateness it can happen. In order to avoid this, the workers should be told that it will be tempting for a government which doesn't accept the need for an international revolution, to enslave and kill millions of their own people to create at most a half-form of capitalism. Turning the other cheek suddenly doesn't seem so bad an alternative. Luckily these aren't the unavoidable choices. The workers can advance the class struggle, to the point of having a socialist government, even in a backward country.

Well this sounds like a radical shift in position for you from advocating that any "Marxists" in New Guinea move to England or the United States and help us make a revolution here in "the West."

The problem I see here is that a communist has to relate to the struggles as they occur in society. Society is not sitting around waiting for the communists to say "Go !" before moving. Nor will they stop just because some self appointed vanguard teels them to.

What you opened with here sounds very close to the menshevik position in Russia in the late 1800s early 1900s except that they saw that in order to obtain the legalization of trade unions, the removal of the monopoly of landlords and so on they would have to politically overthrow the autocracy. The difference with the Bolsheviks was the strategy and tactics to be used in overthrowing the autocracy. No one, except Trotsky and Parvus, thought any kind of "socialist" revolution was on the agenda in Russia, but Lenin did realize that the bourgeoisie would side with the autocracy and oppose the establishment of a democratic republic. The Mensheviks thought they they should wait patiently for the bourgeoisie to lead the revolution for a democratic republic. Lenin thought that the workers and peasants could form an alliance and make a revolution against both the autocracy and the bourgeoisie. That is what, in fact, actually happened.

The class struggle goes on whether we communists participate or not. We cannot control it. If we are smart we can influence its tempo and help lead it to success. But not if we demand that it unfold the way we demand. if we do that it will go on without us.

That is not exactly true, pre 1917 the Bolshevik position was that they should get involved in the interim of provisional (bourgeois) revolutionary government or “play the leading role” to ensure its consummation, which would be a democratic republic; or in other words a constituent assembly.

V. I. Lenin The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution 1909

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/aim/i.htm

The counter revolution being some kind of backsliding into a dictatorship of a compromise fusion of feudalism and capitalism.

So from Stalin around the same time succinctly defending the Bolshevik position.

http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/PRG05.html

the Turati letter is as below.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_01_26.htm

This is obviously the stageist approach, and there is no evidence that the Bolsheviks had abandoned it pre 1917.

The fact that some Right Mensheviks did what the Bolsheviks recommended and went into the Provisional government to consummate the bourgeois revolution (constituent assembly) is no real surprise as the Mensheviks were to left of the Bolsheviks.

And therefore you could expect some cross over on policy between rightwing Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks ‘old’ policy.

This looks more like your statement than it does a quote from Lenin in 1909. Please clarify.

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Yes. There was a conflict between what "the Bolsheviks" advocated and what "Lenin" advocated and there was a contradiction between Lenin's underlying theories from Two Tactics and his Development of Capitalism in Russia and some of the Kautskyite parliamentary shenanigans he hadn't completely broken with. It was only resolved for Lenin, and then only briefly, with his April Theses. After the seizure of power, he, like virtually the entire Bolshevik party, became theoretically unhinged by the ease with which they imposed the ludicrous policy of "War Communism."

One can argue endlessly who was the "real Lenin."

Perhaps I cheated here and tried to claim the Lenin that I agreed with.

it is in the third paragraph of the link provided

V. I. Lenin
The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/aim/i.htm

incidentaly he said the basically same thing in 1911, last paragraph;

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1911/mar/19.htm

In support of Noa, (don't know if he'd agree with what i have to say though...)

i have to say that the legacy of the Makhnovists is being rather unfairly forgotten here. Makhno's peasant movement proved that it is possible to fight for proletarian goals with a peasantry, and even to form the same assembly and council systems.

I believe that they would grasp the need to fight tooth and nail for the spreading of the revolution internationally and attempt any industrial development that they may have the resources for. If they can unite with any revolutionary workers in the cities they would stand even more of a chance as they could attempt to replicate any factories that have been expropriated etc and proceed to self-manage the proletarianisation of a portion of the revolutionary peasants under the guidance of those workers. Note i am asserting that this can all be done without the reintroduction of wages, and through assembly/council systems.

