Left Communism and Bolshevism

not getting the image, just a tripod flag. sure it's funny tho.

Marc Chirik told this story about the comrades of the RKD (Revolutionary Communists of Germany). He had enormous respect for them. They had broken from Trotskyism over the war and had moved rapidly to the positions of the communist left rejection of the USSR as capitalist and imperialist, oppostion to both the democratic and fascist camps, including the national Resistance fronts. They had more experience than anyone of clandestine work because they had been an organised underground group in Hitler's Germany before the war. In occupied France, they even carried out one of those daring escapades when one of their members went to the local prison dressed up as a Nazi officer to order the release of one of their comrades who had been picked up by the police - and got away with it. During the war, they worked closely with Marc's group, the French Fraction or GCF.

After the war, the group disintegrated. They - or some of them at least - went through a process of putting everything into question. At first they began to insist that Bolshevism's absolute end was in 1921. Then they pushed it further back, to 1918 or earlier Then they pushed it all further back and denounced not only the Third International, but also the Second International from which it undoubtedly came. Then they suddenly realised that Engels was just an old reformist. And unlike some of those who argue on these boards, they took the final step. For let's be honest, Engels and Marx were hand in hand really. So Marx was rejected and the true organic continuity was finally discovered - with Bakunin.

The social democratic parties were proletarian; that's the first thing to understand.

8)

This sounds fantastic. Do you have any more information on this group?

Well they were full a' savvy!

Do you mean just historically or in general?

Their pro-working class history? I'm sorry redtwister, I think this is just convenient apologism for your Leninist hang ups.

Come on Alf, tell me more!

In searching the internerd for info on that group i came across a mention of the

"Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald". Any one know any more about this?

cheers

Dave

Do the ICC hope to be the 'vanguard' of the class, like the Bolsheviks (supposedly) were?

from wikipedia:

One other development during the war years merits mention at this point. A small grouping of German and Austrian militants came close to Left Communist positions in these years. Best known, to those few who know of them, as the "Revolutionary Communists", these young militants were exiles from nazism living in France at the start of World War II and were members of the Trotskyist movement but they had opposed the formation of the Fourth International in 1938 on the grounds that it was premature. They were refused full delegates' credentials and only admitted to the founding conference of the Youth International on the following day. They then joined Hugo Oehler's International Contact Commission for the 4th Communist International and in 1939 were publishing Der Marxist in Antwerp.

With the beginning of the war, they took the name Revolutionary Communists of Germany (RKD) and came to define Russia as state capitalist, in agreement with Ante Ciliga's book The Russian Enigma. At this point they adopted a revolutionary defeatist position on the war and condemned Trotskyism for its critical defence of Russia (which was seen by Trotskyists as a degenerated workers' state). After the fall of France, they renewed contact with militants in the Trotskyist milieu in Southern France and recruited some of them into the Communistes Revolutionnaires in 1942. This group became known as Fraternisation Proletarienne in 1943 and then L'Organisation Communiste Revolutionnaire in 1944. The CR and RKD were autonomous, and clandestine, but worked closely together with shared politics. As the war ran its course, they evolved in a councilist direction, while also identifying more and more with Rosa Luxemburg's work. They also worked with the French Fraction of the Communist Left and seem to have disintegrated at the end of the war. This disintegration was speeded no doubt by the capture of a leading militant, Karl Fischer , who was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was to participate in writing the Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald when the camp was liberated.

8)

Thanks Guadia.

I'm still after more info about their eventual transition to anarchism though.

Purely so I'm fully informed about the the dangers of how criticising the bolsheviks inevitably leads to leaving the proletarian political milieu and entering the bourgeois camp of course.

Matt Marx and Engels clearly expressed what a vanguard is in the Communist Manifesto

"The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement".

The Bolsheviks played this vanguard role in 1914 when they stood out against the imperialist war, and again in 1917 when they defended the necessity for the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the soviets. However, their mistaken assumption that being a vanguard meant taking charge of the state not only weakened the power of the soviets; it also made it increasingly difficult for the Bolsheviks to play a vanguard role in the class. In the very harsh conditions of isloation and civil war, they became entangled with the state bureaucracy and more and more divorced from the working class.

