Peace at Brest: Treachery to the working class

The Brest-Litovsk peace continues to be the most crying betrayal not just of the Russian proletariat but of the world international working class, a dishonorable capitulation that extinguished a shining moment of revolutionary possibility, a spark of hope which, were it seized, could have freed the bonds of imperialist domination across Europe and the globe. It was, indeed, a turning point, a revolutionary crisis pregnant with the potential for the extension of the October rebellion into the very center of the continent, where proletarian armies, driven by the consciousness of their class task and inspired by soviet triumph, could have brought an end to the imperialist war in the interests of workers' councils, rather than the bloated capitals of a few dying monarchies and capitalist states. Instead, this instant, bathed in the promise of a turn to proletarian internationalism, was presented to the party bureaucratic convenience and to the necessities of tactics as Lenin himself, regretfully, subsequently viewed them, even though in reality it had been the betrayal of the very foundations of Marxism. At the start of the imperialist conflagration, Lenin had correctly perceived the war as a revolutionary opportunity, appealing to the workers to "turn the imperialist war into civil war," insisting on the revolutionary seizure of power not merely in Russia but as a spark of world disturbance, but the victory of October and the rise of the soviets, so far from encouraging the struggle for revolutionary war, were followed by a harsh swing-back in Lenin's policy: the Party, in the interest of preserving its own immediate organizational leadership, called for peace at any cost, and hence abandoned the living, breathing interests of the millions of workers to bureaucratic prudence. This about-face, this renunciation of the revolutionary methodology and revolutionary content of Marxism, was not a tactical maneuver but a profound theoretical failure: the act of signing peace under duress, of yielding to German imperialist demands, severed the link between the October revolution and the European proletariat as a whole, which abandoned the principle Marx and Engels had developed with unmistakable clarity, i.e., that the emancipation of the working class must be an universal enterprise, not the limitation of its struggle within national borders defined by convenience considerations. Lenin, in this grand blunder, failed or refused to perceive, instead of to recognize, the catastrophic consequences that would befall the Russian workers and peasants and the workers and peasants of all of Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, and the German industrial heartland itself, where revolutionary potential still lingered in war-weary masses, but now was subject to befuddlement, exhaustion, and forced retreat into quietude. The analysis of our brothers in Kommunist serves this tragedy with chilling precision: the mass of soldiers, already tired and declasse, had been the avant-garde of revolutionary passion, their physical and moral exhaustion demanding revolutionary leadership rather than subjection to imperialist caprice; the industrial proletariat of Russia's northern industrial regions, severed from their southern sources of raw materials such as coal and iron, were confronted not only with starvation and the shattering of productive labor but with the destruction of class consciousness, the dissolution of the unity and militancy that had directed the October rising and could have ignited the continental revolutionary fire; meanwhile, the peasantry of the northern and central regions, themselves exhausted by the war, bad harvests, and the dislocations of city industry, were deprived of the revolutionary solidarity that might have been forged by a continued revolutionary process rather than the imposition of peace that severed the industrial north from the grain-raising south and left the workers and peasants both exposed to declassification, hunger, and ideological defeat. The separation of north and south, far from being an exclusively geographical or administrative problem, was actually a rending asunder of the revolutionary body, an artificial construct that dissolved the social and material unity of the working class and peasantry into separate zones of vulnerability where the proletariat, deprived of the support of both consciousness and material resources, risked crumbling into an impotent class unable to complete its historical task. What Lenin, in his myopic enthusiasm for maintaining Party dominance, failed to see, and what the Bolshevik Left Communists of 1918 sensed with doctrinal vision, is that the pursuit of peace at Brest-Litovsk was a counter-revolutionary action not in the guise of quick, obvious betrayal, but in its profound, cascading consequences: it demobilized the revolutionary energy of the masses, it postponed the inevitable struggle with imperialism on the continental stage, and it instilled into the minds of the workers a dangerous sense of restraint and limitation, the feeling that revolutionary opportunities could be subordinated to bureaucratic expediency rather than seized with the full force of Marxist dogma and proletarian self-activity. Lenin's abandonment of revolutionary war was symptomatic of a broader drift from Marxist procedure: by making priority to the Party at the cost of the living interests of the proletariat, by calculating the temporary survival of the new Soviet state at the cost of revolutionary overhaul of European society, he repudiated the fundamental premise of Marxism that the emancipation of the working class must be self-emancipation by effort in class and that revolutionary triumph, not a national ghetto, must be the ignition to the universal advance of the proletariat. The human cost of this treachery was ghastly: the Moscow and Petrograd workers, already weakened by war dislocations, went hungry; the Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants, whose toil and grain supported the industrial north, were moving farther away from the revolution; the industrial proletariat, isolated and fragmented, was in peril of losing class consciousness and militancy; the European proletariat, watching with interest, saw a lesson of retreat rather than an inspiration to revolution, and the world revolutionary wave, which could have engulfed Germany, Austria-Hungary, and beyond, was snuffed out before birth. Historical significance of Brest-Litovsk, therefore, cannot be overstated: it was not so much a peace treaty as an act that wrote large the subordination of proletarian internationalism to party bureaucratic expediency, a moment that demonstrates with crystal clarity the dangers of any deviation from doctrinal purity of Marx and Engels, the dangers of serving tactical convenience at the expense of revolutionary principle, and the tragic cost exacted on the working masses when the Party, however well-meaning, substitutes for the proletariat itself as the historically active subject. In order to fully grasp the extent of this betrayal, one must observe that Marx and Engels conceived of revolution as a perpetual, dynamic motion, an ongoing revolution in which the proletariat, with complete class-consciousness, works to uproot the institutions of bourgeois and imperialist exploitation wherever they may be found, connecting the struggles of all nations in a common emancipatory endeavor; Brest-Litovsk, in contrast, was its opposite: the renunciation of revolutionary potential, the rejection of internationalist obligation, and the application of a limited national logic that undermined the very foundations of proletarian self-determination. And still, even in loss, the lessons stand and unescapable: the 1918 revolutionary crisis, however scattered by the concession to German imperialism, had demonstrated the latent power of the working classes when organized in soviets, directed by class-conscious leadership, and prepared to carry the October triumph onto the broad European stage; it had served to illustrate the need for unwavering commitment to Marxist theory, the risk of subordinating class struggle to party expediency, and the monstrous significance of allowing the revolutionary momentum to be halted at the very moment when the exigencies of history demanded its complete unfolding. The estrangement of industrial north from agrarian south, the dissolution of class consciousness, the declassing and starvation of workers, and the lost opportunity of world revolution coalesce into a warning picture, one that should place every proletarian revolutionary on his guard, on his theoretical toes, and in out-and-out internationalism: the lesson is that war of revolution is not a last resort in moments of crisis but a law of historical necessity driven by the material forces of production and the self-consciousness of the masses, and to forswear it, even in the name of tactical prudence, is to be false to the very essence of Marxist theory and the eternal interests of the international proletariat, and Brest-Litovsk stands forever as an ever-lasting monument to the dangers of subordinating revolutionary principle to the requirements of party convenience.