Yes there are many problems with this, but it is rather preferable to that of a state-capitalist 'holding action' that i see some in this thread hinting at should be used to develop a region.

Yes freedom without the necessary material abundance is merely a self-managed slavery, but at least it has the capacity to evolve naturally into socialism when there is an abundance. This is not possible with state-capitalism, which must necessarily destroy council democracy in order to reintroduce wages, and we all know how hard it is to reintroduce democracy into a totalitarian society...

(It is my opinion that Makhno's movement would have continue to spread throughout the russian peasantry had it not been brutally repressed by the Bolsheviks.)

I must say I was a little confused by this quote from your above referenced site:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/aim/i.htm

It rather sounds like this was something written by Martov about Lenin rather than something Lenin actually wrote --- despite the heading.

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I am intrigued by Harrison Myers comment about Makhno. Quite frankly the only thing I ever read about Makhno was written by a big fan, Voline - and some rather crude and highly suspect rantings of Trotsky. In line with my "agreement" with at least one of "Lenin's" theories, the one articulated in Two Tactics of Social Democracy , I would be really fundamentally opposed to the implementation of War Communism and believe that the workers parties should have bent over backwards to find someone that represented the peasants to ally with. Even Voline admitted that Makhno really had no head for economics and accepted the currencies of the Bolsheviks, the Provisional Government, the Petrolivists (spelling editor), and others so I do not believe that he was much in the deep thinker department. It was a very major error, even a suicidal error, to make open war on the Makhnovists altho I do not know if they would have made an accommodation with the Bolsheviks if one has been offered. I'd like to see Harrison Myers expand on this idea a little more.

In line with Lenin's Two Tactics it would have seemed that the Bolsheviks either should have organized peasants themselves or submitted to an alliance with some political party that did if they were serious about the policy that Lenin articulated in Two Tactics. The fact that they did neither and never looked back on that as an error says something more for Dave B’s point.

How about this one or the same one then.

V. I. Lenin THE AIM OF THE PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE IN OUR REVOLUTION

Social-Demokrat, Nos. 3 and 4,
March 9 (22) and March 21
(April 3) 1909
Signed: N. Lenin

Published according
to the text in Social-Demokrat

From V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1963

Vol. 15, pp. 360-79.

Translated from the Russian
Edited by Andrew Rothstein and Bernard Isaacs

http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/APS09.html

I read it as a response to an article by Martov, and that the "article printed above" is missing.

What should have happened was that the petty bourgeois peasants would win the constituent assembly elections and institute a socio-economic framework amenable to their petty bourgeois aspirations.

That would have involved a respect for private property, the principle of buying and selling, competitive enterprise, greed is good and that the industrious and efficient rightfully succeed at the expense of the indolent and lazy peasant who was too fond of his vodka.

These would have been theoretical principles nominally acceptable to the big capitalist class.

Although the big capitalist class in Russia were generally not interested in agricultural production and the petty bourgeoisie.

And as Kautsky pointed out there was a more cosy and balanced relationship between the feudal autocracy and the big ‘absentee’ or ‘imperialist’ capitalism. As the one understood the benefits of creaming off a bit of the surplus value from the other without strangling the goose too much and rocking the boat.

So what should a party that represents the workers be doing all this time?

When Lenin proclaimed in his April Theses "All Power to the Soviets" was this an error?

Was the actual seizure of power by the Workers Councils* in November 1917 an error?

If neither of the above were errors, and I do not believe they were, what should the Bolsheviks have done instead of what they did do?

*or was it a seizure by the Bolshevik party?

ignoring the fact that lenin failed eventually to make good on his April these promise (by later destroying the soviets), i do not think they were errors, because they had the capacity to improve the international situation (as they did), and very nearly save russia by igniting the international rev.