I would add that we don't think the problem with parties like the SWP or the Stalinists, or other leftists who claim descent from Bolshevism, is that they want to become a vanguard. The problem is that they are part of capital.

Nastyned the point of Marc's story is that the RKD had no history once they rejected the marxist tradition. Bakuninism was just a step into the void.

ahh the vanguard is perched on the Olympian cliffs of History, it holds the final plans of history in it's hardy hands, it intervenes like a foreman, making sure the proles are following the architects design to the letter.

what utterly contemptable bollox.

Do you think the level of understanding in the mass of the population is different today as it was in 1848?

Well, there's another debate as to whether the Bolshevik leaders actually wanted genuine soviet power. But what about the non-bolsheviks who were arguing for soviet power? Were they the 'vanguard'?

Actually Revol, I think you are pretty much in the vanguard when it comes to opposing nationalism in Ireland, among other things. Dare I ask you your opinion of our article on Sean O'Casey and the 1916 rising?

http//en.internationalism.org/wr/292_1916_rising.html

Matt yes, some of the anarchists, for example, were part of the vanguard at that point. And some of the Bolsheviks certainly weren't, eg Stalin, Kamenev and others who wanted to support the provisional Government.

So a 'vanguard party' is a bit of a pointless thing to say, because it's highly unlikely that ONE party will include ALL the 'vanguard' elements within it. And also, the 'party' can lose its status as the 'vanguard', can't it?

Matt,

you're the first one on this thread to use the phrase 'vanguard party'...

Apologies to all.

I was asking the ICC members really. If they follow in the tradition of Lenin, aren't they party communists?

There are times -as there were in 1917 -when the party lags behind the class (Lenin's phrase). This shows the depth and complexity of the party-class relationship, not that the party is useless. Neither can a revolutionary organisation evolve without a continuous struggle against the influence of bourgeois ideology in its ranks. A revolutionary organisation cannot be 'pure', entirely protected from these influences, but that it is not a reason for abandoning the struggle against them, or abandoning the very idea of organisation itself.

Yet like Joe Simpson they emerged triumpant!

Instead of staring into the abyss, Alf - why don't you take the leap?

The key difference is that any revolutionary organisation can only do this from inside/as part of the working class itself; in the most basic sense, an extension of their own experience rather than separate from it and 'leading from above', or attempting to artficially create struggles where they have no forerunner or background in our lives. In that situation there'd be no possibility of the "[organisation] lagging behind', because they will, following Marx's own belief, be the expressions of the revolutionary movement, driving antagonisms to their natural conclusions.

Hi,

This part of Knightroses' last post on Page 17 of the 'stabbing' thread caught my eye as being relevant to the discussion on this thread. He said:

It's important to distinguish between the contribution made by the Bolsheviks to development of the revolution in Russia and internationally through the creation of the Third International (Yes they did have a 'pro-working class' history!) and the cult of Leninism developed by Stalin to defend the counter-revolutionary myth of 'socialism in one country'. Sorry Knightrose, but the ICC DOES deny its adherence to 'Leninism', by which we take to mean the Stalinist deformation of Lenin. But we defend - though not uncritically! - the contributions made by the Bolsheviks to the proletariat's cause. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote at the end of her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution,

[prepares to make obligatory link to ICC's website ]

Some of you may be interested in the two articles we wrote on the question "Has the ICC become Leninist?"

http://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists http://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2

So my main point is, it's important that we're clear what we're discussing here: Leninism or Bolshevism? Indeed, do people at least accept that there is a difference between the two?

B.

I know I'm not revol and I haven't read all of it yet but it looks (well the opening coupla paragraphs look) like something I was thinking of writing myself. I'll read it all when I've more time and then comment properly if I remember.

I'd be interested to know how many referals your site gets from libcom - and how it compares to referals from other places. We'd be happy to tell you the info the other way round...

So just because a party has at times played a counter-revolutionary role doesn't mean we should reject the idea of the party per se?

Why then does the ICC (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you are an ICCer) apply the opposite line of logic to trade unions - that since they have at certain times been against the working class that they should be rejected as a form of organisation.

Not trying to be provocative, just wondering on what basis you make the different analysis?