PS. this thread has also evolved into a discussion about peasants in Russia etc
http://libcom.org/forums/theory/enforcement-rules-anarchism-what-defines-state-29042011

I believe "state-capitalism" (in a backward country) and wages (everywhere) are unavoidable after the revolution, and are fully compatible with councils. Like Alex, I oppose a Makhnovist type of War Communism. Makhno's peasant movement is good for fighting for power, which makes it a lot like Maoism, but after conquest in a backward country it faces limitations (and if it had prevailed in Russia turned into something worse than Maoism), limitations which you simply ignore by presupposing abundance already exists or that there's a "natural evolution" to socialism:

But it can be done with democracy:

For interest perhaps there is a informative and plain speaking article by Radek on the Bolshevik position on the peasant question in the link I will provide below.

That is not to say of course that I agree with it or anything like that. The Kautsky article mentioned in the spat between the Mensheviks and bolsheviks also cropped up in another Lenin article elsewhere at the time ie circa 1907.

It is also worth bearing in mind that in 1917 Lenin thought that the ‘permanent revolution’ theory was a load of bollocks ie

Economic Dislocation and the Proletariat’s Struggle Against It

First published in Pravda No. 73, June 1917

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm

And when Radek wrote the following Bolshevik Russia was unquestionably, by admission of the Bolsheviks themselves, pursuing state capitalism

Karl Radek The Paths of the Russian Revolution[ I ]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1922/paths/ch01.html#n10

One of the things that irritates me about the “rules” of contemporary scholarship is the lack of a way of “dating” when the author wrote a quoted work. Evidently scholarship thinks more of the publisher than they do the writer. It brings a cynical smile to my lips when I see a quote from Das Capital and see a date of 1987 on it.

What counts is when it was written. When it last went into print by the publisher is a matter of indifference to me.

What brought this diatribe on was the Radek piece quoted above by Dave B. When was it written?
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I agree that what we have seen in those parts of the world with an industrial infrastructure where we have seen a peasant uprising that overthrew the old ruling class has resulted in the kind of regimes that one saw in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba. I think Noa uses the term “state capitalism” to describe those regimes. I would agree that such a revolution could not transcend capitalism. I am not certain what Noa means when he inserts the statement that it is “fully compatible with councils.” I think I disagree. I know I am very uncomfortable with that. What does that mean Noa?

“War Communism” was a policy adopted by Lenin and Trotsky during and immediately after the Civil War. I consider that it was when “the Bolsheviks went insane.” It had nothing to do with the Makhnovists. If there is something else that Noa means by “Makhnovist War Communism” I would like to know what is being addressed.

I do agree with the Marxist proposition that the peasantry has a tendency to go ahead and “make a war” and then go home to harvest the crops. Their “localism” tends to mitigate against the kind of staying power to create something like a “dictatorship of the peasantry.” The “peasantry” has a tendency to disintegrate under industrialization. I do think that Mao’s peasant war in China proved Engels thesis in The Peasant War in Germany to be flawed, at least in the 20th century. From what I know I think I would find Makhno’s peasant army much more compatible with a workers council system than I would Mao’s peasant army.

The Bolshevik gamble in 1917 was that they could make a revolution in Russia in 1917, help stimulate a workers revolution in Germany, France, or Britain, and survive long enough for one or more of those revolutions to be able to save the day for the Russian Revolution. The question is – how could they have done that. Crushing Makhno and putting the Left Socialist revolutionaries of trial and creating a one party state was a very bad plan. But what might have worked? I would have started by working my heart out to find some accommodation with the representatives of the peasantry.

No, I argue, as on the 'Lenin acknowledging state capitalism' thread, that those regimes were not capitalist, and not state-capitalist (certainly not in agriculture or most industrial sectors, except probably the military). The problem was that they didn't succeed in creating a state-capitalism, but rather a barbarous conscript labor based sort of mode of production.
An example of state-capitalism is the USA. And if there's a revolution over there, the proletariat will be ruling state-capitalism (through councils or whatever).

noted

Between 1921 and 1922

http://www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1920/dictterr/intro.htm

How come it always has to be the factory proletariat who have to do all the hard work and heavy lifting?

intro quite harsh, castigating Georg Ledebour, however checking his bio (1850-1947, fought in the French-German war!), he supported the spartacist rising.

I think the mundane and more likely ignoble reason that Lenin seized power was to save his own neck and from being strung up for treason for taking capitalist bribes to take Russia out of the war.

December 3d, 1917the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Richard Kühlmann, submitted the following confidential report:

Cited in Pipe’s book

It was known before that though, from Bernstien, allegedly;

I suspect that may be from;

1921 Eduard Bernstein,Vorwaerts an article headed “A Shady Story.”

The provisional government had apparently compiled a legal dossier on it circa June 1917 and were preparing to prosecute Vlad himself.

It is that available in electronic German?

totally irrelevant to the thread, butSchachtlman's response to this kind of nonsense:

Georg Ledebour giving a speech at a funeral service in Berlin, 29 December 1918. (source Granger Collection)

just to come back on the topic,

i didn't followed everything that was written above, but it seemed like maybe i could contribute something. Just a little on consciousness, and oh yeah: bad english because my mother tongue is some strange german language...

The material conditions necessary for socialism, communism includes the consciousness, wich is often treated as a dichotomy next to the material conditions. Certainly in the second international you had a scientist approach to Marx his dialectical materialism, not his dialectical materialism. The Hegelian marxists criticised this approach (not historically during and against the second international) but they found there origins after the second world war as a troskyist offspring. Also Lenin turned to Hegel after the demise of the second international (Lenin's Hegel Notebooks), studying and making annotations of Hegels Logic. An important footnote to this is that Kautsky, Gramsci, Lukacs, Pannekoek all posited that bourgeois society in Western Europe demanded a different strategy to succeed a revolution than what was initially the case in Russia. I think this discussion of then is gaining relevance today. And what is to be done? already spoke of the major differences between the SPD in Germany and the RSDAP in Russia in 1903, the SPD later on being a huge working class party when the leadership betrayed their members in 1913.

In fact Marx doesn't makes a dichotomy (for example thinking/being, subject/object,...) as was made by vulgar materialists. If you read the theses on Feuerbach he explicitly takes in account thinking as activity and concludes the theses with the point that it is to change the world and that activity is the guiding principle. If Feuerbach has a human-centered view, Marx places a dialectical relation between self-knowledge and societal knowledge. And knowledge directs acting also. It also means that in the necessary conditions for socialism and communism you also need a class consciousness. I think the leading up to the famous citation at the end of the feuerbach theses makes clear the broadness of Marx thinking. But one example:

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

Of course the emphasis is laid on practice, activity, changing,...Still the question can be put: wich conditions lead to a certain consciousness? Bertell Ollman comes to the position that Marx had a vision that workers a bit automatically, due to certain conditions, become class conscious. You can ask the question between the difference of false consciousness and class consciousness... And also between the difference on conscious and self-conscious. You can be conscious on your class in certain ways but if you become self-conscious you gain the ability to direct your efforts, to the degree that you can raise consciousness about wich class your part of, and why capitalism should be overtrown.

Today the question of working-class organisation, the revolutionairy subject, class consciousness but also societal consciousness (wich is always tied to a certain activity), becomes ever more pregnant. I think the "economic base" of communism is already there for a long time (even rotten), but the problem is that the workers and other exploited classes who reproduce capitalism, should still produce the alternatives that replaces it. Further on, if capital is replaced by self-organisation of the working class, capital ceases to be because capital is a social production relation wich also reproduces production, religion, science,... as we know it know. It is not purely something material as it is often seen in the surplus-value stolen and materialised in capital accumulation and concentration.

There comes in the crisis we face today, how to develop a revolutionairy organisation wich the masses themselves use to not only counter the current crisis of capital in a succesfull way but also to recommence the task of building their own forces (with more clarity on what the alternative will be, namely communism). It is the latter that in the long run will determine the surpassing of the former.