Davethe....It's a perfectly reasonable question and deserves a longer response than I can do right now, but briefly we think that in the conditions of this epoch - decadence of capitalism, totalitarian state capitalism, recuperation of the 'old' workers movement -it's no longer possible for the working class to maintain permanent, mass organisations until the workers' councils become 'permanent', ie until the revolution. This applies to the trade unions but it also applied to the 'mass' parties which in the previous period combined struggles for reforms with a 'maximum' programme of socialism. That form of party is certainly obsolete.

In the period of decadence, the party could only ever be a minority organisation, based on a clear communist programme. Furthermore, we don't think it makes sense to talk about a 'party' unless you are talking about an organisation that has a real influence in the class. Today's small communist organisations are not parties, although they can play a role towards the emergence of the party in the future.

As I've said in a previous post, what was new about the Bolsheviks was that they began to break from the old social democratic conception of the mass party. Not completely of course. In particular they retained the notion of the party as an instrument for holding state power. And as they degenerated, they returned more and more to the social democratic conceptions which were no longer appropriate in the new period.

the trade union as part of the bourgeois state can't be anything other than bourgeois in nature where as a real party of the working class remains seperate and oppossed to the bourgeois state.

Have trade unions always been "part of the state"?

no. They were always reformist though. In the earlier stages of capitalism, in its ascendant phase the state controled a lot less of society. THere was a time when the social democtratic partys weren't directly part of the state. Even the police weren't always directly part of the state, although obviously the police were always completely anti working class where as trade unions and social democracy at one time where weren't.

There are some issues with this that I want to try and respond to. It seems to present the working class as a completely homogenous class in terms of the development of its consciousness. The reality is that this is not the case.

The situation of the working class in capitalist society creates a general tendency for the proletariat to constantly develop its consciousness in opposition to the ideology of the bourgeosie. Yet, it is also precisely its position in bourgeois society (i.e. lacking any material means of production and therefore any means of intellectual production as Marx might put it) that prevents it from doing so in a straightforward manner. As a result, the ideology of the bourgeoisie has a natural tendency to dominate bourgeois society. These two tendencies constantly war with each other as society's intellectual domain evolves ... reflecting the material combat between the bourgeosie and the proletariat.

Because of this constant ideological pressure, class consciousness cannot develop in a homogenous way. Some workers develop a clearer understanding more quickly than others. Some workers are more combatative than others. Others remain under the domination of bourgeois ideology. Just as this is the situation in the class as a whole, it is also the situation in the elements that make up the class' political organisations. This manifests itself in the right-wing and left-wing of the workers' movement that Alf mentioned earlier.

Now in periods of heightened struggle, such as the Russian Revolution, class consciousness makes dramatic leaps forward. Suddenly, workers everywhere are talking of solidarity, revolution, communism. But this still doesn't take place evenly, some elements advance more quickly, have a clearer understanding.

Being in a proletarian political party doesn't automatically make militants immune to bourgeois pressure or prevent them from succumbing to hesitation when faced with massive upheavals in the social order. This can happen without necessarily tipping a party (or fraction thereof) into counter-revolutionary tendencies, at least not immediately.

Nor should it be unexpected to see militants who have a very advanced understanding on one aspect of the situation (e.g. Lenin in seeing the importance of the Soviets in April 1917) while having a more retarded viewpoint concerning others (e.g. Lenin's confusions on the role of the state).

Finally, I'd just like to add that the situation the Bolsheviks faced in 1917 was completely unprecendented. Only once before had the proletariat seized power (the Paris Commune) and never had it done so in an entire country. The proletariat is a historical class that can only learn from its historic experience - its revolutionary nature doesn't give it a magical insight in how to organise society once it has seized power. Just as its awareness of the necessity for revolution has to be fought for tooth and nail, so does its understanding of how to achieve communism. For marxism, a true understanding of social reality can only be developed through praxis, not a code of eternal truths. The Russian Revolution is rich in lessons of in terms of its successes and it mistakes, but following a new insurrection there will be a whole new set of practical problems for the proletariat to grapple with and a whole new set of mistakes for us to make. Will our political descendents one day look back at us and condemn us for our failings, marking every single mistake, every single step back as "proof" of how we were "really counter-revolutionary"? I'd rather hope they see us in perhaps a more charitable and understanding light ...