Some stuff that could help "enlighten" the matter on material/ideal, subject/object,etc.. is:
-Hegels Logic and all the marxist works developed further on it
-Marx his early writings and his critique on Hegel.
-Lukacs class consciousness
-Alienation: Marx vision of man in capitalist society (b.Olmann)
-Joseph Dietzgen
-probably plenty of other stuff i don't even know about, or can't even understand..

But most of all, our own experience of course ( wich includes reading,discussing,organising)

Wow. badadas and I are really on radically opposite wavelengths. He "didn't followed everything that was written above" so he wants to, as he says, "just to come back on the topic."

I, on the other hand, thought the most recent discussion was point on topic and find his "back on topic" chatter "off topic" as well as uninteresting and almost unintelligible. From what I can make of it it sounds totally idealist.

"Material conditions necessary for socialism communism" implies the economic substructure. The level of consciousness of the proletariat is the subjective condition necessary - not the material.

Trotsky in
Results and Prospects (1906) (Pre-Requisites of Socialism).
Also about the 'subjective' side, class consciousness does not mean some kind of Camattian species being/primitivist solidarity:

O.K. Yes. Before you can build "socialism" you do need to have a proletarian revolution.

And before you can have a proletarian revolution you must have an awake and aware proletariat that organizes itself collectively for the purpose of taking power.

Is that what some of you mean by a "material condition necessary for socialism, communism"?

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Suppose you have a "proletarian revolution" somewhere where the overwhelming majority of the population is made up of peasants (let's say 86%).

Let us suppose further that this "proletarian revolution*" takes place in an area where the industrial infrastructure is at a very low level in the vast majority of the area but at a very high level in a few concentrated cities and towns.

That is the situation that you had in Russia in 1917.*

Building "socialism" there was an impossibility because it lacked the material prerequisites for socialism.

Russia was wealth deprived - there just wasn't enough to "go around." And there wasn't the transportation system to be able to ship goods from where they were made to where they might be needed. The material prerequisite for building socialism just were not present.

So whaddya do? That is the question that I would like to discuss:

Should they have refrained from overthrowing the Provisional Government like the Mensheviks said?

Or

Should they have gone ahead and overthrown the Provisional Government and established a minority proletarian dictatorship?

Or

Should they have gone ahead and overthrown the Provisional Government and established a majoritarian dual dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry?

If they chose the latter course what would it have looked like?

*If Russia had only had an attempt by the proletariat to seize power while the peasant mass remained dormant it would have been a flop. The only reason the Russian revolution succeeded at all was because there was simultaneously a proletarian revolution and a peasant war.

urgh Trotsky

I think it would have better if the questions were phrased in a more historically accurate way.

The provisional government(s) were overthrown or threatened with overthrow and it was justified or whatever in order to ensure the convocation of the constituent assembly.

So from;

Tony Cliff Trotsky: Towards October 1879-1917 15. Towards the insurrection

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/15-towards.html

In context, the rumours of the Bolsheviks being in the pay of the German Government was widespread at this point.

That report was also in Abrmovitch’s book ‘The Soviet Revolution’ chapter 3 where he adds;

And the Bolsheviks may well have failed in their coup had they failed to dupe people into thinking that it was done to ensure the convocation of the constituent assembly.

So the question moves from October to January and the overthrow of the anything but the promised long lived Constituent Assembly of a a few weeks before.

So then;

Or

Or

[that last one would be a bit nonsensical as the Constituent Assembly “would” have been ‘majoritarian dual dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. The Menshevik position however would have been as a party of extreme opposition and to have no further hand in administration of capitalism, the Bolsheviks may or may not have wanted to continue to play a ‘leading role’ to prevent counter revolution.]

Actually the so called ‘minority proletarian dictatorship’ very quickly ended up, as is started out in the Bolshevik party, as a vanguardist (Blanquist) small one party dictatorship.

As predicted by Trotsky (the Menshevik in 1905) and Engels.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_04_23.htm

Although Engels just considered that these kind of Blanquist and Jacobin adventurers would play a role in the death knell of feudalism in Russia and the inevitable introduction of capitalism, and that was true enough.

He clearly didn’t forecast state capitalism being introduced in his name, or ‘under his flag’, that would be the irony of history.

It must be argued that I have now not answered the questions but merely rephrased them, and placed them historically a few months later on.

So re what should or ought to have been done etc.

I can indulge in a bit of popular materialism myself and say the Bolsheviks should or ought not to have had the consciousness of the power hungry bourgeois intelligentsia, and a naïve working class and peasantry should not have trusted and been duped by them.

But given that the only possible material development in Russia was capitalism, and that the self conscious introduction of state capitalism by the Bolsheviks sprang from the material conditions. I can no more do ‘ought’ or ‘should’ to them than to poisonous scorpions who can’t help themselves either.

Even if they didn’t start out bad by basing themselves on the economic system state capitalism. It was in the end, and from the start, that economic base that remoulded their superstructural ideology into its ideal ‘Stalinist’ form of a ‘bureaucratic caste’, that is the necessary political form for state capitalism itself.

Deciphering your meaning: First is not-doing, second is Stalinism, third is NEP.
First option is ruled out because it's not doing anything, second is acceptable but not democratic, third is revolution failure and best choice.

I find it rather strange that self-described "left-communists" embrace the Constituent Assembly altho I admit there is a great deal of logic to that position - at least in the case described here - and, it is true, since much of their pre-revolutionary propaganda agitated in favor of it was rather disingenuous to disband it once it came about. I also know that Rosa Luxemborg held that it was an error to disband it.

I was also a little confused by Dave Bs "quote" from me but with the term "Provisional Government" changed to "Constituent Assembly." I did not pose the question the way you said in your "quote" (altho you did not credit me with the quote).

I agree with Noa that the third option is the best. Unlike Noa I do not believe that the second option is "acceptable." Nor do I agree that the third option is automatically a "revolution failure." Obviously we all know now that the proletarian revolution failed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and I would agree that the Bolshevik gamble that there would be one was a much longer shot than what they thought. But I would still have taken it.

They should have realized, however, that they could not "impose" some kind of "socialist" transformation on the bourgeois revolution - even Trotsky's elegant horseshit theory of the Permanent Revolution did not justify that. I do not know enough to know whether they could have accommodated a Constituent Assembly alongside the Soviets altho I am very suspicious of that. But they did need to find some accommodation with the peasantry and the policy on the ground floor would have looked alot like the NEP. It certainly would not have looked like "War Communism" at all. How long such a "dual dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" could have held out awaiting the German revolution is an open question. (Let us not forget the Civil War !) If there was no proletarian revolution in the West you would have seen a collapse of the proletarian half of the Russian revolution. If Noa was assuming this failure then I would have to agree. How much of the responsibility for the failure of the German Revolution was the immaturity of the German left and how much was due to the shenanigans of the Third International is another open question - at least to me.

I think the "21 conditions" doomed the Third International from the get go. But of course that is yet another question. As was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty*.

*where I am inclined to side with Trotsky's "no War / no Peace" position - but very very nervously.

Yes, Kautsky didn't hold Bolshevism in itself responsible for "state-capitalism". This apparent fatalism contains at the same time a certain optimism, because a Stalinist burial of a revolution is viewed as an impossibility in advanced countries.

My previous post was only the restatement of your choices (and by now it's known that you prefer the third one).

They went ahead knowing that chances for a revolution in the west were very small. I also wouldn't say that they gambled or acted rash.

Again, they were aware of this.

But enough of picking your favorite Octobre ice-cream.

Communists must support struggle of oppressed.

DO YOU SUPPORT KIM JONG IL, YES OR NO?

DO YOU SUPPORT HAMAS, YES OR NO?

DO YOU SUPPORT KHADDAFI, YES OR NO?

DO YOU SUPPORT AHMADINEJAD, YES OR NO?

DO YOU SUPPORT CHAVEZ, YES OR NO?